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

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 kind
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