by A. S. Byatt
‘I like your work. I want to do that sort of thing. Something objective and private. I want to be a historian. To go to Oxford.’ She looked at her aunt. ‘I was going to write to you about it. For advice.’ She bowed her head. Cassandra was touched, but cautious. She thought Deborah had her own infinite capacity for bearing grudges, and that likeness of temperament was no necessary basis for close relationships; at the same time she was able to recognize the real appeal here.
‘Anything I can do to help, I will.’
‘If I could just write, now and then.’
‘Naturally.’
They were silent. Deborah went on looking out of the window.
‘That you can just see out there – that’s Simon Moffitt’s house, isn’t it?’
‘He’s in South America.’
‘Yes, but that’s his house, isn’t it? I know a lot about him. Julia talks a lot about him, to Father.… She …’
Cassandra winced. ‘You’ll do no good by asking too many questions.’
‘Oh, in our house, you get told,’ Deborah slid off the window-seat. ‘Like a myth, your childhood. I’ve envied you, you seem to have had so much —’ She said, ‘Look, you don’t seem to see, I can’t tell you – I feel I know you, and that you’re the one who knows —’
‘What about your father?’
‘Oh, he cares.… All this is bad for him. Don’t you think? I’d be worried for him if it wasn’t an insult. But he’s not quite there. What he wants, what he really wants, is to give out bowls of milk and penicillin.’
And that, too, I know about, Cassandra thought. She felt Deborah’s interest as a temptation; she had already made one uncharacteristic gesture towards her, in offering the cigarette. Here was someone to whom what she knew was relevant and useful. Someone who could learn from her. They looked at each other with a similar wariness; Deborah grinned.
‘I only want someone to talk to.’
‘Well,’ said Cassandra, ‘there’s no harm in talk. If you find it necessary.’
‘I wouldn’t persecute you.’
Cassandra smiled. Deborah made her feel, briefly, human; an object neither of fear, nor patronage. Though this was not without its frightening side. And Julia’s daughter was the last child to whom she could play imaginary mother.
‘And now, if you’ve nothing else to say, perhaps I could get on.… Come back, when you like.’
Deborah left immediately, with a cool, leisurely, and slightly mocking look over what Cassandra was ‘getting on’ with.
Cassandra went on leafing through the papers; then she climbed into the window-seat and stared, not for the first time, across the snowy hills at the chimneys of the Moffitt’s house: the Castle, the Joyous Garde. Deborah’s speculation seemed to solidify, in time, events she thought were significant now only in her own head. This question of theft. And the related question of Simon Moffitt.
She remembered Julia’s first published work. She had been eighteen, going up to Oxford; Julia had been sixteen. She had come running from the post, like a character, Cassandra thought, from Little Women, crying, ‘Look, look what I’ve done.’ They had all looked. It was a serious children’s magazine, printed on utility paper, and Julia had it open where it said ‘Winner of our 1943 Short Story competition. Vigil in the Forest, by Julia Corbett, of Benstone, Northumberland’. Julia had her mouth closed on an uncontrollable smile. Their father gave her one of his rare, smacking kisses, and Cassandra knew immediately what had happened. She thought she had always known it would happen, and had pushed it out of her mind.
She had in the window-seat several versions of the same story. It had been a central episode in the myth from the early days; it concerned Sir Launcelot, benighted in the forest, and bludgeoned into temptation by four queens. ‘For hit behovyth the now to chose one of us four, for I am quene Morgan le Fay, quene of the londe of Gore, and here is the quene of North Galys, and the quene of Estlonde, and the quene of the Oute Iles. Now chose one of us, whyche that thow wolte have to thy per amour, other ellys to dye in this preson.’ ‘This is a harde case,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘that other I muste dye, other to chose one of you.… Yea, on my lyff,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘refused ye bene of me.’
