by A. S. Byatt
There were only about six people at Meeting, besides the family. Julia, who, in spite of having married an active Friend, rarely went to Meeting now, found the Meeting-house, for all its scrubbed wooden bareness of benches and tables, distressing. She did not, as she imagined Cassandra did, find the house itself, or the daily routine, oppressive, but the Meeting-house, stripped for deep thought, was both the place where she had had time to examine her own moments of distress, and the place where, over the years, her family had burst out from time to time in embarrassing speech. All this formulation of thought, she said to herself, here without any framework of ritual as Cassandra has it, seems so far from the sort of thing most of us are really preoccupied with most of the time.
She remembered her father, labouring at length, so scrupulously, blowing out his long moustache, to define the precise moral position of those who were not pacifists and believed killing was justified, then repudiating this position, equally scrupulously, absolutely finally, and, still not finished, exhorting Friends to tolerate those who killed, and ending with a flourish ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do’. She had looked across at Cassandra, on this, who had closed her eyes and tightened her mouth in pain. Both the girls had intensely disliked the way in which Friends familiarized the terrible and made it a comfortable possession. She supposed that this might be inevitably true of all Christians. Cassandra, herself, might now be less intolerant; she had always had a proprietary interest in the terrible which might, in terms of the Church, music, painting, litany, have become in its turn another kind of domestication. As for herself, she was not sure how much good it did to expend a lot of thought on death and suffering at a distance. It could so easily lead to an ignoring of the little daily agonies which were all that deeply affected the fabric of her own life. She felt both determined and vaguely guilty about her shelving of the whole problem.
She remembered Cassandra’s last appearance in the Meeting-house. By then, they were not speaking to each other, and she had been largely unaware of what Cassandra was thinking. Indeed, when she had risen pale and shivering to her feet, Julia had had a moment of fear that she was about to utter an indictment of her own duplicity with regard to Simon. But Cassandra, with what the Quakers agreed tolerantly later to have been excusably unhelpful bad taste, had lectured them with abstract passion on her reasons for leaving the Society of Friends. They had, she had told them, too simple and idealistic a view of human nature. She had been twenty at the time, with a curious maturity of phraseology and an unformed, over-expressive girl’s face. After speaking for five minutes or so she had begun to weep, pushing the tears away clumsily with the sides of her hands and still pouring out the same long, formed, urgent sentences. Julia, who agreed with her, whose views had in this area been formed by Cassandra, had been horribly embarrassed.
‘You never question that it is possible for us to become good,’ Cassandra cried. ‘You believe that if we try to be good we shall affect things, make other people good. You appropriate the story of the Roman senators who sat so still that the Goths and Vandals dared not touch them as a pacifist triumph. I’ve heard it told so in Meeting. But this was no triumph of anything but empty dignity, the Goths beat out the brains of those senators on the marble pavement. You always talk as though passive resistance could convert violence to love. But it can’t, and it doesn’t, and we ought to admit it. There will always be people who will slash open the other cheek when it is turned to them. In this life love will not overcome, it will not, it will go to waste and it is no good to preach anything else. We need God because we are desperate and wicked and we can find Him only through Himself. The Inner Light doesn’t necessarily shine, and doesn’t illuminate much. You will find no meaning by simply examining your consciences, maybe, ever. What I am saying is, we have got to find a way of living in a world that eats and destroys and pays nothing back.…’
Julia had had the illusion that no one was listening but herself because they were all too embarrassed by her sister’s tears. Cassandra had brought public humiliation on them yet again. And her wild words, like most statements of faith, overstated her case horribly and alienated sympathy. She could have done it better herself, and made the Quakers much more uncomfortable by producing partially sympathetic examples of their state of mind. When she heard Cassandra speak of God intimately, as Him, Himself, she knew she did not believe in it. Not, at least, in any way that would ever be practically meaningful in her life. When Cassandra sat down she had felt a mixture of relief, and pity, and anger, at the Quakers because she was sure that simple pity was what they would feel, at Cassandra because she couldn’t be subtle enough to avoid this. Cassandra had no understanding of people’s reactions. She had felt, also, release; Cassandra would never talk to her about these things again, and this was humiliating, and left her lonely – but at least she had a view of her own, and could live from it. After a bit, stooping, her face in her hands, Cassandra had got up and left the Meeting-house. Everyone had agreed that this was unnecessary.
