by A. S. Byatt
Simon, comfortably, laughed.
Chapter 19
CASSANDRA went, on a Monday, as was her habit, into Blackwell’s. She liked to spend time amongst the second-hand books, and on this occasion she had come to pay her account. It was thus she found herself behind Professor Storrin at the cash desk; his pale grey back was curved over in front of her towards the girl.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘and could you order me – shall we say – a dozen copies, yes, a dozen copies, of that new novel by Julia Corbett. A Sense of Glory, yes, that’s it, A Sense of Glory. Thank you so much.’
As he turned away his sleeve brushed Cassandra.
‘Ah, Cassandra.’ Momentarily his cheek touched hers. ‘I have ordered your sister’s book. The reviews suggest that it may be – it may be – interesting, I don’t know if I’m right?’ His grey face wrinkled at the eye corners. ‘I thought I might present it to certain friends. Would you say that was wise?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t aware.… Julia produces books so rapidly, I am never forewarned.’
Storrin took this in. ‘You haven’t seen it?’
‘Not yet,’ said Cassandra, taking a step to the accounts desk.
‘Oh, I hope you will tell me what you think of it. I gather from the reviews that we all come out rather well, on the whole. Yes. And in any case, we all share, don’t we, this deplorable vulgar desire for notoriety in any form? And a gossiping curiosity. Or perhaps you don’t?’
‘No. No, I don’t.’
‘It never does the academic fastnesses real harm to be shaken. I shall be most interested to know what you make of this book. I mustn’t keep you, I mustn’t keep you.’ He extended a brittle hand. ‘I saw you in the Mitre, with the television snake man, was it not?’
‘An old friend,’ said Cassandra.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ said Professor Storrin.
Julia’s book had come out on a Thursday. On the Monday, when Cassandra went into Blackwell’s, Thor returned to the flat, not to stay, but to pack and remove all his belongings. When Julia opened the door to him, unexpected, she thought he had come to reproach her for the book. But he treated her with courtesy, and was trembling with nervousness.
‘I have decided,’ he began, not meeting her eye, ‘I shall go to the Congo, after all. I must be of some use.’ He spoke with his usual lack of emphasis: she could not tell whether he was describing a moral imperative, an emotional urgency, or simply a dull conclusion that there, at least, what he did might make something, to some small degree, better.
‘I can’t stop you. I don’t know how to start, and perhaps I ought not to try.’
He inclined his head. Deborah, behind them, gave a cry, and turned and ran into her bedroom. They heard the door lock. Both of them tried the door and called, without answer. It was Thor who suggested that they should leave Deborah until he had finished his packing. Julia acquiesced.
They packed together, largely in silence. Thor broke this once to announce that the Notting Hill Housing Trust had come up with something temporary and suitable for the Bakers; the Terrys would remove them, probably that evening, in their van. Julia said, in an echo of his own flat voice, ‘You needn’t have done that. I don’t need the space.’ He repeated his assurance that it would be done.
He could not take everything at once. They piled several bags and parcels in the hall.
‘I shall have to come back. I hope you don’t mind that.’
Julia looked at him, dazed by too many conflicting guilts, absolutely unwilling to face any discussion of any permanent arrangement. She would rather endure his going than have to discuss it; a state of mind she would normally have associated more easily with Cassandra.
‘No, no. I want to see you. I want you to come back. As much as – whenever – you can.’
‘As a visitor? You find it easier to be intimate with visitors, I have observed that.’
This was cruel; but she could not bring herself to open up a discussion of her failure in intimacy with him. Neither he nor Simon had any use for her real gifts in that direction, however initially attracted they were by them. She said, ‘No, not as a visitor. I don’t think we ought to try and talk about this, just yet.’
‘We could be divorced. If you want to marry again, now, we can be divorced.’
‘Thor. Oh, no,’ said Julia quickly. She could not bear this finality. ‘Oh, no.’ It was only then that she realized he was thinking, not of Ivan, but of Simon.
