Little Black Book of Stories

by A. S. Byatt

  He closed her in again, and went back to Martha Sharpin, who was intent on a collection of small ivory women, some occidental, some oriental, each a few inches long, lying in various postures, curved for sleep, or extended. They all had removable, thimble-sized navel-and-stomach, which could display, and did, the miniature heart, lungs and intestines, or the curled foetus in the womb. Martha asked Damian if they were diagnostic or votive. He said he didn’t know. He said, thinking of the lead nipples which must have poisoned what they were intended to purify, that the whole thing was a collection of attempts to preserve and lengthen life, which nevertheless bore witness to human interventions that had drastically shortened it. He pointed at the early gynaecological forceps.

  “A huge step forward. But spreading puerperal fever wherever they were used. What am I going to do, Dr. Sharpin?”

  “Martha, please. You need someone to make a start on conservation advice and cataloguing. Someone brave, who won’t get bogged down, and won’t be slapdash.”

  “Do you know such a paragon?”

  “No. But I could work on it—say one afternoon a week—myself, and get it into a state where it could be handed over to a proper curator.”

  Damian said he could think of no better solution. Martha said she would be glad if he could provide a dogsbody—someone to lift and dust, and help with labels.

  The image of Daisy Whimple, a little inappropriately, visited Damian’s mind.

  “I know an art student. She did some good decorations in the Gynae Ward, for Christmas.”

  “She’d need to be able to spell. It’s often not their strong point.”

  Damian had no idea whether Daisy could spell. Nor, when he asked in the ward, did any of the nurses know where she lived. Nor when, with unusual persistence for an overworked man, he called the Art College, could they enlighten him, though they promised to speak to her if she came in to classes, which, they said, she mostly didn’t. Later, Damian wondered why he hadn’t asked them for a competent student who could spell.

  Martha Sharpin began her foray at the Collection. She only rarely saw Damian Becket. One day, when they met by pseudo-accident in the lift, she asked if his hours were regular enough for her to take him out to a meal, to talk over a project she had, to put artists in residence into hospitals. She thought he was the doctor who might see the point. Damian liked being asked out to dinner by this handsome sensible woman, who carried her knowledge lightly, and made life more interesting for many people. He found her attractive. He liked looking at women with good clothes, on their bodies, so to speak. He saw a lot of female flesh, slippery and sweating, even provocatively pouting and posturing at him. He liked the way Martha’s sweaters moved easily around her waist—the sense that she was in control of herself. When they had their dinner, in a dockside restaurant overlooking the rolling grey mist on the Thames, and the snaking lights of the police launches, he admired her trouser suit, wine-coloured this time, fluid and well-cut, ornamented with another glass mosaic brooch in the shape of a paisley dangling an absurd pink pearl. He remarked on it. She said it was “an Andrew Logan. Called Goddess. It has tiny feathers embedded in it, look. Cosmic fertility.”

  They enjoyed their dinner. She explained the difficulties of placing artists in residence. They had had one once who wanted to photograph breast cancers, blow up the prints, and install them in the patients’ waiting area. “They were spectacular photographs,” she said, “but inappropriate. Or too appropriating. Photography has that quality. They weren’t, so to speak, the artist’s own cancers to display.”

  Damian said he supposed there was no sense placing an abstract colourist in a ward or a waiting-room. Martha asked if he’d found the art student he thought might help with the collection. What sort of work did she do?

  “Well, the decorations were ingenious and colourful. I did get the impression she was so to speak slumming. She said she did installations. She mentioned Beuys.”

  “Ah, so that was why you suddenly asked about him—”

  “I don’t really know about him.”

  Martha said he was a great artist who dealt in dark things made of common materials.

  “Fat and felt.”

  “Exactly. Usually on a large scale. Reliquaries of no religion. Things evoking wars and prison camps. He’s probably the greatest single influence on art students today. They do personal versions—you know, the fish slice that my girlfriend didn’t clean, the knickers I wore when I first kissed Joe Bloggs—the disk collection I pinched from my ex-lover—the purely personal. I am an artist so my relics are art. I’m not saying that’s your student’s line. She may really understand Beuys.”

  Damian said he had no idea what she did or didn’t understand but he did know she was hungry. Anyway, he couldn’t find her. They had better look for another dogsbody. And it didn’t sound as though she’d be at all suitable for the placement.

  THE NEXT DAY, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the white head and floating clothing whisk round the corner of a corridor. He strode on, making no sign that he had seen anything untoward, and suddenly turned back into the cupboard door she was standing inside.

  “Hello. What are you doing here?”

  The small face went through various thought processes without finding a suitable answer.

  “I’ve been trying to find you. I’ve got a kind of a part-time job I thought might interest you.”