This episode had been cast, and re-cast; the issue had been in doubt more ways than one. Besides Cassandra’s highly complicated and privately violent version of it, which she had not written down, there were several public chronicles of paths taken and escapes made and an adaptation she had made at fifteen, for a school exercise entitled ‘A Walk in the Woods’. On this the English mistress had written, ‘This is not quite what I intended. Although your vocabulary is good and you express yourself well you must learn to curb the more lurid flights of your imagination and write with more discipline to be really effective.’ From this version, a study in benighted fear, the predatory queens excised, had grown Cassandra’s own tentative attempt at a public story. And it was an adaptation of this which Julia had successfully submitted to the competition.
Cassandra had felt outrage. She could not accuse Julia of simple theft – the story was, or had been, common property. And Julia’s story, although it abounded in similarities of phrasing and passages of description, was in many ways better than her own lumpy version: it was more controlled, and had an element of amused irony that was intensified by the drawings – rather art nouveau – which accompanied it.
But she felt that the imagined world had been violated; that exposure had rendered it lifeless. The long partnership came to an end; there was no more Game; and Cassandra herself was for many months unable to write. The essence of the Game was privacy; privacy could only be preserved by absolute silence. But more deeply, she was in some way prohibited – outside the Journal – from putting pen to paper.
She punished Julia by silence. Cassandra was, and always had been, an artist in not being on speaking terms; and Julia was an ideal victim. Over the years Cassandra the tyrant had laid down rules about this as about everything else. In childhood they had gone out to play, apparently together, separated at the gate and not met until lunch-time. Julia was trained to recognize which remarks, addressed to her over meals, were simple face-savers, before family, and which were genuine overtures. She was always wounded; she never learned; she would always, this time as every other approach hopefully and far too early, be snubbed, and not only be snubbed, but mind. This time she tried independence and wrote another story, which was rejected by the magazine; she could not keep up the Game alone, and had little else to do; she suffered a wild and aimless despair.
Cassandra too, despaired: for the second time in her life she experienced paralysing, irrational, overwhelming fear. The first time this had happened had been when she was sent away to school, a colourless eleven year old in liberty bodice, wrinkled lisle stockings, and a tunic bought prudently one size too large. The other girls were enemies, the building menacing, objects threatening: the notice-board with dangerous pins, the gallows-like wooden swing, the horn spoons with which they ate their Sunday eggs. She wept all night, and then the weeping spilled over into the day; she sat on benches, immobile, with a wet face, and grew thinner. The terror wore off gradually; when Julia arrived, the next year, the two of them pursued their private life in breaks and in the evening. Cassandra’s work improved, and she showed to other girls, at last, the same condescending helpfulness with prep that she gave to Julia.
In the autumn of 1943, when she went to Oxford, the terror returned. For the whole summer she had not spoken to Julia. In Oxford, she approached people with mistrust, expected to be disliked, and burst out occasionally with authoritative and grating literary pronouncements. She ate alone, went to lectures alone, observed with fear the cracks in her window, the scratching of other people’s pens in lectures. She attended lectures obsessively; attempting to find out about Malory, she found herself being enlightened about the Cloud of Unknowing, the Ancrene Riwle, and Dame Julian. Unknowing was what she craved, and religion seemed harder, more inevitabl
e and more reliable than the Game. She attended evensong in Magdalen Chapel, lost herself in the smell of candles and the boys’ voices, went back to Benstone at Christmas drunk with despair and carols, and invaded the study of her parents’ friend Edwin Merton with a desperate and lengthy confession of abstract fear and sense of meaninglessness. Merton did his embarrassed best. He also introduced Cassandra to Simon Moffitt. Simon was desperate too; he and Cassandra met, and talked, several times, at first unintentionally and then deliberately. Simon had more concrete cause for despair, and had made, apparently, more spiritual progress. He was intending to be ordained.
Simon had already some of the glamour of the imaginary world; indeed, she had incorporated into it some of his violent family history.
