The Game (30 page)

‘What are you doing?’ said Julia.

‘I won’t have it.’ He began, trampling around amongst these objects, to tear out the drawers and pile them on the bed; Julia’s clothes trailed between bed and dressing-table.

‘Leave my things alone.’

‘Your things. Your things. Bloody
things.
I want to get at my things,’ he said, childishly. He said to Simon, ‘You know, I should never have married.’ He began to shake the wardrobe, which always stuck.

‘No,’ said Simon. ‘Probably not.’ He looked mournfully at the ground. ‘But in our time it seems to be expected of us, by and large.’

Julia flew at her husband, who in the same moment burst open the rocking wardrobe.

‘Will you shut up. What do you keep telling Simon things for? What the hell is the point of telling Simon about whether or not you ought to be married? Look, for God’s sake, we shall
all
be sorry for this tomorrow. You ought to know better than to keep telling Simon.’

Thor tugged out a Gladstone bag, ripped open the bed, and pulled out his crumpled pyjamas, which he stuffed into the bag.

‘You tell Simon enough,’ he said, as though this were an
answer. He piled in electric razor, bedroom slippers and hair-brush.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going.’

‘Don’t be silly. Don’t be such a fool, you can’t go, that won’t change anything.’

‘I should have gone years ago.’ He shook his foot free of one of Julia’s nightdresses and ran into the bathroom. He came back, carrying his wet pack, thrust that into the bag, turned to Julia and said levelly, ‘All I do is give you something to complain about. All I do. Well it’s not good for you.’ He struggled with the zip and then gathered up the bag and said, ‘But that’s not the point, and I know it. I want to break your neck, too, that’s a fact, and I’m going, before I do.’ He looked absurd, pompous and about sixteen years old. Julia thought, oh God, he will be so ashamed of having said that when he gets back, we shall all suffer for it for weeks. If I could cry, he might get more reasonable. She went up to him and put her arms round his neck; his shame and embarrassment had to be forestalled, somehow.

‘Listen, darling, we can talk about this.’

He shook himself free and gathered up the bag. Then he filled his brief-case almost methodically, with papers which had been removed from his study, and clasped it shut. Then, followed by Deborah, Simon and Julia, now in that order, he hurried out into the hall.

‘Just because you’re overwrought, you don’t have to humiliate me,’ said Julia. Thor unhooked his overcoat and woollen scarf and put these on. It was then that Julia saw that he meant to go. Simon, for some reason, gathered up his own umbrella and brief-case and stood, dangling these. Deborah was standing very close to Simon.

‘Well,’ Thor said, opening the door. ‘Well —’ He nodded his pale head in their general direction, went out on to the landing, and closed the door behind him. For a few moments, they all stood, listening to his footsteps, running but unhurried, down the stairs.

Julia had a large audience for her reaction to her husband’s departure. She turned and stared back at them all; Simon and Deborah; the draggled row of Bakers, black eyes and yellow faces, mute, patient, somehow greedy.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d better at least clear this mess up.’ She spread a newspaper on the carpet and began to pick up shreds of veal, peas, slivers of broken glass.

‘I hope it isn’t along of us,’ Mrs Baker offered.

‘No, no. It’s nothing.’

‘I don’t think it’s nothing,’ said Deborah.

Julia glanced at her with loathing.

‘I think we’d better push off tomorrow,’ Mr Baker said lugubriously.

‘Don’t be silly. It’s nothing to do with you.’

Mrs Baker looked offended. Simon, incredibly, was struggling into his raincoat, in which he had entangled his umbrella.

‘Simon!’ said Julia. ‘Please stay here. Please don’t go.’

‘I ought to be —’

‘You
can’t
, Si —’

‘You have a good cry, that’s right,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘It’ll do you good.’

‘Don’t go yet, Simon,’ said Deborah. Simon executed a complicated reversed loop with arms and raincoat, and stood, clutching to his breast a bundle of both objects. Julia threw a whole plate on to her newspaper, where it broke. Her fingers were slippery with gravy, and she had a narrow cut, from the glass, on one of them.

‘I wish you’d go away,’ she said, curtly, to the Bakers. ‘We’ll sort it all out tomorrow.’

