by A. S. Byatt
Cassandra went over to the window-seat. She began to roll up the oilskin and tie up papers in taped bundles.
‘What are you doing with that?’
‘Putting it away.’ She grinned, briefly. ‘It’s done enough damage.’
‘Damage to you?’
‘Not exactly. I wasn’t thinking of that. I’ve made a life out of it, in a way.’
‘No, but, Cass, is that what you wanted? Is that all you wanted?’
‘Not all, no.’
‘You should have written,’ Julia cried, with love, with pity, with the old admiration, with a furious sense of the openness to mockery of the spencer and the knitted knickers. Cassandra, hurt by the unquestioning past tense leaned over the window-seat and snapped an elastic band round the shoe box of plaster figures.
‘Oh, what did it come to, all the life we had then, Cassandra? Aren’t you appalled that nothing we can do now can possibly measure up to the – the sheer urgency, and beauty and importance of all – all we imagined? I didn’t mean to write the sort of stuff I write. And I don’t suppose you meant – Don’t you feel you’ve been shut out of something? Don’t you hanker? I hanker. A lot of the time.’
The question was disingenuous. Julia knew that Cassandra, in her draughty college, felt like Charlotte Brontë, cut off from Branwell and Zamorna, like Emily, silently pining for another world. She knew, too, that Cassandra, like herself, had been reliving large parts of the past. She was still surprised when Cassandra spoke.
‘Shut out of Eden with the flaming sword across the gate? Oh, yes, I hanker. As you put it. But I think we should not.’ Her voice was dry and pedantic; they were back where they had begun and Cassandra was lecturing. ‘Don’t you think we were illegitimately appropriating to ourselves experience of a kind and intensity we had no right to? I think this was partly because of our background. The whole Quaker tradition emphasizes the practical at the expense of the imaginative – unless, of course, you include the experience of the Inner Light as an imaginative experience. It could be, but it isn’t; that light which lights up and transfigures the real world. But Quakers – historically – solidified into a preoccupation with the real world, with action, with altering things. Father was the tail-end of that tradition. We belong to the decadence. What with the literary emphasis of liberal education as it now is, and servants’ gossip, and Inge’s stories, and the constant flooding outwards and dissipation of the concept of tolerance – oh, we were far enough away from the days when music and painting were wicked, and romances were lies.
‘So you and I created a world, we explored, in the imagination, things that were deficient in our experience. A normal procedure, I assume, only we carried it beyond the point where it was normal. There was a gulf between the life we created and the life we lived. I had hoped to be able to bridge it, in time.’ She paused. ‘You were right to want to be normal. You should never have let me mock you. It ought to be possible for you, now, to find your daily life real, and full enough?’
‘All I do is turn my daily life into imaginary books.’
‘You know, Julia,’ said Cassandra, ‘I think perhaps one should make a real moral effort to forgo one’s need for a sense of glory.’
She talks a kind of mad shorthand, Julia thought, which I understand because I share it.
‘We ought to see things duller, flatter, more on the surface.’
‘What things? No, Cass, life ought surely not to be on the surface.’
‘I think I meant we ought to see each other so. I was thinking of what your husband said.’
Julia could not find an opening to mention Simon. She said, ‘You mean, it would be better for us to be ordinary friends.’
‘I’m not blessed with your capacity for friendship. But yes, something like that.’
They were silent. Julia was surprised, and moved, that Cassandra had made such an effort to communicate: Thor must have had more effect on her than she bargained for. She thought that Cassandra was much worse off than she was; attachment to the Game had betrayed Cassandra into a bleak enough solitude. All the same, she felt a little flicker of irrational envy; Cassandra had appropriated their world, taken it over, turned in on herself. She could afford to be kind to Julia because she had at last efficiently shut her out. Cassandra, frowning, packed the papers together with dusty hands. Then she brushed these against each other, closed the windowseat and sat down on it.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘We ought to see more of each other. We ought – we ought to get used to each other, oh, I do agree. Neither of us is a monster. It’s all been rather silly. And it’s still true I can talk better to you than to anyone – this is a real talk we’ve just had, the first I’ve had for ages. We ought to have grown out of – all that other.’
