by A. S. Byatt
‘I know you don’t want – to talk.’
‘There’s nothing to say.’
Well, some sisters might bloody well talk to each other, Julia’s mind snapped, crossly. For company.
‘Mother’s gone to sleep. Out of exhaustion. Thor’s with Debbie. Debbie’s gone all hysterical. Probably I shouldn’t have brought her. But there didn’t seem much else.… He said better to bring her.…’
‘He seems to know what’s best,’ Cassandra said, entering the conversation with an effort. She added, flatly, ‘He seems good.’
‘I don’t know. He’s too good, do you know?’
Cassandra shivered.
‘Like Father was too good,’ Julia went on. ‘He will give and give and think he can change everything.’
‘It might be best at least to live like that,’ Cassandra said, with a touch of her old authoritative tone. Julia wanted her to go on talking, to make their father real, by talking. But Cassandra said, more faintly, ‘I’m sorry about Deborah. She seems highly strung.’ A teacher’s assessment. Julia said with a rush. ‘She reminds me of you, Cass. All nerves and sharp edges and will-power. She’s clever, too, school-clever. I wish you’d talk to her. She needs … I wish …’
Cassandra’s hands plucked at her skirt. She fills me with embarrassment and a kind of respect, Julia thought. Why do I always lie? I don’t want her to talk to Debbie at all. I said that because I always think I need to make contact, somehow; anyhow, make her see I exist, make her care. I want her to take me into account. I want to be nice to her. Foolish. Useless.
‘Cassandra, nobody’s left us anything to do. Come in now, please. We could play cards, or something. Like we used to do, remember?’
‘If you like,’ said Cassandra, who was now beginning to feel the cold.
So, all afternoon, whilst Thor made telephone-calls, and held his daughter’s hand, the sisters sat in front of the fire in the hall and played games. They played snakes and ladders, chequers, bezique and piquet. Then they played chess. Julia had changed into tight black velvet trousers and a Swedish rough woollen overshirt, square, high-necked, patterned in purple and scarlet. Round her neck she wore a hammered lump of silver on a chain, from a Knightsbridge crafts shop. Leaning across the chess board, moving the pieces with ringed fingers, they looked surprisingly in keeping with each other, as though Burne-Jones or Rossetti could have used them for models for a painting of a mediaeval lady and her page; Julia’s hair dropped forward in a long, pointed curve along her jaw. She was winning; both of them were accurate players, but Julia was more courageous. They played almost silently.
At supper-time Julia went to see if she was needed and found that she was not; she came back to Cassandra with a plate of ham and tomatoes, and announced this to her.
‘It seems funny we’re not needed, Cass.’
‘Tomorrow, maybe …’
‘Have some bread. Cass … do you think they’ve kept the Game?’
‘It was in my room. It must still be there. I haven’t looked.’
‘Would you look? Do you think we could get it out? We’ve played everything else, it would be exciting to see if we could remember.…’
‘If you like,’ said Cassandra.
‘I’ll come up with you.’
When they were children, there were rules which governed Julia’s going into Cassandra’s room – passwords, which changed with bewildering frequency, and all sorts of locked drawers, and locked boxes. She had expended some ingenuity on getting into these; she considered Cassandra laid herself open to espionage. For years she had kept secret the fact that the drawer which held Cassandra’s journal could be worked open with the key of her mother’s sewing-machine. Indeed, she did not know now whether Cassandra had known this.
She had still a slight feeling of sacrilege on going into Cassandra’s tiny dark room.
