by A. S. Byatt
She was afraid to go out. Wolfgang could not understand her delays. She went round the flat, dusting already spotless books and silver teapot, watering the rubber plant. It was a nice flat, but small — one-bedroomed, with one living room and a ship’s-galley-sized kitchen, in which were the washing machine and dryer James and Alison had bought her as house-moving presents when the big house was sold up, when Brian died. The washing-machine was another source of wholly irrational shame. It was automatic, there was no work to it. She had always had one washday a week, sitting over her twin tub, lifting the clothes in and out of the steaming suds with wooden pincers, caring for them. She would rather have had visits from James and Alison, but James was in Saudi Arabia much of the time and Alison was busy teaching. And found her mother threatening, Mrs Sugden understood, for reasons neither of them had any control over, though they tried, at Christmas, sometimes at Easter, they tried for a day or two and then it broke down into fear and violent impatience over little things. Mrs Sugden hated her daughter for putting all the cutlery to drain streaky, and not drying it properly with a cloth. Alison hated Mrs Sugden coming in her kitchen, hated her offers of help with dishes or potatoes, saw them as criticism and threat. Both of them were schoolmistressy, used to having to appear to be unshakeably right.
Wolfgang whined. He was a standard or classic sheepdog, a working collie. He was black, white and tan, and very beautiful, with a deep glistening ruff, a curving white-tipped tail, intelligent amber eyes and an uncertain temper. He had bitten the postman’s sock, once, and had nipped the buttock of a visiting policeman, who had congratulated Mrs Sugden on his effectiveness, with stolid magnanimity. Alison had said he shouldn’t be cooped up in a flat, and so he shouldn’t, Mrs Sugden knew. For this reason, because Wolfgang made her safe in her flat, she had to expose herself to the Common, the underpass, the wood, the sandy hollows and springy heather.
She knew it was irrational, though there was logic in it, to feel better indoors. There were women who had found men waiting for them in the dark when they came home, women who had been followed and then pushed quickly in from behind, women whose windows or barred doors had been contemptuously shattered. Mrs Sugden still felt safer within walls. Partly because of Wolfgang, who knew that this was his territory, who set up a whole orchestra of aggressive sound if anyone knocked, or stopped to stare, who howled and growled and pealed defiance and threat. In Brent — Mrs Sugden thought it was Brent, certainly somewhere like that — only two per cent of homes with dogs had been entered and seventy-five per cent of homes without. Inside her own walls she and Wolfgang had a chance. Outside was different. She knew other women might organize their fear differently, might be most afraid of being cornered, of having their own bed violated, their carpet smeared, their kitchen tools turned against them. In her own rooms, her heart ran evenly like her clocks, almost always, except when she was locking up, except when her hands were on cold glass with black night and whatever else just over the threshold. Fear seeped in through the warped lavatory window. But in general it was in open spaces that she expected the encounter. In open spaces her breath came short, her heart was larger and fleshier and beat in little spurts, she was webbed with dizziness. She could not have run for her life and knew it. This also was shaming. Fear and shame, these were what was left, were they? Mrs Sugden put on her coat, defying them as she defied them daily. Wolfgang circled and pranced in ecstasy. Mrs Sugden put on her woolly hat and gathered up his lead.
Her path took her along two roads of pleasant Victorian suburban houses, upwards towards the high ground. The roads debouched on a wide and whirling motorway junction which carved the common land, white and lethal. The underpass was the secret entry to the wild land beyond the concrete. Wolfgang rushed to and fro, lifting his leg on lampposts and parked cars, glistening with good health. A sudden car changed lanes as Mrs Sugden was looking over a hedge at some iris reticulata, and screeched to a halt beside her, facing the wrong way. Now? Out of a car, now? She looked at the driver’s face, which was square, oriental, and expressionless. He was simply parking, he lived there, he had simply failed to signal. Mrs Sugden dropped her eyes and proceeded towards the underpass. The arch over this was adorned in shaky blood-red paint with the pacific slogan MEAT IS MURDER. The graffiti inside were mostly the work of a neat fanatic, with a spray-gun of white paint, who had surrounded the usual inscribed lists of names, pierced hearts, Julie, Lois, Sharon with tidy boxes and correctly spelled admonitions. “You are a whore.” “You are an exhibitionist tramp.” “You disgust me.” Mrs Sugden would have given this moralist nine out of ten for handwriting, and ten for spelling. She imagined him in a shiny white raincoat to match his paintwork, staring fixedly from inside metal-rimmed glasses above well-polished shoes. He was certainly a manifestation of the man she feared: his work showed that his hand was steady and his intention clear. It might be that he preferred the young and the pretty, with whom he seemed to have a quarrel. He might not notice a thickened person with grey frizz under a woolly hat, plodding quietly through the puddles?