‘Yes.’ Cassandra felt tired; she recognized in herself a feeling, familiar enough, that Julia, present, was not formidable, was even likeable.
‘Why don’t I come and look you up in Oxford? We could do some sight-seeing together. And have nice normal cups of tea.’
Julia felt splendidly that she was at last knitting up a rent that ran across the whole web of her life. And Cassandra smiled, briefly. ‘If you can find the time, I’d like that,’ she said. She looked round her room. ‘Have a cigarette,’ she said, repeating, belatedly, her gesture to Deborah. Julia accepted, smiling; they could pick up where they had left off at school. They could face each other and grow. They would diminish, in each other’s mind, to manageable proportions.
Cassandra went to bed congratulating herself on having at least made some effort to pay the debt she owed to the pale Scandinavian. She had tried, because of what he had said, to face a fact, and found it now rather exhausting. Like Julia, she had felt unable to mention Simon, who had been, she thought, in many ways just another piece in the Looking-Glass chess game whose moves and maps had been laid out long before his arrival. He had a real existence of his own, but it did not, whatever she had hoped or wanted, concern her. He was far enough away, now. Whereas Julia was at hand. One should live in the real world, she told herself, getting into bed.
That night she had again one of the recurrent nightmares that had begun shortly after Simon’s departure, when he might have been supposed to have left the country, and had continued with varying frequency. From these dreams she always woke changed – relieved, informed, moved, afraid, not the same woman who had put her head on the pillow. Considerable moral and emotional effort went into undoing them, into persuading herself that nothing had happened or would happen. They were so vivid and bright.
They always began with herself walking through some foreign landscape, in brilliant sunlight, in an impossible clarity – over prairie grass, over desert, through jungle creepers, along tropical beaches. They had that obsessive visual detail that was part of Cassandra. Over the months, over the years, she had studied a whole flora and fauna. She held tiny birds and remembered the cold, twig-like texture of their pink legs, the clutch of tiny claws, the area of blue, fragile skin around golden eyes, and needle-fine black beaks. One night she walked over a sandy wood floor beneath a whole flock of roosting birds the size of terriers, whose purple and gold plumage dangled from bulky pillow-case-like bodies, and, swaying between branches, brushed her hair. Another night a whole field of grass was alive with elongated, hurrying creatures, a cross between rats and lizards, with black snouts and tiny blood-red hands.
In the early stages, she had a sense of largeness. Landscape, forms of life, were capable of infinite extension. Warmth and light invaded her, like the aura of a migraine.
Simon would appear, walking unhurried. He would be glad to see her and would hold out his hands, which she never took: she knew that the impossible embrace would take place, with certainty, but that they had all the time in the world. They talked: she could usually remember what he had said. They climbed mountain paths and peered down rabbit-holes. Simon turned aside leaves and showed her, maybe, a nest of oval and circular insects, with irridesc
ent turquoise backs, and fringes of flickering jetty legs. He had the authoritative physical presence he had in the drawing-room dream, and moved rapidly, laughing; she had to strive to keep up. Occasionally he was bizarrely dressed. Once he appeared in crimson tights, sword and frilled jabot. More usually, he wore his dirty grey flannels and swinging sports-coat. She could have counted the wrinkles in his socks. Lately, he wore bush-clothes, and there was beard-stubble on his face.
After the walking, and the shared certainty of expectation, everything gained speed, like a film taken at the wrong pace. Leaves and bushes would begin to flutter wildly. Creatures multiplied. She would notice a tree-trunk alive with scuttering mice or a section of a path boiling with innumerable insects, crawling over each other, hurrying, falling. Simon’s warm presence would vanish whilst her attention was elsewhere. She would see things she recognized; a pile of those clammy, featherless baby birds, blind reptiles with gaunt triangular heads, that fall from trees. A dead mouse, with maggots lumping themselves shapelessly across the browning flesh. A flattened hedgehog, like a blood-fringed doormat. The cat, using its teeth sideways, crackling shears, on the rib-cage of a rabbit, shaking its head to free a caught tooth, making, in its throat, a low, rasping sound.