‘It was in the window-seat,’ said Cassandra. ‘As I remember.’ She knelt down in the bay of the window and turned back the lid. There were armfuls of the Game; an enormous roll of oilskin, several shoe boxes of clay figures, more boxes of little cards, which were written over with rules and forfeits laid out like laws, long, heavy ledgers written up alternately by Cassandra and Julia; move by move chronicles, increasing in length and complexity over the years. It had all begun when they were seven and nine, with the personification of a pack of cards which they had divided into four armies – the red were Julia’s, the black Cassandra’s. From day to day they had expanded the account of their battles, rounding out characters and creating rules for movement – the oilskin map had come next with a whole countryside laid out on it, castles, rivers, cottages, chapels, glued and varnished largely by Cassandra who was capable of producing fine and delicate lines with a paint brush and pen. This oilskin map covered a good half of their hall area, when unrolled now; they had wanted to make it three-dimensional, but had run into storage problems.
The clay figures had been a later development, when the armies had expanded beyond their original thirteen men, and when Cassandra had discovered Morris, Tennyson and the Morte d’Arthur indiscriminately together. In the early days, they had worked entirely together, and the plots they created had consisted largely of the machinations of organized military antagonism. Later, the emphasis shifted from the moves on the board to the chronicling of intrigue, misguided love and eternal hatred: Cassandra wrote long poems in ballad metre about the affairs of Queen Morgan, and Julia chronicled every stage of the hopeless passion of Elaine of Astolat. Both sisters at this stage were aware that the other’s imagination was also vigorously working in private on what was discussed less hotly in public, over the map. Julia had what she read of Cassandra’s journal to prove it. But it had been completely absorbing, Julia thought now, it had taken up almost all her attention between the ages of seven and seventeen: they had worked out already attitudes to all sorts of adult problems which she for one had found alternately percipient and fantastically thwarting – how did one ever rid oneself of a longing for a devouring love which one saw, wisely, to be impossible, but had enjoyed in such verisimilitude and detail when nothing else was happening to one at all? She looked at Cassandra, who was silently, with pursed lips, deploying her black forces across the map. The things she had imagined had frightened Julia, who as a child had had nightmares, and woken screaming and sweating to be comforted by Inge on account of things she had lived through with Cassandra earlier in the day. Cassandra had always seen the nightmares as a simple manoeuvre to gain credit for herself and put Cassandra in the wrong; but for days together Julia had walked up and down the village streets pursued by vague fears and a sense of doom. Her attempts to palliate Cassandra’s dramas with happy endings, or innocent affections, had been no use – Cassandra paid little attention, and when she did twisted Julia’s stories towards her own grim conclusions.
Well, she had shaken it off, slowly, and felt impoverished for it. She had shaken off, that was, almost everything but the nightmares, which persisted; her own countryside peopled by Cassandra’s characters and events. It was easy enough to see what Cassandra had made of it all – an object for detailed examination, sterilized with footnotes and things.
She could guess, she thought, what Cassandra dreamed – and not only at night. As for herself, it could have been clear enough to Cassandra what use she had made of their stories. ‘In Miss Julia Corbett’s first two novels an element of romantic fantasy was uneasily blended with a warm, human understanding of very real daily problems. In her later work she has consolidated her achievement in the second field – she is probably the best of that increasing number of women writers who explore in loving detail the lives of those trapped in comfort by washing-machines and small children – but with the fantastic romantic overtones some of the vigour has been lost. In the earlier books, clumsily conveyed, was a sense of possibilities and concerns outside domestic claustrophobia. I sometimes wish Miss Corbett could see her way to reopening, reinvigorating her fantastic vein; she might then have
it in her to be a very good writer.’ This was from The Guardian; Julia had it by heart; it had both irked and vaguely encouraged her. She wondered whether Cassandra had ever read her novels, and whether Cassandra had written anything herself. She thought: she is not creative. She is critical. But it wasn’t the whole truth. It was strange how even now what she saw to be the childish clumsiness of the little figures seemed so much alive.
They began to play, very self-consciously, going back to the very early days of their partnership when the game had depended on the organization of the moves rather than on sustained imaginative effort. In the later days, they had sat and narrated the feelings of their characters in high romantic prose, with a certain formality. Julia was aware that they were both pretending to forget things; she herself ‘lost’ several characters in the Forêt Sauvage and could not remember how they could be extricated; Cassandra had to ask whether the Abbey grounds, as well as the Abbey, were sanctuary. Cassandra was smiling slightly – Julia, losing a slice of land and several soldiers cried, ‘Do you remember when we decided they were all immortal the day I cried too much to go on? Oh, I was a bad loser.’
