by A. S. Byatt
‘If she sounds awful at all you must have got the idea from me. It’s so silly, I love her, I love her really. I just can’t – couldn’t – live with her.’
‘The love,’ Ivan said, in a soothing voice, ‘comes out in the book. That’s why it’s so good, sweetie. Truly.’
‘Oh, hell,’ said Julia. This was not the judgement she needed. She began to cry. Ivan took her in his arms; it was not in his arms she wanted to be. Nevertheless she shifted her body against his, and stroked his face, sobbing wildly, whilst he kissed her on the eyes, and smoothed her hair.
In Cassandra’s room a clock ticked loudly; outside, for some reason, Oxford bells were pealing. She had hardly, yet, begun to think it out. Almost anonymously her mind began the habitual motions: shrinking, rejection. She would not speak to Storrin again. Nor to Vanessa Curtess. It might be, it might well be, that Oxford itself was uninhabitable. There were, she supposed, other places.
Like certain reptiles she had learned to survive by leaving in Julia’s hand the dead stump of the tail by which she had been grasped. One could even, she thought, sacrifice a more necessary limb, a hand, a foot, which would not grow again, and still survive. One could do this for ever so long as one was not touched to the quick. Let Julia store and catalogue the limp relicts of what had been Cassandra. Successive skins, discarded hair and nails, the dead stuff of witchcraft, like the photograph, like the fiction. A thought, a story, a way of looking, a friend, a city. The image comforted her; she elaborated it; somewhere else, in the dark, she was coming to a decision.
What was necessary was to measure the extent of the damage and the extent of the requisite surgery. To tie up arteries – this image too, was capable of elaboration. Not to feel pain in an imaginary extremity.…
Someone banged on the door. She did not answer. After a pause, nevertheless, Simon came in. Cassandra peered grimly at him between the crimson wings of her chair. He had not been in her mind; she had not got round to him. He was going to have to go, too. Indeed, she saw, now, he was going to have to go first. She tightened her mouth, drew back into the chair, said nothing.
‘Cassandra —’
‘Well?’
‘Don’t make it difficult for me? May I sit down?’
She indicated, with her jewelled hand, the window-seat. He perched there, awkwardly.
‘Cassandra —’
She was reserving her strength. He took the book from his pocket and held it out; she made no move to accept it.
‘I take it you have seen this.’
‘No.’
‘But you know?’
‘Now, yes.’
‘I think it’s intolerable,’ he burst out.
‘It doesn’t matter what we think,’ she said, almost impapatiently. One had no power to change what was accomplished; one’s power lay simply in fitting one’s life to one’s new circumstances. In excising the affected parts. He was several steps behind her; he was less experienced.
‘What I think about this ought to matter. It’s aimed at me, as I see it. It concerns me.’
‘Not much,’ said Cassandra, coldly.
‘Ah, Cassandra, don’t. I was afraid you would be hurting yourself over this. Of course anyone would be hurt by it. Anyone. I was annoyed myself. And I know you. I know you. I came to say, don’t …’
‘Don’t what? What are you afraid I may do?’
On this he swung his head, down and up again, stretched out his awkward arms in what could have been a gesture of despair or a broken-off embrace, twisted his sorrowful mouth and his scarred and fading face into an expression of extreme agony, levered himself to his feet and began to pace her room.
‘I know you,’ he said again. ‘I know how proud you are. I – you don’t mind me saying this? – I’m afraid you may just cut yourself off. From Julia. From me. I’d be sorry for that. And I don’t think you can afford to. Forgive me if I’m wrong.’
‘What do you suggest I do?’
He seemed discouraged by her tone, but went on. ‘You’ve got to fight. You’ve got to stay in the open. Read this book. You weren’t going to, were you? And then, if you feel angry, write and tell Julia so – give her a chance to reply, but attack her, face to face.… I think she’d be glad of that. There’s sympathy and understanding in this book, as well as …’
‘I don’t want sympathy. Or understanding.’
