The Game by A. S. Byatt
Tea-parties represented a normality of behaviour she had feared and avoided. Simon, normal and diminished, let them into the elegant, bleak house she had vaguely expected never to enter. Julia displayed a brisk familiarity with where to hang coats and the whereabouts of bread-knife and tea-pot stand. They had tea in a room which, Julia told Cassandra, had been Simon’s father’s study – book-lined, gloomy, with red leather arm-chairs and a mahogany desk with brass drawer-handles on which Simon stacked his uneven slices of utility bread and a dish of home-made jam. Over the hearth hung a huge Martyrdom of St. Sebastian; the saint’s limbs were elongated and female, his mouth somewhere between pouting and secretively smiling, his flesh precisely punctured by the arrows so that the wounds recalled the raised red mouths of rubber suckers. The enjoyment of pain with the pain taken out, she had thought. She made no attempt to communicate the thought. She could remember very little of the conversation, although it flowed easily enough; she had not gone there with any intention of conversing. Both the others eagerly directed their remarks to her, deferring to her opinions; she gave them brief, undeveloped answers, sat stiff, and looked remotely out of the window.
She wondered, now, what Simon had made or intended of that tea-party. He had smiled steadily through it, sitting easy and animated, talking with more apparent openness in the company of both of them than he did, at least, alone with her. He had seemed to find the situation he had brought about both comfortable and satisfactory. There had been a time when she had hoped that after a long and cautiously developed acquaintance – when both of them had changed – she would have been able at last to share normal things with him, and then tea-parties would have had the drama, the inevitability, the beauty, the freedom, of her other world. But meeting him in this way precluded for ever meeting him in any other. She watched him laugh with Julia, and thought she would not know him, and had not known him. A fine observation, however scrupulous, however impassioned, was no substitute for the desire on his part to communicate. Detaching herself, she allowed her contempt to flourish at last, remembering things she had ignored: awkwardnesses, inaccuracies, small unkindnesses, unnecessary fulsomeness with the Vicar. She held to that. She was prematurely resigned, indeed, almost indecently anxious, never to see him again. Her abdication was grim and complete.
Since that afternoon she had never spoken more than was in politeness required of her, either to Simon, or to her sister. She had evaded, with polite and apparent fictions, any further invitations, she had avoided Simon when, inevitably, he came to the house. She had left unanswered a letter he wrote her about Plato. The tea-party had been a concession to dignity. It was all she could do. Once, a few weeks later, she had opened the door to him by mistake.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Cassandra. Come up and see the snakes?’
‘I have to work.’
‘Don’t say that. You cut yourself off. It isn’t good for you.’ There was no answer to this; his kindness, since he had talked of her to Julia, was an insult. It always had been; she had chosen not to notice. At least he was incapable of a direct question.
‘You shouldn’t cut yourself off. You must make some contact with people.’
‘I do, in my own way. I know what I’m doing.’
‘I doubt that. Neither you nor I know that.’
She looked at him with a flicker of interest.
‘We don’t think it matters what we do. But it does. Now Julia —’ he said. ‘Julia —’
‘Julia is in the garden.’
‘No, wait, Cassandra —’
She did not see why he should preserve his good opinion of himself at her expense. It was refusing these small encounters that exhausted her; that, and fending off Julia’s attempts to confess, discuss, or clear the air. She walked away from him. She did not think he had expected this precisely; but all that was left, as she saw it, to do, was to uncreate him in her mind. If she could have worked through the relationship, unhindered, if she could have cast him off, and held him as an interesting memory when they had nothing more to say to each other, she would not now feel so stunted, so trapped in his view of her then, which he had shared, and modified, with Julia. There was nothing to do but behave as though he had never been.
