The Game (12 page)

The lanky, lugubrious boy, with his distant courtesy, and his clear first-hand knowledge of her misery proved a better confidant than the weary vicar. She had been ready either to fall in love, or to undergo a religious upheaval, and for some months she juggled with the two fairly successfully. The relationship depended upon her producing and discussing despair of one kind; loving Simon produced despair of another, which in turn made the religious refuge necessary. She never knew whether Simon liked her or not; she suspected that their walks and picnics were due to a mixture of a need for an audience and an unflattering desire, on his part, to exercise a newly-discovered and indifferent Christian charity. She was his first clumsy experiment in pastoral care. She was content to be so – she needed a great deal of time to change herself before she was capable of being anything else. She was shrewd enough to see that he, too, was not at ease in the world of ascesis and self-denial they spent their time talking about; his self-effacement was a little strained, his security too hardly achieved. She offered him, however, respect on trust, and argued passionately every inch of the way; at no point on her long journey into the Church was she more apparently, even angrily, agnostic. What she dreamed of was her business. She was skilled with dreams. She wrote to him throughout the term, and at Easter they met again.

Cassandra’s Journal.
Easter 1944.

Today he showed me the snakes. I hoped he might, as I imagine he would not show them to most people. He says he has ‘for some reason’ always kept them a secret. So I was very flattered, but could not comment as intelligently or enthusiastically as I would have liked to. I hoped to feel we were sharing something, but he was a bit schoolmasterish – more letting me be there than wanting me. I refine too much on what he says. I said, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ He said, ‘Just sit there and keep me company.’ I was absurdly pleased by
this. (Must watch myself, no lies, no lies). One must never ask for more than is offered – not out of virtue, but because if one does one loses what one has.

Snakes are strange things. Not evil-looking, as I had supposed, not anything much, just little heaps like coils of rope or something one might have dropped. He keeps them hidden in this cave. In glass tanks. He has earth on the bottom, and odd stones, and dishes of water for them to swim in. None were swimming. I would make it all look much better, but he clearly doesn’t care how it looks. There is water running down the back wall; the stone is stained, silver and gold and olive; there are minute ferns growing in crevices. One could perhaps grow ferns all round, put in a few shelves.

It is strange to me to think anyone could love those snakes – stranger than before I saw them – but in some way he clearly does. He has ten grass-snakes, three smooth-snakes and two adders he caught in the heather. He has a collection of skins, wrapped in oilskin, in a metal box, and a book full of observations. There are no thoughts, only notes on how they excrete, how and when they cast their skins, how they swallow, how long they go without food, what they will and won’t eat. They have no names, although he knows them all apart. He told me they were beautiful, which I suppose is a kind of thought. I expected to find them beautiful myself – I am the sort of person you would think would – but I didn’t. There was a dryness and nothingness about them. I was somehow surprised they were alive. They were
nothing
, really, just accidental tubular shapes of things. He says spring is late so they are torpid; they are inert, as though the step from life to death was insignificant to them. Snakes have no lids to their eyes, and so look plainly out at you; this makes them seem not so much fascinating as stupid.

I like watching him watch them. One of the things about knowing him is the excitement of mapping out all the directions in which there are things to learn I shall never know more of than that they are there. (Prose!!) I really don’t want to know more than he voluntarily tells me, partly because I
am shy. I stand around in a waiting silence much of the time but he doesn’t seem to mind too much. I hope my waiting doesn’t oppress him. God knows I don’t mean it to. He said last week I was censorious, but oh, Simon, not with you, ever.

We had for lunch spam, tomatoes from his greenhouse, half a hard-boiled egg each and an apple.

We had another argument about the Incarnation. I was trying to say I didn’t see it was
necessary
for Christ to have been God or to have died. It seems to have made, proportionately to what is claimed for it, so little difference – historically, that is – it hasn’t changed war or murder or cruelty,
most people
still know nothing about it. I said I didn’t want God to have been made flesh, as far as I was concerned if there was any point in the idea of God it was precisely that He was
not
flesh, he was something else, something other. He said might we not then feel God was inaccessible, and I said that individually, for myself, that was how I did feel. I see the flaw in my argument here.

