by A. S. Byatt
Thor said, ‘Can you tell us, Mr Merton, what we must expect? I think we should know what to expect. We were told nothing definite.’
Cassandra thought, he finds it easier to be a son-in-law – more natural – than I do to be a daughter.
‘Well —’ said the Vicar, turning a corner.
‘Yes, please, we need to know,’ said Julia, warmly.
‘Well —’ said the Vicar, ‘it was a bad stroke. It would be wrong of me to tell you that he is certainly dying. But Dr Moore told me that – as things seem, as things seem – it is unlikely he will recover. Or, if he does recover – he will not be strong again. You know that he is paralysed completely, and can’t speak? That may, of course, improve to a certain extent. But I don’t think you should hope too much.’
‘I see,’ said Thor. ‘Thank you. And my mother?’
‘Bearing up splendidly,’ said the Vicar. ‘Splendidly. Very calm. I think it’s telling on her. But she is splendid.…’
‘She would have to be,’ said Julia. ‘She wouldn’t know what else to be.’
‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that she expects perhaps too much of herself.’
He likes summing people up, Cassandra thought. He always has. He liked to have authority to understand and judge other people. Nevertheless, he did it quite well. Her mother’s life was largely a faithful attempt to draw on strength not apparently available, in the hope that the expectation would create it. She was a woman who would take on any duty, and accept any misfortune, on this basis, and then through sheer effort of will preserve a climate of calm around an increasing struggle. So she had survived war, and refugees, and her husband’s imprisonment, and Cassandra’s own defection, simply by assuming that nothing else was possible. Well, Cassandra thought, if strength had not been given, something else had. A kind of toughness in defeat. She thought of her mother’s square, thick body, her square corsets, her horn-rimmed glasses on their long chain, her sensible hands and sensible shoes. Her strength was a shell’s strength, that was the trouble; it provided a shell’s simple invulnerability. A layer of hardened scales. And slowed her movements. Cassandra, angry with herself for thinking in this way at this time shrugged her shoulders silently and looked out of the window.
Thor said, ‘We can at least relieve her of much of the burden, now.’
Something in his tone brought home to both sisters that they had been expecting to assist at a ceremonial, in so far as they had been expecting anything at all: his voice made them aware that death was a matter of holding basins, washing sheets, sweat, incontinence, swabs, sedatives. Cassandra turned her head uneasily, allowing herself to think of death, her stomach contracting with real fear. She was aware of the movement of Deborah, beside her, sliding one hand into Thor’s large one, across his knee. Why did Julia bring that child? she asked herself angrily. She can’t bear it. She did not ask herself how she had come by this knowledge.
There was a silence; then the Vicar said, ‘I remember driving the two of you along this road, in different circumstances. When we were all younger, yes. I still feel a certain proprietary interest in you. I read your novels with – great interest, Julia, if I may say so. Very evocative. They provide me with an insight into the modern generation I shouldn’t otherwise have. You speak for a generation, or so the girls in the village tell me.…’
Julia smiled, and said thank you, once or twice; she felt inhibited from any discussion by the presences of Thor and Cassandra.
‘Opinions of friends, I find,’ she said with enthusiasm, ‘are all one really cares about, after a bit. If people one really cares for know what one is trying to do … this is what matters.’
‘Oh, I tell them all I knew you as a little girl,’ said the Vicar, smiling his sad, handsome smile, as though he was really thinking about something quite different, as though his friendliness was a result of pure generosity.
Cassandra caught sight of it as he turned to Julia; it was a look which, for several reasons, she associated with Simon. She leaned her own head slightly against the window, away from them all; they were coming out of the suburbs now, along the long dull road up into Northumberland. Fine February snow was beginning to fall. She was beginning to feel constricted already.
‘I remember you running away from home,’ said the Vicar. ‘Both of you. Quite regularly. I’ve fetched you both back from all sorts of places in that little old Austin, do you remember?’
Julia laughed.
