Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
The next book on the shelf is the last short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called Little Black Book of Stories
One night – a knock comes on the door. Mado is asleep – James opens the door. A beautiful young woman in a red silk dress stands there, and invites herself in. She calls herself “Dido” – James has no idea who she is – but she seems to know a hell of a lot about his life. Particularly about his wife. She’ll suddenly say something deep and penetrating about his wife’s character (“She was always like that, wasn’t she …”) – Dido says that she is an orphan and she has cast her own family off. She comes a couple of different times – and every time she goes, she leaves something behind – something James can see the next morning (the sash to her dress, whatever) and know that she had actually been there, he hadn’t dreamed her. But who is she?
So begins a long series of late nights – of talk – of reliving the marriage – with a woman who has to be in her early 20s … how does she know, intimately, Mado’s side of things? She’ll say something like, “She was always a great liar …” And James will reply, “How do you know?”
Anyway, it’s a lovely sad elegiac story – a beautiful way to end the collection.
The following excerpt is why Byatt – even with her intellectualism, her interest in the cerebral – is considered also to be a great erotic writer. She’s one of my favorites in that regard. Actually, it makes me think that it’s BECAUSE of her cerebral bent, her intellectualism – that she is such a poignant erotic writer.
Excerpt from Little Black Book of Stories
Afterwards, many things made him doubt that she had really been there at all. Starting with the name she had given herself, Dido, out of his reading. Though equally, she could have picked up his book whilst he was seeing to Mado, and chosen the name of the passionate queen more or less at random. She had known that Po was Eridanus, which he had forgotten, he thought, registering fear at a known fact lost, as he always did. She had some classical knowledge, unexpectedly. And why not, why should a beautiful woman in red silk not know some classical things, names of rivers, and so on? She had known that Mado hated pink, which she could not have known, which Mrs. Bright did not know, which he kept to himself. He must have invented, or at least misremembered, that part of the conversation. Maybe she existed as little – or as much – as Sasha, the imaginary blood-sister. He felt a weird sense of loss, with her departure, as though she had brought life into the room – pursued by death and the dark – and had taken it away again. What he felt for her was not sexual desire. He saw the old man he was from the outside, with what he thought was clarity. His creased face and his arthritic fingers and his cobbled teeth and his no doubt graveyard breath had nothing to do with anything so alive and lovely. What he felt was more primitive, pleasure in quickness. She was the quick, and he was the dead. She would never come again.
In bed that night he was visited – as he increasingly was – by a memory so vivid that for a time it seemed as though it was real and here and now. This happened more and more often as he slipped and lost his footing on the slopes between sleep and waking. It was as though only a membrane separated him from the life of the past, as only a caul had separated him from the open air at the moment of birth. Mostly he was a boy again, wandering amongst the intense horse-smell and daisy-bright fields of his childhood, paddling in trout-streams, hearing his parents discuss him in lowered voices, or riding donkeys on wide wet sands. But tonight he relived his first night with Madeleine.
They were students and virgins; he had half-feared and half-hoped that she might not be, for he wanted to be the first and he wanted it not to be a fiasco, or a worse kind of failure. He hadn’t asked her about it until they were undressing together in the hotel room he had taken. She turned to laugh at him through the black hair she was unpinning, catching exactly both his anxieties.
“No, there’s no one else, and yes, you will have to work it all out from scratch, but since human beings always have worked it out, we’ll probably manage. We’ve done pretty well up to now,” she said, glancing under her lashes, recalling increasingly complicated and tantalising fumbles in cars, in college rooms, in the river near the roots of willows.
She had always demonstrated a sturdy, even shocking, absence of the normal feminine reticences, or modesty, or even anxiety. She loved her own body, and he worshipped it.
They went at it, she said later, tooth and claw, feather and velvet, blood and honey. This night he relieved intimacies he had very slowly forgotten through years of war, and other snatched moments of blissful violence, and then the effacement of habit. He remembered feeling, and then thinking, no one else has ever known what this is really like, no one else can ever have got this right, or the human race would be different. And when he said so to her, she laughed her sharp laugh, and said he was presumptuous – I told you, James, everyone does it or almost – and then she broke down and kissed him all over his body, and her eyes were hot with tears as they moved like questing insects across his belly, and her muffled voice said, don’t believe me, I believe you, no one else ever …
And tonight he didn’t know – he kept rising towards waking like a trout in a river and submerging again – whether he was a soul in bliss, or somehow caught in the toils of torment. His hands were nervy and agile and they were lumpen and groping. The woman rode him, curved in delight, and lay simultaneously like putty across him.
And his eyes which had watered but never wept, were full of tears.