Here, too, Julia had first seen Thor, who had come to speak to Friends at Benstone in 1947 about Quaker witness to peace in occupied countries. She had felt, with him as with Cassandra, for opposite reasons, that the force of what he had said was dissipated by his incapacity to present it persuasively. He had told, in a slightly choked voice, faltering occasionally and repeating himself, a string of the sad little Quaker stories of the moral victories gained by passive resistance that she was used to; the soldier who threw down his arms when ordered to slaughter the schoolmaster and his patiently waiting family; the men of faith who had survived the concentration camps without hatred. He had told them in rather a hurry, as though they were simply additional evidence to prove a main point; it was only at the end of his talk that Julia herself made the imaginative effort to see that the choking was real emotion, that the stories were told flatly because they were facts and he was the witness, and he believed passionately that facts should speak for themselves. She had looked at him and wanted to shake him for deliberately draining his stories of their urgency, for not stressing his own personal reactions, for making his people into examples, not individuals. In those days – he must have been twenty-four – he was gaunt, so that his cheek-bones, which were very pronounced, almost shone through his skin, and his pale eyes slanted deeply back above them as though the whole surface of his head was being forcibly tugged towards his crown. This had given him a slightly staring look, almost unbalanced. Julia, remembering this, and how she had approached him after the talk so gingerly, stole a glance at his solid, clean-cut face beside her. He had rounded out, he had a heavy look now, a supremely sane look. She had not the slightest idea what he was thinking.
The faces in the Meeting-house were mostly familiar, still; she looked from one to the other, and then up at the single high window, with its dangling cord in the gable; outside was a smoky sky pocked by falling white snow. In here an attempt had been made to reduce life to its elements, an attempt increasingly compromised, over the centuries. Well, she had never spoken here, she had only watched, and now she came back out of politeness and nostalgia. She didn’t want life reduced to its elements. She didn’t want simplicity. She wanted the complicated, irreducible social world outside, where it was possible to believe in people who really cared more for their motor-cars than for anything else, people who spent most of their time thinking about who had snubbed whom at whose party in what dress, people the Quakers would have reduced to a formula and simply judged, or would perhaps have defended on the grounds that they were not as they appeared. Well, they existed outrageously, and, as far as Julia could see, they were as they appeared, and that was enough for her. She needed them, she wanted them, she wrote about them, she fed off them. She expected nothing, and this seemed to her the only possible form of moral activity. She leaned back against her bench with a certain defiance, on this thought, as the first Friend stood up to pay his tribute to her father. ‘Our prayers go with him in his suffering
,’ he said. Julia thought there was a short story somewhere in a Quaker meeting, but wasn’t sure that she was detached enough to write it.
Cassandra sat still beside her father, trying very hard to take her own advice to Deborah, to detach herself, not to think. She had a book open on her knee, but was not looking at it. Above all, she thought, she must not sum up in her mind her father, who was not dead, and might not be dying. His skin was yellowish and opaque, like cheese, and the white moustache was draggled by sweat. His eyes were open and motionless. Cassandra had no idea what he knew, or felt, whether he wanted to communicate, whether he was aware of her presence.
