by A. S. Byatt
‘I think we’ll have coffee in my room,’ said Cassandra.
They had not yet been in Cassandra’s rooms. Whilst Cassandra made coffee, Julia wandered up and down, restlessly, touching everything, fingering figures over the hearth, rearranging pens on the desk, reading bits of essays, spinning globes with a finger-nail.
‘Sit down, won’t you?’ said Cassandra.
Julia ran a hand along the top of the television. ‘I see you’ve got Morgan here.’
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra. She set out cups and sugar. ‘Black or white?’
‘Black. What’s all this?’
‘A critical edition of the Morte d’Arthur. For students. Nearly completed.’ She drew up a footstool, gathered herself into the crimson chair, pushed a cigarette into an ivory holder, poured coffee, and reiterated, ‘Sit down, won’t you?’
Julia took her coffee, and sat on a stool, opposite her sister. A clock ticked.
‘Where did you get the lovely little figures, Cass? Tell me about your day – how do you spend your time? Do you enjoy teaching – do you like students? Do you hold with all this about the Grail story being really a fertility myth? Do you think …’
Cassandra told her, dry and informative. About the tutorial system, Cassandra’s summers in Ravenna, the relationship between the Fisher King, the blind Norse God, Hothur, who slew Baldur his brother, because fate so willed it, and the blind soldier Longinus whose spear pierced Christ’s side, released blood which restored his sight, and passed into the Grail legend with Joseph of Arimathea’s cup. They both had a sense that they were restoring, through talking about these things, the good parts of the old relationship in an innocent way.
‘It’s like – it really is like – being in the room you have seen just a corner of in a mirror,’ Julia said. ‘I’ve thought so much about all this, I’m glad it’s real, I’m glad I’m here.’
Cassandra looked at her sharply from inside the wings of her chair. What she would have said to this was lost, since there was a knock on the door and a girl came in with half an essay and an apology. Julia stood up, and slid into Cassandra’s bedroom. Behind her she heard the beginning of a halting explanation.
She went round the bedroom with some thoroughness, fingering Cassandra’s dressing-gown on the door, reading the titles of the books which covered the wall above the bed-head, surprised to find, shiny and virginal-looking, The Silver Swan, by Julia Corbett, and also The Trivial Round. She took these down and observed her own smile, apologetic and inviting, on the dust-jacket. ‘Julia Corbett is an extraordinary woman who portrays with grim accuracy the trials of ordinary women.’ Oh, Christ. She put them back. Had Cassandra read them? Or had someone sent them, and had Cassandra put them up there unread? She found several locked volumes of Cassandra’s Journal, neatly labelled simply with the year. So that went on. She turned back Cassandra’s bedspread and observed a longsleeved, navy, viyella nightdress and a lace bed-jacket under the pillow. She went through a pile of magazines on the bedside table. Saeculum, Review of Mediaeval English Studies, The Bibliographer, St. Eusebius’ Parish Magazine, Nature World. This was a month old. On page 12 was an article: The least-explored fauna in the world. ‘Simon Moffitt tells of new discoveries among the smaller reptilians in the Amazon basin. A new giant toad.’
So. Julia tapped the sad, slightly hairy face with a fingernail and replaced the magazine where she had found it. So.
There was a palm-cross, slightly dusty, in a small silver vase on the same table and a letter from Gerald Rowell. This thanked Cassandra for her invitation, and agreed that his curate’s views on the Church Triumphant, as expressed in his last sermon, might be said to be misleading. ‘Like most young people, he’s an enthusiast. Naturally, I have spoken to him about it.’ The letter ended ‘I was more glad than I can say to hear that all goes well with you, and that the terror is receding. I think it might reassure you if I tell you both that I know the terror is real and horrible, and that I genuinely believe you can bring yourself through it. You have a great deal of courage.’
Another, mysterious Cassandra. Julia thought a moment. On her way past the door she heard her sister’s lecturing voice, accurate, mocking, repeating each accusation once, for emphasis, after the point had been taken. She looked at her face, alive and tremulous, in Cassandra’s mirror, and allowed herself a moment of pure dislike. She knew where Cassandra had learned to wear people down in that way, to humiliate, to hurt.
