The Game (11 page)

‘I wanted to talk to you. But not if you’re busy.’

‘What did you want to talk about?’

‘Oh, as for that.… I hoped it might develop.… I don’t like Julia crying.’

‘She always has,’ said Cassandra, before she could stop herself. ‘Do you always call your mother by her Christian name?’

‘She says the thought of being called Mummy made her feel sick.’ She looked out of the window. She wore a
mustard-coloured polo-neck sweater, a pleated navy skirt, and thick tartan stockings which Cassandra thought ugly. She said, ‘Have a cigarette?’

Deborah slewed round. ‘Thanks. I don’t – I don’t smoke. But I’d like one.’

Cassandra tossed her the cigarette packet and the matchbox; Deborah clumsily lit and sucked.

‘I’ve always had a sort of picture of you as the person I could talk to.’

Cassandra thought. ‘I see that. But I think you’re probably wrong.’

Deborah sighed. ‘I can’t cope with this family.’ She tapped non-existent ash off the end of her cigarette. ‘I certainly can’t cope with Julia crying.’

‘Do you have to cope?’

‘She likes moral support. I always end up comforting her. That’s the funny thing. Once I was invited to stay with a girl from school – something that doesn’t happen to
me
often, I may say and she rang up the second day and said would I come back, we didn’t see enough of each other, she said she thought we ought to be together. That was the time they said
The Silver Swan
sounded one plaintive note of self-pity all the time. So I went home and told her that there comes a time in every writer’s life when the critics think they’re important enough to slate —’ She looked at the floor and twisted her hands. ‘But she doesn’t
like
me,’ she said.

‘We all believe that, at some stage in our lives.’

‘No, she specially doesn’t. It’s partly this thing – why she’s crying now. I – I wish she didn’t always write books about how we – Father and I – how we diminish her, stop her living.… I don’t want to stop her living. I want to live myself. But she – but she – You know what she’s like, you might understand.’

‘We all diminish each other. We all impinge on each other. It’s natural.’

‘And I remind her of you,’ said Deborah. ‘I can’t help that. She’s always telling him – writing letters to people – She
doesn’t let me exist. I thought –
you
might see I existed. I’ve been thinking, if I met you, properly —’

It was all clearly so well thought out. Cassandra shivered slightly. She said, ‘You don’t know me. One should never exercise one’s imagination on people one doesn’t know. It’s a kind of theft. Savages believe photographs are a theft. So are expectations. What can I do?’

This puzzled Deborah, who wrinkled her face, and returned to the attack.

‘She steals, too. She says I never tell her anything, and when I do, she puts it in books. And gives me copies. So that my thoughts aren’t mine. Look – Once – once I told.… Once one of the mistresses at school wrote her a letter saying she ought to respect my confidences. That I was an unduly secretive child.’ She laughed. ‘So Julia showed me the letter, and burst into tears, and I had to comfort her about that. I had to tell her it was all silly and I knew a book was a book, and life was life … and I didn’t mind.…’

‘What do you want me to say? Of course your confidences should be respected.’

‘Of course.’ Deborah’s assurance was suddenly shaken. She said uncertainly, ‘Of course they’re very good books. I know they’re very good books. I know Julia’s a creative writer. A person has to write what they know …’

‘I think that no one has any necessary right to publish what they know – however good it may be for them to write it. Or even if what they have written is very good. That a piece of writing is good doesn’t override other considerations – moral considerations – when it comes to damaging others. That’s an absurd overvaluation of the printed word.

‘And as a Christian I mistrust your use of the word “creative”. Only God creates. Our works are imaginative, at the highest. If we
imagine
our experience we transmute it – rearrange it, meditate on it, light it differently, change it, relate it to the rest of the world. Stories in themselves have no necessary imaginative value. They may be simply therapeutic for the author. They may be positively dangerous – not a lighting
up of facts but a refusal to face facts, a distortion. This always happens, not usually to a harmful degree. But the imagination can be violently dangerous. Not enough – mere recording – is valueless. Too much is an evasion of truth. I know this.’

Deborah appeared very puzzled by this speech, which was delivered in a harsh, lecturing voice. Cassandra turned the garnet on her finger. ‘Even in my work – the discovery of facts isn’t enough. One has to imagine them – think about them, light them up – and one inevitably intrudes one’s own personality. Ideally, one should not. Facts should speak for themselves. But they never do.’