Cassandra laughed, and settled the red knights in her dungeon.
‘At least they are immortal,’ said Julia, feeling a sudden rush of warmth towards Cassandra, the Game, her childhood and herself, as a child, mourning and reviving the dead knights.
‘Immortal?’ said Thor from the gallery. ‘Who is immortal?’
He leaned over the banister, a pale figure in a thick white fisherman’s sweater, his blond hair gleaming. Julia stared up at him.
‘Characters,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t. They have gone to sleep. I am going to bed.’
‘It’s a bit early. I’ll come. I’ll come in a moment.’
‘As you will,’ said Thor, vanishing.
When he had gone, Julia said, ‘Oh dear. Oh damn. He makes me feel I behave so badly. At least, I just let him do all the things I ought to be doing. Oh God, Cassandra, I hate myself.’
‘Do you?’ said Cassandra. She added, ‘We all need to protect ourselves from thinking too much. We all have different ways. I should think he might understand that. He’s intelligent.’
‘You know it’s not only self-protection. It’s a kind of self-indulgence.’ Julia looked almost pleadingly at Cassandra.
‘Well —’ said Cassandra. Then, ‘In any case, what does he know? If he does know, he’s likely to forgive. He seems forgiving.’
‘Forgiving?’ said Julia.
‘Not that I’m in a position to judge,’ said Cassandra, balancing the black Queen on the palm of her hand. The Queen’s face, by some lucky accident, had a real severity of expression, whilst her skirts were sculpted into real movement. Cassandra closed her hand over her; she was an object still so familiar that she was difficult to see clearly. Julia thought; that was almost a conversation with Cassandra. She bent her head over the network of paths and rivers on the carpet, traced one with her finger, and plunged.
‘Have you been watching the telly, lately, Cass?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you – would you mind watching?’
‘If you like,’ said Cassandra. Julia could not tell whether the suggestion had pleased or displeased her; nor was she quite sure what feeling had driven her to make it. Cassandra had behaved abominably over the whole thing with Simon; and to watch him, together, at that distance beside their own fire, might neutralize some of the bad feeling; clean something up. Though anything that had had to wait so many years to be cleared up might well take more than one television rite. She stood up and switched on the set, and put out the lights.
The picture jiggled into shape.
‘Don’t you hate that girl?’ said Julia. ‘All coy and routine. Having to do all that smiling. Awful job. Ugh, I hate her. Do you know, Cass, I’m going to be on the telly myself, on a rather highbrow sort of quiz programme thing, called The Lively Arts. Run by a lovely man called Ivan Rostrevor, who has all sorts of super ideas and loves me, which is always nice, isn’t it? We’re going to be a sort of panel, of all different kinds of artists, and study our different reactions to different sorts of things – Ivan wants to show how daily life affects the artists, and how the artists’ daily lives are affected by being artists. I mean, he might show us a film of a road accident. Or a rocket. Or children at nursery school. Or a revivalist talking about C.N.D. He’s got all sorts of ideas. He says the artist’s both different from and the same as the common man … some weeks we’re going to examine our own daily lives.…’
Nervousness, Julia thought, is making me talk to her as I talk to people in the studio, or something. The cultured girl bent the bow of her smile for the last time on the details of the new series of broadcasts of genuine religious services.
‘I suppose they pay well,’ Cassandra said. Julia twisted her rings.