‘You were always the extravagant one. I remember a time when you ran away in nothing but a nightdress. Cassandra’ – he hesitated over the Christian name as though it was no longer appropriate – ‘Cassandra was always – better prepared.’
With suitcase, and savings, Cassandra thought. I meant to go. I must have meant to go. It may have been a failure, but it was not simply a gesture – it was an instinct of flight, powerful and unquestioned, bred of no particular complaint. She remembered the summer night when she had walked out of the front door and headed south, mile after mile down country lanes towards a carefully selected country station. After some time, she had become afraid, too afraid to look round, or do anything but walk more rapidly. Blood beat behind her eyes. There was something crawling in the hedgerow, breathing heavily in the next field. Her hands were wet with fear.
Julia came up with her in the main street of a village, her face flaming with exertion, judging that by now she had achieved a fait accompli; they were far enough from home for her to be able to give up running and hiding, and approach openly.
‘Let me come too, Cassandra, let me come too, it isn’t fair.’
Cassandra had waited until she was there, and had then attacked, desperately, using the suitcase, nails, teeth, shoes, silently intent on real damage, grunting like an animal with effort. And Julia, laughing hysterically, her coat falling open to display the sprigged winceyette nightdress, had warded off the blows patiently, keeping up a shrill stream of cries. ‘You always leave me out. You won’t let me have anything, ever. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.’
People had come out of houses, and had torn Cassandra away – it had taken this – had applied lint to Julia’s cuts and scratches, and had asked her various questions, and then telephoned. And the Vicar – since, as so often, Father was away – had come. And they had gone home.
‘All children feel the need to run away from time to time,’ Julia said wisely to the Vicar. ‘From the happiest homes particularly. It’s just an assertion of premature independence. Desire for the unknown.’
Cassandra remembered the Vicar, left alone with her in his sitting-room whilst Julia was questioned elsewhere, asking:
‘Well, why, Cassandra?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to lose myself. I can’t bear to be as I am.’
‘Does anything particular worry you?’
‘No, no, everything.’
‘That’s fairly common. There are remedies. Try running to me, next time, will you? You can tell me as much as you like and no more.’ With the same abstract good-will, not personal, and therefore partly daunting, partly reassuring. It would have been nice if he cared, she had thought then; but there was something very safe about his god-like calm. Still, she had not run to him for another eight years, or so.
‘Fear of the unknown,’ she said, with unexpected harshness. ‘Or fear of the familiar. Maybe the same.’
‘Like suicide,’ said Thor. ‘A bid for attention, a reproach to those who have noticed nothing, usually intended not to succeed.’
During the uneasy silence which followed Thor’s remark, the Vicar thought about Cassandra Corbett. She had made his life difficult at one stage – although this was an improper way to see it; the Corbetts were an old Quaker family and Cassandra’s violent conversion to Anglo-Catholicism at the age of eighteen had created the maximum discomfort for himself and his friends, her parents, who, however tolerant they were, felt her mood as a rejection of themselves. And in this they were right, he
was sure, though he had never been able to understand precisely what Cassandra was rejecting. He reflected on the curious prevalence of women in the Anglican Church, and grimaced – all those years ago, when he had decided to become ordained, one of his less noble motives had been the glamour of a legitimately bachelor existence, no domestic details, no women, no claims. Well, he thought, we learn virtue by putting ourselves in a position where we cannot refuse to exercise it, for shame. There are always the faithful who knit and embroider and arrange flowers. But, in his experience, those who made intense religious demands were the young girls, wracked in the abstract by physiological changes he knew nothing about and was too nice to mention – or closed-in women, a little older than Cassandra was now. In his thirties he had sat, embarrassed, whilst she sat in his study, night after night, alternately weeping and making him passionate intellectual speeches about the nature of despair; he had read her letters and dutifully written replies a quarter of their length. He remembered, too, discussing St. Augustine with her and Simon Moffitt; the girl in a square, military-cut navy-blue suit, an expression of acute, elated anxiety on her clever face, doing most of the talking; and Simon’s eyes meeting his own across her, with amusement, embarrassment, a flicker of male complicity? He had never, in fact, made any direct effort to ascertain Simon’s feelings, and had never done so. Indeed, the regularity with which Cassandra had made a third at their meetings had made this unnecessary; her presence had created an automatic and easy silent bond between them and had inhibited this from becoming anything else. We learn virtue by putting ourselves in a position where we cannot refuse to exercise it. The Vicar tapped his fingers on the wheel, and smiled to himself. He was sorry he had lost Simon; that something had prevented Simon from going into the Church. He would have thought it would have been the girl who was suffering from the temporary hysterical religiosity of late adolescence. But Cassandra, in his fifties, was still with him; authoritatively Anglican, dryly knowledgeable, certainly devout, only slightly addicted to cliqueish jokes about vestments or Jesuits. And he, used to women now, enjoyed her company more than he might have imagined possible, and was a little afraid of her. She struck him, now as when she was eighteen, as a spiritual desperado, and one whose capacity for violence was by no means spent. I wonder what she lives for, he thought, and said aloud:
‘And you, Cassandra, how are your studies progressing?’