‘No, of course you don’t. That doesn’t stop people extending them. Not only Julia. You can’t brush yourself entirely clean of them.’
Cassandra smiled, thinly, evasively.
‘Read it now,’ Simon said urgently, ‘and then come out to dinner. With me.’
‘No,’ she said, to this last. As he talked, her sense of the situation crystallized. It was worse, she saw, than she had thought.
‘No?’ He wrung his hands and turned on her. ‘Do I count for nothing in all this? May I not feel? Do I have to be the rock against which you choose to dash yourself and have no choice? I think you ought to live in the world with Julia, you ought to be magnanimous in her direction, and I’ve said so, but I can’t make you do anything, clearly. But, as for me.… Listen to me, Cassandra, it cost me something to come here. That book – that book does make me feel a bit of a fool. Of course it does. But I don’t think you and I can pay any attention to that, we can’t afford to. Is it boorish of me to point out – since you don’t seem to see it – that it makes some difference that I’m here? With you?’
Cassandra looked at him blankly.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘I want to help. I want to help. I don’t want to be responsible for any more damage. Please —’
‘You were never very good at helping. You had no gift for it. You are too much’ – she produced, judiciously, their joint conclusion – ‘an emotional meddler, Simon. You should let things be.’
She said, less guarded, not looking at him. ‘Don’t you see, above all, I can’t take your pity?’
‘I’m trying to say, it isn’t pity. Or not only pity.’ He was not used to fighting; the scrupulous, brave words had a note of defeat. ‘And pity doesn’t necessarily smear you, as you seem to think. It’s meant something to me, to see you, these last few weeks. And to you, I think. Not much, maybe, but something. It was real. Wasn’t it? It can still be real. This,’ he tapped the book, ‘this isn’t real. This is a lie, at worst, and – and a piece of imagination at best. You can’t destroy a reality with fiction. Can you? Oh, for God’s sake, face up to it, Cassandra.’
Cassandra did not look at him: she said, ‘It seems sufficiently clear – to me – that you can both destroy and create reality with fiction. Fictions – fictions are lies, yes, but we don’t ever know the truth. We see the truth through the fictions – our own, other people’s. There was a time when I thought the Church had redeemed fiction – that the Church’s metaphors were truths – but lately that’s seemed meaningless. Dangerous even, like any other fiction. We feed off it. Our fictions feed on us. ‘And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.’ I don’t know quite why Coleridge should have found the serpent’s method of ingestion so peculiarly repellent … but it’s a powerful metaphor.…’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Julia does. I imagine that’s the theme of her book. What Dr Johnson called ‘the hunger of the imagination that preys incessantly on life’. She’s saying, I assume, that I made too much of you. I lived off you. Well, that’s true. So I’m peculiarly vulnerable to – to the imagination.’ She smiled.
‘Don’t be melodramatic. You spin ideas, Cassandra, so you can’t see for them. After all, here I am. Here I am.’
‘Yes, but what can we have to say to each other? What can we ever say to each other now that won’t be seen in terms of Julia’s fiction? Our course is plotted for us in it, I understand.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘To me, yes. As you should know, I don’t like,’ Cassandra sighed, heavily, ‘to be watched.’
‘You ought to learn to stand i
t. It’s a prerequisite of – what was your way of putting it – “occupying one’s space in the world”.’
‘No one could say I had ever been good at that. It’s too late to start.’
She had taken off all her rings, and made a little pile of them in her black lap. ‘Leave me alone, Simon.’ She looked at him with a mad, donnish, kindliness. ‘It isn’t your fault. Let it be.’ She looked down at her naked hands. ‘It’s kindest to leave me alone,’ she said, informatively.
‘I don’t particularly want to be kind. I want —’
‘Go away, Simon.’
‘You’re mad.’ She said nothing. ‘I shall come back,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she said, with deliberate vagueness.