She had heard nothing of Simon since the book came out, and rather suspected she would not. She felt, now, the impossibility of her attempt to know Simon, and realized that she must always, unconsciously, have felt this, since the book had always been there. Unpublished, it was true, the book had been simply another part of that structure of our thought about another person which we do not admit to, and therefore do not have to justify, or stand by. But once it was public, it was part of the relationship, it changed it, and indeed, made it impossible. She must, she had told herself often enough between Wednesday and Monday, always have known that, too: it had been one of those destructive moves we are only enabled to make by rigidly refusing to consider their nature, until too late. Although when the book was begun, this problem had been seen in terms, not of Simon, but of Cassandra. She had not known then, that there would be any continuing relationship with him to be threatened – though indeed, conversely, she would almost certainly never have embarked on one if it had not, as she now saw it, been doomed from the outset. She saw now that the description of, the nostalgia for, the long involvement in Cassandra’s passions which came of writing the book had contributed to the violence of her own welcome for Simon, even whilst she believed she was free, at last, to see him new. She loved him, in so far as she did love him, as a child loves an imaginary hero, or a television idol. She did not know him; he did not let himself be known. He was never to be grasped and passion could be lavished on him forever without being tested out against real limitations, his or hers. Only he was not Sir Lancelot; she had conversed with real flesh and blood – only flesh and blood, as he had said of Cassandra so long ago, that gave the impression that it was irrevocably “not quite all there”. Another kind of love, from another person might, of course, call out in him another reality; but that was only idle speculation. She had imagined him. And he had, as the book had foreshadowed it, gone to Oxford. So she had, as it were, made solid for public consumption more than she could have known or bargained for. Simon she hoped never to see again, and told herself glumly that this was for the best. Cassandra she could not contemplate, although she knew she must.
The reviews had been both respectful and enthusiastic. She had expected of herself detachment and vulgarity enough to be, at least partially, elated by this. But she was simply horrified. She surfaced. ‘Thor, I’m sure the best thing is not to talk, we’re both bound to say things we don’t mean.’
He accepted this, gathered up two heavy suitcases, and turned to her.
‘You look tired, Julia.’
‘It’s this book.’
‘I saw there was a book. I saw reviews.’ Julia waited. He did not elaborate.
‘It was the end of something, of a part of my life.’
‘Do you think it can end? I do not know what you hope to achieve.’
‘Thor – Thor, it wasn’t a wicked book, was it?’
‘Wicked?’ he said, blinking. Julia looked up at him. He had stopped trembling and was looking over her shoulder towards Deborah’s door. His hair was stubble-pale, his skin was tight over his skull, he was shining slightly with sweat and anxiety so that the planes of his face took on that angular glitter peculiar to perspex sculpture. A cross between an angel and a convict, Julia thought. She felt his presence almost as in the days of their first acquaintance, as that of an admirable stranger whose approval she desperately required.
‘You know what I mean. Wicked.’
Initially he had been to her – taking these words as deeply and seriously as possible
– moral support. He had been a judge, who believed, despite a concomitant belief in tolerance, in judgement. Because she had been able, because he loved her, to manipulate that judgement they had both been diminished. But, even diminished, he had been a court of appeal against Cassandra’s automatic condemnation. He could still be. He was rock hard, at the centre, and he knew what wickedness was, and he believed in it. His leaving her was his judgement for the way she had distorted his actions; she was paying for that. Let him also now, she felt obscurely, judge her for what she had done to Cassandra, and impose penance: penance could free her. If he would do this, they had a remote chance of meeting again, honourably, as at first they should have met.
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have written it?’
‘I suppose you write what you have to write. If not that, it would have been something else, in the end. If I were you, Julia, I would not worry.’
‘But Cassandra?’
‘Cassandra is her own concern. I don’t see that you are in a position to care about Cassandra.’
‘It wasn’t done in order to damage her, you must believe.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, dismissing the question. It came to Julia that he had hardened. At some stage in the past he had had enough of her problems; now he knew it. He was leaving her to herself. He would not come back.
