by A. S. Byatt
‘Eat your rice, Ju, it’ll go cold.’
‘She makes things nice for me with little plastic mats —’
‘Darling.’
‘Oh, I listen, I listen, I’m not made that I can say go away. I say “it must have been dreadful”. She hates everyone so for what she thinks they’ve “done” to her. And she expects nothing different, ever.’
‘Well, you can write a domestic novel to end all domestic novels, amongst the suds and nappies.’
‘That’s what Debbie said. Debbie’s furious. She locks herself in her room and won’t come out except for meals unless he’s in. She said to me’ – Julia laughed nervously, because this had hurt – ‘she said, “Well at least you’ve got some real difficulties to write a real book about, for a change.” ’
‘Acute child. I don’t like your daughter.’ Julia, who was accustomed so to present Deborah that no one could like her was perversely hurt. And Ivan had not contradicted the judgement on the novels.
‘She’s just an awkward age. I wish she’d got a boy-friend.’
‘Wouldn’t let you have knowledge of it if she had, my beautiful.’ Ivan showed all his small teeth in a white grin and began to scoop rice into his mouth with chopsticks. ‘So all you can do is take voluminous notes on the tribulations of Mrs Baker.’
‘No,’ Julia wailed. ‘I can’t do it. Because her life was really awful, and I’d make her into a kind of wistful-comic charlady. Thor’d be furious with me and he’d be quite right.’
‘Never mind. It can’t last. Something ghastly’s bound to happen, and then, my sweet, it will all be over.’
Julia persisted. ‘I just can’t settle to any work, I feel all uprooted, everything I do seems meaningless. I can’t even – talk to Thor in bed – or anywhere – because They are always drifting by and I remember Mrs B Seeing Everything, in her hotel.
‘And I meant to try and write a real book – a complicated book – not about myself – and I haven’t got time or space to concentrate.’
Ivan laughed. ‘You all come to that. It’s a mistake. You’re a perfectly normal, fairly simple-minded, not unduly intelligent woman, and you write clever, circumscribed, pin-pricking little books, and you have this itch to be a prophetess, or a great sufferer. I’ve been wanting to say for a long time – come off it, Julia.’
‘I’m sorry you see it that way.’
‘You’re silly. You’re perfectly nice as you are.’ Ivan rolled boyishly over on the hearth-rug and gripped her ankle, grinding the bones. Julia allowed this. Ivan caressed her leg for a few moments in silence. Julia sat, her legs together, straight out in front of her. Ivan ran his hand up her leg, under her skirt, and caressed her thigh. Julia said, not commenting on his activities, ‘I don’t suppose old Baker will ever get a job. Thor drives him off looking for them, in vans. But there’s so much he won’t do because of this dignity Thor’s so keen on.…’
‘Shut up,’ said Ivan. He sat up abruptly and pushed Julia over on to her back, where she lay, staring rather pathetically at him.
‘And don’t look at me has it come to this, because this is where it’s always been coming and you know it. You are the most provocative woman I’ve ever met. At a second meeting you offer no less than everything. And I want you horribly. So be honest, my love, enjoy yourself.’
‘Don’t mock,’ said Julia. Her mind was tick-tacking over various uncomfortable calculations. She drew her legs fractionally closer together.
‘I’m not mocking. I’m perfectly serious. I’m even laying myself open to appearing as the selfish lover in one of your books. Love could go no further. Julia,’ he said, shifting closer and peering down at her with jetty eyes, ‘I can’t find any other way to speak to you. Don’t be put off.’ He put out his finger, with a real or assumed timidity, and drew it across her lips. Julia was touched by this; she was always ready to be touched.
‘Anyway, where’s Merle? This sort of thing is so messy, Ivan. It spoils things.’
‘You’ve no guts.’
‘Yes I have. But I am a sort of prude. I like friendship, not passion. Now, my sister has a positively Byronic hunger for passion and doesn’t get much chance to practise. But it’s not my line.’
‘And for that momentary malice you deserve no quarter. Defend yourself, my darling.’