He said, surely I saw something was wrong with the world – ‘something horribly twisted’ was how he put it. He said some twisting back on a really grand scale was needed, some ‘re-wrenching’, not done by us, to counteract this.

I said, something was certainly horribly wrong, but it seemed to me likely that it had
always been
wrong and had not at one point in time ‘gone wrong’. I said we have no right to think this re-wrenching actually took place just because we think it ought to have. He said the point about the Crucifixion was that it was the moment when the eternal was involved in history – thus its effects were eternal (we are now for ever able to be saved) and historical (it has to be worked out). I said this was too metaphorical. I was angry because he didn’t see that if the ‘going wrong’ wasn’t historical, the atonement needn’t be. He was angry with me; he wants me to believe.

I told him that what I found saving was the order and structure one could see in things, smooth-running, meaningful. The growth of plants, the circulation of the blood, networks of working muscles, veins on leaves, movements of planets and
shoals of fish. A harmony one could see. This is what we are for, to pay attention to this beautiful network of designed movement that we and our tragedies are held in. He said that suffering and sin were rents in this network, and that Christ was a guarantee that they could be mended, the fabric could be restored. I said I thought the need for Christ was a need to simplify, to reduce to terms of human suffering something that is neutral, not loving, inhuman, not human.

We were angry with each other. I wish I didn’t have to win arguments, especially with him. It doesn’t do me much good. Moreover, about concrete suffering at least, he knows more than I do. Mine is all in the head. But he knows. I feel he is always on edge and menaced. I don’t know why. I speculate about how he lives in that house; going into it is unthinkable. He must do normal things, brush his hair and teeth, sit by the fire.… He doesn’t talk about his family. I don’t ask.

In the afternoon, he fed one of the snakes.

Cassandra’s Journal.
February 1963.

We are still all in Benstone; I had hoped to be able to leave before now. The protracted stay frets everyone’s temper. J. displays her usual partial and superficial awareness of other people’s feelings; this can cause more damage than a complete lack of concern with them. Moreover, she obtrudes her own feelings. When I was younger I used to feel that emotional self-indulgence must later be paid for. It occurs to me in middle age that those who learn to take in childhood equip themselves to take as adults, and so it continues. A hard thought. There is an aesthetic pleasure in the recognition of hard facts which is intense and brilliant and pales very quickly as one realises that knowing a fact changes it little, or not at all. (Here is the fallacy behind the more vulgar hopes of psycho-analysis: we cannot think away poverty, ugliness, fear.)

He understood and understands this supremacy of facts. The pleasure in knowing that what is thwarting exists and is thwarting. But he does not pay sufficient attention to the
human need to imagine. We cannot, in fact, recognize a simple fact, and we must have more than facts to live by. So much of what most deeply affects us is at best dubiously factual.

I have been reading – with pain – some early parts of this journal. He and I have – like dancers – changed position over the years. Then we were both more concerned with the historical truth of Christianity. Now I have come to see that the death of Christ is
imaginatively
necessary to us. It is the supreme event of both factual and imaginative worlds, it relates the factual world of meaningless suffering to the imagined world where action is meaningful, love is purposeful. We are
in need
of this relationship. Whatever we can imagine a man should be, He is, and whatever we factually suffer, He suffered – since each man’s death is, for him, the extreme of suffering. So here our worlds are welded.

Whereas Simon seems to have abdicated the attempt to reconcile love and suffering; he regards the order of facts as the only available truth, and uses the imagination primarily as an instrument for scientific comparison. He perceives similarities in dissimilarities and produces, not metaphysical metaphors, but tentative scientific laws. We have both hardened, we are both more limited.