Cassandra had loved him, at first passionately, and then with hopeless devotion. He had loved her, too, certainly. One of her mother’s favourite sayings had been ‘Our children cannot doubt that they are loved,’ and they never had doubted, they had never, Cassandra thought, surprised at the image her mind naturally produced, had a foothold for doubt. It was only that she had had to share his love with so much else: prisoners, a model village, refugees, lepers, delinquents, prostitutes.…
He was, Cassandra thought sadly, an infinitely tolerant man, and took everything as it came. Because of this, unfairly, she never quite trusted him – she found herself striving to shake this inevitable love into admiration. She felt that he affectionately tolerated her chosen pursuits – Oxford, Malory, the Church – with a simple refusal to judge her which blunted any attempt she might make intellectually to shake him, or emotionally to touch him. She could not tell him her life was not arid because he had never allowed himself to form the opinion that it was. She suspected him of finding more human value in Julia’s domestic novels than in her own work, and resented this vaguely, without ever tackling him about it. She was aware that he tolerated Julia, too – she had watched him amusedly ‘loving’ one of Julia’s intense enthusiasms for new friends.
She was angry with herself for letting her thoughts stray that way, and wished there was something she could do, practically, for him. She dared not touch his pillows. She was no good at this kind of thing. She would have liked to take his hand, too, but dared not, and when she looked into his faded eyes she felt that he must feel, if he felt anything, that she was peering at him with indecent curiosity.
She wondered what he felt passionately about; his most apparently passionate acts had been gestures of self-denial, long imprisonments for pacifism, and, lately, lying down outside military installations, all six-feet-two of him in a speckled tweed suit, absurd and dignified. He had fought injustice and unreason violently, as though it was possible to win.
And as far as bringing up children went, he had been a negative idealist, a passive idealist. He had laid down no laws, exerted no pressure, expected nothing, left them to make their own choices. From very early he had offered to his children, by way of precept, nothing more than a reasoned exposé of alternative courses of action: the decision must be theirs. He did not drink, but they must choose for themselves; they were left to choose their school, their future, their companions, their religions. Both of them had at different times felt it as an affront that he could apparently feel so little involuntary emotion about them as to pursue this course so successfully. We were not – especially I was not – ever sure of him, Cassandra said to herself. And out of all this liberalism, extremism grows. What was in fact given to us was space to discover violence. It was too hard for us, all this choosing, we lacked the enclosing warmth of anything either to rebel against or to welcome in weak moments as absolute restriction. One tends to think that those who are brought up libertine will compensate by growing strict, and those who are marshalled and punished will turn Bohemian. But with us, make your own decisions, anything reasonable is permitted, shifts so easily to everything is permitted, any decision is possible. The Inner Light can indicate the edges of a limitless darkness. Better to grow up believing that it is, de fide, not so.
Her father’s hand twitched beside her; he gave a flurry and a gulp; something ran out of the corner of his mouth; and then he slackened. The heavy, bubbling breathing was no longer evident. Cassandra leaned over him cautiously; the tired eyes looked expressionlessly back at her; she touched his cheek and his hand with a trembling finger. She was horrified that she did not now whether he was alive or not. One did not expect not to know. Her knees began to tremble. For a moment she kept very still, thinking of literary acts, looking glass, feather, closing those eyes. She began to shake all over, stumbled to her feet, and hurried out into the corridor calling, in a cracked voice, ‘Nurse, nurse.’
If Nurse could have gone out on her day off, she would, but the snow prevented it, so she was writing letters when Cassandra burst in. This wild irruption was something Nurse would describe to cronies for years; one of the moments of ultimate drama that made tolerable long periods spent by querulous sick-beds and hopeless death-beds. At least you saw life, Nurse would say. Miss Corbett had been a horrible sight; all necklaces flying, and open-mouthed and gasping, and staring eyes. One never knew how death would take people. Shaking like a leaf. And the poor old gentleman lying there, not even certainly dead. Though he had been dead all right, at least when she got there, and had probably known nothing.
Cassandra watched Nurse trot away down the corridor and then went to be sick in the bathroom. There she sat on the floor, legs outstretched, mopping her nostrils with a handkerchief. Death was such a fact. She ought to go back in there. She ought to go and help Nurse. Her stomach heaved again. Even this, I can’t do with any dignity. And the father I was thinking about, all that network of love and responsibility, nothing left. The thought and the physical unpleasantness of the fact were somehow unconnected. I could manage one or the other.