But she was not disposed to talk, had to be asked twice, and then merely said, ‘Very well.’
By the time they had passed through Alnwick, conversation had fluttered to a stop – only Julia asked spasmodic questions about old acquaintances, brightly. The snow was thickening, and the air in the car, fanned round by the heater, was soporific and heavy. Deborah still held Thor’s hand. Cassandra, turned away to the outside, was aware in spite of herself of the tightness of the grip.
At last they reached Benstone village. Here, in summer, little gardens of purple and white flowers grew in the road without fences; tough, shrubby flowers, blown by a sea-wind. To the north and east were the long beaches Swinburne had chanted about. The village was built on a steep hill. At the bottom were the church and the vicarage, the village stores and the post office; at the top was the Old House, last in a line of increasingly large grey stone houses fronting the street directly. Here the Corbetts had lived for three generations: they were one of the oldest Quaker families, solid, unpretentious, civilized bourgeoisie.
Numbed by the long drive and the car heater they all crowded into the hall – a large, low room with a wood fire burning in a stone fireplace, into which they came straight from the street. The roof was beamed, and the floor was bare wood, with various large rugs, comfortable rather than elegant, spread about between leather arm-chairs. The main staircase, uncarpeted and wooden, came straight down into the room from a narrow landing like a kind of minstrel’s gallery. Underneath it, rather dimly lit, was a huge Burne-Jones painting of knights, ladies, hounds and horses plunging through a tangled wood drawn in meticulous detail. It had happened that some of the more worthy of the worthy Friends would complain to the liberal elder Corbetts that the painting represented blood-sports, and was unsuitable; but it had been bought by a Corbett who had been acquainted with Christina Rossetti, and thus had a certain degree of virtue attached to it. Cassandra stared absently at this painting, whilst Julia looked rapidly from object to object – piano, books, terracotta groups they had done themselves, years ago, feeling suddenly the habitual pleasure of coming home.
It was Thor who crossed to the foot of the staircase to meet Mrs Corbett as she came down, and it was to him she cried, ‘Oh, at last —’ in her booming, committee-woman’s voice. He took her firmly in his long arms, cracking against him the glasses which hung against her bosom.
‘How is he?’ said Thor.
‘Much the same. I don’t know. He can’t speak.’
‘Does he – seem to want to speak?’
‘I don’t know. He seems – frightened. That’s what I can’t bear, I can’t do anything to make that better, he just seems frightened.’
There was, Cassandra thought, a basic absurdity about this fear, spoken in this brisk, summing-up voice.
‘It may be your own fright,’ said Thor, directly. ‘You can’t know. Now, sit down. We’re all here; you must rest a little. Keep your strength.’
He assisted her into a chair: Thor was the only person who unfailingly assisted Elizabeth Corbett. Julia pulled off her coat, dropped it over a chair, and ran forward to sit at her mother’s feet.