Mrs Baker shepherded them all, with deliberation, into their own quarters; Simon sat down, nursing his equipment, on the edge of the couch. Deborah sat down next to him. Julia went and emptied the nappies out into the sink. Then she brought back the nappy bucket and began to pile her newspaper pickings into it. She did not look at Simon; she wanted him; for one wild moment she had seen the door closing behind her husband as a door closing her in with Simon.

‘I wish,’ she said, ‘I could just get up and leave all this. Just go.’

‘Simon,’ said Deborah, ‘will he come back?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘How will he be able to stay away? He believes in being normal. Having roots. He can’t just go.’

‘He wants to be good,’ said Simon. ‘But I think he may settle for doing good, now.’ He twisted his umbrella. ‘He’s an immoderate man brought up in a tradition of moderation. So he was immoderate about that too. A naturally violent man, a fanatic, trying to be a reasonable pacifist.’

‘He’s a fool,’ said Julia, ‘and he doesn’t know himself.’

‘Which of us do?’ said Simon. ‘I never know how much it matters. Clearly, one ought to know oneself well enough – not to destroy oneself through making immoderate demands on oneself. One ought to know other people enough not to expect the impossible of them, either. And so it follows, one ought not to live by a theory of human nature that won’t bear treading on, that caves in, under one’s feet. But I think he’s found that out, now. It only really applies to him. All the rest of us are probably too conscious of our limitations – we’d do better to expect more of ourselves, and know ourselves a little less thoroughly. As for him – if he goes out there now he’ll go knowing he’s a fanatic – and not bothering too about the element of self-aggrandizement in that – and knowing that small acts are something
in themselves.
Penicillin and milk, Deborah, facts, in themselves. I admire him.’

‘Yes,’ said Deborah. ‘So do I.’

‘If it weren’t for you, Simon Moffitt,’ Julia said, ‘this would never have happened.’

Simon avoided her eye. ‘I’ve had much less to do with it than you have.’

‘You go about, offering helpful advice and comfort. Are you so sure your own house is in order?’

‘All my life I’ve avoided having a house,’ said Simon, ‘for that reason.’

‘Simon!’ said Julia. She did not know what plea or confession
should follow this: everything was out of proportion; she knew she should not be seeing Thor’s departure in terms of Simon, but this was how it was. But she was not seeing Simon clearly, either; she was too conscious of Deborah’s watching eye.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve really got to go.’

Deborah held one shoulder of his raincoat for him. He looked dubiously at Julia.

‘I’ll come back,’ he said, ‘when I get back. I’m out of town for a few days. I don’t know how long. But I’ll come back.’

He wandered towards the door.

‘You ought,’ he said to Julia, ‘to think out clearly what you really want.’

Julia was momentarily lightened by the murderous rage with which this remark filled her; she said, briskly, ‘Well, if you must go, get on with it, for goodness’ sake,’ and strode into the kitchen. Here, from a need for martyrdom and activity, she began violently to wash the nappies. After a moment, Deborah joined her.

‘If I were you I’d make Mrs Baker do those. This is a nice mess, isn’t it? At least he didn’t tell us to look after each other. Did he?’

C
ASSANDRA
watched the gardener turn on the tap. The hosepipe jerked as though it was alive, flung itself from side to side, and gushed water. The gardener closed it off, partially, and headed it into the pool; the whole glass-house was filled with a slow, bubbling, dropping sound. Steam hissed faintly. The gardener stumped along the grating that surrounded the pool, glancing only cursorily at Cassandra, to whose presence he was now used. Outside it was raining steadily; the beat of water on the glass roof mixed with the bubble of the hose. Cassandra covered a sheet of paper with a recurrent ribbed pattern in charcoal, clear and then blurred, the hosepipe still and in motion. On the rim of the concrete pool, beside her, lay a packet of cooling fish and chips and her canvas satchel.

In the pool a shoal of very small fishes moved, connected and purposeful, through the weeds, with hard little heads and tapered bodies. Cassandra was waiting for the big fish. When the gardener had gone she took out a cardboard pot of dried daphnia and sprinkled a little on the surface of the water. The little fish darted up and then wheeled away, as, from somewhere amongst the tangled roots and liquid mud, the big fish rose, pink and bulbous. Cassandra watched it. It was the size of a man’s fist and was pale and glistening. It had long, trailing, ragged fins and tail, sprouting from the rotund surfaces, and the dark coils of its entrails were visible through the walls of its belly. On the head its eyes stood out, straining, and the surface between them was cracked and crazed and patterned with little crevices and bloodshot streaks, iridescent, discoloured, white, apricot, rose. It was extremely ugly and Cassandra knew every line of its body. It was clearly very old and made no unnecessary movements; slowly now, trailing its tattered appendages, it razed the undersurface of the water,
sucking in with horny lips the specks of food, adding a series of dry little gulps to the other sounds in the place. Cassandra decided to paint it from underneath, distorting it carefully so that it was seen elongated, cramped to the surface, where its cracked head was reflected. It looked stonily at her; a thin black ribbon of excrement dangled from it. Cassandra upended herself beside the pool and laid her head sideways on the stone, staring in. Then she began to paint.