After a time she stood up, and went out into the garden, which sloped up behind the house into the hills. She sat on the low wall that marked off garden from hill grass – today, all was indistinguishable thick snow – and clenched her fists on her knees. She thought she ought to pray. She felt trapped – as though her past was fixed now, and could not be remodelled, and her own behaviour had finished it with the largest amount of mess, and lack of warmth possible. I should have spoken to him, she thought, he might have heard. She began to weep, angry and choking, fighting back each sob; she sat there in the cold, until her face was purple and crimson and blotched.
When the others came back from Meeting they were met by Nurse, who had done what was necessary. Miss Corbett, she said, had been present at the end, but had gone out somewhere. Elizabeth Corbett went up with Nurse to look at the body; she stood a long time, in a decent silence, and went to bed, after Nurse had telephoned the doctor, where she wept for some time, and fell into a heavy sleep.
Deborah became hysterical. She was carried off, rigid and choking, by Thor, and put to bed. Julia said, ‘But after all you hardly knew him, darling,’ and Thor said, ‘Julia, please don’t be silly, be quiet,’ and appeared downstairs again only briefly, to tell Elsie to bring his supper and Deborah’s upstairs.
Julia found herself suddenly alone. She sat down in the hall by the fire and thought about her father. She had always been the one who could make him laugh: he didn’t mind what she said to him, they shared a whole world of private jokes. They had gone for walks by the river together, and she had amused him with stories, this side of malicious, about girls from school, and, later, not quite risqué stories about worthy Friends. He liked this, because most people he met respected him too much and thought him too good to be amused in this way, and he did not want to feel isolated, or rarefied. Later, she had brought him all her novels and begged him to tell her what he thought of them, partly because she wanted to be assured of his approval, but partly because he was one of the few people she knew who found no difficulty in assuming that fiction was fiction. Other people tended, if they knew her at all well, to be a little embarrassed in her presence, as though she was given to constant indiscretion. Oh, she would miss him.
She became aware that she was admiring herself for
her plucky reaction, and constructing a chain of near-sentimental thoughts about her father as though he was a character in a novel. Well, she told herself, either self-indulgently or practically, that’s natural enough, there’ll come a moment when I really take it in, I can’t expect to realize what’s happened, all at once. He wouldn’t expect me to …
She was suddenly completely oppressed by the sense that there was no figure now between herself and the end. She was herself the adult generation – a woman with a great daughter, in the last stretch of life. She wasn’t ready for that. She lived so much on the assumption that she was ‘still young’.
Perhaps she should go and see him. When she thought this, her scalp pricked; she could imagine the body only through Nurse’s restrained hints at Cassandra’s extreme reaction to it. Something vaguely hideous, something nasty … not her father, who had laughed. When she thought of Cassandra, running away, locked in the bathroom, she had a sudden sense of a real and monstrous event, and felt herself lonely and afraid. They had left her alone here, and this she could not bear.
Cassandra would be in the garden. She put on her red cape, and went out through the back door, following the blurred footprints through the snow. Once she saw how Cassandra was taking it, she would know what had happened.
She sat down on the wall, next to her rigid sister.
‘Aren’t you cold, Cass?’ Cassandra’s bony hands were blue.
‘No,’ said Cassandra. Then, ‘It’s still snowing.’ Snow was blowing in little clouds on the hill.
‘Cass,’ said Julia, ‘you ought to come in. Do come in.’
Cassandra shrugged her shoulders.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Julia desperately. ‘I need company, Cassandra.’ It had always been like this. Always asking, for something she should long ago have known better than to expect. Cassandra looked at her, silently; the muscles of her face were stiff, and Julia could see the swelling round her eyes. She was nobody you could comfort.