by A. S. Byatt
‘You didn’t like things to mean too much. I loved you too much.’
‘I wanted to be an ordinary man, not take on a destiny, that was all. You were a one for destiny.’
‘You haven’t behaved as though that was what you wanted.’
‘No, I haven’t. I expect you know all sorts of reasons for that.’
‘I expect I do, yes,’ Cassandra grinned, briefly.
‘Well, don’t judge me. That was a clever picture, but don’t judge me.’
‘I don’t judge.’ Cassandra thought. ‘I don’t judge you, at least.’
‘You just think about me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I don’t mind that, if you don’t. It makes me feel real, oddly, outside – what I was telling you about.’
Cassandra smiled to herself darkly over the irony that these wilder flights of her imagination should make Simon feel, not that she was mad, but that he was real. She looked at him; he was smiling too; when he caught her eye the smile broadened, and he gave her a nod, as though they had come to some agreement. She nodded back, donnish, business-like, and real warmth filled her.
‘So you will come out to dinner?’
‘Of course.’
‘And we’ll have a real good talk, and some more brandy. You look as though you could do with some yourself. We’ll really talk it out. You don’t mind me telling you things? You do listen. I’ve saved a lot up for you, it turns out.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Cassandra.
Chapter 18
MRS BAKER passed Julia in the hall and indicated the parcel. ‘That come this morning,’ she said flatly, and closed herself into her own quarters. She was for some reason not on speaking terms with Julia, and had not been since Thor’s departure a month earlier. Indeed, nobody seemed to be on speaking terms with Julia.
Tucked under the string of the parcel were two letters from Thor. Julia had lost count of Thor’s letters, which arrived at the rate of one, or sometimes two a day. They were long, theological, autobiographical, indecisive and peculiarly remote. He had, so far, neither come home nor, as far as Julia could find out, made any arrangements to go to the Congo. He was living in an hotel in South Kensington. Deborah had lunched with him in the Strand Corner House and reported that he seemed to be waiting.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Julia asked Deborah. Deborah said, ‘I don’t know that there’s anything that you can do,’ in her father’s uninflected voice. You can do? You can do? You can do? Julia repeated to herself nervously. She had reached a stage where she examined herself hopefully for signs of incipient nervous breakdown. ‘But I’m tough, that’s my trouble,’ she told herself aloud, opening the letters. ‘Nasty, but tough.’
The first began, ‘Dear Julia, it has seemed to me lately that our responsibilities properly seen, are infinitely extended, and since our capacities are limited we must of necessity fail and failure is of little importance. This affects you, Julia …’
The second began, ‘It seems presumptuous to suppose that there is any order available for our immediate contemplation. Life is only meaningful in particular instances and in particular instances it appears random and horrible. In particular instances also salvation can be meaningful. Maybe not in general.’
Julia began to cry. Thor’s letters often made her cry; she recovered herself enough to write careful little answers, covering several letters at a time, although she did not feel she understood either what they meant or why they were written. They seemed to her an accusation: she felt simply, and more and more exclusively, guilty. Everything was her fault. They all thought so. She was guilty of Thor’s indecision. She was guilty of inattention to Deborah. Simon believed she was at fault. He was accusing her of not being happy, because he had wanted to find her happy. He also wanted Thor to be better off without her; she believed he was seeing Thor, and encouraging him to think this. When he came – erratic as always – his empty cheerfulness was an affront. So were his absences. His manner was pastoral: Simon, she was coming to see, had been prepared to love her because she was embedded in a family and thus taboo. Just as in the beginning she had been Cassandra’s sister, and thus taboo. He wants one, once he’s made sure he can’t simply have one, she thought. She did not know whether she loved or hated him, but the desire persisted: she dreamed of having him naked in bed and biting him until he cried out. At times she saw her whole life as a problem of coming to grips with Simon.
Well, she thought, she was used to things being her fault. As a child, she had learned painfully that Cassandra believed her to be at fault simply in being alive. And at some level deeper than her surface attempts to attract love or prove herself she had accepted this judgement.