‘I wish we had been here to – to be with you,’ she said. Elizabeth Corbett looked down on her with a face momentarily creased towards tears.
‘I’m sorry to fetch you all this way, Julia. There may have been no – no need. But —’
‘I know, I know darling,’ Julia said. She took her mother’s hand and held it against her face. ‘We’ll do all we can.’
‘Let me take your coat,’ said Cassandra to Deborah. Deborah nodded, speechless, and struggled out. She was wearing a smart navy-blue knitted suit, with a red and white collar. She pulled off the blue woolly hat, revealing a head with her father’s bulging brow topped by a springing mass of gingery, wiry curls. Cassandra, taken aback, stared at her, and Deborah somewhat consciously, cast down her eyes. She followed Cassandra through into the little cloakroom in the corridor leading to the back of the house, where Cassandra hung up everything except her own velvet hat. Then she said, loudly:
‘Please, what are we supposed to do?’
‘I don’t know. Keep quiet. Lend moral support. Your father seems to know.’
‘It’s his job. Lending moral support’s his job. I – I’m – scared of – of people dying. I’m sorry.’
It was a long time since anyone had made any kind of a personal appeal to Cassandra. She thought again, crossly, Julia should not have brought this girl.
‘It is one of the things we all have to accept,’ she said.
‘Oh, that’s what we say.’
‘That’s what’s true.’
‘Yes,’ said Deborah. ‘But – but it’s still often something we just say.’
‘There are ways and ways of accepting.’
‘Yes. And one is always afraid one might not manage it. Don’t you think?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cassandra slowly. She looked again at Deborah’s hair and freckled nose; it was uncanny that she had not noticed this at their earlier meetings. She said, ‘One has to learn to cultivate detachment. Are you fond of reading? Let me find you a book.’
Deborah gave her, on this, an odd grin that could only have been called conspiratorial; the thought of this recurred uneasily to Cassandra at several moments during that long evening.
Chapter 4
DURING the next week and a half, only one thing changed; the snow fell steadily, and blew and piled around the house, and out on the hills behind the house. It was one of those late, freak winters, and the family, held there initially by Jonathan Cor
bett’s unchanging condition, found that when it still did not change any decision to return south was postponed because the roads were impassable.
Before the snow fell, a nurse had arrived, who took over Inge’s room; Inge had come in her teens to look after Cassandra and Julia when they were children, had told them Scandinavian legends of long dark nights and ice mountains, and had gone home to marry, in her late thirties, a childhood friend who had suddenly made a fortune from hand-turned wooden furniture and bowls. It was through Inge, and the proximity of the shipping line to Oslo and Bergen that the Old House had become a centre for visiting Scandinavian Quakers, including Thor. Inge had left, but there was still Elsie, the maid, who had been there as long as Julia could remember and was part of the family; Elsie cooked, and cleaned, and carried things for Jonathan Corbett up and down the stairs. Julia spent some time chatting to Elsie in the kitchen, reminiscing. She remembered Inge and Elsie as the stable part of her childhood; her parents had been often away, and always busy; the house had been often enough full of visiting deputations and then, in the war, had been a depot for milling refugee children. Inge and Elsie had been constant; they had done the scolding and loving.
Thor and Julia slept in what had been her parents’ bedroom before they moved out into separate rooms. This always gave Julia a feeling that an adult, married state had been thrust upon her such as she had imagined it in childhood, and not as she had in fact experienced it in the warm muddle of her Great Ormond Street flat. Thor, naturally enough, was quite unawed by this. He was very busy, and organized everything, ordered meals, ordered people to put on gumboots and go down into the village to buy food. On Sunday, when the nurse had her day off, he took his wife, his mother-in-law, and Deborah to the Quaker Meeting-house, whilst Cassandra, who had got up very early to go to the Vicar’s communion service took her turn at sitting beside the long, slightly bubbling body of her father.