Julia, on the other hand, was real and dangerous. In the beginning she had been merely inquisitive eyes, scuffling, proprietary curiosity the other side of the locked door. But lately she had come to see her as an almost impersonal menace, something which would infallibly take what she, Cassandra wanted because its only function was to want precisely that. She had the story. Which could be abandoned. She had Simon. Who could be forgotten. It was important to keep secret what she herself now wanted – whatever that was. At the time, the remorseless logic of this as a guide to behaviour had pleased her. She went back to Oxford ignorant of what the two, in each other’s company, were doing.
After another term and another vacation Julia trapped her at the end of the garden, where she was reaching up with the secateurs into the lilac, gathering branches for Easter vases on altar and Meeting-house table. Julia appeared purposefully at the end of the path. She had lately become a proper reporter and was rarely at home. Her face and pale eyes seemed more colourless than usual; as she came up Cassandra saw that her expression had a harshness quite different from her usual placatory grin. She had been very patient with Cassandra, had risked innumerable rebuffs, had persistently and gently reopened conversations, and allowed herself to be humiliated by silence. Cassandra thrust her head into the bush so that her vision was criss-crossed with twigs and close white flowers.
‘I want to talk to you. There is only you.’ Cassandra snipped two sprigs and inclined her head.
‘You knew Simon had gone?’ Julia informed her abruptly. Cassandra swallowed and did not answer. ‘He went to London, a week ago. Now he writes and says he’s off to Malaya with a zoological team. He must have known he was going for weeks – for months. Secretly fixing. He wrote me a sort of apologetic letter. A final letter. Just cutting off contact.’ She said, ‘You know, Cass, he’s an awful emotional dabbler.’
‘He’s afraid of committing himself. And afraid of feeling,’ Cassandra said. ‘He explores other people’s emotions partly to see if he’s got any himself – he fears he may not have – and partly just to keep other people off him. To distance them.’
The contempt was coming out finely. This was the first thing Cassandra had said to Julia about Simon: Julia clearly found it encouraging.
‘Oh, yes,’ she cried, ‘that’s exactly what I feel.’ She added, unfortunately, ‘I’m so glad you know. I thought you didn’t know.’
Cassandra plunged back into the bush and made several well-directed slashes with the secateurs; lilac stems fell and tangled round her feet.
‘I’ve had an awful time, Cass. I haven’t the slightest idea – really I haven’t – what I really feel about him. He’s so very odd. I don’t understand what he’s saying half the time. Or why he – Sometimes so desperate and insistent. Sometimes just standoffish and kind. I’ve never felt so uncertain in my life. And begging, and begging.… And then, just when you give in, just going off —’
Her voice rose. ‘Cass, you’ve got to listen, you’re the only person I know, you’re the only one who’d understand.’
‘Clearly I wouldn’t understand. That seems to me all that’s certain.’
‘No, you must let me talk, this time. We’ve got to clear this up. We’ve got to go on knowing each other all our lives. Cass, being friends with you is more important in the long run than anything Simon can ever mean to me.’
‘There is no good to be done by talking.’
‘Oh, there is, there is. Cassandra, I know – with Simon – you think I – only because you —’
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra. She stood with secateurs dangling and held her face together.
‘But you know that’s unjust. What about him, then? What about him? Isn’t he someone, doesn’t he want things and do things, didn’t he start it
Cassandra winced.
‘Why must everything always be my fault?’ Because it was, Cassandra had thought. She had thought, too, that Julia needed to tell her the details because whatever they had done was not real or finished until she had been made to be the audience, fully informed. As though they were only acting out her fate, her story; their love, or whatever it was, was simply a function of her own fear. Well, it should stay that way; she would not lose what power she had by becoming involved as an actor, or suffering with Julia. That would be the final constriction, the final limitation. She would keep what freedom detachment, or ignorance, provided.
‘You must let me tell you.’
‘When you’ve learned you can’t have things both ways,’ said Cassandra, ‘you’ll begin to grow up. I don’t want to know.’
