by A. S. Byatt
‘Let me see that,’ said Thor. Julia gave it to him. The baby screamed across the flat. There was a smell of stale nappies. Mrs Baker had nervously washed them twice a day when she first came, but this was no longer the case, and Julia was too much afraid of being looked at angrily to ask for improvement.
‘Who sent you this?’ said Thor, in that absurd, over-dramatic voice in which real passion often expresses itself. Julia looked up at him plaintively. Mrs Baker stopped, and turned back to watch, milk splashing from her wavering jug into Julia’s carpet.
‘Ivan sent it,’ Julia said. ‘It was Ivan.’
‘Why did he sent it?’
‘Well, why not?’ said Deborah.
‘And you be quiet,’ said Thor to his daughter. Julia grasped, suddenly, the precise cause of his displeasure. He was angry that she had told Ivan enough to put him into a position to send such a drawing. His own tolerance of her emotional vagaries was his pride; this was what he was for; that she should chatter so liberally outside was too much. She cried out of sympathy, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, you are always sorry,’ he said, ‘when you have caused trouble. But not for what you have done.’
‘Don’t,’ Julia cried, ‘don’t lecture me like a child. I’m not. I’m a responsible woman.’
‘That is not how you behave.’
Julia stood up and found herself screaming. ‘And in front of all these bloody dirty people you’ve dragged into the flat to persecute me. Your motives are above reproach, of course. Charity excuses anything. You should stop judging, or you’ll get judged, you’ll get judged.’ He said nothing. Julia thought, as her own face crumpled into tears, that he looked ill: he had the taut, staring look he had had when she first knew him, and his lips were sore with a dark line cracking the surface. She looked at him helplessly and furiously, turned and ran and slammed herself into the bedroom. Mrs Baker dropped the milk jug and sniffed; the children howled. Thor went and put his arm clumsily and heavily about Mrs Baker’s shoulder. Mr Baker lurched aggressively out of the spare room where the baby was now frantically and breathily screaming. Deborah gathered up the offending newscutting and carried it into her room.
The cutting reached Cassandra two days later. She found it on her way out to Holy Communion; she opened the envelope clumsily with black, kid-gloved fingers, and it fluttered to the floor. There was a letter with it.
‘My dear Aunt Cassandra, Julia’s television man sent her this. For some reason it has caused an almighty row at home. None of us speak, now. Except the baby, that screams.
‘I thought you were really the best person to have this, though what I think may not be of much account. I would rather you had it. I hope you remain well; you never answered my last. I rather rely on getting letters from you. Now we have got a housefull of slum-dwellers my correspondence is all I can call my own; a pitiable state of affairs. I do feel you and I ought to be more informed about things – we ought to make it more our business what’s going on than we do. Perhaps I ought not to write to you. Unlike Julia, I am not able to write out how awful things are, but please believe they are awful. I do need to be believed, I think something awful’s brewing. People neither tell one things nor hide them from one, this is a terrible strain, if you know what I mean?
‘This amounts to a hysterical letter, Aunt C. – before you get too angry consider that I haven’t written you any such, yet, and have much cause. Do you know what I feel like? Something crawling in the undergrowth, hearing things crashing and fighting overhead, that daren’t move in case they put their feet on it but of course they may, anyway, put their feet on it. Consider the child, all the books say. Write and tell me I’ve got to stand on my own, I’ll believe it if you say it. My dear aunt, your loving niece, Deborah.’
Cassandra studied the cutting intently: Simon’s shadowed face, Ivan’s serpentine decorations, raincoat, figleaves. She folded it, brooding, and put it into her handbag. The letter she tore up and dropped into the waste-paper basket. She went on to church.
She was glad to sit down. She had felt unwell for some weeks, and was liable to misjudge distances, to kneel too far from pew to hassock, to trip against steps that had appeared to be some distance away. The inimical aspect of her surroundings had increased to hallucination. She had, in church, a real sense that the building was falling open like a flower, and then closing, one half over the other, driving pews together, impelling pillars athwart each other. Or, in Hall, the mock mediaeval crossbeams of the roof edge slowly down, compressing the girls’ din to a single intolerable shriek. She had added to the rising pile of studies of flora several very precise studies of foreshortened roof-tracery, bosses and joists. These had a new harshness of line.
