The Books: “Sugar and Other Stories” – ‘The July Ghost’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

This excerpt is from “The July Ghosts”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt. A creepy story. Byatt is so good psychologically. A young man, whose girlfriend up and left him for another man, is kind of reeling from the shock of it – he needs to find another place to live, so he rents a room in a woman’s house. There’s a husband in the picture – but things are prickly between them – the young man is a witness to the weirdness in the relationship, and the weirdness of the woman herself. He minds his own business, he has a lot of work to do, he’s a writer, and he sits out in the back garden, writing and reading. Kids play in the next yard – so often one of them will come over to retrieve a ball that flew over the fence, or whatever. One day, he sees a little boy sitting up in the tree, staring down at him. He says to him, “You be careful up there … don’t fall …” The boy doesn’t respond. There’s something about the boy that really strikes him. His smile, first of all. The boy continues to appear, intermittently, out in the garden, lying in the grass in the corner, smiling over at him. One day, the young man sees the little boy exiting the house, coming out of the kitchen door – as though he lived there. He decides to mention the little boy to the woman.

What I meant earlier by saying that Byatt is so good psychologically is that in just a few sentences she has set up our expectations of how this woman will behave. So that when she starts to behave in unexpected ways – it is breathtaking, and very moving. She seems practical, unemotional, repressed, humorless – not unkind … but certainly not a woman of any deep feeling.

Here’s an excerpt.

Excerpt from “The July Ghosts”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

He felt reluctant to inform on the boy, who seemed so harmless and considerate: but when he met him walking out of the kitchen door, spoke to him, and got no answer but the gentle smile before the boy ran off towards the wall, he wondered if he should speak to his landlady. So he asked her, did she mind the children coming in the garden. She said no, children must look for balls, that was part of being children. He persisted – they sat there, too, and he had met one coming out of the house. He hadn’t seemed to be doing any harm, the boy, but you couldn’t tell. He thought she should know.

He was probably a friend of her son’s, she said. She looked at him kindly and explained. Her son had run off the Common with some other children, two years ago, in the summer, in July, and had been killed on the road. More or less instantly, she had added drily, as though calculating that just enough information would preclude the need for further questions. He said he was sorry, very sorry, feeling to blame, which was ridiculous, and a little injured, because he had not known about her son, and might inadvertently have made a fool of himself with some casual refernence whose ignorance would be embarrassing.

What was the boy like, she said. The one in the house? “I don’t — talk to his friends. I find it painful. It could be Timmy, or Martin. They might have lost something, or want …”

He described the boy. Blond, almost ten at a guess, he was not very good at children’s ages, very blue eyes, slightly built, with a rainbow-striped tee shirt and blue jeans, mostly though not always – oh, and those football practice shoes, black and green. And the other tee shirt, with the ships and wavy lines. And an extraordinarily nice smile. A really warm smile. A nice-looking boy.

He was used to her being silent. But this silence went on and on and on. She was just staring into the garden. After a time, she said, in her precise conversational tone,

“The only thing I want, the only thing I want at all in this world, is to see that boy.”

She stared at the garden and he stared with her, until the grass began to dance with empty light, and the edges of the shrubbery wavered. For a brief moment he shared the strain of not seeing the boy. Then she gave a little sigh, sat down, neatly as always, and passed out at his feet.

After this she became, for her, voluble. He didn’t move her after she fainted, but sat patiently by her, until she stirred and sat up; then he fetched her some water, and would have gone away, but she talked.

“I’m too rational to see ghosts, I’m not someone who would see anything there was to see, I don’t believe in an after-life, I don’t see how anyone can, I always found a kind of satisfaction for myself in the idea that one just came to an end, to a sliced-off stop. But that was myself; I didn’t think he – not he – I thought ghosts were – what people wanted to see, or were afraid to see … and after he died, the best hope I had, it sounds silly, was that I would go mad enough so that instead of waiting every day for him to come home from school and rattle the letter-box I might actually have the illusion of seeing or hearing him come in. Because I can’t stop my body and mind waiting, every day, every day, I can’t let go. And his bedroom, sometimes at night I go in, I think I might just for a moment forget he wasn’t in there sleeping, I think I would pay almost anything – anything at all – for a moment of seeing him like I used to. In his pyjamas, with his – his – his hair … ruffled, and, his … you said, his … that smile.

“When it happened, they got Noel, and Noel came in and shouted my name, like he did the other day, that’s why I screamed, because it – seemed to same – and then they said, he is dead, and I thought coolly, is dead, that will go on and on and on till the end of time, it’s a continuous present tense, one thinks the most ridiculous things, there I was thinking about grammar, the verb to be, when it ends to be dead … And then I came out into the garden, and I half saw, in my mind’s eye, a kind of ghost of his face, just the eyes and hair, coming towards me – like every day waiting for him to come home, the way you think of your son, with such pleasure, when he’s — not there — and I — I thought — no, I won’t see him, because he is dead, and I won’t dream about him because he is dead, I’ll be rational and practical and continue to live because one must, and there was Noel …

“I got it wrong, you see, I was so sensible, and then I was so shockecd because I couldn’t get to want anything – I couldn’t talk to Noel — I — I — made Noel take away, destroy, all the photos, I — didn’t dream, you can will not to dream, I didn’t … visit a grave, flowers, there isn’t any point. I was so sensible. Only my body wouldn’t stop waiting and all it wants is to — to see that boy. That boy you — saw.”

He did not say that he might have seen another boy, maybe even a boy who had been given the tee shirts and jeans afterwards. He did not say, though the idea crossed his mind, that maybe what he had seen was some kind of impression from her terrible desire to see a boy where nothing was. The boy had had nothing terrible, no aura of pain about him: he had been, his memory insisted, such a pleasant, courteous, self-contained boy, with his own purposes. And in fact the woman herself almost immediately raised the possibility that what he had seen was what she desired to see, a kind of mix-up of radio waves, like when you overheard police messages on the radio, or got BBC I on a switch that said ITV. She was thinking fast, and went on almost immediately to say that perhaps his sense of loss, his loss of Anne, which was what had led her to feel she could bear his presence in her house, was what had brought them – dare she say – near enough, for their wavelengths to mingle, perhaps, had made him susceptible … You mean, he had said, we are a kind of emotional vacuum between us, that must be filled. Something like that, she had said, and had added, “But I don’t believe in ghosts.”

Anne, he thought, could not be a ghost, because she was elsewhere, with someone else, doing for someone else those little things she had done so gaily for him, tasty little suppers, bits of research, a sudden vase of unusual flowers, new bold shirt, unlike his own cautious taste, but suiting him, suiting him. In a sense, Anne was worse lost because voluntarily absent, an absence that could not be loved because love was at an end, for Anne.

“I don’t suppose you will, now,” the woman was saying. “I think talking would probably stop any – mixing of messages, if that’s what it is, don’t you? But – if – if he comes again” — and here for the first time her eyes were full of tears — “if — you must promise, you will tell me, you must promise.”