The World and Other Places by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online Page A

away the ones with sardine.
    St Teresa of Avila: ‘I have no defence against affection. I could be bribed with a sardine.’
    So it is for me for whom kindness has always been a surprise.
    In the lives of saints I look for confirmation of excess. To them it is not strange to spend nights on a mountain or to forgo food. For them, the visionary and the everyday coincide.Above all, they have no domestic virtues, preferring intensity to comfort. Despite their inhospitable ways, they ferment with unexpected life, like those bleak railway cuttings that host horizontal dandelions. They know there is no passion without pain.
    As I told her this, as I had told her so many things, she turned to me and said, ‘Sixteen years ago I lived in a hot country with my husband who was important. We had servants and three children. There was a young man who worked for us. I used to watch his body through the window. In the house we lived such clean lives, always washed and talcumed against the sweat. Not the heavy night nor the heat of the day could unsettle us. We knew how to dress.
    ‘One evening, when the boards were creaking under the weather, he came past us, where we sat eating small biscuits and drinking tea, and he dropped two baskets of limes on the floor. He was so tired that he spilt the baskets and went down on his knees under my husband’s feet. I looked down and saw my husband’s black socks within his black shoes. His toe kicked at a lime. I ducked under the table collecting what I could, and I could smell the young man, smelling of the day and the sun. My husband crossed his legs and I heard him say, “No need for that, Jane.”
    ‘Later, when we put out the lamps, and I went to my room and Stephen went to his, my armpits were wet and my face glowed as though I’d been drinking.
    ‘I knew he would come. I took off my nightgown four or five times, wondering how to greet him. It didn’t matter. Not then or afterwards. Not any of the two months that followed. My heart swelled. I had a whale’s heart. The arteries of a whale’s heart are so wide that a child could crawl through. I found I was pregnant.
    ‘On the night I told him, he told me he had to go away. He asked me to go with him and I looked at the verandah and the lamps and Stephen’s door that was closed and the children’s door that was ajar. I looked at his body. I said I had to stay and he put his head on my stomach and cried.
    ‘On the day he left I lay in my room and when I heard his flight booming over the house, I wrapped my head in a towel. Stephen opened the door and asked, “Are you staying?”
    ‘I told him I was. He said, “Never mention this again.”
    ‘I never did. Not that nor anything else.’
    We walked on in silence. We walked through the hours of the day until we arrived at nightfall and came to a castle protected by a moat. Lions guarded the gateway.
    ‘I’m going in now,’ she said.
    I looked up from my thoughts and saw an ordinary house fronted by a pretty garden with a pair of tabby cats washing their paws. Which was the story and which was real? Could it be true that a woman who had not spoken for sixteen years, except to order her food in four ounces, was nowwalking into this small house full of everyday things? Was it not more likely that she would disappear into her magic kingdom and leave me on the other side of the water, my throat clogged with feelings that resist words?
    I followed her across the moat and saw our reflection in the water. I wanted to reach down and scoop her in my arms, let her run over my body until both of us were wet through. I wanted to swim inside her.
    We crossed the moat. She fed me on boiled cabbage. I have heard it is a cure for gout. She never spoke as we ate, and afterwards she lit a candle and led me upstairs. I was surprised to see a mosquito net in England.
    Time is not constant. Time in stories least of all. Anyone can fall asleep and lose generations in their dreams. The night I spent with