She peered distractedly at the pew-end, drew off her gloves, and addressed herself to God. In Meeting, in her youth, God had seemed something approached through clinging grey floss, a kind of insulation which thickened as she raised her thoughts painfully, until these thoughts were finally blunted against a ceiling of compressed asbestos. Her attempts had most often ended in a defeated return to indulge in her live mediaeval action. In the Church, the same effort was not imperative; God had been present enough in a harmony between sounds and words and objects created by others outside herself. It was as though the Church gave to God that secondary, more intense life that literature had given to her own aimless emotion in youth; neither decorative nor hopeless. But lately this harmony had not held her. She had returned increasingly to private wrestling with the asbestos. Colour and sound had faded. ‘We receive but what we give,’ she said crossly to God through floating lumps of flock, uncertain whether it was herself or Him she was accusing. This private struggle had always been waiting for her; she felt too unwell to take it on.
When Father Rowell held up wine and wafer Cassandra, with the old ladies, came unevenly out of her stall and made for the altar. When she was in motion vision did its worst. She saw flakes of asbestos clustering like dead butterflies on the heads of the columns, which sagged, as though melting, like giant candles encrusted with simmering grey. She put up her hands to ward things off her face, things which hung festooned from the rood loft and collected in the air as though the air had burned and solidified into floating ash. Something hummed and sang.
‘Miss Corbett!’ said Father Rowell.
Cassandra heeled over and hit her head against a pew foot.
‘Hysterical women dons,’ said one undergraduate to another.
Cassandra came round, hearing a liquid gasp in her own throat, and found herself on Gerald Rowell’s sofa, peering at her own black-laced feet. She saw his pale eyes behind his fine, golden spectacles, and moved her head so that the light danced on the surface of the lenses. He waited for her to speak.
‘I’m sorry, Father. That was vulgar.’
‘Never mind that. Have you any idea why, Cassandra?’
‘I am very tired,’ said Cassandra, conventionally. He held out a cup of water; Cassandra sat up and sipped.
‘You have trusted me in the past.’
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra vaguely. She could make nothing of his expression.
‘You have no right to exhaust yourself. None of us has a right to destroy himself. You know what I am trying to say.’
‘Yes.’ Cassandra was barely listening. ‘I am suffering a kind of metaphysical distress. Probably insignificant. I don’t think it would be of much use to talk about it.’
‘You cannot be sure of that.’ He waited.
‘Everything I touch – everything I touch – turns to ashes.’ She smiled, privately, over the thought that he could not know how literally this was so. ‘After all, in this world, everything must turn to ashes,’ she said, in a tone abnormally matter-of-fact, a parody of his own preaching manner. ‘We must accept these trials.’
‘You make it impossible to speak to you.’
‘Speech alters almost nothing. We talk too much. We should keep quiet and concentrate on survival.’ She looked wildly p
ast him, into the room beyond, and then stiffened again, smiling slightly. As though, even there, something lay in wait. She watched whatever it was, and Father Rowell watched her.
‘God has not put us, Cassandra, in any normal sense at a level where survival is of paramount importance. You and I are born civilized, self-conscious, intelligent, physically fortunate. We are required to live in the world. We are required to speak to each other. We are placed where we have abundant spare energy, which it is our duty to expend in love. Love for other people. Love for God.’
‘The glass,’ said Cassandra, swaying her head and peering at his spectacles and his eyes behind them, ‘and what is through the glass. I know, that is what we say.’
‘That is what is true.’
‘Yes, yes,’ she said impatiently, ‘but there are other truths.’ She stood up abruptly and gathered up gloves and handbag. ‘As I said, it was a little vulgar. You will acquit me of making a habit of it. But let us not make it worse by speaking as if it were significant.’
‘What other truths?’ said Father Rowell.
Cassandra walked steadily to the door.
‘Let me at least call you a cab.’
