Love by Angela Carter Page B

did you act on the spur of the moment or was she an old friend?’
    The room seemed so dark to Lee he could hardly make out the colour of the woman’s hair though he could see perfectly well that, outside the window, the sky was still light.
    ‘I’d been sleeping with Carolyn, her name is Carolyn – I’d been sleeping with Carolyn for some little time owing to thinking it would ease the strain.’
    ‘Did your relations with this girl alter your behaviour to your wife?’
    ‘Oh, yes. I was much nicer to her.’
    ‘I see,’ said the woman in a satisfied voice, as though she had expected him to say this. ‘Do you feel guilty?’
    ‘Rather guilty,’ said Lee and gave her his dazzling smile, secure she could not see it because it was so dark. Then they were silent again until Lee said, as if to himself:
    ‘Sometimes she hardly seems alive at all, at the best of times. Annabel, she’s like a shadow that sits and remembers and probably the things it remembers never happened.’
    ‘It . . .’ said the woman reflectively. ‘How odd you should refer to your wife as “it”.’
    ‘I was referring to the shadow of my wife.’
    ‘I see,’ she said and made a note on her pad. ‘What is the nature of both your relationships with your brother?’
    ‘Complex.’
    ‘Your brother does not seem to be entirely normal,’ she said gently.
    ‘In our milieu, that’s something of a compliment, you bourgeois cow.’
    ‘Has it come to personal abuse already?’ she enquired pleasantly.
    ‘Abuse or violence, take your choice. But if you took your boots off, I’d kiss your insteps with pleasure.’
    ‘I’m sure you would,’ she replied in a comfortable voice. ‘Your brother seems to take your wife’s fantasies for granted, as if they were real.’
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘How do you yourself regard your wife’s fantasies?’
    ‘I dunno. What a question. I don’t know from one minute to the next what it is that exists for her, it’s like a flicker book.’
    ‘Does your wife want children?’
    ‘Sweet Jesus!’ said Lee, aghast.
    ‘Have you ever discussed having children with her?’
    ‘No. No, I’ve hardly thought about it beyond the odd scare now and then. Why do you ask? Would you think it was normal?’
    ‘In many circles,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve started to cry again, I can hear you.’
    ‘I told you, I have bad eyes.’
    ‘But the lights are all out. How can your photophobia affect you? You have no excuse for tears except sentimentality.’
    ‘Then turn the lights on again, save me my face.’
    She did so. She was more black and gold than ever, like a holy image in a very white case and her veiled regard, half-hidden by smoked glass, gave her face an oracular ambiguity so that her blunt-lipped mouth, which might have brought forth snakes, issued slow words with a pregnant weight although now she produced a mere banality.
    ‘Perhaps Annabel should get a job and try to make friends of her own outside the environment imposed on her by yourself and your brother.’
    ‘What’s that again?’ gasped Lee, stunned; he had been anticipating something portentous.
    She said: ‘I don’t think your brother is a suitable person to live in the same house as such an unbalanced girl as Annabel. Indeed, it is probably very bad for them both.’
    ‘Dear God, do I have to choose between them?’
    ‘There is a condition of shared or, rather, mutually stimulated psychotic disorder known as “
folie à deux
”. Your brother and your wife would appear excellent candidates for it. Will you please stop crying. You are beginning to embarrass me.’
    ‘I told you, I can’t help it. Here, have I really got to cope with her on my own?’
    She shrugged enigmatically.
    ‘What’s wrong with my brother?’ he demanded truculently.
    She threw back her golden head and laughed for a long time until Lee reluctantly began to laugh also for he knew very well what she meant.
    ‘Listen,’ he said through his laughter. ‘I feel very