Julia was no good at self-defence when it came to a direct attack, and opened her legs pliably enough when they were pushed. She was not easy to stir, and had been, ever since Simon’s first attempt to kiss her, neurotically afraid of being watched; she was unable, although she knew it to be impolite, to resist twisting her head from side to side to see whether the room had suddenly become inhabited. Afterwards, she felt hot and sticky, and, as Ivan handed back to her those of her clothes he had removed, a sense of temporary respite. It meant, at least, that she was able to lean peaceably against Ivan’s small male warmth on the sofa, since she didn’t need to fear provoking someone who had already been provoked.
‘You’re not really cross?’ he said.
‘Oh, no. No.’
There was a silence.
‘Did you know that your friend Simon Moffitt was in difficulties? Lost his cameraman to a crocodile, or something. They’ve got a stock of films but then that’s going to be the end of them for the time being, apparently.’
Julia thought of Simon, and the strained delicacy of his love-making and felt wistful. She should have been more abandoned. She thought of his knobby face, and his nervousness, and his meddling.
‘Poor Si.’
‘What was he like?’
‘I hardly remember. I don’t know if I ever knew. I loved him.’
‘Good for him,’ said Ivan. Merle came in, bundled in a white raincoat, smiling.
‘You two look comfortable,’ she said.
‘I’ll make us all some coffee,’ said Ivan, kissing Julia and standing up. He said to his wife, ‘We were talking about Simon Moffitt. Julia’s got this thing about Moffitt. A real girlhood passion. One can just see why, can’t one?’
‘Not very salubrious,’ said Merle. ‘I mean, the sort of thing he does, the sort of place he does it in. It gives me the creeps, honestly, darling.’
Next day Julia left the flat early in the morning, carrying a brief-case and several note-books. She walked several times round Russell Square, past the gaudy tea-kiosk, past the fountains, granite griddle-cakes with single tubes of water suspended thinly above them. In the night she had slid one hand over Thor’s huge rib-cage in tentative invitation; he had not responded. Outside, a child was coughing and she could hear Mrs Baker padding across the carpet. With her privacy she was losing her sense of identity. Thor excluded her and Ivan’s grab, neatly defining her as a sexual object, diminished and humiliated her. He had said she was provocative; so she was, she needed to prove she was there to be seen; but the proof always, contradictorily, drove her to further uncertain agony of guilt and self-distaste.
She found it, rather grimly, good to be alone. There ought to be more things possible to me, she told herself. I think too much about limitations, I’ve lost my sense of possibility. Not marriage, nor childbirth, was responsible; the roots of the failure were older and deeper. She grappled with this idea of possibility and limitations. Modern novels – her own, amongst others – concerned themselves too exclusively with limitations. They enjoyed glumly setting them out. A novel ought, ideally, to balance in a perpetual juggling trick the sense of real limitation against a real awareness of human possibility. Cassandra, now, was aware of the grandeurs of possibility but had refused to explore her limitations, realistically, at all. It was all in the air. Cassandra was the solitary self. But if one could see – in the reality that restricted one – the nevertheless shining and extensive possibility.… Not sum up, or give in, too soon, above all.… There was a sense in which Cassandra’s pursuit of a sense of glory was right and proper, if only it were at all related to the real world.
Julia had rarely had so many consecutive abstract th
oughts. They were exhilarating – releasing her from Thor, from Ivan, from the Bakers. I could have called that novel, she thought, A Sense of Glory. It could have been about the way Cass sees Simon – intensely meaningful, unreal. The telly does have that effect, anyway. I know that from my own feelings when I see Simon on it. He seems substantial, important, as I was never sure he was, in the flesh. An idol, with a whole, ungrasped, different reality depending from him. A world with another world contained in it.
Now, I could write this novel about a woman with a dream world that – extends her possibilities. And she introduces a real man into this world, and understands – really understands – one aspect of him, this way. Julia tripped over someone’s tricycle, smiled, apologized, hurried wildly on. And the dream world, which is beautiful, is quite shattered when she meets him again after a long time.