She began to open the parcel. Under a layer of shavings was newspaper and under the newspaper were books. Julia lifted one out and looked at it mournfully. A Sense of Glory by Julia Corbett. The cover was predominantly white. In the foreground a black nun-like figure, swathed in a cocoon of fine black lines, sat hunched in an attitude vaguely reminiscent of Rodin’s Penseur. This figure was watching another figure, planted inactively in the middle distance as though levitating slightly and swathed in a much larger haze of yellow lines. The levitating figure wore a flat, wide-brimmed priest’s hat. There were a few rather dangerous-looking spires in the background. Julia opened the book, grimaced at her own smiling face inside the dust-jacket, snapped it shut again and said, ‘Oh Christ, oh Christ.’
Deborah came out of her room. Julia pushed the book back into the parcel and looked at her daughter over it.
‘What’s in there, Julia?’
‘Books.’
‘What books?’
‘Never mind. Never mind.’
She thought: I shall have to go to Oxford. I’ll have to go and explain, even if it does no good. I don’t know how I ever thought I could risk her not noticing. I’ll tell her it was done out of love – that the feelings about Simon are my own feelings. If I could only make her understand, if I could only make her understand that what I wanted was to understand … then? Then she might let go. She might forgive me and let go. The net was as tight and constricting as ever, and she herself had fastened it more securely. We think, Julia thought, that we are releasing ourselves by plotting what traps us, by laying it all out to look at it – but in fact all we do is show the trap up for real. Iron bars make a cage all right, and the more you look at them or reproduce them the more you know it’s a real cage. Dimly, miserably, Julia became aware of what she thought was a truth. Whether or not there was a primal guilt, whether or not she was at fault in being alive, all her own efforts had been directed towards making the guilt real, weighty, binding. Because if it was real, then she was responsible. And if she was responsible she had a choice – her acts were her own. She could be detached from Cassandra. Alternatively, if she had committed a real crime, not conditioned by Cassandra’s fantasy, it should be possible for Cassandra really to forgive her. That’s what I always hope, she thought, that she’ll forgive me. When I’ve done things, I run to her for forgiveness. Which she withholds. I ought not to care. I must go to Oxford and tell her how all this came about.
She heard Deborah talking.
‘Simon said he’d drop in when he gets back today.’
‘Gets back?’
‘Gets back from Oxford. He’s been in Oxford.’
Julia had nothing to say. She sat nursing her box of books. For the first time in her life her curiosity completely deserted her. She did not want to know, she wanted passionately not to know what Simon was doing in Oxford. She also wanted passionately never to see Simon again. She thought: I did it, he went there because I feared it, because I planned it, because I imagined it. What the book might now mean she did not want to have to think. After a moment the situation seemed vaguely familiar. She remembered Cassandra peering furiously at her out of the lilac when she had wanted Cassandra to know about Simon, and to forgive her. Cassandra had attempted to annihilate her by ignoring her. Well, she
understood that, now.
And she could not, now, if Cassandra had possibly seen Simon, ask Cassandra to forgive her for the book in which she had imagined such a meeting. Who had stolen whose action?
She looked up from her books and met her daughter’s inquisitive, hungry stare. Deborah grinned. Deborah was no doubt in a position to tell her what Deborah believed she wanted to know.
‘Why don’t you go to school?’ she said. ‘You’re late.’
She went, when Deborah had gone, and stowed her parcel of books under the bed.
Much later in the afternoon she pulled it out again, and posted one copy to Ivan, with whom she was also, as far as she knew, not on speaking terms. Forgiveness was not part of Ivan’s way of life.
Publication day began to look like an approaching execution; except that she had few illusions about her own powers of survival.