He belonged to an old Northumberland family, remarkable for persistent Catholicism under persecution and for little else – there had been a Robert Moffitt whose two-volume Flora and Fauna of Northumberland had been illustrated by Bewick, and now Simon. The Moffitts kept themselves to themselves. A year earlier, Simon’s father, who had fought in the First World War, and worked for the Government in this, had come home on leave and shot himself. Simon’s mother had married an army officer, considerably younger than herself, immediately. This was all Cassandra knew – she did not attract village gossip herself, and remained largely unaware of it.
The lanky, lugubrious boy, with his distant courtesy, and his clear first-hand knowledge of her misery proved a better confidant than the weary vicar. She had been ready either to fall in love, or to undergo a religious upheaval, and for some months she juggled with the two fairly successfully. The relationship depended upon her producing and discussing despair of one kind; loving Simon produced despair of another, which in turn made the religious refuge necessary. She never knew whether Simon liked her or not; she suspected that their walks and picnics were due to a mixture of a need for an audience and an unflattering desire, on his part, to exercise a newly-discovered and indifferent Christian charity. She was his first clumsy experiment in pastoral care. She was content to be so – she needed a great deal of time to change herself before she was capable of being anything else. She was shrewd enough to see that he, too, was not at ease in the world of ascesis and self-denial they spent their time talking about; his self-effacement was a little strained, his security too hardly achieved. She offered him, however, respect on trust, and argued passionately every inch of the way; at no point on her long journey into the Church was she more apparently, even angrily, agnostic. What she dreamed of was her business. She was skilled with dreams. She wrote to him throughout the term, and at Easter they met again.
Cassandra’s Journal. Easter 1944.
Today he showed me the snakes. I hoped he might, as I imagine he would not show them to most people. He says he has ‘for some reason’ always kept them a secret. So I was very flattered, but could not comment as intelligently or enthusiastically as I would have liked to. I hoped to feel we were sharing something, but he was a bit schoolmasterish – more letting me be there than wanting me. I refine too much on what he says. I said, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ He said, ‘Just sit there and keep me company.’ I was absurdly pleased by this. (Must watch myself, no lies, no lies). One must never ask for more than is offered – not out of virtue, but because if one does one loses what one has.
Snakes are strange things. Not evil-looking, as I had supposed, not anything much, just little heaps like coils of rope or something one might have dropped. He keeps them hidden in this cave. In glass tanks. He has earth on the bottom, and odd stones, and dishes of water for them to swim in. None were swimming. I would make it all look much better, but he clearly doesn’t care how it looks. There is water running down the back wall; the stone is stained, silver and gold and olive; there are minute ferns growing in crevices. One could perhaps grow ferns all round, put in a few shelves.
It is strange to me to think anyone could love those snakes – stranger than before I saw them – but in some way he clearly does. He has ten grass-snakes, three smooth-snakes and two adders he caught in the heather. He has a collection of skins, wrapped in oilskin, in a metal box, and a book full of observations. There are no thoughts, only notes on how they excrete, how and when they cast their skins, how they swallow, how long they go without food, what they will and won’t eat. They have no names, although he knows them all apart. He told me they were beautiful, which I suppose is a kind of thought. I expected to find them beautiful myself – I am the sort of person you would think would – but I didn’t. There was a dryness and nothingness about them. I was somehow surprised they were alive. They were nothing, really, just accidental tubular shapes of things. He says spring is late so they are torpid; they are inert, as though the step from life to death was insignificant to them. Snakes have no lids to their eyes, and so look plainly out at you; this makes them seem not so much fascinating as stupid.
I like watching him watch them. One of the things about knowing him is the excitement of mapping out all the directions in which there are things to learn I shall never know more of than that they are there. (Prose!!) I really don’t want to know more than he voluntarily tells me, partly because I am shy. I stand around in a waiting silence much of the time but he doesn’t seem to mind too much. I hope my waiting doesn’t oppress him. God knows I don’t mean it to. He said last week I was censorious, but oh, Simon, not with you, ever.