  “What kind of a job?” Suspicious, ready to run away.

  “Can you spell?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. I was always a good speller. Either you are or you aren’t. I am. I always get ten out of ten in those competitions for spelling things like harass and embarrass and sedentary and minuscule, I don’t boast of it. It’s like being double-jointed.”

  “Are you interested in work?”

  “I’m an artist.”

  “I know. This is part-time work that would interest an artist.” He wanted to say, a hungry artist, and smile at her, but he stopped himself. He saw her as a hungry child. She saw herself as a woman artist.

  DAISY AND MARTHA were installed in the Collection. They put on white hospital overalls and white cotton gloves, and set about the discovery of the treasures and horrors. They worked Friday afternoons. When Damian was not working, he sometimes dropped in to see how they were progressing. All three exclaimed over a bottled foetus wearing bead necklaces around neck, wrists and ankles, or a large cardboard box that proved to contain the wax heads and hands of a group of nineteenth-century murderers, all looking remarkably cheerful. Damian took Martha out to dinner—to return the first invitation, and to discuss the artist in residence. They also discussed Daisy, quite naturally, and partly in this context.

  Damian asked whether Martha thought Daisy could be the required artist. Martha said Daisy did not discuss her own work, and she, Martha, had no idea what it was like. Daisy was good at the conservation work—deft, quick-witted, with a good memory. “She says funny things about terrible things,” said Martha. “But I feel she’s sad. She says nothing personal. I don’t know where she lives, or who she hangs out with. She seems to haunt the hospital.”

  “I think she scrounges. I think she doesn’t get enough to eat. She’s got a boyfriend. She says she lives on his studio floor.”

  “She intrigues you.”

  “She was in the Gynae Ward herself, last year. She had a bad time. I looked her up. It was a bad time that—that the hospital didn’t exactly help—”

  Martha said every woman must wonder what it felt like to be a man who saw so many women. In extreme situations.

  Damian said his profession had made him unnaturally detached. I see them as lives and deaths, he told Martha, as problems and dangers, and sometimes as triumphs. Not mostly as people. I’m not good at people, said Damian Becket.

  Martha smiled at him in the candle-light, and the lights on the river bobbed and swayed. She said:

  “You’re very kind, for a detached man.”

  “I’m kin
d because I’m detached. It’s no trouble to be kind, if you remember to think of it. And I had a religious upbringing.” He hesitated. He stared at the dark water. He said:

  “It’s odd what persists of a religious upbringing. I’ve no God and I don’t want Him, I don’t miss church and all the smells and singing. But I do somehow still consider myself married to my wife, though we haven’t seen each other for four or five years now, and hope never to see each other again.”

  Martha understood very clearly that she was being offered something. She frowned, and then said:

  “I’ve never had a religion, and never been married—never even come close—so I—have to use my imagination. Does your wife consider herself married?”

  “She’s an actress and a Catholic. That’s a daft answer. Do you know, I don’t know what she thinks.”

  ONE DAY, looking for Martha, he arrived to find the Collection in darkness and both women away. He began to wander amongst the shelves, when his foot squelched on something. He looked down. It was a potato chip and it was warm. He looked around and saw two more, at intervals. He bent down and touched them. They were both warm. He listened. He could hear his own breathing and what seemed like the sounds of the myriad dead things and outdated artefacts, shifting and settling. But he could hear breath, when he held his own, light breath, breath trying to be silent. He began to search the Collection, listening for a giveaway rustle, and heard nothing, except, breath, breath, silence, gasped breath, breath, silence. He stalked quietly, and between a long row of upright packing cases saw another potato chip, and what might be the opening of a burrow. So he peered into the darkness and took out the torch he always carried, and waved the pinpoint of light around in the mouth of the tunnel. Something white trembled vaguely at the other end.

  “Don’t be frightened,” said Damian kindly. “Come out.”

  Louder breathing, more trembling. Damian went in, and illuminated a nest, made of white cellular blankets, the sort that are on hospital trolleys, old pillows. Daisy sat in the midst of them, oddly clothed in her white coat and gloves. A plastic box of chips nested in the folds of the blankets. Damian said, “If you eat those with those gloves on, you completely destroy the point of the gloves being sterile—”

  Daisy sniffed.

  “Are you living here?”

  “It’s temporary. I got kicked out of the studio.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, months back. I sleep here and there. I sleep here when I can’t find a floor to sleep on. I’m not doing any harm.”

  “You’d better come out. You could get arrested.”

  She scrambled out, a curious bundle of disparate garments, hospital white, vaguely Eastern underneath. She said:

  “It’s cold down here. It’s hard to keep warm.”