Cassandra and Simon had almost made a habit of walking together through the Botanical Gardens and down by the river. Cassandra told herself that to repeat an action three times hardly made it a habit; this was, nevertheless, what she felt it to be. Simon, she thought, meant her to understand that that was what it was; he announced his further visits to Oxford carefully by letter, so that she could expect him and prepare for him. He might have done this all those years ago, if she could have accepted it; it was what he would have wanted. She did not like to speculate about what might have been. But now she lived through her depopulated days and nights in a kind of tired ease that was vegetable, and slightly more than that.
When he came he talked to her as though she was what she had never been and had never hoped to become – an old friend. He was, Cassandra reflected, the kind of bachelor whose social life in general flowered late, became easier and less suspicious, as it became clearer that relationships of old friendship were now all that could ever be expected of him. Once this was accepted, much of the compulsion to be evasive could vanish: this was something she had had sufficient opportunity to observe within her academic walls. This on one level: on another he talked compulsively, from time to time, about Antony Miller: Cassandra listened neutrally, and felt a satisfaction when at last the tone of the stories shifted from metaphysical desperation, and from Simon’s own dual sense of guilt and betrayal by events – as though those fish had been sent to try his spiritual resources and found them depleted by Antony Miller. He became in the end reminiscent, anecdotal, slightly sentimental; Cassandra smiled grimly and judged him out of danger.
He talked to her too of Julia and Thor, and even more of Deborah, whom he saw himself ‘helping’; here, Cassandra could have detected another of his emotional meddlings, but she chose not to judge. She had almost certainly not done Deborah any good herself by not meddling. Simon’s pastoral compulsion might, in that context, have its uses. Deborah was tougher than she herself. In the old days she would have attributed Simon’s persistence in telling her about Julia to a largely conscious malice, a desire to stir things up; now she was sure that he thought he wanted simply to prove, both to himself and to her, that he lived on a neutral level, they were all together, people with equal weights in the world. Well, she would take that, too, and let the malice be what it would. She wanted so little, comparatively, of him now. She expected nothing.
And what she had was transfigured. Buses, pillar-boxes, telephones, staircases were there to be used. Food was there to be bought and eaten. She was balanced on her feet, she had weight, and was related to things. Distances were measurable and each distance was the proper distance. The air shone.
On the third visit they went back into the glass-house. Simon walked her twice round the pond and then stopped and scraped the gravel on the bench with a finger.
‘Are you still painting?’
‘No. No, I’m not. It seems to have worn itself out.’
‘I thought it might. So have my nightmares. I’ve gone back to dreaming about my very early childhood for some reason. Why do you think you went in for that, then?’
‘Recreation.’
He picked up the pun. ‘You weren’t satisfied with creation as you found it?’
‘Which of us is? But I don’t think I was trying to improve it. It was a matter of fending it off. Or maybe of relating myself to it. In the sense of making it manageable, in my own terms. It’s a matter of weight. If one doesn’t occupy one’s space in the world, the world does have to be warded off – immobilized, reduced, kept down. Trimmed to size.’
‘Yes, I see.’ He did see. Cassandra closed her fist on a handful of prickling gravel. ‘I suppose,’ he went on, ‘it isn’t really odd that neither of us married. It’s odder the people who do, when you think of it. Thor, for instance. He shouldn’t ever have contemplated relating himself to the world in that way, should he? If ever there was a man whose good was single-minded violence.… It was different for you and me.’
‘There wasn’t enough of us.’
‘Precisely. But I suppose in general marriage is the best – the most usual, the most inescapable – way of making sure one does – as you put it – occupy one’s space in the world. Harder to have the same doubts about one’s own presence and reality?’
‘Not having been married, I wouldn’t know.’
‘Julia says she feels unreal. But really she only feels limited. She’s the sort of woman you’d have thought that was good for. As for me, what I clearly wanted, don’t you think, was to annihilate myself? Make a space where I’d been into which the jungle would just move without any pattern, and I wouldn’t be missed?’
‘I think so.’
‘And you?’