That was not certain. She had watched a whole television film on the subject, sitting on the sofa with a reluctant Wolfgang panting beside her. There had been an interview with one young convicted rapist who, silhouetted black against a bland turquoise ground, had said that he always chose ugly or unattractive women. Incredibly, he put his hand to his mouth and added, oh, I hope none of them are watching, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. He explained. He did it out of a deep sense of inadequacy, a need to dominate. The civilized words tripped easily off his tongue, in this classroom discussion. He had been exposed to intensive group therapy. Pretty ones, he said, might have intimidated me, you know, I might have backed down. Hearing him say this, in his pleasant young voice, out of the black hole of his obscurity, Mrs Sugden had known that this voice was his voice, the man’s voice, that she was listening to him speak. He was like boys she had taught, coming back to show off how they had got on in the world. Boys had liked her, as a teacher, in those younger days. She had liked boys. The cheeky youngster, the workman with his wolf-whistle from scaffolding, the teaching student grateful for being shown the ropes. It was the world that had changed and she with it.
At the further mouth of the underpass, on her way up into light, she encountered a solitary man, walking rapidly and frowning. He was tall, black-avised with a heavy growth of stubble on gaunt cheeks under a woollen cap pulled well down. Combat jacket, faded jeans, dirty trainers. Fear fogged Mrs Sugden’s gaze. She went on walking, past him. He held his eyes averted, rigidly, as alarmed by her, apparently, as she by him. Or perhaps just English. Once there had been a time when people passed the time of day, surely there had, even if their polite greetings had been a formal indication that they posed no threat? Now, no one dared. She, for fear of provoking him, he, for fear of misapprehension. Or perhaps he was just sour. Perhaps he had not really seen her at all.
In the earlier days of her fear Mrs Sugden had tried to make herself think about other things. She had promised herself little rewards. If I get as far as the first copse, on the way to the pond, without thinking about him, there will be a letter from James. Or, more reliably, I will allow myself to buy a chocolate eclair. She had long ago given up this childish self-bribery with things she didn’t really look forward to — she found it hard to look forward to anything much, except sleep. It had directly brought on the one mental battle which had caused her to turn tail before the copse, crying for Wolfgang in distress, battling her way home with bursting chest and wandering eyes. No, no, fear was better faced squarely. She could go out into his world if she was prepared for him, if she thought him out rationally, if she knew him and what might happen.
The question she asked herself, as she made her way along the track to the first copse, all silver birch and hazel catkins, quite like the country, if you ignored the solid background roar of motorway traffic on the other side of silence — the question was, was it always like this? Were little girls a
lways violated and old women struck down in their thin blood, or is it more now, is it really more, and different? We are asked to think about it more, anyway, she answered herself, and if there was not more already, the thinking makes it more, it must be so. It is civilized that we can discuss these things openly and comfort the damaged, and not blame or shame them, but it all increases my fear, and not only my fear, but whatever he feels. For she knew that both she and he were fascinated by the hooded head, the solitary terror, powerlessness, no one coming to help. She knew he watched videos of cruelties he might not quite have thought of, as she nightly contemplated fates she had not yet imagined, as well as those she had. It was in the air.
The thing she was clear about, and wanted someone to be clear about too, was that her imagination of his being, of their meeting, was fuelled by fear, by fear pure and simple. Not by any kind of misplaced desire. She was not sure if he knew that, though she thought it was probably her fear he desired, and that he would have found desire, if she could ever have felt it, disgusting, to be punished in her. She had to turn off a Carry On film in which all the fat middle-aged harridans had enquired eagerly, at the sack of Rome, or Jhaipur, or somewhere else unreal and lunatic, when the raping was going to start. No. Desire was another thing. Desire in her had died long before Brian, who had died in his sleep and in hers, flinging out an unaccustomed arm across her breast in a brief, last, involuntary paroxysm. She remembered wanting Brian and the earlier, lively impatience of wanting or needing a man, men. Now she was like cold pudding, stiff and set. The house was quieter without Brian, and this was good, as well as lonely. His retirement, so brief, had been clutter and potter and constant small collisions of will and table-space and living-space. She was appalled for Brian, that he was not there, that his hopes and history and pleasure in food and views on Mrs Thatcher and delight in dahlias were gone, but for herself she was partly — how to put it coolly — satisfied?