I’ve got to have a television idol, it’s such a good image for this sense of glory. I couldn’t use a naturalist.
She thought of Father Rowell, and Cassandra’s deference towards him, and then of Simon’s first television appearance and the priest who had preached the subsequent programme. I could make this man a television clergyman. Not a jolly one. Sententious – like Si – not simply chummy. Even God-like, until you knew him. He’d be clever, but not that clever. He wouldn’t understand her, of course, he’d subtly fail her.… He’d be, for her, absolute limitation and infinite possibility.
No, this is mine, she thought, and headed out of the square and down Southampton Row. She reached the public library in Theobald’s Road in a state of tense euphoria, and took a lift to the Reference Library. There, seated in reasonable anonymity in a crowd of Afro-Asian students, she started on what was to be the most rapid and least altered piece of work in her life. It almost, eventually, wrote itself; she had much less work to do on it than on her more apparently artless and confessionally chatty pieces. She spent the next few weeks solidly working, closed away in the library in every spare moment.
Chapter 12
Cassandra’s Journal. April.
Tyranny of objects. There is a point beyond which the apparent antagonism of certain chairs, or paper-weights, if dwelt on, ceases to be ludicrous. As though they might crush or crowd out. This may also be true of human beings. I find myself assuming hostility in, for instance, Miss Barton, because of the configuration of her upper lip – somewhat swollen – taken in conjunction with the dark hairs at her mouth corners. Now, it is not these physical facts which menace, clearly – they must be simply a focus for my resentment of hostility that I assume is in her. There is, of course, real hostility. Yesterday she found it necessary to suggest that I had been too severe in refusing a reference to Gillian Sachur. A foolish girl. I had thought my decision out with care. She has a right to her view. But she expressed it with hostility, and concentrated her grim look on my hands in an obsessive way I could not like.
I must nevertheless keep in mind a distinction between Miss Barton, and chairs, or paper-weights.
It could be argued that I resent the simple idea of reality conveyed in the solid presence of chair and paper-weight. I am particularly disturbed by glass objects – increasingly, since that serpent has been in my possession – because they contain, being transparent, the suggestion that they are not simply solid.
A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleases through it pass
And then the heaven espy.
Here is the paradox of all vision. But let it be remembered that these objects have weight, as well as transparency. Not only surface, and heaven beyond the surface, but ponderous weight. I do not express this clearly. There are degrees of reality to be apprehended in all objects, at any given time, and degrees of capacity, in ourselves, to apprehend them.
‘All objects, as objects, are essentially fixed and dead.’ It is this fixed, dead weight that makes them hostile.
Forms of glass. The pane of glass, for instance, through which I see the garden from inside my room. Last night, looking out from a lighted room, I saw the moon. The pane of glass reflected the yellow glitter of the lamplight; it was thus seen to be solid. But when I stood between the lamp and the glass, the dark circle of the shadow of my head contained the pale sliver of moon. Here is an image of vision – a chain of alternating light, reflected light, and darkness. One sees, through a darkness which is a shadow of oneself – a reflection of one’s absence – this pale light, which is itself after all, visible almost always only in darkness, a partial reflection – off another dead, dull, solid surface – of the sun’s vital unseen light. One creates an emptiness, a darkness, in which to see it, by interposing one’s own solidity between the bright lamplight and the apparently solid glass surface which reflects it. And thus negates all solidity. It is all in the head, in my head.
Another form of glass. Mirrors, of course, are not transparent; they are on the contrary, an assurance of solidity. There is an absolute difference between the recessive caverns or corridors of mirror reflected in mirror, with my face repeated idiotically on the perpetuated thresholds, and the receding open space my shadow, as it were, illuminates through plain glass. I do not need, or like, the reassurance of mirrors; they do not reflect the hollow in the skull; they close off ways. Mirrors are partial truths, like certain putative works of art. Like almost all works of art.