‘No, no. I can walk.’
‘If you.… If you should have anything to say, if you should change your mind, I am here.’
‘I know,’ said Cassandra. ‘I know.’
In her room she took out the cutting again, and studied it. She supposed that it made little real difference to her that Simon was again in England and she had not known. But she had spent time imagining him in the jungle when he was not there; and this sapped her sense of her own presence a little further.
She had recently bought an easel; now, she set to work on another painting. She sketched in the broad outline of a man in a raincoat under a tree. Then, carefully, as though all her other work had been preliminary studies for this, she began to spread behind him an intricate network of twisting foliage with tiny, formalized, haphazard creatures from the dreams clutching with claw and feeler to tendrils, to fronds, to broad, spatulate leaves. She painted a square inch at a time, peering closely at it. The tree rose like a pillar in front of the deepening backcloth. Above it, in great flakes of paint, Cassandra laid a grey, thick sky that furred the branches and impinged heavily on the whole scene.
Chapter 14
‘YES, you know, but I —’
‘It is an art form. Look what they said about the cinema. No, look, television’s the new art medium. All the other forms have got worked out – worked out – too bloody self-conscious. Even if they’re self-consciously unselfconscious. The artists seem to be playing with the forms. Fiddling about with the form all the time.’
‘You can’t —’
‘Now, the thing about television as an art medium – the real thing it’s got, or ought to have got, over all the other art forms is this immediacy. Great flexibility and variety, granted, but also this immediacy. It could stimulate all sorts of new discoveries. Why not? I mean, this cliché about bringing art into people’s homes, it’s a truth. Do you realize just what power an art medium that’s a casual part of almost everyone’s life has got? I mean, it’s in there, it’s in people’s lives. They get their thoughts from it. It’s a fearful responsibility.’
‘I hadn’t seen it that —’
‘No, listen. This programme. The Lively Arts. It’s an attempt to relate the work of artists at all points – with this immediacy – to the way people live. Now art – art is a function of man’s self-consciousness. Art’s what he makes of the fact that he’s aware of his life. Not like an animal. Or aware of more abstract things, like colour and sound. Now look, now look, television’s man’s self-consciousness now. I mean, how many people see life in terms of what the medium shows them? Many many more than ever saw it in terms of a Shakespeare play or a Tolstoy novel or even Charlie Chaplin. Now, what this programme’s for is to make them conscious of what we’re offering them. I’m not a dilettante don dishing out culture. I’m not committed – I don’t want to tell them how to better themselves socially. I’m not interested in the sort of art that needs a lifetime’s training to appreciate. I just want to increase the ordinary man’s awareness. Of himself. Of the artists’ awareness of him. Of things around him. I want to interweave the artist’s sense of significance with people’s lives. Does that make sense?’
‘I —’
‘And television opens up to art – to this consciousness – all sorts of things that weren’t available or were getting excluded. Like your stuff.’
‘Yes. I shouldn’t have thought my work was of absorbing interest – or importance – to them.’
‘Your ratings don’t tell that tale. No, honestly, you show them wonders.’
‘What I’m trying to say is, I’m not an artist.’
‘I don’t see that.’
‘You don’t listen. If – if there’s an artist concerned, it was my friend, Antony Miller. Who is dead. He – he made the films. But I don’t – I suspect your terminology. I can’t put my finger on it, but I —’
‘Well, we’ve got you.’ Ivan waved an expansive hand. ‘Even if we can’t have him. Hamlet without Shakespeare. You did agree to appear.’
‘Oh yes.’ Simon turned away, leaned over the ice-bucket, and dropped, with tongs, two ice-cubes splat into his drink. It was almost an angry movement. Ivan watched him. He felt for some reason wrathful. On first meeting Simon he had felt, seeing in the flesh the patient face, loose and composed, curiously drawn to him. After a moment’s uneasy silence, apparently weighted with significance, he had been impelled to talk, and to talk at length, without mockery, about what he believed in. For two minutes or so he had thought he was addressing an enthralled listener. Now, there seemed to be no one there. Silently, somehow, Simon had cheated him. He retreated into the professional thought that whatever he was in the jungle, on this programme Simon Moffitt was going to be an inadequate and embarrassing performer. Then, as the professional thought ran into the private thought, he decided that Julia could not, now, find this irritable person attractive. Ivan was satisfied with his own body and cared for it. Julia could not like this pitted skin, this nervous Adam’s apple, these loose lips. Where Simon had shaved his beard a hot rash had spread disastrously, making his face a strange patchwork of walnut and rose. He caught Simon’s eye.