No, it was nothing to do with desire, she thought, skirting the copse, coming on the ruffled pond. Here were an old man with a fat terrier bitch, two elegant track-suited young women with a dalmatian, and a group of little boys, cupping their faces over cigarettes, bunking off. He would never strike at the pondside, that she was sure. It was exposed, and heavily frequented. She could even, occasionally, ask a tweeded dog-walker to throw a stick into the water for Wolfgang. Her arthritis had finally put a stop to this game, this year. And Wolfgang was so young, he needed the resistance of the water, that tired him more thoroughly than running through air. She approached the little boys. “Would you throw my dog’s stick for him? I’m not able to, myself.” She caught the electric message between them: shall we be nice, shall we be nasty, is she to be classed as a silly old bag or a poor old thing in need of help, what will the group do? They were still quite little boys. Probably they already threatened other little boys. Perhaps they had their fears, too. One of them said, “Come on then,” rough-friendly, and hurled Wolfgang’s stick. Wolfgang sprang out onto the water, leaping and surging until he was out of his depth, then swimming purposefully and fast, his bushy white tail a luminous rudder in the translucent murk. Coming back, he shipped water and coughed at every stroke. The boys threw again and again. Wolfgang plunged. Beyond him were two Canada geese who’d never been seen there before. Lovely things, thought Mrs Sugden, with their stripy barrel bodies and their thin strong black necks. The male nudged the female and honked. Once Mrs Sugden would have remarked on their beauty to the boys, but now she held her peace. Some boys, not all, spoke jeering filth. One boy that size would hardly think of attacking anything as large as Mrs Sugden, let alone Wolfgang. But the whole bunch just might, if they egged each other on. Mrs Sugden knew boys. She knew that these boys knew things, they watched things on the screen she did not know or want to know. Men have fantasies, women don’t, only love, which is a sort of fantasy, she thought. She had taught boys who might have been these boys’ fathers. They had not known all that much. On icy dark days she had buttoned their stiff little flies with fingers clumsy-cold, tucking them in, tapping their innocence, telling them to run along now and keep clean. The lavatories, which were huge earth closets, were frozen solid, on bad days. Their little extremities were blue and waxy. They were not knowing little things, not like these, the cold air was different, whatever there had then been to fear, she herself had not been knowing enough to take account of.
In those days there had been both war and hanging. She stood there stolidly, watching the boys play with Wolfgang, and said to the man in her mind that it was easier to understand that it had nothing to do with desire if you thought of hanging. It depended how old he was, whether he would know what she meant, or need to have it explained. Hanging had frightened her more thoroughly and sickly than Hitler ever had. Perhaps this was a failure in her imagination but it was so. We were always going to win the war, she believed Churchill, but the hood and trap and condemned cell waited for every man. You see, she told him, I dreamed over and over I had to be hanged by mistake, although I hadn’t done anything. I dreamed about being strapped up and blindfolded and dragged there. It was a sniff of pure evil, it was what men did to men, it was in the newspapers, in thrillers, in the air. You are him now, the hangman and the murderer. The one with power is foul, you see — the murderer became the victim in the dock. We stopped all that, we cleansed our minds of that horrible place. Now we think of women and little children in locked cars, in rubbish areas, in brambles on waste land. What I mean is, there can be simple fear, nothing to do with desire. You must not see my fear.
After Wolfgang’s swim, they struck off into the copse. Wolfgang licked up filth and scrabbled in old leaves. The ground underfoot was sodden, under spongy sphagnum, with a dark peaty water that welled up, round the bright green tufts, like old blood. The things to be found here were always surprising. Once Wolfgang had turned up a pink high-heeled shoe. Once, Mrs Sugden had almost stepped on large Y-fronts, navy-blue piped in white, billowing slightly just under the liquid surface. They seemed to be almost new. Mrs Sugden did not disturb them. They gave her a little shock, not electric, but a sharp lapse in the supply of air to her lungs and brain.
