Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes

intelligent, and then he despised her for being what he had made her.
    Perhaps he had made her barren too. Was that possible? Anything, she thought, was possible. So the next time they argued about her defectiveness, she looked up, held his eye and quickly, before the courage went, said, “I’ll go if you go.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I’ll go if you go.”
    “Jean, don’t talk like a child. Repeating yourself is not the same as explaining yourself.”
    “Perhaps you’re the one that’s defective.”
    That was when he hit her. It was, in fact, the only time in their life together that he did, and it was less a punch than an awkward round-arm cuff which landed where her shoulder joined her neck; but she was not to know this at the time. As she ran from the room, words seemed to descend on her from all angles. Bitch , she heard for the first time, and imbecile , and woman , this last word beaten and sharpened until it had an edge for slashing with.
    The words continued to be thrown after she had shut the door behind her. But its presence emptied them of meaning: two inches of close-fitting wood drained a violent anatomy of your character into mere noise. It felt as if Michael were throwing objects at her which all made the same sound as they hit the door: was that a plate, an inkwell, a book, a knife, or a tomahawk hung with feathers and still sharp despite its many previous victims? She couldn’t tell.
    She was grateful for this, as she thought back over the incident in the next few days, as she accepted Michael’s apologies and declined his caresses. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me: why did people formulate such proverbs unless they feared all too accurately that the opposite was the case? Painshealed, she knew (that first wound in her stomach had gone within the hour), but words festered. Woman , Michael had shouted at her, screwing the sound up into a ball first so that he could throw it farther and more accurately. Woman , where the word itself carried no venom, but the poison was all in the tone. Woman , two anodyne syllables which he redefined for her: all that exasperates me was the new meaning.
    After that, they stopped discussing children. Over the years they continued to make love, perhaps once a month, or at least whenever Michael seemed to want to; but Jean felt passive about the whole business. When she thought of Michael and sex she imagined an overfilling water tank which occasionally had to be drained; it didn’t have to be done too often, it wasn’t exactly a nuisance, it was just part of running the house. As for herself and sex, she preferred not to think about it. Sometimes she pretended to more pleasure than she felt; this was only polite. She didn’t find sex funny anymore; she just found it ordinary. And all those phrases she had once learnt—silly, exciting phrases which had seemed to flirt with her—now came from a very long time ago, from the island of childhood. The island you could not leave without getting wet. She thought of two wave patterns meeting at right angles, and felt a little guilty. As for those slogans—the one about the curve of normal desire and the other about the feeble and transient upwelling in women suffering from fatigue and overwork—they seemed like faded graffiti briefly glimpsed on the wall of a country bus shelter.
    She didn’t need any Alpine air; and the fatigue she suffered from was not physical in origin. She kept house for Michael; she gardened; she owned a succession of pets, aware that the village considered them substitutes for children. She kept a pig that escaped and was found eating the cat’s-eyes in the middle of the road. She had dealings with secret animals, the ones who would come only when she was out of the way. At times, lying in bed, she would hear the hedgehog rattling its jampot lid of milk as if in thanks, and she would smile.
    For twenty years she maintained a normal part in village life;she