Elementals - A. S. Byatt [58]
She stood and stared. She stared. The painter shifted from foot to foot. Then she said, ‘Oh yes, I see what you saw, how very strange.’ She said, ‘How very strange, to have been looked at so intently.’ And then she began to laugh. When she laughed, all the down-drooping lines of cheek and lip moved up and apart. The knit brows sprang apart, the eyes shone with amusement, the young voice pealed out. The momentary coincidence between image and woman vanished, as though the rage was still and eternal in the painting and the woman was released into time. The laughter was infectious, as laughter is; after a moment Concepción, and then the painter, joined in. He produced wine, and the women uncovered the offering they had brought, spicy tortilla and salad greens. They sat down and ate together.
A. S. BYATT
Elementals
A. S. Byatt is famed for her short fiction, collected in Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Her full-length novels include the Booker Prize–winning Possession and the trilogy sequence of novels The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower. She has also published four volumes of critical work, of which Imagining Characters is the most recent. She lives in London.
ALSO BY A. S. BYATT
FICTION
The Shadow of the Sun
The Game
The Virgin in the Garden
Still Life
Sugar and Other Stories
Possession: A Romance
Angels and Insects
The Matisse Stories
Babel Tower
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
CRITICISM
Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings
Imagining Characters (with Ignês Sodré)
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2000
Copyright © 1998 by A. S. Byatt
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Baglady” appeared in the Daily Telegraph, and “A Lamia in the Cévennes”
in The Atlantic Monthly, © 1995; “Jael” in The Guardian, © 1997;
“Christ in the House of Martha and Mary” on Word Pictures, BBC Radio 3,
and in You magazine, Mail on Sunday, and “Crocodile Tears” in
The Paris Review, © 1998.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan).
Elementals: stories of fire and ice / A. S. Byatt.
p. cm.
1. Polarity—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.Y2E44 1999
823’.914—dc21 99-10627
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42573-7
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