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

find a floor to sleep on. I’m not doing any harm.”
    “You’d better come out. You could get arrested.”
    She scrambled out, a curious bundle of disparate garments, hospital white, vaguely Eastern underneath. She said:
    “It’s cold down here. It’s hard to keep warm.”
    “It’s designed to produce an ambient temperature for the Collection, not for squatters.”
    Daisy stood up and stared at him.
    “I’ll go then,” she said, hopefully.
    “Where? Where will you go?”
    “I’ll find somewhere.”
    “You’d better come back with me. And sleep in a bed, in a bedroom, if you can bear it.”
    “You don’t have to sneer.”
    “Oh,
for God’s sake,
I’m not sneering. Come on.”
    DAMIAN COOKED PASTA, whilst Daisy padded round his flat, studying his prints, with a slightly defiant, assessing look. He found he couldn’t ask her what she thought of them. He didn’t want to know what she thought of the floods of colour and delicate round harbours of his Herons, the lacquered reds, the gold and orange, the strange floating umber. He put food on the table, and kept the conversation going by asking her questions. He was uneasily aware that his questioning sounded very like a professional medical examination. And that she was answering him because she owed him for the food, the shelter, for not kicking her out of the job or out of the hospital. So he learned that she’d quarrelled with the boyfriend, after and probably because of the complicated abortion. He asked if she’d minded losing the baby, and she said it wasn’t a baby, and there was no point in minding or not minding, was there? He asked her if she ate enough, and she said well, what did he
think,
and then recovered her good manners, and said grittily that a hospital was a good place for scrounging, you’d be surprised how much good food went to waste. He asked if she had a grant, or any other source of money than the work at the Collection, and she said no, she did washing-up in restaurants now and then—and officecleaning. She said, economical with the information, that when she got her degree, if she got it, she might think of teaching, but of course that took time up that you might want to spend—need to spend—on your art.
    He asked her what sort of work she made, and she said she couldn’t say, really, not so he could imagine what it was like. Then she was silent altogether. So he turned on the television—his ex-wife flickered across the scene, playing Beckett and he changed channels quickly—they watched a football match, Liver-pool against Arsenal, and drank a bottle of red wine between them.
    IN THE SMALL HOURS he heard his bedroom door open, and the pad of footsteps. He slept austerely in a narrow single bed. She came across the room in the dark, like a ghost. She was wearing white cotton panties—he had felt quite unable to offer her any garment to sleep in. She stood and looked down on him, and he looked more or less at the panties, through half-opened eyes. Then she pulled up the corner of the duvet and slid into the bed silently, her cold body pressed against his warm one. Much went through Damian Becket’s half-drowsed mind. How he must not hurt her. Not offend her. She put cold fingers on his lips, and then on his sex, which stirred. He touched her, with a gynaecologist’s fingers, gently and found the scars of the ovarectomy, a ring pierced into her navel, little breasts with rings in the left nipple. The piercing repelled him. He thought irrelevantly of the pierced hands of the run-of-the-mill man on the cross. She began, not inexpertly, to caress him. He was overcome by a wash of hot emotion—if he had had to name it, he would have called it pity. He took her in his arms, held her to him, made love to her. He felt her tighten and stiffen—thank God there were no more intimate studs or rings—and then she gave a little crow and settled with her head on his chest. He stroked the colourless fluff of her hair in the dark.