She walked round her sister, head up, her arms full of branches and flowers. Behind her she heard Julia running, stumbling, in the other direction. She thought that Julia knew where she was vulnerable but could never really believe it, and so was compelled to go on probing. This was only partly Julia’s fault. She felt – as she often felt when she had just parted from Julia – a kind of useless, accepting affection; an inactive understanding.
And then she had been hurt by the phrase ‘just when you give in’. She had, perhaps, after all, allowed herself to be told too much.
After she had walked for some time Cassandra lay down on her bed, her hands folded under her face, her nose pressing her knuckles. She had done this since childhood. It was not relaxation; she put effort into it; but after a time she could usually reduce herself to being conscious of nothing but black space in the head and peripheral, defining discomfort; coldness, or pains in the ankles. In the dark behind the closed lids aquamarine plants grew, and shattered into splinters of light; crimson fluid welled up and held momentary globular shapes; in a dancing network of green glass threads apparitions like Simon’s caerulean butterflies spread and were disembodied. Cassandra pressed her body against the bed. If she released the pressure of the knuckles, the patterns of light became gentler, and then still.
Julia had assumed that they must be more real to each other, more durable, than anything else. Well, there was a partial truth to that. At best, or at worst, they had been too real to each other, sharing the same thoughts. Not defined, setting up, therefore, a struggle to separate. In an ideal state they should be no more and no less real to each other than anyone else. Thor, for instance. Or Simon.
What I do, what means most to me, she thought, in a moment of panic, is patterns created by the pressure of my own hands on my eyes. She had been allowing herself to forget how Julia’s touch had made Simon seem for ever inaccessible. The television screen was like the Looking Glass, beyond which was a different space, where certain laws did not obtain. She had entered this world, she had hacked creepers and trodden trails, she had analysed the hum of insects and the screech of macaws, she had suffered flies and heat and scoured pots on stones by the river. In the literature she studied, the dream was a mode of knowledge. Beyond Simon were the remote knights, in their thickets, and the lover, in the knee-high, delicate, grass-green forest, set within its sheltering walls, reaching out at last, with his serious, anxious expression, to pluck the rose.
It is no accident, Cassandra told herself, that I chose a field of study where the great images are those of unsatisfied desire, formalized, made into a mode of apprehension.
She shifted her body, and the lights all ran together inside her head, white.
Chapter 9
THEN, suddenly, the thaw came. All night sections of the roof-load of snow cracked away, gathered momentum, buckled at the gutter, and splatted into paths and garden. Snow in the flowerbeds filmed over with deepening water, and in the morning lawns were spattered with black dots across the white – like fruit cake under icing. Elizabeth Corbett said they must all leave before floods in their turn detained them. Thor concurred and rang the station. That evening, they packed.
Cassandra was packing when Julia found her. Her bed was strewn with apparently identical black garments rolled into long tubes. On the dressing-table was a pile of jewels, ready to be put in tissue paper and chamois: chains, brooches, rings, lumps of unset stone. There was a strong smell of leather and old books; Julia thought she must be imagining the hint of incense. She herself, in hooded and fringed Scandinavian jersey, purple clocked with black and olive, over purple tights and pointed purple suède boots, fitted the picture indifferently well. She thought: it’s ironic that what Thor gives me can so easily be worn to suit Cassandra. She closed the door behind her.
‘May I come in?’
‘As usual, you ask for what you have accomplished. Clear yourself a chair, sit down.’
Julia moved from Cassandra’s round, carved wood and plum velvet chair what looked like a spencer and a pair of knee-length knitted woollen knickers, the elastic broken and knotted in two places. She sat down, and said, folding these garments, ‘It must be draughty in your college.’
‘It is.’
Cassandra began to roll the jewels into little balls of tissue paper.
‘But you’ll be glad to get back?’
‘One comes to need one’s own routine.’
‘If Thor had his way we’d be breaking right out of ours. Into a new life. Cass, you don’t think I was wrong about that, do you?’
