by A. S. Byatt
‘I’m not moving all that. Only the papers. The Oxfam people are coming to take what we don’t. Only they’ve no use for the papers. The police went through all those. As you no doubt gathered. Mother doesn’t want any of her things.’
‘And you?’
‘No.’
Simon took off his coat and hung it across the red chair. ‘Well, where do we start?’ he repeated. Julia wished, on the whole, that she had not brought him, although there was, absurdly, no one else she could have asked – no safe, ignorant stranger. And he had been genuinely helpful. He had hired and driven the car in which they would remove the papers. She had hoped he might provide protection against the college authorities, but he had left her to face these on her own. Her interview with the Principal had not been pleasant.
The papers had been stacked in the middle of the room. Academic files and boxes. Parcels of letters tied with string – Deborah’s, her own, Gerald Rowell’s. Cassandra seemed never to have thrown anything away. There was a shoe-box which proved to contain a rather haphazard collection of her own press cuttings. Notebooks full of remnants of narrative verse, blank, misty, decorated, concerning Morgan le Fay. The stack of paintings. Volumes of the journal. The last entry had been read out in court.
‘When we were little,’ Julia told Simon, ‘I used to annoy her by taking all the books out of the book-case, piling them up in the middle of the floor, and sitting on them.’
‘King of the castle.’
‘She used to lock me out. When I stole the key she bought a bolt and screwed it on, herself.’
‘So she’d had practice,’ Simon said.
The deceased, the coroner had been told, had arranged matters with obsessive determination. There had been new bolts fitted to both outer and inner doors. A gap below the inner door had been stuffed with a gown, both doors had been sealed with cellulose draught-excluder and the window gummed up with wide strips of brown paper. The curtains were drawn and a bed of folded blankets arranged on the hearth near the fire. The deceased had swallowed a bottle of seconal and several glasses of brandy. She had also turned on the gas. There had been no note. The bolts and other precautions suggested, the psychiatrist had told the court, a degree at least of derangement; the deceased had been hysterically concerned to prove she was no gambler. It was, in these cases, just possible to assume that there was an obsessive attempt to ‘play fair’; any rescuer who had broken down those doors would have been a real rescuer. We could not tell. It was this evidence, in conjunction with Father Rowell’s, which had decided the verdict.
‘While you were talking to that woman,’ Simon said, ‘I met some of the girls on the stairs. One of them said they actually saw her from the lawn, sticking the windows up – ‘like a great black bird beating against the glass’ she poetically and inaccurately put it. Apparently, knowing her, they thought nothing of it. She said they all gathered at the foot of the stairs and watched them go up. The Principal, the chef in his white hat and apron, and the Senior Tutor. They broke the doors in. There’s a Miss Curtess who’s left in a state of nervous collapse because she suspected, and did nothing, except knock from time to time and get no answer. The girl thought I was the News of the World. She told me they’re all shocked. She says they all feel guilty, and resent this. A proper little psychologist.’
‘Don’t we all?’ Julia’s voice was sharp.
‘I don’t know what you feel.’
‘What you said, I feel,’ said Julia. ‘What she meant me to feel, but other things as well.’
Simon’s look flickered towards her and away. He crossed the room, and stood by the hearth, on that piece of carpet Julia had not yet looked at.
‘She always made the rules. She planned the story, and I fitted in, I carried it out. She made me what I am. She made perfectly normal behaviour into crimes – like borrowing books, like telling people things, like talking to you. She locked me out until I was crazy to get in. And then she saw to it I was guilty of real crimes, that what I’d done I couldn’t change or undo. She made me – take things – and then left me in possession. She wanted it this way. Why should I be guilty?’ She looked round the empty room, down at the books. ‘Why should I take possession? I don’t want her life. I never really did. Certainly not now.’
Simon said nothing.
‘She meant to finish me off.’
‘You see it simply as an act of vengeance?’
‘I’d do better to.’
‘You are still talking as though she were alive.’ Julia hesitated, did not quite contemplate what he was saying.
‘No, but I am still alive. I’ve got to live with it.’
‘She said she couldn’t bear being watched.’
He held, still in front of the fire, a stance uneasily reminiscent of the military ‘at ease’. As though he was neutralizing the place, deliberately, Julia thought, wishing more strongly that she had not brought him. He had given evidence about his final visit to Cassandra. Julia had found this evidence intensely humiliating. Now, sensing instinctively that emotional self-indulgence was her best way to survive, she took him up, petulantly. Cassandra had died of preserving her dignity, had she not?
‘I can’t think what you had to come and talk to her about it for.’
‘Somebody had to do something. I was there. I wanted to stop you destroying each other.’ He produced a deprecating smile.
‘Casting yourself on the swords? Well, you made it worse. I know her – I knew her. You made it seem real to her. Inescapable. And at the same time a drama. She liked drama. If you hadn’t interfered, Si, she’d have slithered round it in her imagination, somehow, pretended it didn’t exist. But you gave it body.’