‘I like your work. I want to do that sort of thing. Something objective and private. I want to be a historian. To go to Oxford.’ She looked at her aunt. ‘I was going to write to you about it. For advice.’ She bowed her head. Cassandra was touched, but cautious. She thought Deborah had her own infinite capacity for bearing grudges, and that likeness of temperament was no necessary basis for close relationships; at the same time she was able to recognize the real appeal here.

‘Anything I can do to help, I will.’

‘If I could just write, now and then.’

‘Naturally.’

They were silent. Deborah went on looking out of the window.

‘That you can just see out there – that’s Simon Moffitt’s house, isn’t it?’

‘He’s in South America.’

‘Yes, but that’s his
house
, isn’t it? I know a lot about him. Julia talks a lot about him, to Father.… She …’

Cassandra winced. ‘You’ll do no good by asking too many questions.’

‘Oh, in our house, you get told,’ Deborah slid off the window-seat. ‘Like a myth, your childhood. I’ve envied you, you seem to have had so much —’ She said, ‘Look, you don’t seem to see, I can’t tell you – I feel I know you, and that you’re the one who
knows
—’

‘What about your father?’

‘Oh, he cares.… All this is bad for him. Don’t you think? I’d be worried for him if it wasn’t an insult. But he’s not quite there. What he wants, what he really wants, is to give out bowls of milk and penicillin.’

And that, too, I know about, Cassandra thought. She felt Deborah’s interest as a temptation; she had already made one uncharacteristic gesture towards her, in offering the cigarette. Here was someone to whom what she knew was relevant and useful. Someone who could learn from her. They looked at each other with a similar wariness; Deborah grinned.

‘I only want someone to talk to.’

‘Well,’ said Cassandra, ‘there’s no harm in talk. If you find it necessary.’

‘I wouldn’t persecute you.’

Cassandra smiled. Deborah made her feel, briefly, human; an object neither of fear, nor patronage. Though this was not without its frightening side. And Julia’s daughter was the last child to whom she could play imaginary mother.

‘And now, if you’ve nothing else to say, perhaps I could get on.… Come back, when you like.’

Deborah left immediately, with a cool, leisurely, and slightly mocking look over what Cassandra was ‘getting on’ with.

Cassandra went on leafing through the papers; then she climbed into the window-seat and stared, not for the first time, across the snowy hills at the chimneys of the Moffitt’s house: the Castle, the Joyous Garde. Deborah’s speculation seemed to solidify, in time, events she thought were significant now only in her own head. This question of theft. And the related question of Simon Moffitt.

She remembered Julia’s first published work. She had been eighteen, going up to Oxford; Julia had been sixteen. She had come running from the post, like a character, Cassandra thought, from
Little Women
, crying, ‘Look, look what I’ve done.’ They had all looked. It was a serious children’s magazine, printed on utility paper, and Julia had it open where it said ‘Winner of our 1943 Short Story competition.
Vigil in the Forest
, by Julia Corbett, of Benstone, Northumberland’. Julia
had her mouth closed on an uncontrollable smile. Their father gave her one of his rare, smacking kisses, and Cassandra knew immediately what had happened. She thought she had always known it would happen, and had pushed it out of her mind.

She had in the window-seat several versions of the same story. It had been a central episode in the myth from the early days; it concerned Sir Launcelot, benighted in the forest, and bludgeoned into temptation by four queens. ‘For hit behovyth the now to chose one of us four, for I am quene Morgan le Fay, quene of the londe of Gore, and here is the quene of North Galys, and the quene of Estlonde, and the quene of the Oute Iles. Now chose one of us, whyche that thow wolte have to thy per amour, other ellys to dye in this preson.’ ‘This is a harde case,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘that other I muste dye, other to chose one of you.… Yea, on my lyff,’ seyde Sir Launcelot, ‘refused ye bene of me.’

