Free Love by Angela Carter

first meeting, walked through the quiet streets together as if alone in the world. Suddenly she emitted a rich, low chuckle and pressed his hand but he was by now quite sober and in a state of great agitation for he had behaved more foolishly than he would ever have believed possible.
    ‘The last time my mother communicated to anyone, it was to say she knew she was the Whore of Babylon,’ he said, but he was thinking mainly about Annabel. Carolyn turned wide eyes to him; he had never mentioned his mother to her before and she thought this must be the beginning of a further stage of intimacy.
    ‘Tell me about your mother,’ she said encouragingly.
    ‘She’s locked up,’ said Lee. ‘Certified.’
    She had not expected him to sound so bored.
    ‘Poor Lee,’ she said tentatively.
    ‘We was better off with the aunt, wasn’t we. You don’t want to live with a mad woman, do you, not at the impressionable age.’
    A few days later, Buzz showed him the pictures he had taken on the hill. He could never have imagined such terror in her face for he had little capacity for metaphysical dread himself; otherwise, he had foreseen exactly how she would look for the woman in the playground and the girl on the hill were already superimposed on one another in his mind so that to speak of his mother was to speak of Annabel. He noticed his grammar-school accent had given way entirely so he knew he was under stress. Besides, his eyes burned.
    ‘Your aunt . . . your aunt brought you up?’
    ‘Yes. Both of us. She –’
    He could not finish the sentence and left it hanging in the air. Carolyn grew sad and a little apprehensive to find no increase but a diminution of intimacy, for he had suddenlybecome unresponsive to her and she shivered, sensing, perhaps, the imminent loss of a little of her marvellous assurance. She lived in a terrace built out on a cliff over a river, a silent place.
    ‘Are you coming in?’
    He gave her a curious look of mild reproof and she felt a premonition of sorrow.
    ‘Lee?’
    She stood and beseeched him in the cold midnight in her pretty, silly clothes. But Lee knew he walked some kind of tightrope above a whirlpool, though he believed that the knowledge itself might be enough to avert a fall if he walked carefully and, even if he now intended to break with Carolyn, he was sufficiently sentimental or else, perhaps, vain enough to go upstairs with her. But her room made him vertiginous and he had to keep from the window in case he jumped out. Then he knew he could no longer live at everyday altitudes and had been deceiving himself. He succumbed to guilt immediately.
    ‘What have I done wrong?’ she asked like a miserable child, confronted with an indifference which flowed with the magic speed of a Japanese water flower, and now Lee oscillated sickly between two focuses of guilt, his mistress and his wife. Yet all he had wanted from Carolyn, in the first place, had been a little, simple affection and she, from him, pleasure, although now she was in such a tranced and helpless state she thought she would be lonely without him for the rest of her life.
    ‘I don’t know you,’ said Lee. ‘I don’t know you at all, do I?’
    It was an excuse or an attempt at an explanation rather than a complaint but she was cut to the heart for she did not realize they had only intersected by chance upon one another and exchanged spurious, self-contradictory falsehoods as if flashing lights in one another’s faces.
    Lee saw the ambulance from the top of the street and broke into a run. He was in time to see them carry Annabel from the house, wrapped in a blanket, and then Buzz spat at him. Buzz was still painted like a fiend and fixed at last upon a situation which fired all his histrionic opportunism.
    ‘I broke the door down and you was off screwing and she dying, wasn’t she?’
    Lee felt nothing but surprise. Perhaps one of the ambulance men held Lee off him; anyway, soon he found himself in the casualty ward of