The Game (17 page)

Simon would appear, walking unhurried. He would be glad to see her and would hold out his hands, which she never took: she knew that the impossible embrace would take place, with certainty, but that they had all the time in the world. They talked: she could usually remember what he had said. They climbed mountain paths and peered down rabbit-holes. Simon turned aside leaves and showed her, maybe, a nest of oval and circular insects, with irridescent turquoise backs, and fringes of flickering jetty legs. He had the authoritative physical presence he had in the drawing-room dream, and moved rapidly, laughing; she had to strive to keep up. Occasionally he was bizarrely dressed. Once he appeared in crimson tights, sword and frilled jabot. More usually, he wore his dirty grey flannels and swinging sports-coat. She could have counted the wrinkles in his socks. Lately, he wore bush-clothes, and there was beard-stubble on his face.

After the walking, and the shared certainty of expectation, everything gained speed, like a film taken at the wrong pace. Leaves and bushes would begin to flutter wildly. Creatures multiplied. She would notice a tree-trunk alive with scuttering mice or a section of a path boiling with innumerable insects, crawling over each other, hurrying, falling. Simon’s warm presence would vanish whilst her attention was elsewhere. She would see things she recognized; a pile of those clammy, featherless baby birds, blind reptiles with gaunt triangular heads, that fall from trees. A dead mouse, with maggots lumping themselves shapelessly across the browning flesh. A flattened hedgehog, like a blood-fringed doormat. The cat, using its teeth sideways, crackling shears, on the rib-cage of a rabbit, shaking its head to free a caught tooth, making, in its throat, a low, rasping sound.

C
ASSANDRA
was glad to be back in Oxford, which was grey and muddy. She was glad to close her own door on herself, and pleased and surprised to find how many people she was, after all, connected to, by little threads of common surface conversation. The Old House always gave her an exaggerated sense that she was socially entirely isolated. But she returned energetic, made small efforts herself, and was generally thought to have mellowed. After a week she went out and hired a television set, explaining that she had a sister who was about to appear on it. On top of the box she stood the small plaster figure of Morgan, whom she had brought back from Northumberland. Both these new objects seemed slightly out of place.

She was more lively, but she was also restless, and went for long afternoon walks in the Botanical Gardens, where the river was in flood; the lawns were lakes of frozen, muddy water, ice-flakes cracking on the grass at the edges. Cassandra, coming daily, watched the water slide up strange shrubs and bushes from all parts of the world, and then slide down again, leaving the lower branches strung with roots and trails of dead grass. Leafless, they were all similar. Cassandra purchased Wellington boots and splashed around reading, with her collector’s zeal for catalogued information, the little metal tags which labelled and separated them. These expeditions invigorated her: she came back to college smiling.

Immediate contact with her family was small. Deborah wrote several times – long, carefully reasoned, amusing letters, largely about literature. There was no sign of the hysteria or malice Cassandra had suspected, and she answered scrupulously and with some pleasure. This sustained, impersonal contact pleased her, too.

Deborah said nothing about Julia. Cassandra watched the
first issue of
The Lively Arts.
It was called ‘All in a day’s work’ and combined snippets of film from studio and concert hall with interviews with the artists explaining themselves and their methods. Cassandra watched Julia, curled on a Swedish day-bed, with Deborah standing silent at her elbow, explain that she found it impossible to put an object in a book that wasn’t a real object, somewhere. ‘I need to be in touch with what’s concrete.’ Cassandra had never been in Julia’s flat; like Simon’s dark hut, it was a visible corner of a world whose dimensions were there, behind it, to be guessed, or imagined.

Three days after this, she had a letter from Julia.

Dearest Cass,

I am absolutely exhausted, and in a very funny frame of mind, and could do with a day off. I wonder if I could come for that visit we were talking about? Or didn’t we mean it? I should like to think we did. Would you invite me over for the weekend or something and see how we make out? Oxford must be rather nicely mournful at this time of year I should think. I’d love to do some serious looking at buildings, that’s the sort of thing I need.

