The Game

A. S. Byatt is famed for her short fiction, collected in
Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories
, and
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
Her full-length novels include the Booker Prize–winning
Possession
and the trilogy sequence of novels
The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life
, and
Babel Tower.
She has also published four volumes of critical work, of which
Imagining Characters
is the most recent. She lives in London.

FICTION
The Shadow of the Sun
The Game
The Virgin in the Garden
Still Life
Sugar and Other Stories
Possession: A Romance
Angels and Insects
The Matisse Stories
Babel Tower
The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye
Elementals
The Biographer’s Tale

CRITICISM
Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch
Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time
Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings
Imagining Characters
(with Ignês Sodré)

‘C
OME
again
soon
,’ Julia said, arresting them again at the top of the stairs, smiling and pleading. ‘I mean it, I really mean it. You must come again.’ They laughed, drawn together by their departure, their faces pale and round above coat-collars already turned up against the cold. ‘
Promise
,’ said Julia, and they promised, and began to descend the turning staircase. Julia hung over the banister watching their dark heads protectively down three flights, saddened by the receding clatter of their feet. At the bottom they stopped and turned their moon-faces up to her. ‘Thank you,’ they called, and Julia cried, ‘We loved having you.’

She stood a moment twisting her rings on her fingers. She had several rings, all rather boldly designed and clean-cut, silver and bronze, hoops and bosses. Her hands seemed slightly heavy with them. She went back, then, into the flat.

In the attic living-room everything was warm. The wood fire was still alive in the hearth, and the room was hazy with soft smoke. The floor was polished bare boards, spread with long-furred rugs, and there were several low stools on which Julia would sit, her knees drawn up to her chin, close to the fire. There were earthy-brown coffee mugs squat on a low table, two stainless-steel bowls of fruit, a scarlet glass tray with liqueur glasses. Julia sniffed smoke and wine and was aware of worry. Somewhere, plates clashed.

She went through the living-room into the kitchen, where, at a pale blue and grey sink, under a fluorescent light, her husband in shirtsleeves was piling plates shining with water, one after the other, on to a stainless-steel draining-board.

‘We don’t have to wash up just yet?’

‘It doesn’t take a minute. I feel better when things are in place.’ He cast her a placatory glance. ‘You don’t have to help.’ Julia picked up a tea-towel.

‘Thor,’ she said, ‘it went well, didn’t it? They liked it, didn’t they? I mean, they were exactly the people to try out that honey sauce on?’ She dried some plates. ‘They liked me, didn’t they? You can tell if people like you. I liked them enormously. The sort of people who can become real
friends
—’

‘Yes,’ said Thor. He took a deep-blue linen cloth and began to polish carving knives, his cropped blond head very pale under the pale light. After a moment he offered, ‘I think he will ask you to appear on his programme.’

Julia studied her hands. ‘I didn’t ask him for that.’

‘I know. He doesn’t think you did. He liked you. He said you were very much alive.’

‘Did he?’ Julia strode back into the living-room. ‘Did he really, Thor? I thought
he
was alive, didn’t you? I thought that the moment I met him. He’s got such energy. He cares so much about everything. That’s rare. And he’s so intelligent. Both of them are so intelligent —’

She sat down on a leather stool by the fire.

‘I wonder if I talked too much. I always do, I get carried away, I know you think.… He’s a man you could tell anything to. Almost anything. I’m sure he thought I talked too much.’

‘Why should he? He was curious.’ He thought a moment. ‘There are so many people you can tell anything to, Julia.’

Julia was not sure where, in this sentence, the emphasis was; one of the traces of her husband’s Norwegian birth was the uniform flatness of his sentences. Thus she did not know whether she was being rebuked or not. This was the sort of minor moral indecision which he often provoked in her.

‘I should hate him to think I was
effusive
.’

‘I do not think he thought that.’

‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly.’

There was a silence. Julia said, ‘I wish I didn’t always feel so overwhelmed.’

Thor put a large hand across her shoulder, and rubbed her white crêpe dress against her skin.

‘Julia – be a little peaceful, sometimes. Don’t mind things so much. It isn’t good.’

Julia shrugged quickly and then relaxed. ‘One
ought
to mind. One ought to care. I love it, meeting people, really —’

‘That’s not what I mean. You will not simply take what is given. What comes.’

‘But that’s just what I
do.
That’s what I thought you were complaining about. I take and take and take.
Everything’s
given. More than I can manage.’

‘I do not know what you mean by everything is given,’ said Thor, his northern foreignness slightly more pronounced. ‘In the nature of things, it cannot be. I agree, you will behave as though everything was … available. It tires you. Besides, you know yourself, you insure against a poverty, Julia.’

‘Don’t,’ said Julia. ‘Don’t tell me. You know so much, but you don’t have to
tell
me.’

He stiffened into silence. Julia leaned her face against his legs. ‘You know me, you know me so well. I love you. But don’t frighten me. Don’t take me up too much.’

‘You are easy to frighten,’ he said, in the same easy expressionless voice. He knelt down beside her; Julia said quickly, ‘And anyway I’m not fussing, it was a good dinner-party, it was a success.’

‘It was a good party, yes. And they liked you. I’m glad they liked you.’ She leaned towards him, and their mouths met, lightly.

‘Thor —’ said Julia.

‘I have a lot of work to do,’ he said, ‘before tomorrow. I don’t know why charity – why Christianity – should go with such a lack of sense of hard facts. They have faith, because they have promised grain, it will be forthcoming. They have faith that difficulties with transport and cash can be got round. Well some can, but only with my work. Also, they transfer to me the faith they would do better to reserve for God and then not take into account. I spend my time accomplishing near-miracles: it is different. And today three letters saying we are
inefficient and extravagant with the half-crowns they so charitably put into the tin cans —’

Thor was paid administrator of a largish charitable organization run by the Quakers in conjunction with one or two other religious bodies. Often, after parties, he worked into the small hours, making Julia feel guilty, since their visitors were mostly her own professional acquaintances. He seemed indefatigable; but during dinner she had watched his abstracted face once or twice – he did not drink – had thought he was saving himself, and had been exhausted by the tension between keeping the conversation lively, and wondering whether to let it die and the visitors depart, so that he could work. She kissed him. ‘Well, mostly, their faith’s justified. Their faith in you, that is. You don’t promise what you can’t perform.”

‘No,’ he said, standing up. In the doorway he asked casually ‘Will you accept his offer?’

‘He hasn’t made it. And I haven’t thought.’

Thor smiled and closed himself out.

Left alone, slightly let down, Julia walked across the room and back, restlessly. She thought of Ivan, who had just left, and might want her on his television programme. She liked the idea of being promoted from being a woman writer to being – in some sense – an expert on the art of the novel. In her mind her own voice echoed, lively, stimulating. She would meet new people. Hopefully, ready to see it as a new world to be entered, she turned on the television.