‘I meant to. With the best intentions. To make it real. It wasn’t good for either of you to go on as you were.’
‘Well,’ cried Julia, on the edge of tears, ‘what the hell had you to offer either of us to change anything?’
He did not meet her eye. ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ he said, rapidly, addressing his words to the pile of books. ‘You’re quite right. Yet Edmund was beloved. I seem doomed to entangle myself in others’ self-destruction.’
Julia puzzled and then remembered. ‘Oh, your father. Of course. I’m sorry, Si, it was nice of you to come and help, in the …’
He shifted from one foot to the other.
‘I shouldn’t rely on being able to be angry with her, Julia. Not for too long. You’ll find that wears off.’
He gathered up several volumes of the journal.
‘Are you going to read all this?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I just don’t know. I suppose I may in the end. Not for a bit. Curiosity’ll get the better of me in the end, I suppose, it always does.’
Simon made no answer to this, except to walk to the door. Seeing him with those books in his arms Julia felt deeply shocked: as Cassandra, alive, might have felt at such sacrilege, at the sight of those two shifting her things. She had made a column of several rings on one finger; now, she fumbled to disperse them.
‘Come on,’ said Simon. ‘Keep moving.’ He made for the stairs.
In the end they had all the papers piled in the college entrance hall. Simon began to carry them out to the car; Julia went back up the stairs.
Alone in the room she saw why she had brought Simon. She was, she considered, unlike Cassandra, vulgarly insensitive to atmosphere. Her myths had not concerned themselves with hauntings. In the Tower or Holyrood House she was tormented simply by her own curiosity working on a superfluity of available information. She would attempt to embody the precise feelings of David Rizzio or Lady Jane Grey. Cassandra’s room, without Cassandra’s presence, was, if she chose, simply a college room; Cassandra’s things were things, unconnected; their power to arouse desire or fear had been withdrawn. She wanted neither to inhabit nor to desecrate the place, only to let the objects as objects lie fixed and dead to wait for the charitable collectors to make use of them.
But this room was heavy with C
assandra, the air was thick with concentrated distress. The objects were live, potentially shocking. Julia made an effort of will not to imagine what it had felt like to be Cassandra, sustaining a furious intention through so much frenzied action: screwdriver, sticky paper, the organized cool interview with the doctor. She had not seen her sister; she had still not seen anyone dead. As she went into the bedroom she momentarily put up an arm to shield her face.
The bed had been stripped; nothing else was changed. On the chest of drawers, under the oval mirror, stood the clay Queen Morgan and the glass serpent. Objects out of a rite, Julia thought, who had last seen them perched on the television. Once, as a child of ten, she had surprised Cassandra before their mother’s mirror, veiled in an old lace curtain, conducting between lighted candles an intense solitary dialogue. Discovered, she had shrieked with outrage. Julia understood that her sister had spent time in front of this mirror, encouraging herself. She felt hot, cold, slightly breathless. Very slowly, she approached her own face to the mirror and studied it – an ordinary face, frightened, lips parted like an actress’s, strands of bright red hair straggling out from under a black silk scarf with vermilion roses. A melting, innocent face.
She said, softly, what she had intermittently been thinking since she arrived.
‘Out flew the web, and floated wide
The mirror crack’d from side to side,
The curse is come upon me …’
Her own voice frightened her. She did not feel alone; she felt the terror with which she had woken in childhood from nightmares induced by Cassandra’s too-vigorous story-telling. She dared not look round for fear of what was behind her; she studied herself in order not to see that other gaunt, freckled, censorious, anxious face.
All her life Cassandra had been the mirror where she studied the effects of her actions. It was Cassandra’s reactions that proved her existence; now, she had lost a space and a purpose. Cassandra had been to her, as she had been to Cassandra, both a live woman with whom she could deal and an irrational force, destructive, inimical, impersonal: She. Well, she was dead. She was dead, they were both dead? Any power, any existence Cassandra had, she, Julia, in the imagination, lent her.
‘I can’t afford it,’ Julia said to her reflection. ‘I’ve got to let go, there is no possession, I will be on my own.’
The soft face creased into the old, easy tears. ‘I hate you,’ Julia said to it, and stumbled across to the bed. When Simon came back he found her face downward on the bare ticking weeping wildly, for terror, for herself, for Cassandra, for loneliness, for the incompleteness of her solitude. He put a hand on her shoulder; Julia knew he had expected this.
‘Come on Julia, let’s get you out of here. I’ve got it all stowed away, we can go.’
They were well outside Oxford before either of them spoke. Julia let the tears run freely as she had always let everything run. Simon drove on in silence, a little too fast: now and then the hired car bucked in protest.
‘Do you want to stop for a drink, Julia? Coffee, spirits?’
Julia mopped her warm, wet face. ‘No, thank you.’
‘What happened so suddenly?’
‘The room frightened me.’
‘She must have been so much afraid. She was so uncertain that she existed, anyway.… And to give up that little certainty.…’
‘It was something she’d always partly wanted,’ said Julia, deliberately.