We had for lunch spam, tomatoes from his greenhouse, half a hard-boiled egg each and an apple.
We had another argument about the Incarnation. I was trying to say I didn’t see it was necessary for Christ to have been God or to have died. It seems to have made, proportionately to what is claimed for it, so little difference – historically, that is – it hasn’t changed war or murder or cruelty, most people still know nothing about it. I said I didn’t want God to have been made flesh, as far as I was concerned if there was any point in the idea of God it was precisely that He was not flesh, he was something else, something other. He said might we not then feel God was inaccessible, and I said that individually, for myself, that was how I did feel. I see the flaw in my argument here.
He said, surely I saw something was wrong with the world – ‘something horribly twisted’ was how he put it. He said some twisting back on a really grand scale was needed, some ‘re-wrenching’, not done by us, to counteract this.
I said, something was certainly horribly wrong, but it seemed to me likely that it had always been wrong and had not at one point in time ‘gone wrong’. I said we have no right to think this re-wrenching actually took place just because we think it ought to have. He said the point about the Crucifixion was that it was the moment when the eternal was involved in history – thus its effects were eternal (we are now for ever able to be saved) and historical (it has to be worked out). I said this was too metaphorical. I was angry because he didn’t see that if the ‘going wrong’ wasn’t historical, the atonement needn’t be. He was angry with me; he wants me to believe.
I told him that what I found saving was the order and structure one could see in things, smooth-running, meaningful. The growth of plants, the circulation of the blood, networks of working muscles, veins on leaves, movements of planets and shoals of fish. A harmony one could see. This is what we are for, to pay attention to this beautiful network of designed movement that we and our tragedies are held in. He said that suffering and sin were rents in this network, and that Christ was a guarantee that they could be mended, the fabric could be restored. I said I thought the need for Christ was a need to simplify, to reduce to terms of human suffering something that is neutral, not loving, inhuman, not human.
We were angry with each other. I wish I didn’t have to win arguments, especially with him. It doesn’t do me much good. Moreover, about concrete suffering at least, he knows more than I do. Mine is all in the head. But he knows. I feel he is always on edge and menaced. I don’t know why. I speculate about how he lives in that house; going into it is unthinkable. He must do
normal things, brush his hair and teeth, sit by the fire.… He doesn’t talk about his family. I don’t ask.
In the afternoon, he fed one of the snakes.
Cassandra’s Journal. February 1963.
We are still all in Benstone; I had hoped to be able to leave before now. The protracted stay frets everyone’s temper. J. displays her usual partial and superficial awareness of other people’s feelings; this can cause more damage than a complete lack of concern with them. Moreover, she obtrudes her own feelings. When I was younger I used to feel that emotional self-indulgence must later be paid for. It occurs to me in middle age that those who learn to take in childhood equip themselves to take as adults, and so it continues. A hard thought. There is an aesthetic pleasure in the recognition of hard facts which is intense and brilliant and pales very quickly as one realises that knowing a fact changes it little, or not at all. (Here is the fallacy behind the more vulgar hopes of psycho-analysis: we cannot think away poverty, ugliness, fear.)
He understood and understands this supremacy of facts. The pleasure in knowing that what is thwarting exists and is thwarting. But he does not pay sufficient attention to the human need to imagine. We cannot, in fact, recognize a simple fact, and we must have more than facts to live by. So much of what most deeply affects us is at best dubiously factual.
I have been reading – with pain – some early parts of this journal. He and I have – like dancers – changed position over the years. Then we were both more concerned with the historical truth of Christianity. Now I have come to see that the death of Christ is imaginatively necessary to us. It is the supreme event of both factual and imaginative worlds, it relates the factual world of meaningless suffering to the imagined world where action is meaningful, love is purposeful. We are in need of this relationship. Whatever we can imagine a man should be, He is, and whatever we factually suffer, He suffered – since each man’s death is, for him, the extreme of suffering. So here our worlds are welded.