‘I really ought to try to speak to Deborah,’ he said. He went and rattled Deborah’s door, and called through it, for a moment or two. There was no answer.
‘I would take her with me, if she wanted to come.’ He came back to the door. ‘Perhaps better not now, in a few years. Julia —’
‘Yes?’
‘Don’t be hard on her. She will be all right. I don’t want to leave her, it isn’t easy, it is simply that I find I can’t stay. But don’t be hard on her.’
‘I don’t know why you think I should be hard on her. She looks after herself pretty well.’
‘Yes. She does.’ He began to leave. ‘I shall have to come back again.’
‘You said that. Any time.’
‘We have to talk about money.’
‘I don’t want your money.’
‘There is Deborah.’
They looked at each other, faintly puzzled, and then he left.
Cassandra came slowly back to the college. She was still, with some deliberation, largely inhabiting the indifferent happiness of the past few weeks. Her mind worked extremely slowly. She had been annoyed by a kind of glee she detected in Storrin. It was only after some time that she came to realize that what he had said implied that Julia had written a novel of which parts, at least, were set in Oxford. She had thought, irrationally, reverting to an earlier grievance, that his glee was something to do with the fact that she herself had not written a novel. She thought she had accepted, lately, that she could not and would not write a novel: thus her reaction to his glee was irrelevant, must be mastered. This brought her across the river. On the way into the college, making her further realization, she told herself that her reactions to Julia’s prying had always been excessive; what Julia knew about Oxford could do little real damage, however embroidered.
She almost tripped over the step, in the entrance hall. On the table there was a very fat letter from Deborah. Cassandra’s hand shook a little as she picked it up; hypersensitive in this one direction, she thought she sensed sympathy and fellow-feeling and in that moment knew and refused to know.
She pushed the letter, unopened, into her handbag and went, not into her room, but into the Senior Common Room. Miss Curtess was alone in there; she flushed and looked away when Cassandra came in; Cassandra did not notice this.
The window-seat, overlooking the college garden, was, as usual, piled with papers; yesterday’s Sunday papers, crumpled and spread, last week’s intellectual weeklies. Cassandra sat down, opened and closed her handbag, looked furtively across the scattered chintz arm-chairs into Miss Curtess’s equally furtive gaze, withdrawn immediately, and began to read.
‘Julia Corbett has wrought a tour de force from apparently very unpromising material.’
‘Julia Corbett has at last broken out of the suffocating domestic prison where she was strangled with her own waste fertility, to write a study of that sterile, in some sense permanently retarded emotion we call hopeless love, felt in intelligent if cranky, middle age. The book is set in a semi-monastic academic community whose absurdities are presented with vivid immediacy. Julia Corbett has a gift for the surface detail that implies a moral judgement; she can sum up a whole woman by describing the precise bad fit of an ill-chosen magenta taffeta dress, or the distressing juxtaposition of a dangling crucifix and tinned college spaghetti and tomato sauce. Her world, hovering on the edge of the grotesque but never engulfed in it, is, to an outsider at least, appallingly convincing.
But this is not her main achievement. She has, against all the odds, succeeded triumphantly in calling up sympathy for her central character, Emily, the lady don, cherishing and repressing an imaginative life on the scale of Charlotte Brontë’s passion for the Duke of Zamorna. Emily’s Monsieur Héger is an unctuous, slightly silly television priest, one of the false, or at least inadequate prophets of our time. She knew him in childhood and has studied him and given him imaginary life ever since. It is absurd; it is also genuinely pitiable. Naturally the man in the flesh, finally encountered, fails pitiably to measure up to the huge imagined expectations that have been built round him, the “sense of glory” he carries with him. Miss Corbett makes, en passant, some very intelligent comments on the adolescent religiosity of our modern devotion to the television idol. I have yet to meet a priest who fills her bill, but he is not inconceivable, and offers splendid opportunities for the exploration of the dubious roots of religious belief in emotionally starved women. We are left at the end with the question of whether the cold breath of reality on the glittering imaginative structure will prove absolutely destructive, or be the beginning of a more restricted, but more mature existence. Can Emily learn? The doubt is real, and that, too, is an achievement.’