Cassandra hesitated perceptibly. She said, ‘No,’ and then, ‘does he?’
‘I don’t honestly know what he thinks. Sometimes I even think he only brought it up at all to call my bluff.’
She watched Cassandra’s mouth compress, and the thought on Cassandra’s face: Julia in a confessional mood. However Cassandra said, surprisingly, ‘What bluff?’
‘Well – I write these books. About people confined in a domestic pressure-chamber. Needing an outburst, a whole-hearted gesture, some sort of extravagance or violence.…’
Cassandra did not say whether she read the books.
‘And you think he wants you to know you’re not the only one.’
‘Well, it might be that.’
‘Or it might be genuine concern with non-domestic problems.’
Cassandra lugged out a suitcase from under the bed and began to push rolled-up stockings and handkerchiefs into her shoes, as she had done when they left for school.
‘He’s been funny since we got here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed. He’s cold. He resents all sorts of things about me lately. But he ought to have known what I – was like.’
‘Perhaps he thought you might change.’
Julia took this. ‘Oh yes, he did. So did I. But it’s him that’s changed. He – I –
‘Changed?’
‘Well, when I married him he seemed safe. And concerned with real things. After living here. I wanted a real life of my own. He seemed so normal.’
‘He’s a little like Father,’ said Cassandra. ‘Of course, nobody is as much like anyone else as one initially thinks they may be.’
‘That’s clever of you. Yes, he wants to understand, and he’s limited by his own goodness. He can’t really think ill of you, or get impatient, or understand meanness intuitively. I used to think that was marvellous. Real wisdom I’d live up to, in time.”
‘And now?’
‘Now he frightens me. And I understand better. He is – sexually rather constrained, you know, and makes it – made it, when he was younger – worse, by keeping his distance. He never knew enough to take it easy. So when we met – and I know I do rather throw myself at people, though I try not to because it always causes trouble’ – Julia hurried on – ‘he – he felt violently attracted, and took this as a sign from God that he was in love. No, don’t grin, he did think that, he told me so. Damn it,’ said Julia, ‘he always looks as though he knows what he’s doing.’
Cassandra, slightly unnerved by these near-revelation
‘I wasn’t up to it. For all sorts of reasons I wasn’t up to it. I – I cheated him. I wasn’t what he expected. I’m not – like that, I – didn’t know I wasn’t, either. Now he goes about behaving like a frustrated saint. Well, he may be, but it’s not only the saint.… In any case, he seems to think everything’s my fault.’
Cassandra came sideways round the bed foot and gathered up an armful of what looked like bandages.
‘He blames some of it on me,’ Cassandra said. ‘He told me so. Over the television.’
‘But I never see you or think about you,’ said Julia with automatic and patent untruth.
‘He asked me if I hadn’t done enough damage.’ They thought this over, in silence, and then looked at each other with curious complicity; Cassandra finished, smoothly, ‘I didn’t know precisely what he meant.’
‘Coming back here does bring things up. Old fears. I feel everyone’s against me. I feel everyone thinks I’m a fool. Everything matters too much. It’s suffocating.’
‘That’s natural.’
‘Oh, do you think so? I think he thinks we’re unnatural, that there’s something really wrong with us. That we’re abnormal. Trapped.’
‘You always worried obsessively about what was natural, or normal. You may well be normal. I don’t suppose many people would describe me so. I can’t say it worries me.’
‘There you go, dismissing me again.’
‘I’m not dismissing you.’
‘You always have. I – I meant to stop that. I meant to shock you, to make you see I could.…’ She took off several rings, dropped one on the carpet, and got down. From under the chair her voice went on, ‘That isn’t to say that’s what I still want, but the idea crops up from time to time. All my childhood’ – accusing, offering, struggling to her knees – ‘I meant simply to catch up and do something that would stagger you, that would make you admire me. And then we could have been friends. Well, we made a nice mess of it. Between us and Simon.’