‘That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted – I think – to make my own world. To contain all I could have or want – or at least to want nothing that wasn’t mine, to let everything else go. I didn’t want a jungle. No.’ She indicated their surroundings. ‘A carefully laid-out glass-house.’ She grinned, and Simon laughed aloud. ‘You can’t do it.’
‘No, but —’ Simon thought, slowly. ‘We aren’t – we aren’t, you and I, necessarily wicked? I’ve – I’ve often thought – you could make a good man, a really good man – out of me and Antony together. Or – or maybe you and Julia. The instinct to separate oneself isn’t necessarily wicked, as long as you don’t carry it to excess? The human animal is much the most aggressive, you know. Much the fiercest. Some of it got channelled into buildings and society and machinery. We know what happened to the rest. I – I do believe in – exploring an essential solitude. K-keeping oneself to oneself, I’ve come to believe in that. It isn’t simply a lunatic myth, Cassandra, that if one were really able to be alone, not out of lack, or need – then one might be able to – to cultivate one’s garden – one’s own garden — Look, and from the garden, we could see everything with, with real indifference, no one thing, no one person more than any other. A – an infinitely extended curiosity. A neutral love. A – an innocent vision where everything and everyone was indiscriminately and haphazardly beautiful? N-not being related might get rid of the aggression? One could just grow? I know what that feels like, I’ve felt it, once or twice.’
‘And I,’ said Cassandra, remembering how as a child, as it now seemed to her, she had told him about the beautiful network in which she saw the world hung as a fisherman’s glass ball, and had thought that the seeing was a kind of growth. She said, ‘Hortus conclusus. Vegetable love, a green thought in a green shade. The innocent garden.’ She waved at the creepers. ‘Slow, non-aggressive growth. I don’t think we can do it. It’s possible to want it, possible to try to live towards it, not possible to have it. And anyway, why do we want it?’ Her hands moved busily, sifting the grits, pushing them into a maze of little walls. ‘You and I, because we both had more than our share of fear, too early. If an animal is, as you say, unusually aggressive, then the weaker specimens, the duds, will be unusually timid? We protect ourselves by burrowing. How can one learn vision by burrowing?’
‘Simply fear? But why shouldn’t fear produce virtue?’
; ‘Oh, according to Hobbes, it does. All the virtues. But not’ – Cassandra turned to look at him, and they watched each other warily – ‘not innocence, Simon. Not that indiscriminate love you want. Not indifference. Fear produces pacifism, which I know about and mistrust, not innocence, which I don’t. I don’t believe in innocence, except as something we invented, to desire.’
‘But you believe in original sin?’
‘No. No. Not cosmologically. I believe in accident. In rents in the network.’
‘I used to believe in that. But sometimes it seems haphazardly purposeful. It sounds to me as though you believe in Natural Selection, and you don’t think you and I are the fittest. That’s a bit gloomy.’
‘Even plants contend that way. As far as the individual plant goes, they just respond to the sun. Or its absence. Vegetable love, as I said. But not in the aggregate, I gather.’
‘You can avoid or control Natural Selection in a glasshouse, true,’ said Simon. He smiled. ‘But out in the big world, well.… ‘Natural selection, as we shall hereinafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action and is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts as the works of Nature are to those of Art.” ’
‘Who said that?’
‘Charles Darwin. Before sin was, that is. Nature as the primal artist.’
‘Nature,’ said Cassandra, ‘red in tooth and claw. In Memoriam was written before the Origin of Species was published.’
Simon grinned. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘we know where we are. We can’t afford to care about that, can we? We must burrow, if burrow we must. Look, detachment can’t bring innocence, but we can stop caring about what we can’t help?’
‘It is always foolish to care about what one can’t help. But unfortunately we never know with any certainty what we can’t help. And we are not usually capable of not caring.’
‘What do you care about, then?’
Cassandra looked about the glass-house as though fearful it might be bombarded with stones. She said, ‘Nothing much, at the moment. But I place no reliance on continuing in this way.’