‘Miss Corbett’s weird heroine sees everything with a steady, lunatic clarity.’
‘There are a galaxy of minor Oxford characters, all equally obsessed by the unreal, the unattainable, and their obsessions reflect and illuminate each other. There is the suave don who wants to be a television idol himself, and produces deliberately, as the epiloguer does naturally, a false charm. A spinsterly, vulgar passion for the erotic works of the Earl of Rochester balances, and lights up, the antithetical purity of Emily’s unreal world.’
‘Miss Gee had nothing on Julia Corbett’s Emily Burnett.’
Cassandra’s mind fumbled defensively with irrelevances. ‘Miss Corbett’ bothered her: it was her name, the only name she had. And it was not, she thought, morally possible, let alone morally or aesthetically admirable, to ‘sum up a whole woman’ by describing the inadequacies of her clothing. She opened her handbag again, closed it on Deborah’s fat letter, breathed deeply, and felt her guts thud and stiffen.
‘You said nothing to warn us,’ said Miss Curtess, in a thick, red voice, ‘of what your sister was springing on us.’
‘I could not have said anything. I didn’t know.’
‘I think it was ill-considered. There are moral obligations that come before self-expression.’
Cassandra stood up. ‘I don’t see it as a question of morals.’
‘No, of course you don’t. It seems to me unkindly meant, Cassandra. But beneath your notice.’
Cassandra could not, probably, have avoided recognizing the solidifying of the issue in the consciousness of those around her. Her feeling towards Miss Curtess was, however, rage, not gratitude. She could make no answer, and left the Common Room abruptly and silently: it was only on the stairs that she realized that her silence had effectively confirmed Vanessa Curtess’s view of the situation. She went, heavily and slowly, into her own room, taking each breath carefully, incapable for the moment of thought.
Som
eone rang the doorbell, and, not content with that, rattled the letterbox and banged with fists and feet. Julia came out into the hall, stared at the door and made no move to open it.
‘Julia!’ through the letterbox.
‘Go away.’
‘I shall just go on ringing the bell.’ The steady shrilling began. Julia opened the door.
Ivan came in, took off his coat, and settled into a chair. He extracted from his coat pocket a copy of A Sense of Glory.
‘Well, how do you feel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What does she say?’
‘She wouldn’t say anything. She may not have seen it, but if she has, she wouldn’t say anything.’
‘And Moffitt?’
‘He doesn’t read books.’
‘Doesn’t he?’
‘He doesn’t read my books, he said so.’
‘Well, I asked him if he’d read this and he said no, but he’d go out and buy it.’
‘I wish you’d keep out of my life.’
‘You let me in. You invited me in.’
‘To a tiny, not very important area of it.’
She decided not to tell him that Thor had left her. This and the other guilt were causing her, as far as she could judge, equally violent and differing pains.
Ivan grinned. ‘It’s not a bad book. Much more controlled and thoughtful than your usual stuff. I’d expected an outburst, I must admit. But this seems obsessive about the style and the structure. It even has that sort of lifelessness books have when they’re overwrought. Overwrought in a literary sense, that is. That’s rather a good pun, maybe the one causes the other, don’t you think I’m clever, Ju? Do you think you’ll write a good book, now?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I honestly don’t care. I —’
‘Oh, but you will care. You can’t help it. What’s biting you, love?’
Julia looked at her hands and did not answer.
‘Is it her? It beats me you can put off suffering so long if you’re going to suffer. You just can’t bear facing unpleasantness, can you, you never could? Listen, my darling, if your sister can’t shake this off, that’s her lookout, honestly. It isn’t a mean book; it’s not as though you’d screamed invective at her. And anyway I should think she deserved what she got. She must have been hell to grow up with. I get the feeling she’s much more awful than you make her sound.’