Free Sugar and Other Stories by A. S. Byatt Page B

to stone. He put a hand between her legs and she moved them heavily apart; he heaved himself over her and pushed, unsuccessfully. She was contorted and locked tight: frigid, he thought grimly, was not the word.
Rigor mortis
, his mind said to him, before she began to scream.
    He was ridiculously cross about this. He jumped away and said quite rudely, “Shut up,” and then ungraciously, “I’m sorry.” She stopped screaming as suddenly as she had begun and made one of her painstaking economical explanations.
    “Sex and death don’t go. I can’t afford to let go of my grip on myself. I hoped. What you hoped. It was a bad idea. I apologize.”
    “Oh, never mind,” he said and rushed out again on to the landing, feeling foolish and almost in tears for warm, lovely Anne.
    The child was on the landing, waiting. When the man saw him, he looked questioning, and then turned his face against the wall and leant there, rigid, his shoulders hunched, his hair hiding his expression. There was a similarity between woman and child. The man felt, for the first time, almost uncharitable towards the boy, and then felt something else.
    “Look, I’m sorry. I tried. I did try. Please turn round.”
    Uncompromising, rigid, clenched back view.
    “Oh well,” said the man, and went into his bedroom.
    So now, he said to the American woman at the party, I feel a fool, I feel embarrassed, I feel we are hurting, not helping each other, I feel it isn’t a refuge. Of course you feel that, she said, of course you’re right — it was temporarily necessary, it helped both of you, but you’ve got to live your life. Yes, he said, I’ve done my best, I’ve tried to get through, I have my life to live. Look, she said, I want to help, I really do, I have these wonderful friends I’m renting this flat from, why don’t you come, just for a few days, just for a break, why don’t you? They’re real sympathetic people, you’d like them, I like them, you could get your emotions kind of straightened out. She’d probably be glad to see the back of you, she must feel as bad as you do, she’s got to relate to her situation in her own way in the end. We all have.
    He said he would think about it. He knew he had elected to tell the sympathetic American because he had sensed she would be — would offer — a way out. He had to get out. He took her home from the party and went back to his house and landlady without seeing her into her flat. They both knew that this reticence was promising — that he hadn’t come in then, because he meant tocome later. Her warmth and readiness were like sunshine, she was open. He did not know what to say to the woman.
    In fact, she made it easy for him: she asked, briskly, if he now found it perhaps uncomfortable to stay, and he replied that he had felt he should move on, he was of so little use … Very well, she had agreed, and had added crisply that it had to be better for everyone if “all this” came to an end. He remembered the firmness with which she had told him that no illusions were pleasant. She was strong: too strong for her own good. It would take years to wear away that stony, closed, simply surviving insensibility. It was not his job. He would go. All the same, he felt bad
    He got out his suitcases and put some things in them. He went down to the garden, nervously, and put away the deck-chair. The garden was empty. There were no voices over the wall. The silence was thick and deadening. He wondered, knowing he would not see the boy again, if anyone else would do so, or if, now he was gone, no one would describe a tee shirt, a sandal, a smile, seen, remembered, or desired. He went slowly up to his room again.
    The boy was sitting on his suitcase, arms crossed, face frowning and serious. He held the man’s look for a long moment, and then the man went and sat on his bed. The boy continued to sit. The man found himself speaking.
    “You do see I have to go? I’ve tried to get through. I can’t get