‘A lot of surface interest,’ he said, waving a hand towards the face.
‘What?’
‘Surface interest. For the camera.’
‘Oh,’ said Simon simply, taking a large and apparently painful gulp of gin. He prolonged the uneasy silence that followed until the arrival of the other members of the Lively Arts team.
These were a poet, a musician, and a sculptor. They were all young, and struggling to become established. The musician, a pale blond youth called Percy Mottram was doing best: he was both composer and violinist. He was unpopular with the other artists and popular with the public for the same reasons: he was very beautiful, with a diffident, appealing face, and contributed to discussion a personal, down-to-earth, no-nonsense touch, as though he spoke for the man in the street. The other artists considered this mischievous. Ben McIntyre, the sculptor, had once said that if Percy occasionally wrote like an angel he invariably talked with the vulgarity and banality of most librettos. Ben was vociferous and expected. He had a bushy red beard and a navy, polo-necked sweater, and smelled slightly. There had been a good programme on his work, which was obsessed by a kind of wire puzzle trickery of bent, or mobile rods imprisoning an anguished, semi-human figure for whom escape was possible through a combination of padlocks, clues of thread, pressed levers. Except that the figure was welded to the base, or broken on the bars, or hung in chains amongst what looked like a forest of violent television aerials. These works had appeared more impressive under the camera’s moving eye than they did standing alone on plinth or rostrum. The poet, Gordon Bottome, taught in a technical college, was the chairman of the meetings, and able to speak fluen
tly through all gaps and uncertainties. He was metrically sound, Left-wing in sympathies, saw literature as the regenerating force of civilization, in so far as he had any faith that civilization could be regenerated, and wrote, largely, ironic meditations on strangers glimpsed on buses or in railway buffets and careful meditations on what poetry might be for, or might do to you. He irritated Ivan, and had been put on to the programme by Ivan’s superiors to curb what was, in this context, Ivan’s fanatical belief in his own powers, and to restrain Ivan from attempting to be over-ambitious or over-complicated. Ivan told him that he was an educationalist first, not an artist, and he retorted that if this was the case he was not ashamed of it. He was fond, also, of laying down the law about what the audience ‘could take’ of a given subject. What the audience could take was usually minimal.
To these persons Ivan introduced Simon Moffitt, who swallowed nervously and choked. He explained that they were first to watch several of Simon’s films, and then would hold a ‘completely random’ discussion of his work; from the recording of this a more formal discussion could be plotted and laid out for the programme. Simon, his eyes half-closed, looked into his glass. Ivan tried to assess the effect of Simon on the team – he wished Simon would do or say something to sustain that pitch of fanatical faith in his importance which was necessary if they were to work well together. During his explanation Julia, who was, as usual, late, made an entrance.
She had come to hate arriving at Lively Arts meetings. Since she was the only woman on the team she had at first been an object for its attention, and had later become the object of a kind of clubbish exclusion which she felt another woman would have been able to avoid. On this occasion she was flustered by having, unwisely, provoked an altercation just before leaving by asking Mrs Baker to wash the overflowing bucketful of fouled nappies in the bathroom. Mrs Baker felt more secure, Julia had decided, now she saw herself as a weapon in a domestic civil war, rather than an object of charity. So she had made some play with the difference between her own grimy overall and Julia’s fine woollen shift, low-necked, pale apricot, drawn up girlishly with a string under the breasts. Julia felt bad. She had made her stand just before coming out so that she would not have to stay in the flat and feel bad. But, having come out, she felt distracted and disproportionately menaced.