Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt

He said:
    “You’re more a dandelion than a daisy.”
    “An old one then, a dead clock.”
    That threw him, for he thought of the dispersal of dandelion seeds and then of how inapposite this was to him and her with her ruined tubes. He said:
    “You know, I have to say, all these studs and things, in soft body tissue—there’s a considerable possibility they’re carcinogenic.”
    “You can’t worry about everything,” said Daisy Whimple. “What a thing to say, at this particular moment.”
    “It’s what I was thinking.”
    “Well, you could keep it to yourself for a better moment.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “That’s OK.”
    He lay on his back, and she lay curled on top of him, and he waited for her to go away, which after a time, perhaps sensing the waiting, she did.
    She stayed a week. She came to his bed every night. Every night he stroked the pierced and damaged body, every night he made love to her. At the end of the week she said she’d found a place to go, a friend had a spare sofa. She kissed him for the first time in the daylight, with her clothes on. He felt the cold metal of the ring in her lip. She said, “I expect you’ll be glad to see the back of me. You like your own company, I can see that. But it’s been good for you, what we did, for a little bit?”
    “Very good.”
    “I never know if you mean what you say.”
    ONE RESULT of Daisy’s brief habitation was that Damian allowed himself to know that he desired Martha. He wondered briefly if Daisy might have confided in Martha, and concluded that on balance, she would not. He went down to the Collection himself alone, and removed the blankets, the pillows, the food trays. He thought, in a week or so, when his flat was his own again, his sheets were laundered, his solitude with his images re-established, he would invite Martha there. She was a complicated person who needed slow, slow movements, he thought, not really sure why he thought these things. He too needed to move slowly, in a deliberate, considered way, he thought, putting behind him the vision of the white panties, the memory of the metal taste of the nipple-rings.
    MARTHA’S BEHAVIOUR suggested she knew nothing either of Daisy’s brief habitation of the Collection, or of the events in Damian’s flat. Damian did not mention Daisy to Martha in any context. Martha said she thought she had found an artist in residence, a young woman called Sue Basuto.
    “I think you’ll like her work because it’s elegant and colourful and kind of abstract. And I think she’d benefit from a hospital residence because she works with dripping water and pulses of light, in transparent boxes and tubes. She’s part of a group show at the St. Catherine’s Gallery in Wapping. Would you have time to come and look at it? We could perhaps go on and have supper or a drink if you’d like that.”
    Damian said he’d like that very much.
    They had reached a point where they embraced decorously, cheek to cheek, on meeting and parting.
    ST. CATHERINE’S GALLERY turned out to be a cavernous decommissioned red-brick Victorian church, perhaps ten years older than St. Pantaleon’s Victorian buildings. Damian and Martha went to the opening together: most of the assembled company were art students, in tight black clothes, with pink or shocking blue hair. Their voices were small and shrill under the vaulting. They were given transparent plastic beakers of red Australian wine from a winebox, and potato crisps on plates.
    Sue Basuto’s work was just inside the door. It had a humming motor, and resembled an Escher woodcut of impossible flow patterns, tipping green floods into crimson funnels over shining slides which balanced finely and reversed the flows. Damian liked it but wondered if it was more than a toy. The people in the church were all gathered to stare at an installation on what had been the altar-steps, under the rood screen. It was hard to see, because of the crowding, and from a distance seemed like a