The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (Vintage International) by A.S. Byatt Page A

her father, and naked she will return. But since he has taken all her old clothes she asks him for a smock to cover her nakedness, since ‘the womb in which your children lay, should not, as I walk, be seen bare before the people. Let me not,’ says Griselda, ‘go by the way like a worm. In exchange for my maidenhead, which I brought with me and cannot take away, give me a smock.’ And Walter graciously allows her the shift she stands in, to cover her nakedness.
    But Walter thought of other twists to the intrigue, since every twist made his plotted denouement more splendid and satisfactory. No sooner, it seemed, was Griselda back at home, than her husband was there, asking her to return to the castle and prepare the rooms and the feast for his new young bride. No one could do it better, he told her. You might think that the pact was over on her return to her father’s house, but this was not Griselda’s idea: patiently she returned, patiently she cooked, cleaned, prepared, made up the marriage bed.
    And the bridal procession arrived at the castle, with the beautiful girl in the midst, and Griselda worked away in the hall in her poor clothes, and the feast was set, and the lords and ladies sat down to eat. Now indeed, apparently, Griselda was a belated spectator at the wedding. Walter called Griselda to him and asked her what she thought of his wife and her beauty. And Griselda did not curse her, or indeed him, but answered always patiently, that she had never seen a fairer woman, and that she both beseeched and warned him ‘never to prick this tender maiden with tormenting’ as he had done her, for the young bride was softly brought up and would not endure it.
    And now Walter had his denouement, the end of his story, and revealed to Griselda that his bride was not his bride, but her daughter, and the squire her son, and that all would now be well and she would be happy, for he had done all this neither in malice nor in cruelty, but to test her good faith, which he had not found wanting. So now they could be reconciled.
    And what did Griselda do? asked Gillian Perholt? And what did she say, and what did she do? repeated Dr Perholt. Her audience was interested. It was not a story most of them knew beyond the title and its idea, Patient Griselda. Would the worm turn? one or two asked themselves, moved by Griselda’s image of her own naked flesh. They looked up to Dr Perholt for an answer, and she was silent, as if frozen. She stood on the stage, her mouth open to speak, and her hand out, in a rhetorical gesture, with the lights glittering on her eyeballs. She was an ample woman, a stout woman, with a soft clear skin, clothed in the kind of draped linen dress and jacket that is best for stout women, a stone-coloured dress and jacket, enlivened by blue glass beads.
    And Gillian Perholt stared out of glassy eyes and heard her voice fail. She was far away and long ago-she was a pillar of salt, her voice echoed inside a glass box, a sad piping like a lost grasshopper in winter. She could move neither fingers nor lips, and in the body of the hall, behind the grey-scarved women, she saw a cavernous form, a huge, female form, with a veiled head bowed above emptiness and long slack-sinewed arms, hanging loosely around emptiness, and a draped, cowled garment ruffling over the windy vacuum of nothing, a thing banal in its conventional awfulness, and for that very reason appalling because it was there, to be seen, her eyes could distinguish each fold, could measure the red rims of those swollen eyes, could see the cracks in the stretched lips of that toothless, mirthless mouth, could see that it was many colours, and all of them grey, grey. The creature was flat-breasted and its withered skin was exposed above the emptiness, the windy hole that was its belly and womb.
    This is what I am afraid of, thought Gillian Perholt, whose intelligence continued to work away, to think of ways to ascertain whether or not the thing was a product