  “It’s designed to produce an ambient temperature for the Collection, not for squatters.”

  Daisy stood up and stared at him.

  “I’ll go then,” she said, hopefully.

  “Where? Where will you go?”

  “I’ll find somewhere.”

  “You’d better come back with me. And sleep in a bed, in a bedroom, if you can bear it.”

  “You don’t have to sneer.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I’m not sneering. Come on.”

  DAMIAN COOKED PASTA, whilst Daisy padded round his flat, studying his prints, with a slightly defiant, assessing look. He found he couldn’t ask her what she thought of them. He didn’t want to know what she thought of the floods of colour and delicate round harbours of his Herons, the lacquered reds, the gold and orange, the strange floating umber. He put food on the table, and kept the conversation going by asking her questions. He was uneasily aware that his questioning sounded very like a professional medical examination. And that she was answering him because she owed him for the food, the shelter, for not kicking her out of the job or out of the hospital. So he learned that she’d quarrelled with the boyfriend, after and probably because of the complicated abortion. He asked if she’d minded losing the baby, and she said it wasn’t a baby, and there was no point in minding or not minding, was there? He asked her if she ate enough, and she said well, what did he think, and then recovered her good manners, and said grittily that a hospital was a good place for scrounging, you’d be surprised how much good food went to waste. He asked if she had a grant, or any other source of money than the work at the Collection, and she said no, she did washing-up in restaurants now and then—and officecleaning. She said, economical with the information, that when she got her degree, if she got it, she might think of teaching, but of course that took time up that you might want to spend—need to spend—on your art.

  He asked her what sort of work she made, and she said she couldn’t say, really, not so he could imagine what it was like. Then she was silent altogether. So he turned on the television—his ex-wife flickered across the scene, playing Beckett and he changed channels quickly—they watched a football match, Liver-pool against Arsenal, and drank a bottle of red wine between them.

  IN THE SMALL HOURS he heard his bedroom door open, and the pad of footsteps. He slept austerely in a narrow single bed. She came across the room in the dark, like a ghost. She was wearing white cotton panties—he had felt quite unable to offer her any garment to sleep in. She stood and looked down on him, and he looked more or less at the panties, through half-opened eyes. Then she pulled up the corner of the duvet and slid into the bed silently, her cold body pressed against his warm one. Much went through Damian Becket’s half-drowsed mind. How he must not hurt her. Not offend her. She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred. He touched her, with a gynaecologist’s fingers, gently and found the scars of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple. The piercing repelled him. He thought irrelevantly of the pierced hands of the run-of-the-mill man on the cross. She began, not inexpertly, to caress him. He was overcome by a wash of hot emotion—if he had had to name it, he would have called it pity. He took her in his arms, held her to him, made love to her. He felt her tighten and stiffen—thank God there were no more intimate studs or rings—and then she gave a little crow and settled with her head on his chest. He stroked the colourless fluff of her hair in the dark. He said:

  “You’re more a dandelion than a daisy.”

  “An old one then, a dead clock.”

  That threw him, for he thought of the dispersal of dandelion seeds and then of how inapposite this was to him and her with her ruined tubes. He said:

  “You know, I have to say, all these studs and things, in soft body tissue—there’s a considerable possibility they’re carcinogenic.”

  “You can’t worry about everything,” said Daisy Whimple. “What a thing to say, at this particular moment.”

  “It’s what I was thinking.”

  “Well, you could keep it to yourself for a better moment.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s OK.”

  He lay on his back, and she lay curled on top of him, and he waited for her to go away, which after a time, perhaps sensing the waiting, she did.

  She stayed a week. She came to his bed every night. Every night he stroked the pierced and damaged body, every night he made love to her. At the end of the week she said she’d found a place to go, a friend had a spare sofa. She kissed him for the first time in the daylight, with her clothes on. He felt the cold metal of the ring in her lip. She said, “I expect you’ll be glad to see the back of me. You like your own company, I can see that. But it’s been good for you, what we did, for a little bit?”

  “Very good.”

  “I never know if you mean what you say.”

  ONE RESULT of Daisy’s brief habitation was that Damian allowed himself to know that he desired Martha. He wondered briefly if Daisy might have confided in Martha, and concluded that on balance, she would not. He went down to the Collection himself alone, and removed the blankets, the pillows, the food trays. He thought, in a
week or so, when his flat was his own again, his sheets were laundered, his solitude with his images re-established, he would invite Martha there. She was a complicated person who needed slow, slow movements, he thought, not really sure why he thought these things. He too needed to move slowly, in a deliberate, considered way, he thought, putting behind him the vision of the white panties, the memory of the metal taste of the nipple-rings.