Chapter 10
CASSANDRA was glad to be back in Oxford, which was grey and muddy. She was glad to close her own door on herself, and pleased and surprised to find how many people she was, after all, connected to, by little threads of common surface conversation. The Old House always gave her an exaggerated sense that she was socially entirely isolated. But she returned energetic, made small efforts herself, and was generally thought to have mellowed. After a week she went out and hired a television set, explaining that she had a sister who was about to appear on it. On top of the box she stood the small plaster figure of Morgan, whom she had brought back from Northumberland. Both these new objects seemed slightly out of place.
She was more lively, but she was also restless, and went for long afternoon walks in the Botanical Gardens, where the river was in flood; the lawns were lakes of frozen, muddy water, ice-flakes cracking on the grass at the edges. Cassandra, coming daily, watched the water slide up strange shrubs and bushes from all parts of the world, and then slide down again, leaving the lower branches strung with roots and trails of dead grass. Leafless, they were all similar. Cassandra purchased Wellington boots and splashed around reading, with her collector’s zeal for catalogued information, the little metal tags which labelled and separated them. These expeditions invigorated her: she came back to college smiling.
Immediate contact with her family was small. Deborah wrote several times – long, carefully reasoned, amusing letters, largely about literature. There was no sign of the hysteria or malice Cassandra had suspected, and she answered scrupulously and with some pleasure. This sustained, impersonal contact pleased her, too.
Deborah said nothing about Julia. Cassandra watched the first issue of The Lively Arts. It was called ‘All in a day’s work’ and combined snippets of film from studio and concert hall with interviews with the artists explaining themselves and their methods. Cassandra watched Julia, curled on a Swedish day-bed, with Deborah standing silent at her elbow, explain that she found it impossible to put an object in a book that wasn’t a real object, somewhere. ‘I need to be in touch with what’s concrete.’ Cassandra had never been in Julia’s flat; like Simon’s dark hut, it was a visible corner of a world whose dimensions were there, behind it, to be guessed, or imagined.
Three days after this, she had a letter from Julia.
Dearest Cass,
I am absolutely exhausted, and in a very funny frame of mind, and could do with a day off. I wonder if I could come for that visit we were talking about? Or didn’t we mean it? I should like to think we did. Would you invite me over for the weekend or something and see how we make out? Oxford must be rather nicely mournful at this time of year I should think. I’d love to do some serious looking at buildings, that’s the sort of thing I need.
That telly programme was ghastly, Cass, I don’t expect you saw it. When it comes to it I have a horror of saying what I think, I really can’t bear being pinned down. I probably just don’t think enough, that’s why it seems woolly. Still, I seem to have gone down quite well, people keep writing and asking for bits of my hair and more unmentionable things, imagine. But I feel a bit reduced and humiliated, I don’t know quite why, you might know.
I see you’ve been writing to Debbie. Good for you. She doesn’t have much to say to me, but that’s supposed to be normal with mothers of adolescent girls. But you don’t know much about me in that capacity do you?
Thor is well. He entertains a lot of churchy ladies, and works an eighteen-hour day at least, which is exhausting to live with.
I’m completely bogged in my next book. I seem to have just come to a stop, I don’t know why. I feel I’ve got to change everything – my whole way of writing, my subject-matter, everything. I’ve got to dig deeper and spread wider. I want to write something with a few symbols and a Message. The telly makes one awfully conscious of one’s lack of Message. I’ve got such a slithery, shapeless personality to project, no grip. You would have. I do want to talk to you. Look, do answer this, Cass, I need you to.
Love, J.