The television screen is a form of mirror. Mirror of our desires, of our ways of seeing.
J., last night, spoke on the screen about the relationship between art and life. I do not consider her an authority on the subject. The screen emphasizes the bones on her skull; overemphasizes; she appears more clear-cut, less soft, less fleshy and speaks more decisively, although with little gestures of appeal to the invisible audience. A mirror-image of myself – a certain nod we have in common is emphasized, also certain tricks of speech, which have persisted and are more easily remarked in magnification.
‘Why do you write, Miss Corbett?’ they asked her. ‘What drives you?’ She replied, after some encouragement, as I understood her, with much smiling, that she did not write either to ‘express herself’, or to persuade her readers of any social or moral truth, or ‘to put forward a view of life’. She wrote, she said, compulsively, in order to understand events, in her own life, or others’. ‘Would you say that your novels were autobiographical, Miss Corbett?’ they asked her. ‘They have been. The book on which I am working at present is not autobiographical.’ I suppose this may be the usual response. They asked if it helped her to control her life; she replied that it did not. They continued: ‘And when you have finished a book do you feel triumph – satisfaction – or disappointment?’ None of these, apparently. J., facing the camera squarely, honest eyes blazing, ‘No, no, something much more neutral. A sense of release. And renewed vigour. I feel ready to start all over again on something else.’
I thought of Deborah, and her complaint that she is disposed of. She has cause.
With J’s television appearances I have a sense of a diminishing reflection. With his, on the other hand, I have the illusion of a world infinitely extended through dissolving glass, the Looking Glass. This must be untruth, and dangerous. Somewhere, in an unseen jungle, across an ocean and a continent, a real man, Simon, whom I love, is at this moment paddling through real water, or grubbing in real dirt, or losing real red blood from hands scraped, or cut, or sucked by flies. Here, now, I walk through unreal creepers, I study unreal dirt and water.
What I see on the screen is an image, but an image, not only of myself, but of a real man. And some of my thoughts about him are not fantasy, but knowledge. What he says, what he shows, I am occasionally, by careful attention, able to know and predict. I can accurately describe plants he must see that the screen does not show and I do not see. More than that, I know to a certain extent what he is afraid of – how well I know it I shall never tell – and what he thinks. Love is attention, though that is only a part of the truth. Between fantasy and reality are infin
ite degrees, and I bring myself, occasionally, to the illusion (or more) that we do share an experience or a thought. If, by denying my own solidity, I could see him as he is? Even so, the glass barrier is solid; screen, window or looking-glass. If it were not solid? No. Solidity is fact, is fact, it cannot be translated into pure threat.
Between fantasy and reality are the dreams. Things we touch, involuntarily, in dreams; things we possess there; untrodden paths we tread. This changes us. This changes also our relation to the dead weight of objects. Occasionally – I do not speculate how – what I have dreamed, and written down, he has afterwards said. I have dreamed other things he has not said. He spoke, tonight, about a moulting snake; I had heard it before, I knew it. He connected this release, as in my dream, with vision.
First he showed the animal lying torpid; then the splitting of the skin; then the animal leaving the skin – like oiled silk, like a length of live water. He was left with the stiff, semi-transparent husk, on which the scales seem harsher and larger. He said, ‘If we had to depend on markings alone it would be impossible to distinguish snakes by their exuviae.’
During the period immediately before the shedding of the skin the colour of the snake changes; there is no gleam; he showed this, and pointed out that the black areas on this particular snake were a ‘dead blue’ and the creamy under-surface and olive rounds were as though covered with an opaque, milky skin. He showed the eyes, covered with a hardened slightly flaking film. They were expressionless, simple surface, reflecting nothing. He said it was not true that snakes were completely blind when moulting. The eyes are covered with a raised lens, which is also shed. ‘Normally,’ he said ‘snakes have very fine vision. This is a stumbling block to those who believe they lost their limbs, eyelids and ear openings as a result of burrowing, since most burrowing animals have their vision greatly impaired. Moreover this snake is a climber, and sees acutely.’