Simon appeared at a distance, pushing a hollowed log canoe down a slight slope, into water that rippled and splashed. For some time he paddled silently across the screen; first across a pool of open water, then into a dark tunnel of arching creepers. Then they watched a caiman, on its bandy legs, hoist itself out of the water on to a narrow beach, where it lay, staring. Simon explained, precisely, how it breathed – ‘the air enters the raised nostrils at the end of the snout and passes over the palate into the throat, which can be closed by a flap of mucosa. Thus, when it opens its mouth under water to seize its prey, this does not interfere with its breathing.’ He expatiated upon its teeth, which, before he had explained how one tooth slotted into the other jaw had seemed to sprout haphazardly, stump-like, all along it. ‘This is a smooth-fronted caiman: it and the dwarf caiman – the smallest alligators – appear to violate the rule that two very similar species are not found closely associated in nature. Normally, we find that some kind of “competition” for survival does appear to operate: exact studies of apparently similar species which do coexist seem to suggest that they are in some ways importantly separated – one may live in the trees, the other on the ground, one may – must – eat food entirely different from the other. And so on. In other words – except in the case of the smooth-fronted and the dwarf caimans, you will find that crocodilians in the same area are either of the same species, or so dissimilar that there is no clash of interest between them.
‘A naturalist,’ Simon said, as the camera held him and his caiman together in one picture, ‘has to be making constant distinctions between the individual and the species, between form and the apparent breaking of that form. Between general laws – like the one about competition – which explains certain facts, and the particular exception which may teach one something about both the law, and the species which does not conform. I am making a detailed study of the habits of these two species of caiman. But the individual caiman is of interest in himself, and because of what he adds to our knowledge of his species. This one, for instance, will have stomach contents not precisely the same as any other. We are delighted both by the inevitable recurrence of patterning – the veining of a leaf – and the fact that no two leaves, no two faces, no two alligators are ever the same. In the case of faces, we are trained to observe differences – though we are less skilled in the case of people not of our own race. But what I have to teach myself is to attend so sharply to these creatures as to pick up differences even in their scale formation.’
The caiman was raising itself to its feet. It lifted a slow, clawed foot, amongst folds of skin, and then rested, in mid-motion: the camera insisted, for a moment, on the ticking pulse of life in the soft skin of its throat, under its immobile stare. Then, heavy and slow, it began to walk away, raised, almost strutting, on its disproportionately thin legs, its huge tail stretched out like a weight behind it. Simon explained that it was an illusion to think that they dragged themselves; they walked, as the crocodilians had walked in the early days of the earth, though some of those had leaped on two legs. ‘Living fo
ssils,’ said Simon. ‘A form of life that really flourished in another climate, and on the whole couldn’t adapt. But again, the individual fate – the fate of the species, or of the individual creature – is different from what may seem laid down by general laws of change or fate. We don’t know why almost all reptiles died. Nor do we know why these did not.’
The camera rested for a moment on a whole floating group of the animals, thick bodies floating indistinguishably together.
‘Reptiles are fairly well classified,’ said Simon. ‘I spend time studying the water, too.’
He was shown, dipping jars, measuring, paddling a little farther along the creek, dipping, measuring. They saw his face, peering mournfully at them over the side of the boat, shadowed by beard-stubble, with the ungainly shoulders hunched behind it. He gave a snort of discomfort. Cassandra tied a knot in a gold chain. Julia said:
‘Cassandra, who takes the photographs?’
‘I have asked myself that.’
‘I mean, it must be somebody bloody good with a camera. They don’t seem to mention whoever it is. It’s funny, how it’s all presented as though there aren’t any other people there, isn’t it? I mean, most of these explorer bods have whole teams of bearded workers, don’t they? And Indians, and chaps with bales on their heads.’
‘Hudson,’ said Cassandra. ‘No camera. Whoever it is, it’s good, I agree. So good – so fluid – it all seems unreal, somehow. I mean, unreal, because so much an image for man observing – his origins? His animal nature? The roots of life? I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing.’
‘No, but it is all a bit self-conscious, Cass, you’ve hit it exactly. A bit produced. I mean, he’s pretending to be a naked hermit, but we can all see it’s been put together with fantastic skill for the telly – all those magnifications and things.… I mean, it makes all the appeal he has somehow dishonest.…’