This episode had been cast, and re-cast; the issue had been in doubt more ways than one. Besides Cassandra’s highly complicated and privately violent version of it, which she had not written down, there were several public chronicles of paths taken and escapes made and an adaptation she had made at fifteen, for a school exercise entitled ‘A Walk in the Woods’. On this the English mistress had written, ‘This is not quite what I intended. Although your vocabulary is good and you express yourself well you must learn to curb the more lurid flights of your imagination and write with more discipline to be really effective.’ From this version, a study in benighted fear, the predatory queens excised, had grown Cassandra’s own tentative attempt at a public story. And it was an adaptation of this which Julia had successfully submitted to the competition.

Cassandra had felt outrage. She could not accuse Julia of simple theft – the story was, or had been, common property. And Julia’s story, although it abounded in similarities of phrasing and passages of description, was in many ways better than her own lumpy version: it was more controlled,
and had an element of amused irony that was intensified by the drawings – rather
art nouveau
– which accompanied it.

But she felt that the imagined world had been violated; that exposure had rendered it lifeless. The long partnership came to an end; there was no more Game; and Cassandra herself was for many months unable to write. The essence of the Game was privacy; privacy could only be preserved by absolute silence. But more deeply, she was in some way prohibited – outside the Journal – from putting pen to paper.

She punished Julia by silence. Cassandra was, and always had been, an artist in not being on speaking terms; and Julia was an ideal victim. Over the years Cassandra the tyrant had laid down rules about this as about everything else. In childhood they had gone out to play, apparently together, separated at the gate and not met until lunch-time. Julia was trained to recognize which remarks, addressed to her over meals, were simple face-savers, before family, and which were genuine overtures. She was always wounded; she never learned; she would always, this time as every other approach hopefully and far too early, be snubbed, and not only be snubbed, but mind. This time she tried independence and wrote another story, which was rejected by the magazine; she could not keep up the Game alone, and had little else to do; she suffered a wild and aimless despair.

Cassandra too, despaired: for the second time in her life she experienced paralysing, irrational, overwhelming fear. The first time this had happened had been when she was sent away to school, a colourless eleven year old in liberty bodice, wrinkled lisle stockings, and a tunic bought prudently one size too large. The other girls were enemies, the building menacing, objects threatening: the notice-board with dangerous pins, the gallows-like wooden swing, the horn spoons with which they ate their Sunday eggs. She wept all night, and then the weeping spilled over into the day; she sat on benches, immobile, with a wet face, and grew thinner. The terror wore off gradually; when Julia arrived, the next year, the two of them pursued their private life in breaks and in the evening. Cassandra’s
work improved, and she showed to other girls, at last, the same condescending helpfulness with prep that she gave to Julia.

In the autumn of 1943, when she went to Oxford, the terror returned. For the whole summer she had not spoken to Julia. In Oxford, she approached people with mistrust, expected to be disliked, and burst out occasionally with authoritative and grating literary pronouncements. She ate alone, went to lectures alone, observed with fear the cracks in her window, the scratching of other people’s pens in lectures. She attended lectures obsessively; attempting to find out about Malory, she found herself being enlightened about the Cloud of Unknowing, the Ancrene Riwle, and Dame Julian. Unknowing was what she craved, and religion seemed harder, more inevitable and more reliable than the Game. She attended evensong in Magdalen Chapel, lost herself in the smell of candles and the boys’ voices, went back to Benstone at Christmas drunk with despair and carols, and invaded the study of her parents’ friend Edwin Merton with a desperate and lengthy confession of abstract fear and sense of meaninglessness. Merton did his embarrassed best. He also introduced Cassandra to Simon Moffitt. Simon was desperate too; he and Cassandra met, and talked, several times, at first unintentionally and then deliberately. Simon had more concrete cause for despair, and had made, apparently, more spiritual progress. He was intending to be ordained.

Simon had already some of the glamour of the imaginary world; indeed, she had incorporated into it some of his violent family history.

He belonged to an old Northumberland family, remarkable for persistent Catholicism under persecution and for little else – there had been a Robert Moffitt whose two-volume
Flora and Fauna of Northumberland
had been illustrated by Bewick, and now Simon. The Moffitts kept themselves to themselves. A year earlier, Simon’s father, who had fought in the First World War, and worked for the Government in this, had come home on leave and shot himself. Simon’s mother had married an army officer, considerably younger than herself, immediately.
This was all Cassandra knew – she did not attract village gossip herself, and remained largely unaware of it.