Free Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt

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