Free Sugar and Other Stories by A. S. Byatt

her unnatural calm had given way to agitated pacing, and her eyes were dark and deeper in. At this point in the story he found in himself a necessity to bowdlerize for the sympathetic American, as he had indeed already begun to do. He had mentioned only a child who had “seemed like” the woman’s lost son, and he now ceased to mention the child at all, as an actor in the story, with the result that what the American woman heard was a tale of how he, the man, had become increasingly involved in the woman’s solitary grief, how their two losses had become a kind of
folie à deux
from which he could not extricate himself. What follows is not what he told the American girl, though it may be clear at which points the bowdlerized version coincided with what he really believed to have happened. There was a sense he could not at first analyse that it was improper to talk about the boy — not because he might not be believed; that did not come into it; but because something dreadful might happen.
    “He sat on the lawn all morning. In a football shirt.”
    “Chelsea?”
    “Chelsea.”
    “What did he do? Does he look happy? Did he speak?” Her desire to know was terrible.
    “He doesn’t speak. He didn’t move much. He seemed — very calm. He stayed a long time.”
    “This is terrible. This is ludicrous. There
is no boy.
”
    “No. But I saw him.”
    “Why you?”
    “I don’t know.’ A pause. “I do
like
him.”
    “He is — was — a most likeable boy.”
    Some days later he saw the boy running along the landing in the evening, wearing what might have been pyjamas, in peacock towelling, or might have been a track suit. Pyjamas, the woman stated confidently, when he told her: his new pyjamas. With white ribbed cuffs, weren’t they? and a white polo neck? He corroborated this, watching her cry — she cried more easily now — finding her anxiety and disturbance very hard to bear. But it never occurred to him that it was possible to break his promise to tell her when he saw the boy. That was another curious imperative from some undefined authority.
    They discussed clothes. If there were ghosts, how could they appear in clothes long burned, or rotted, or worn away by other people? You could imagine, they agreed, that something of a person might linger — as the Tibetans and others believe the soul lingers near the body before setting out on its long journey. But clothes? And in this case so many clothes? I must be seeing your memories, he told her, and she nodded fiercely, compressing her lips, agreeing that this was likely, adding, “I am too rational to go mad, so I seem to be putting it on you.”
    He tried a joke. “That isn’t very kind to me, to imply that madness comes more easily to me.”
    “No, sensitivity. I am insensible. I was always a bit like that,and this made it worse. I am the
last
person to see any ghost that was trying to haunt me.”
    “We agreed it was your memories I saw.”
    “Yes. We agreed. That’s rational. As rational as we can be, considering.”
    All the same, the brilliance of the boy’s blue regard, his gravely smiling salutation in the garden next morning, did not seem like anyone’s tortured memories of earlier happiness. The man spoke to him directly then:
    “Is there anything I can
do
for you? Anything you want? Can I help you?”
    The boy seemed to puzzle about this for a while, inclining his head as though hearing was difficult. Then he nodded, quickly and perhaps urgently, turned, and ran into the house, looking back to make sure he was followed. The man entered the living-room through the french windows, behind the running boy, who stopped for a moment in the centre of the room, with the man blinking behind him at the sudden transition from sunlight to comparative dark. The woman was sitting in an armchair, looking at nothing there. She often sat like that. She looked up, across the boy, at the man; and the boy, his face for the first time anxious, met the man’s