I think also, although this may be fanciful (God knows I have had long enough to work on it, and no distractions) that our present attitudes were implicit in the way we watched the snake feed, that afternoon. It was I, not he, who found the raw fact intolerable. I think his religion was more robust, a simpler need for immediate consolation. That – coupled with the usual adolescent rebelliousness – was why he left the Roman Church. He had no need for assent, but a need (apparently still unfulfilled and now abandoned) for human assurance. Oh, Simon, how we change. I should relinquish the possibility of knowing you with more ease and more grace if what there was had simply worn itself away.

He had given the snake – one of the larger grass-snakes – a
live frog, from a tank full of the creatures which he kept for this purpose.

He explained to Cassandra what was happening, as though, she felt, the knowing accuracy of his description was a defence again the fact of the frog’s being swallowed.

‘They like,’ he said, proffering the frog, gathering its legs gently in his hand, cupping its body, ‘something bigger than their own heads, to get a grip on.’ The frog jerked. ‘Come on,’ said Simon to the snake, pushing it a little. ‘This one is used to being hand-fed.’

The snake suddenly stretched out and sank its teeth into the frog. ‘The teeth are very well designed. If we are talking about design. The backward slope gives it a good grip.’ Cassandra said nothing. He looked sideways at her, one of his flickering looks that rested on her face and ended over her shoulder. ‘I can’t get this one to take dead food yet.’

The snake began to walk its head, stretched and ungainly, over the frog. The frog wriggled a little and the teeth sank deeper.

‘Each half of each jaw can be moved independently. Like pulling a bag over something in separate tugs. When it gets to a wide bit, it can separate the lower jaw halves completely and push them right down. Then it pushes sideways with its throat muscles. It will take a longish time to swallow this big frog. All that saliva helps it down. You may have read somewhere’ – Cassandra had not – ‘that they cover their prey with saliva first, to soften it. People get that idea because if you frighten a snake that’s just fed, it will throw up whatever it’s swallowed.…’

The snake’s four jaw parts and its stuffed and choked mouth were still progressing.

‘It can digest one end of the frog whilst it’s still swallowing the other. For instance, it may digest the feet before the frog is dead. Frogs are very resistant to death.’

Cassandra sat still, and neither protested nor wriggled. She felt Simon was forbidding. Since then she had watched an anaconda swallow a small pig, on the television, under his
surveillance, but both his commentary and her observation had become more remote, she thought, cooler. In the jungle he, perhaps, had sweated something off. Whereas the screen made him and his snake, for her, unreal somehow; her watching was pitiless. A loss? One cannot suffer with all frogs and pigs. One cannot. There had been on the stretched faces of both grass-snake and anaconda a kind of rigid, anonymous grin.

‘As for what you call my obscure references to Simon Moffitt,’ Julia wrote, ‘they are obscure because my feelings are obscure. I suppose you might say he was my first love. (Are you interested in that, Ivan? Well, if not, you can always skip through this letter – you don’t even have to
look
as though you’re politely listening.) In those days I saw him as a sort of cross between Heathcliff and Sebastian Flyte. He had a romantic Bridesheady sort of charm – a rather sordid family history that was the object of much village speculation – and the sort of glamour that comes of having thrown over the Family Tradition – although only far enough to be flirting with the C. of E. in the person of our local vicar (also a charmer). You get the picture. Things were complicated because of my sister – whom I loved and was terrified of – having violent feelings – again obscure – about him, let alone me. It all got a bit like a cheap novelette. That upset her too, she hates even a hint of vulgarity. And whereas my life
is
like a novelette, I do like it to be the muted, not the melodramatic kind, lowest common denominator not highest common multiple of emotion, if I’ve got my terminology right, love?

‘Simon doesn’t look as though he’s a straightforward man; he was certainly anything
but
a straightforward boy. A sexual twister, and an (unconscious?) cajoler.… The sort of man who makes women feel, erroneously, that they can do things to bring him out or straighten him up. Hence your teenagers, which I find absolutely understandable.…’

They met outside the post office. Julia pushed her pennies into the stamp machine and watched the stamps uncoil through the slit. She stuck them on, and took the letter out of the envelope to read through, partly in case she had said something
embarrassing, partly out of a giddy pleasure in her own eloquence.