That telly programme was
ghastly
, Cass, I don’t expect you saw it. When it comes to it I have a horror of saying what I think, I really can’t bear being pinned down. I probably just don’t think
enough
, that’s why it seems woolly. Still, I seem to have gone down quite well, people keep writing and asking for bits of my hair and more unmentionable things, imagine. But I feel a bit reduced and humiliated, I don’t know quite why, you might know.

I see you’ve been writing to Debbie. Good for you. She doesn’t have much to say to me, but that’s supposed to be normal with mothers of adolescent girls. But you don’t know much about me in that capacity do you?

Thor is well. He entertains a lot of churchy ladies, and works an eighteen-hour day at least, which is exhausting to live with.

I’m completely bogged in my next book. I seem to have just
come to a stop, I don’t know why. I feel I’ve got to change everything – my whole way of writing, my subject-matter, everything. I’ve got to dig deeper and spread wider. I want to write something with a few symbols and a Message. The telly makes one awfully conscious of one’s lack of Message. I’ve got such a slithery, shapeless personality to project, no
grip.
You would have. I do want to talk to you. Look, do answer this, Cass, I need you to.

Love, J.

Cassandra read this letter several times. She found it curiously menacing in tone. She did not know whether it was a calculated appeal to her own vestigial, but occasionally powerful, protective feeling towards Julia. She decided that it might not be calculated, but that she would write back, pleasantly, and say that she was very busy. Then she read the letter again, and decided that what was threatening in it was her own contribution to it, and that the only dignified course was to ignore these feelings. She therefore booked the college’s principal guest-room, wrote to invite Julia from Friday to Sunday two weeks later, and even arranged a dinner-party for the Saturday night. She was asked to comparatively few dinner-parties, and found this occasion useful for gathering together the small number of people to whom she owed invitations.

When the time came she went to meet Julia on the station, and noticed that she was gritting her teeth with apprehension. Julia stepped down from a punctual train, looking like an undergraduate, in a black soft leather coat with a fur-edged hood that gripped her face, and a black corduroy tunic over purple sleeves and purple stockings. Cassandra’s huge fear settled into the recognition of a small, self-contained human being. Velvet hat nodding under its topaz pin she advanced. Julia gave a welcoming cry, and after a brief hesitation they took each other’s hand. It was the first time they had met, or arranged to meet, simply to see each other.

Julia began talking very fast. ‘This is wonderful.
Oxford.
I want you to take me on a real tourist’s guided tour. I want to see everything, absolutely everything.…’

Cassandra took Julia’s case in her little, black-gloved hand, and they found a taxi.

‘I thought you might find it interesting to dine in Hall tonight. But you might prefer a restaurant? The food in Hall is said to be very bad.’

‘Oh, no, I should love to dine in Hall. I want to see exactly how you live. I told you, I want to see everything.…’

‘It’s not so interesting,’ said Cassandra, suddenly defensive.

Dinner in Hall was more of an ordeal than Julia had expected. They sat side by side at High Table, peering out over the rows of girls below them. Cassandra was enveloped in the folds of a black gown, over the already considerable folds of her black dress; like a bundle of old stuff, Julia thought, with her wrists and neck protruding from it pale, stick-like, freckled, slightly shiny. Julia thought she herself would have been more at home amongst the undergraduates than amongst these women in jersey dresses, wine, grey, emerald, buckled belts riding over high bellies or dropping on shrunken hips. The younger ones wore twin-sets over tweed skirts. Someone said Grace in a cracked, female voice, and they all sat down. Conversation was made difficult by the general wawling squeal which bounded about in the body of the Hall, so that for a moment or two she watched her sister’s jewelled hand carrying spoonfuls of soup regularly to her mouth, and kept silence. She turned to her neighbour – a plump, frightened-looking creature, with hair reminiscent of the White Queen’s, to whom Cassandra had made no attempt to introduce her, and told her with enthusiasm, in a piercing near-shout, how much she regretted not having taken a degree. This confidence was met by a murmured and disjointed acquiescence; Julia understood from it that it was natural to desire college life but that since she had not come there she was probably not fitted to do so. She could hardly hear, and was not disposed to argue: she retreated into anonymous observation.