Cassandra read this letter several times. She found it curiously menacing in tone. She did not know whether it was a calculated appeal to her own vestigial, but occasionally powerful, protective feeling towards Julia. She decided that it might not be calculated, but that she would write back, pleasantly, and say that she was very busy. Then she read the letter again, and decided that what was threatening in it was her own contribution to it, and that the only dignified course was to ignore these feelings. She therefore booked the college’s principal guest-room, wrote to invite Julia from Friday to Sunday two weeks later, and even arranged a dinner-party for the Saturday night. She was asked to comparatively few dinner-parties, and found this occasion useful for gathering together the small number of people to whom she owed invitations.
When the time came she went to meet Julia on the station, and noticed that she was gritting her teeth with apprehension. Julia stepped down from a punctual train, looking like an undergraduate, in a black soft leather coat with a fur-edged hood that gripped her face, and a black corduroy tunic over purple sleeves and purple stockings. Cassandra’s huge fear settled into the recognition of a small, self-contained human being. Velvet hat nodding under its topaz pin she advanced. Julia gave a welcoming cry, and after a brief hesitation they took each other’s hand. It was the first time they had met, or arranged to meet, simply to see each other.
Julia began talking very fast. ‘This is wonderful. Oxford. I want you to take me on a real tourist’s guided tour. I want to see everything, absolutely everything.…’
Cassandra took Julia’s case in her little, black-gloved hand, and they found a taxi.
‘I thought you might find it interesting to dine in Hall tonight. But you might prefer a restaurant? The food in Hall is said to be very bad.’
‘Oh, no, I should love to dine in Hall. I want to see exactly how you live. I told you, I want to see everything.…’
‘It’s not so interesting,’ said Cassandra, suddenly defensive.
Dinner in Hall was more of an ordeal than Julia had expected. They sat side by side at High Table, peering out over the rows of girls below them. Cassandra was enveloped in the folds of a black gown, over the already considerable folds of her black dress; like a bundle of old stuff, Julia thought, with her wrists and neck protruding from it pale, stick-like, freckled, slightly shiny. Julia thought she herself would have been more at home amongst the undergraduates than amongst these women in jersey dresses, wine, grey, emerald, buckled belts riding over high bellies or dropping on shrunken hips. The younger ones wore twin-sets over tweed skirts. Someone said Grace in a cracked, female voice, and they all sat down. Conversation was made difficult by the general wawling squeal which bounded ab
out in the body of the Hall, so that for a moment or two she watched her sister’s jewelled hand carrying spoonfuls of soup regularly to her mouth, and kept silence. She turned to her neighbour – a plump, frightened-looking creature, with hair reminiscent of the White Queen’s, to whom Cassandra had made no attempt to introduce her, and told her with enthusiasm, in a piercing near-shout, how much she regretted not having taken a degree. This confidence was met by a murmured and disjointed acquiescence; Julia understood from it that it was natural to desire college life but that since she had not come there she was probably not fitted to do so. She could hardly hear, and was not disposed to argue: she retreated into anonymous observation.
The main course was dried lamb chops, dried mashed potatoes, and drying tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. Cassandra, leaning across to address someone, entangled her dangling crucifix in the spaghetti. It had to be wiped clean. Julia was rigid with embarrassment; obsessed by an image of the bloody loops of paste over the rigid, jewelled arms of the cross, she saw her sister ludicrous, even grotesque, and could not meet her eye. She thought she remembered, disproportionately, absurd facts of this kind; they made her books. They distracted one’s attention, she thought, from the essence – although it was surely from such titbits of facts that one’s attitude to other people was built up? She watched, hungrily, a pair of trembling blue-veined hands, clumsy, fragile, crumble the corner of a crust. Well, what was, she wondered, this essence she was missing? She looked from face to face along the table. Sexless, timid, judging, anxious, drawn-up faces, what did they want? Had they ever been like the screaming, sprawling girls below them? Were they, like Cassandra, in retreat into another world where things happened more perfectly and more intensely? Across the table two women had prolonged a conversation about brands and durability of sewing-machines throughout the meal. Did they want knowledge or power, were they hungry for the academic praise that had singled them out in youth? She collected their expressions with a speculative curiosity she would have said was akin to love. She looked at Cassandra and saw that she was being observed.