‘Do you think so?’
Julia glanced at his face to see what he might be thinking. If the girls in the college felt guilty, if her mother and the Principal, who could have done nothing, felt guilty, if the unpleasant, self-accusing letter she had had from Gerald Rowell told any truth, what must Simon be feeling? His face had a melancholy droop, a complacent sadness.
‘There was nothing you could do, either, Si. She would die.’
‘Nonsense. I could have cared more, I could have done more with what care I had. You frighten me, Julia. Listen – if there’s one thing I know – never mind how – it’s that one doesn’t at first, recognize a real blow. You’re trying to be too hard. Because you think she wanted to make a murderess of you you won’t admit that you are – partly – a murderess. And other people are going to think so, too.’
‘The book’s best-selling, this week.’
Simon gave her a momentary look of pure dislike, which she accepted. ‘I should have thought that proved my point.’
‘It does. That’s why I told you. Don’t bother about me, Si, I shall survive.’
‘Don’t expect too much of yourself.’
‘Nobody could accuse me of ever having expected too much of myself,’ Julia said. ‘I expect too little.’ She thought of explaining that that would no longer be true and decided against it; she did not want to explain herself to Simon. Nor to anyone else; she wanted solitude; and this, too, was new.
She knew, or thought she did, what Simon feared. She knew at least what she most feared herself. It was possible that Cassandra’s death – the vanishing of the real woman who wore absurd clothes, who could lock doors and be kindly on occasion, who could be elsewhere and known to be elsewhere – it was possible that this death had simply loosed that other who, unrestricted now, larger than life, narrower in purpose, dependent on Julia for breath and movement, would gnaw intolerably at her imagination in the future. By this she had been driven; but now she meant to work in freedom.
‘I’m not refined enough not to survive,’ she said, aloud, to Simon. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it she meant to live, now. She meant to be harder. She would not depend on other people’s thoughts of her; she faced, coolly she thought, the prospect of being generally disliked for what she had done. She was no longer married. She would be better to Deborah; that was a positive guilt about which something could be done, and best by her. She would come to grips with things and write better books. But she would not come to grips with Cassandra; let what was finished be cast off. Nor would she come to grips with Simon; no beginnings were possible here, only labyrinthine recriminations. She was not curious about Simon, either; she was going to be curious about nothing that had to do, or had ever had to do, with Cassandra. She was going to excise Cassandra from her life; it was the only possible way. Before, her curiosity had been hysterical and indiscriminate, a grasping. Now, it would come from herself, but a detached, a judging, a discriminating self.
Simon was speaking.
‘… advise a change of scene. Different sort of job, move house.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I thought I told you. I sail for Malaya next week. We are all driven – we repeat a certain chain of actions, with variations. We have conditioned responses. Mine is flight. Sea voyages. Jungles. Our area of choice is very limited.’
‘But we have some choice?’
‘Very little.’ Simon turned a corner.
‘You think I’m driven?’
‘It’s a view.’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
It is difficult to hold on to the certainty of a change in oneself – vague but certain – which has not been tested out against experience. Julia knew she was a new woman, but this woman had, as yet, no acts to her credit. She was like the tree in the quad, and her growth would be hard, stunted by others’ need to see wrongly or not to see at all. It was no good talking, she had to start behaving differently, and this couldn’t be done until they reached London. And then, Julia thought with realism, it couldn’t be done at one blow, or in one movement. It was like slimming; one must not expect too much at once, nor give up or repine too much over occasional backsliding. She would, for instance, continue to weep in Ivan’s uncomprehending arms. But the will to change was there. Julia knew it was there. What was over was over.
Behind Julia and Simon, in the dark boot of the car, closed into crates, unread, unopened, Cassandra’s private papers bumped and slid.
THE END
ALSO BY A. S. BYATT
ANGELS & INSECTS
&
nbsp; In “Morpho Eugenia,” a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a family whose clandestine passions come to seem as inscrutible as the behavior of insects. And in “The Conjugal Angel,” a circle of fictional mediums finds itself haunted by a real historical personage.
Fiction/Literature
BABEL TOWER
Frederica’s husband’s violent streak has turned on her. She flees to London with their young son and gets a teaching job in an art school, where poets and painters are denying the value of the past and fostering dreams of rebellion, which hinge upon a strange, charismatic figure, the unkempt and near-naked Jude Mason.
Fiction/Literature
THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE
Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student, decides to escape postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire, The Biographer’s Tale is a provocative look at “truth” and our perennial quest for certainty.
Fiction/Literature
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
When children’s book author Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of a museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined.
Fiction/Literature
THE DJINN IN THE NIGHTINGALE’S EYE
In this collection of fairy tales for adults, the title story describes the relationship between a world renowned scholar of the art of storytelling and the marvelous being that lives in a bottle found in an Istanbul bazaar. Byatt renders this interaction of the natural and supernatural not only convincing, but inevitable.
Fiction/Literature