The main course was dried lamb chops, dried mashed potatoes, and drying tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce. Cassandra, leaning across to address someone, entangled her dangling crucifix in the spaghetti. It had to be wiped clean. Julia was rigid with embarrassment; obsessed by an image of the bloody loops of paste over the rigid, jewelled arms of the cross, she saw her sister ludicrous, even grotesque, and could not meet her eye. She thought she remembered, disproportionately, absurd facts of this kind; they made her books. They distracted one’s attention, she thought, from the essence – although it was surely from such titbits of facts that one’s attitude to other people was built up? She watched, hungrily, a pair of trembling blue-veined hands, clumsy, fragile, crumble the corner of a crust. Well, what was, she wondered, this essence she was missing? She looked from face to face along the table. Sexless, timid, judging, anxious, drawn-up faces, what did they want? Had they ever been like the screaming, sprawling girls below them? Were they, like Cassandra, in retreat into another world where things happened more perfectly and more intensely? Across the table two women had prolonged a conversation about brands and durability of sewing-machines throughout the meal. Did they want knowledge or power, were they hungry for the academic praise that had singled them out in youth? She collected their expressions with a speculative curiosity she would have said was akin to love. She looked at Cassandra and saw that she was being observed.

‘I think we’ll have coffee in my room,’ said Cassandra.

They had not yet been in Cassandra’s rooms. Whilst Cassandra made coffee, Julia wandered up and down, restlessly, touching everything, fingering figures over the hearth, rearranging pens on the desk, reading bits of essays, spinning globes with a finger-nail.

‘Sit down, won’t you?’ said Cassandra.

Julia ran a hand along the top of the television. ‘I see you’ve got Morgan here.’

‘Yes,’ said Cassandra. She set out cups and sugar. ‘Black or white?’

‘Black. What’s all this?’

‘A critical edition of the
Morte d’Arthur.
For students. Nearly completed.’ She drew up a footstool, gathered herself into the crimson chair, pushed a cigarette into an ivory holder, poured coffee, and reiterated, ‘Sit down, won’t you?’

Julia took her coffee, and sat on a stool, opposite her sister. A clock ticked.

‘Where did you get the lovely little figures, Cass? Tell me about your day – how do you spend your time? Do you enjoy teaching – do you like students? Do you hold with all this about the Grail story being really a fertility myth? Do you think …’

Cassandra told her, dry and informative. About the tutorial system, Cassandra’s summers in Ravenna, the relationship between the Fisher King, the blind Norse God, Hothur, who slew Baldur his brother, because fate so willed it, and the blind soldier Longinus whose spear pierced Christ’s side, released blood which restored his sight, and passed into the Grail legend with Joseph of Arimathea’s cup. They both had a sense that they were restoring, through talking about these things, the good parts of the old relationship in an innocent way.

‘It’s like – it really
is
like – being in the room you have seen just a corner of in a mirror,’ Julia said. ‘I’ve thought so much about all this, I’m glad it’s real, I’m glad I’m here.’

Cassandra looked at her sharply from inside the wings of her chair. What she would have said to this was lost, since there was a knock on the door and a girl came in with half an essay and an apology. Julia stood up, and slid into Cassandra’s bedroom. Behind her she heard the beginning of a halting explanation.

She went round the bedroom with some thoroughness, fingering Cassandra’s dressing-gown on the door, reading the titles of the books which covered the wall above the bed-head, surprised to find, shiny and virginal-looking,
The Silver Swan
, by Julia Corbett, and also
The Trivial Round.
She took these
down and observed her own smile, apologetic and inviting, on the dust-jacket. ‘Julia Corbett is an extraordinary woman who portrays with grim accuracy the trials of ordinary women.’ Oh, Christ. She put them back. Had Cassandra read them? Or had someone sent them, and had Cassandra put them up there unread? She found several locked volumes of Cassandra’s Journal, neatly labelled simply with the year. So that went on. She turned back Cassandra’s bedspread and observed a longsleeved, navy, viyella nightdress and a lace bed-jacket under the pillow. She went through a pile of magazines on the bedside table.
Saeculum, Review of Mediaeval English Studies, The Bibliographer, St. Eusebius’ Parish Magazine, Nature World.
This was a month old. On page 12 was an article:
The least-explored fauna in the world.
‘Simon Moffitt tells of new discoveries among the smaller reptilians in the Amazon basin. A new giant toad.’