She wandered back into the other room in time to take to herself an admiring glance from the departing student for her clothes, or her face, or both. Deep inside the chair Cassandra said ‘Would you care for a glass of brandy?’ Julia looked sharply at her, trying to see under the bundle of clothes, under that harsh voice, through her own sense of failure and blunted love, the person who lived in these rooms alone. What was it like to be Cassandra? Like a spider, in a web, waiting. No, that was her own feeling about Cassandra. ‘I’d love some brandy.’
Cassandra stood up and searched in a cupboard. ‘I’m no good with girls. Too impatient. Not that they care, anyway.’
Julia thought, she is not attracted by them, as I suppose many of these women are. She is simply jealous of them. As with me.
Cassandra handed her a lady-like quantity of brandy in a liqueur glass.
‘I enjoyed our talk, Cass. I’m so glad I came. I love seeing how you live, it’s about time you were simply real, as far as I’m concerned. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Oh yes, I know.’
‘We are going to be able to meet, and be pleased, and not think about each other, aren’t we? Out of our different absorbing lives – the real people, meeting.’
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra, grinning.
‘You’re mocking me.’
‘You are always too ready to think that.’
‘I mean – we’re just other people in the world, only we know each other well.’
‘Oh yes, I agree.’ Cassandra smiled. ‘We are doing something perfectly normal, and we think ourselves clever.’
‘Well it’s about time we did see each other for what we are,’ said Julia; they raised their glasses to each other with a queer courtesy, and drank.
When Julia had gone to bed in the guest-room, Cassandra went round her own room, twitching at curtains and chair covers. After some thought, she put Queen Morgan into a desk drawer. After some further thought, she plucked out the copy of Nature World and stuffed it into the bottom of a file labelled ‘Sir Percivale: Variants’.
On Saturday Julia insisted on an even more intensive course of sight-seeing than what Cassandra had already conscientiously planned. Together, in black patent knee-high boots and furred bottines they covered the wet streets, Bodleian, Ashmolean, Sheldonian, a string of college chapels and libraries. Julia asked intelligent questions about carvings and glass, and made confidences about Deborah – ‘she’s lucky to have you to complain to’ – and Thor. ‘The situation’s got easier. He’s got such a lot of visitors. Smelly old women he doesn’t introduce. Indians in turbans. There’s a sort of wild busyness about him. He doesn’t seem to mind me so much – either way. I suppose that makes things easier.’
‘I’ve no doubt he’ll contain himself somehow,’ said Cassandra. ‘He seems determined to do so.’
Julia looked at her suspiciously and went back to her speculation: what was it like to be Cassandra? She was beginning to feel she could know this; as they came back up the High she felt that they had at last reached a point where the inevitable knowledge of long acquaintance could become an intelligent love. She studied the bony, rigid profile beside her and felt for a moment that she shared Cassandra’s stern purposes, Cassandra’s evasions, Cassandra’s solitude.
Cassandra had to conduct an interview in the afternoon: Julia went through the curio shops in the High, looking for something for Deborah. At tea-time she returned to Cassandra’s room, with a parcel.
‘I bought you a present, Cass. It seems appropriate. I hope it’s approp
riate. It’s very beautiful. I hope you don’t think it’s in bad taste. The moment I saw it I thought you ought to have it.’
Cassandra unplucked, slowly, Sellotape and two layers of bottle-green tissue paper. Julia’s present was a snake, about two feet long, made of sulphur-yellowish glass. It was rigid from head to tail, although the surface was moulded to suggest a certain curving bumpiness; the head rested level with the body and the under-surface suggested to the hand the spread of slackened and easy muscles. The head was flat, and broad-snouted, with the suspicion of a horn above the nostril. It was beautifully coloured, with rhombs and coins of two dull greens and a dark gold all along its body, and a black line interweaving. Inside, flowing and turning under the green and gold, was a confused network of crimson lines, suggesting viscera, or a mapping of the nervous system. It had crimson, slightly convex eyes, which were the orifices of crimson funnels whose pointed ends met inside the skull. Between the flat lips, inside the delicately curving white teeth, lay a black thread of forked tongue, whose root was at the juncture of the eyes. Cassandra turned the cold glass in her hands.