When he was gone Cassandra laid out the rings in a neat row on the desk-top, put her chains and cross with them, rearranged them so that the colour gradation followed that of the rainbow, drew the curtains, put on the light, climbed back into her chair and took up Julia’s book. It took her three hours to read it.
Julia caught Deborah with a suitcase creeping out of the front door.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I’m leaving. I’ve had enough. I want a life of my own.’
‘Well, anyone who thinks they can have that is a fool. Are you going to your father?’
‘No, as a matter of fact. Because (a) I don’t want to live in the Congo. And because (b) he’d be better off without me.’
‘Well then, where?’
‘Oxford,’ said Deborah.
‘You’re not!’ said Julia. Deborah opened the door. Julia kicked it shut again and Deborah hit Julia, hard across the legs, with the suitcase. At this, Julia discovered that seeing red was a precise description of a physical condition. She wrenched away the suitcase and brought it down on Deborah’s head. ‘I say you’re not! You can bloody well stay here!’ Deborah twisted her hand in Julia’s hair, slapped Julia’s face, and made again for the door. Julia flew at her.
‘Get your coat off! Get those things out of that case!’
‘You don’t want me. Let me go.’ She ran back: Julia ran after her, into the silent flat. Deborah turned and screamed at her, ‘You take everybody’s life. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’ She launched herself at her mother.
‘I hate you, too,’ said Julia, between blows. ‘You are a censorious little bitch. You are only half-human. However, you’ve got to live with me.’
They were now fighting on their knees; Julia shook her hair out of her eyes, pinned Deborah down with one hand on the carpet, and said, ‘It’s a pity if we don’t learn to live with people we hate. Cold hatred is the worst thing, let me tell you. I know I’m not one to talk. But you’re an idiot to think of Cassandra. She may not hate you, but she doesn’t like you. Does she? You need a bit of blood for Christ’s sake. You are my daughter, I love you. I do love you. I can’t let you go there.’
Deborah wriggled and bit and fought back; both weeping, they battered each other into a breathless and bleeding calm. Julia sat up, panting, and said to her daughter, ‘I can’t let you make a myth out of Cassandra. She’s no good, not for you.’
‘I know, really. O.K., I know.’ She looked at Julia gravely. ‘You shouldn’t have done that to her, though, Julia.’
Here was judgement.
‘I know.’
‘It’s different for me. I mind, too, but your other books, they weren’t really about me, they were about you, what you felt about me. But this was about her. It really was.’
‘I thought that made it better, at the time.’
‘You can’t have really thought that. Not knowing her.’ She paused. ‘Do you think I’ve got to stay?’
‘What else can you do? Listen, Deborah, make some allowances for me? Please? If I’d ever lived with people who made allowances – real ones – I’d not need to ask for so many.’
‘I’ve made a lot.’
‘Yes, well, it’s you that gains from them. Let that console you.’
They looked at each other with a kind of animal affection.
‘Julia, what will she do?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’
Cassandra, heading out of the doctor’s surgery, was seen by Gerald Rowell, who called her name. She went away from him down the street so fast that he had to run, skirts flaring, to catch up with her.
‘Cassandra!’
She turned into an off-licence.
‘Cassandra!’ He followed her in.
She leaned over the counter. ‘I want a bottle of brandy, please. Rémy-Martin, if you have it. But anything will do.’
‘Cassandra!’ he said, more sharply.
She stowed the brandy in her knapsack, and faced him.
‘How are you, Cassandra? I haven’t seen you for some time.’
‘Haven’t you? Did you want to?’
‘Have you time for a drink?’
‘Later. Later, I may have. Not just now. Thank you.’ She grinned. ‘Had you anything particular to say?’
‘I wanted your permission’ – he was white, stammering slightly – ‘to write a stiff letter to your sister.’
He watched her take this in. ‘I don’t mind what you do,’ she said.
‘Would it help?’
‘It would upset her, I imagine. She’s easily upset.’
‘I meant, would it help you?’