After a time the door opened and closed and steps clanged on the grating. Then the door ground again. Cassandra knew that someone else was inside; she could feel the faint sounds of clothing and breath. The fish goggled desperately under the surface of its world: Cassandra had to guard, these days, against a feeling that the glass-house was hers and that no one had the right to intrude or disturb her fish. She tapped her teeth with her tongue and looked up with a momentary frown through the curtain of steam and feathery foliage. He was leaning on his umbrella, watching her; caught out, on hands and knees, sandy hair springing about her face, she stared back. She was completely and really uncertain whether she had called him up. Either way, she knew now what madness felt like. She remembered that she had not known whether her father was alive or dead. He was wearing a white macintosh.

‘Cassandra?’ he said, dubiously. ‘Cassandra!’ His voice echoed against the glass. ‘I – I didn’t know you were a nature student.’ He began, with the same clanging steps, to come round the pool. Cassandra’s painting slid into the water and skidded across the surface. The fish backed several feet, stirring troubled fins. Cassandra struggled to sit upright. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Let me.’ He stretched out his arm, coat, jacket and all, across the pool and made a lurching grab. He retrieved the painting and began to dab at it with a handkerchief.

‘Am I doing damage? Am I making it worse?’

Cassandra, clumsy with shock, shifted herself and knocked the fish and chips into the water. The packet sank slowly; they watched it; the newspaper unfurled and a chip and a film of grease bobbed to the surface.

‘Look what you’ve made me do,’ Cassandra snapped, savage. He started slightly, and then began, patiently, to retrieve chips and flakes of sodden cod in handfuls. His sleeves dripped.

‘I’m sure we ought not to disturb the balance. Or all the fish might die.’ He righted himself, and considered her. ‘Now, what are you doing here, painting hosepipes and fish? Julia said you were a don.’

‘I am,’ said Cassandra, strangled.

‘Do you know, I’ve got water running right into my armpits? Trickling down my ribs. I don’t suppose you want this fish and chips. Have they got a disposal bin in here?’

‘I don’t know.’ Cassandra had begun to shiver; her mouth was dry; she felt all the symptoms of panic fear. She had not called him up, but there was something wrong with him, something distorted, something not allowed for. ‘Why …?’ she whispered, swallowing. ‘Why …?’

‘Why am I here? I’m giving a paper. On toads. To a zoological group who kindly paid my expenses, and then there were some specimens I’ve been helping them with here. I came up from Liverpool Street, I’ve got a room in the Mitre. It’s all fixed. It’s a good paper but of course I’m a bad talker.’ He was not looking at her. Gathering herself to pay him attention she thought him, for him, garrulous. ‘I was going to look you up, as a matter of fact, in your college, almost immediately. Deborah told me where to find you. There was something I wanted to … I’ve been hearing about you. I thought …’ He looked at her, and waited for a response. Cassandra swallowed again. A cloud of little fishes had gathered round the remaining morsels of cod, sucking at them.

‘Yes, I meant to ask you,’ he said, still in the same bright, conversational tone. ‘I knew a man who was eaten by fish. I saw it.’

‘Piranhas?’

‘Yes. I saw it.’

Cassandra looked down at the pool and then across at his face. There were, in the softness of real flesh, the scars, the
pockmarks, the protuberances. He was assessing her in some way, and still smiling. Cassandra’s imagination worked on the dead man and the fish: blood in water, flaps and shreds of flesh, eager toothed mouths. She saw, precisely, as though it was given from outside herself, stripped bones turning in water, drowned and floating reddish hair, torn tendons; the bones were not dry, but pearly and damp with life and streaked with red. She thought she saw what he saw; this was what, over the years, she had been training herself to do. No, she had not called him up, he was not her creature, but she shared what he saw.