‘It’s terribly realistic in a funny way,’ Julia said. ‘I mean, considering how artificial it is, it’s realistic. And so very three-dimensional – I suppose because it’s transparent.’
‘A dimension of inwardness,’ Cassandra said slowly. It was important to Julia that Cassandra should accept the gift, as it is important, after a reconciliation, that both parties should take, even share, a joke on the subject of the quarrel. This was between the two of them.
‘You could look at it for a long time,’ said Cassandra, ‘and not come to the end of it. Thank you.’
She placed it carefully on top of the television. Julia noticed, then, that Morgan le Fay had been removed overnight.
They received the first dinner-guest, Father Rowell, side by side in front of the forbidding white marble hearth of the college’s Havisham room – named after a benefactor, but associated by generations of irreverent students with dedicated and cobwebbed emotion. Julia wore a long, plain, flame-red fine woollen shift, with long sleeves, which she was glad of since the room was chilly. She had gathered a knot of her hair on top of her head and spiked it with a silver pin. Round her neck she wore a chain of flat, hammered links. The effect was one of organized barbarism. Cassandra had brought out her only evening dress, which appeared at all Gaudies; this was made of green and gold velvet, and had long, widening sleeves. She had strewn necklaces with more than usual profusion into the scooped-out neckline, and the knobs of her collar-bone protruded between fine chains of gold, parting them. Julia thought: we look like Goneril and Regan out of a bad modern production set in a cross between the Elizabethan and the Stone Ages. All we need is a white and Grecian Cordelia. She still felt great warmth and tenderness towards Cassandra, and was dismayed to see that her sister’s dress was parting at the seams in the arm-pits. Cassandra was not a woman to whom one could point out these things. She herself was a woman only too easily embarrassed by them.
Father Rowell bent over Cassandra’s hand and lifted it to his lips. ‘Cassandra my dear. I trust all is well with you.’
Cassandra stiffened.
‘May I introduce my sister, Mrs Judith Eskelund?’
‘How do you do.’ The priest put out a momentary, boneless hand. ‘How do you do?’
His look met Julia’s, flickered into focus, and slid away above her head. Julia thought, queer. She was one of those women who claim instantaneous recognition of homosexuality in men; ‘something about the eyes’ she would explain, wisely. Father Rowell’s eyes were a very diluted blue, behind gold-rimmed spectacles. His face had the thick smoothness of wax, and so had his head, except for two tufts of very pale, gingery fluffy hair above his ears. He wore what Julia thought of as a long black skirt, under which his boots seemed large, and clumsy. Out of shyness perhaps, although it seemed more like deliberate rudeness, he did not speak to Julia, but turned one shoulder to her and said to Cassandra, ‘I see you are not coming with us to Glastonbury this year?’
‘Well —’ said Cassandra, ‘I have so much on my hands …’
‘Too much work, perhaps,’ said the priest.
Julia looked quickly from one to the other, collecting tones of voice. She had never heard anyone speak to Cassandra with that note of indulgent authority. Nor had she known Cassandra in that way shy, or placating. They moved on to some question concerning the curate’s views on the Sarum and Roman chasubles, which Julia saw as low comedy; she felt immensely touched by a kind of gawky, ersatz domesticity that came over her sister. She is another middle-aged lady latching her feelings on to the necessarily available priest, she thought; she was unaware of Cassandra’s momentary revulsion from her own consciousness of this.