She knew what it would feel like for everything to seize up with shock. She had precognitions of clamped arteries jerking her heart into boom and then flabby stillness. Inventing possible ways it might happen helped with the whelming of the fear. She invented someone stubble-bearded and smelly, veering away as Wolfgang bounded up, showing his teeth in his expectant grin. She imagined someone young and muscular and resourceful — moving the knife from beside her own jugular to catch Wolfgang’s leap on it, contemptuously, as he sprang. She didn’t know whether Wolfgang would spring or not, that was the truth. He was a cantankerous beast: he bit people for his own pleasure, not for her protection. In his youth he had frequently bitten other dogs. He liked dogs bigger and slower than himself, staid and portly dogs who presented a stable target. He had to be dragged off. His eyeballs at such times became suffused with blood, a clear poppy-scarlet. Last week Mrs Sugden had seen the same colour between the swollen eyelids of a mugged pensioner, televised in a powder blue shawl from her hospital bed. Every line of the grey and blooming-purple skin, of the spare yellow-white hair, of the dark threaded stitches across cheek and brow had stayed in Mrs Sugden’s mind. But above all the scarlet eye-whites.
On the other side of the copse was a straight path. It was made plain and level with bitumen and asphalt for a certain distance, and then the surfacing abruptly gave way to sandy furrows. By the side of the straight path trotted, decorously, a cream Labrador bitch. Wolfgang knew this dog: it was one he liked to bounce at. Mrs Sugden knew it. It was a guide dog, enjoying a brief run on the loose. Its owner and charge walked steady and upright, looking neither to left nor right, along the smoothed track. She was a tall woman, in a straight tweed two-piece, with an impeccable knot of iron-grey hair gleaming above her collar. She carried the dog’s harness in one hand, and a handbag in the other. She advanced
evenly, in sensible laced shoes. Mrs Sugden had spoken to her once, when Wolfgang had bounded up and tangled with the guide dog just as she was being re-harnessed. Mrs Sugden had apologized: the woman had said, in what Mrs Sugden labelled a cultivated voice, that it was nice for Elsie to have contact with other dogs. She had tried to pat Wolfgang and Mrs Sugden had counselled against it, saying his temper was uncertain. What was he like, the woman had asked, and Mrs Sugden had described him, enjoying it, his black, his white, his bright eyes, the sheen of good health. She had said how clever and well-trained Elsie must be. Elsie’s owner said Elsie was too serious, a worrier, couldn’t be persuaded to run off and play. It did her good to meet other dogs, she reiterated, unable to see Wolfgang’s band of hackles, or the sneer where his lip lifted from his teeth at the side.
Mrs Sugden decided not to cross to that path, but to stay on the side where she was, in the shade of the trees. Wolfgang might upset dog or owner. Better safe than sorry. So she walked parallel, at a good distance, a bit behind. Watching, and thinking.
The blind walker had a follower. Not for the first time, even in Mrs Sugden’s experience. She had seen him at least twice before, padding along the track behind the other woman and her dog. There was something indefinably wrong with him, even on these earlier occasions. He walked with exaggerated care, as though he were playing grandmother’s footsteps. He was large, and thin, and young, or fairly young, and gangling. He had long blonde curls and a very bright blue track suit, piped in white, above rather frivolous training-shoes, rainbow-striped in girlish pastel shades. With rose-pink shoelaces. His movements were jerky and excessive: he put a hand to his ear and hearkened to a jay laugh, he stood with folded arms and legs grandly straddling and appeared to study early pussy-willow. Mrs Sugden had noticed before that he never passed the blind woman, but came along after, creeping and then jogging a little. Today he had changed his behaviour. He had always reminded Mrs Sugden of the television puppet Andy Pandy: today he had positively taken to capering, like a demented leprechaun, knees up and pointed toes down, in huge circles around the woman and dog. Mopping and mowing, said Mrs Sugden’s fairy-tale vocabulary to her, as he bent lithely and sprang up again, mopping and mowing. She could barely see his face, but he appeared to be smiling. His arms gestured — a welcoming embrace, a kind of hand-over-hand imaginary rope-climbing. The blind woman must surely have heard him, but she appeared impassive, strode on, like a metronome, unvarying. The dog trotted beside her, marking the edge of the safe track. Mrs Sugden might have continued to observe from across the tufts of grass and heather if she had not noticed that the circles were diminishing. And that the hand at the end of the mobile arm flashed in the sun.