‘Please don’t worry about me,’ said Cassandra. ‘I shall be silent. I thought you were troubled on your own account. Indirectly, I owe you an apology for that.’ He was, indeed, she saw, possessed by a personal fury. ‘You have, as it were, lent your flesh and bones to a more irresponsible spirit. I have seen the book: decidedly, yes, I owe you an apology. I should have foreseen this. But it will come to matter less, you know. You will survive. It was so far from the truth.’
‘I should never have spoken to her,’ said Gerald Rowell. Cassandra looked at him with a flicker of remote interest; he went on, too hastily, ‘I wish you would come for that drink.’ He attempted to lay a hand on her arm; she leaned out, suddenly, and tapped his spectacle-lens with her thumbnail.
‘I never noticed they were bi-focals. What happens, if you take them off?’
‘Oh, everything runs into everything else, and the colours blur. I can’t move without them, I have to sit still.’
‘You should do it more often. Sit still and let everything run into everything else. We need a sense of being undifferentiated. Undifferentiated,’ cried Cassandra. ‘I keep chasing metaphors. Out of a desire for an impossible unity. Such effort, keeping everything separate all the time when under the sea, we are assured, no man is an island, we are all joined. You mustn’t think too hardly of Julia for her artistic effort, Father, it’s what we all do. We affirm that we can inhabit each other, body and soul, that’s all.’
He tried to understand. ‘We are all part of each other, in Christ, we are all made whole.’
‘That wasn’t quite what I meant. I think I had better go. Or what Julia meant. We overlap. I wish we didn’t. We could tolerate it if we were either separate or indistinguishable.’
‘You alarm me.’
‘Don’t be alarmed.’ She hoisted her knapsack over her shoulder. ‘Think about it. I must go now, I have to be alone.’
‘Cassandra!’
She let the door swing in his face and hurried away down the street. He saw her turn into the ironmongers. He thought a while, and then telephoned Miss Curtess, who promised to keep an eye on Cassandra, and was volubly indignant over Julia’s book for long enough to exorcise his own anger and replace it with pure embarrassment.
Chapter 20
Cassandra’s Journal
So have I become a doll to stick pins in? Or a mirror on the wall to be asked what she, what either of us, means? At first I felt simply dirtied. My shoes, my nightdress, my pens, my papers, little dirty details of me lifted. Pinned out – oh yes, even my underwear – like a limp doll to be filled with puffs of her breath. What was missing filled in by her wit
h dotted lines, pieces of new string to jerk the joints, or wood to replace limbs, as they do in museums, and never a footnote to say, this material is conjectural. This is an eclectic and conflated text.
Our normal intercourse is made up of this, all the time, I know. I know. We hide our knowledge of it. We could not live if we were made to see ourselves more than conjecturally as others see us. At best we translate their vision back into our own terms. But she does a little more than simply see me, and that little is intolerable.
When we were children, we were not quite separate. We shared a common vision, we created a common myth. And this, maybe, contained and resolved our difficulties. This is that primitive state that has been called innocence. We wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air.… But there is no innocent vision, we are not indistinguishable. We create each other, separate. It is not done with love. Or not with pure love. Nor with detachment. We are not simply specimens, under the bright light, in the glass case, in the zoo, in the museum. We are food for thought. The web is sticky. I trail dirty shreds of it.
I do not choose to stay to be pitied for that rag doll’s passions. They are not mine. But they were fed and watered by me, too much of my energy went into their growth for me to be able to clear them away, or make myself a space to inhabit.
There is nowhere I shall not drag this grotesque shadow, our joint creature. I can choose, at least, to put out the light that throws it. I want no more reflections.
Chapter 21
‘WELL, where do we start?’
‘I still can’t see why you wanted to come.’
‘I wanted to help. If I could.’
‘It might have been better to come on my own.’
‘I don’t know. It might have taken more out of you. Besides there seems to be an enormous amount simply to carry.’