The other guests arrived in a body. They were Professor Nathaniel Storrin, a medievalist, Martin Redman, a young Fellow of a college, his wife, Sylvia, who had been Cassandra’s student five years ago, and Miss Vanessa Curtess, a Fellow of Cassandra’s college and an expert on Huysmans. Professor Storrin greeted Cassandra impetuously, both arms outstretched. Cassandra, reaching for him, split her seams further, so that now a very large slice of pale flesh was visible. Storrin was a man who looked dignified and profound, with a long, aquiline, English face, silver hair and a tall stoop. Martin Redman was square and stocky; his wife followed at his heel: she was a round red-cheeked girl with a pudding-basin hair-cut and a short, emerald taffeta dress with a bow balanced on her bottom. Vanessa Curtess was a heavy, dark, shingled woman. She wore a dress of coffee-coloured lace whose square-cut neckline jutted forward like a boat’s prow, revealing the line where the severe brassière cut across the swelling flesh of her bosom. When she was introduced to Julia she flushed, neck to brow. Julia was beginning to feel happy. She understood parties, even parties like this. In all the novels she had written parties had taken place.
A maid bobbed at them with a tray of glasses of medium dry sherry. Cassandra, Gerald Rowell and Storrin were engaged in an informed conversation about the Celtic Theory. Julia looked automatically across at Martin Redman, but Miss Curtess was telling him something about simple-minded insularity and looked angry. Sylvia Redman was at her elbow.
‘You must be really Julia Corbett. I saw you on the television. It never occurred to me you were related to our Miss Corbett. You’re so dissimilar …’
‘No, I’m really Mrs Eskelund. I’ve got a husband and a great big daughter at home.’
‘Yes, I know. I know that of course. I – I like your books. They – they deal with a real problem, one nobody thinks anything ought to be done about. That is – women, intelligent women, who are suddenly plunged into being at home all day. The – the real boredom. I – I love my babies – I’ve got two – very much. But some days I just sit down and cry out of a – a knowledge of waste. Waste. The indignity and waste of being a woman. I know I’m much less interesting than I was as an undergraduate. And I can’t say I don’t mind.’
‘I never was an undergraduate. But I’m sure you’re right about waste. And boredom. Women get far too great a share of boredom. That’s something the novel can explore. The novel makes it not boring.’
‘The glory and the horror and the boredom,’ said Sylvia Redman, predictably. Julia remembered Cassandra saying ‘One should forgo one’s need for a sense of glory.’ Such a need leads one into odd habits, she thought, and smoothed the red dress over her hips.
‘Life closes in, just when one imagines it will do the opposite,’ said the intense girl. ‘Now I keep telling myself I must keep up with things. Do some organized reading, or something. But – keeping up just simply for the sake of keeping up – seems so petty, somehow. Nothing more than not admitting defeat. And since the babies I get so tired. They don’t tire me, it isn’t that I work hard, but life’s tiring. The effort of starting up again in the evenings. The awfulness, if one does start up, of them starting crying.’
‘Yes, I do know.’ Julia surveyed her absent
ly. She thought, you tell everyone this, this is the only thought you think. You look to me as though you gave up without much struggle. And that green taffeta doesn’t bear witness to any real acquaintance with the glory and the horror. If there was any one thing you cared enough about, Julia thought, you’d start up again in the evenings fast enough. She grinned quickly to herself on this thought, looked up, and caught the priest’s eye, cold and judging. Martin Redman seemed to be trying to shake off Miss Curtess; he joined Julia and Sylvia rather abruptly, trailing her behind him.
‘All this prescriptive moral good health,’ she was saying, ‘is so limiting. We need a more passive freedom – to explore the intricacies of our real corruption, to know coldly what we are capable of —’
‘I don’t want that kind of nasty freedom, thank you,’ said Martin. ‘I happen to value decency. Scrupulousness. Good judgement.’
‘Lawrence,’ said Vanessa Curtess, ‘was neither scrupulous nor a good judge.’
‘Oh, my God,’ said Martin. He moved sideways, opening the circle so that the group of mediaevalists was added to it.
‘Darling,’ said Sylvia, ‘did you know that Miss Corbett’s sister is really Julia Corbett, the novelist?’
Martin looked Julia over.
‘I saw you on television,’ he announced. ‘Talking about your art. Hacking away at your husband’s character. I wouldn’t stand for that if I was him. I’ve not read any of your books. I just turned the telly on to see what that chap had to say about musique concrète, but all he did was put on a funny act like a monkey with a hurdy-gurdy. Don’t you think that sort of programme hopelessly degrades art in any case? How can you take your work seriously and get mixed up in that sort of thing?’