The Game (7 page)

She was angry with herself for letting her thoughts stray that way, and wished there was something she could do, practically, for him. She dared not touch his pillows. She was no good at this kind of thing. She would have liked to take his hand, too, but dared not, and when she looked into his faded eyes she felt that he must feel, if he felt anything, that she was peering at him with indecent curiosity.

She wondered what he felt passionately about; his most apparently passionate acts had been gestures of self-denial, long imprisonments for pacifism, and, lately, lying down outside military installations, all six-feet-two of him in a speckled tweed suit, absurd and dignified. He had fought injustice and unreason violently, as though it was possible to win.

And as far as bringing up children went, he had been a negative idealist, a passive idealist. He had laid down no laws, exerted no pressure, expected nothing, left them to make their own choices. From very early he had offered to his children, by way of precept, nothing more than a reasoned
exposé
of alternative courses of action: the decision must be theirs. He did not drink, but they must choose for themselves; they were left to choose their school, their future, their companions, their religions. Both of them had at different times felt it as an affront that he could apparently feel so little involuntary emotion about them as to pursue this course so successfully. We were not – especially I was not – ever
sure
of him, Cassandra said to herself. And out of all this liberalism, extremism grows. What was in fact given to us was space to discover violence. It was too hard for us, all this choosing, we lacked the enclosing
warmth of anything either to rebel against or to welcome in weak moments as absolute restriction. One tends to think that those who are brought up libertine will compensate by growing strict, and those who are marshalled and punished will turn Bohemian. But with us, make your own decisions, anything reasonable is permitted, shifts so easily to everything is permitted, any decision is possible. The Inner Light can indicate the edges of a limitless darkness. Better to grow up believing that it is,
de fide
, not so.

Her father’s hand twitched beside her; he gave a flurry and a gulp; something ran out of the corner of his mouth; and then he slackened. The heavy, bubbling breathing was no longer evident. Cassandra leaned over him cautiously; the tired eyes looked expressionlessly back at her; she touched his cheek and his hand with a trembling finger. She was horrified that she did not now whether he was alive or not. One did not expect not to know. Her knees began to tremble. For a moment she kept very still, thinking of literary acts, looking glass, feather, closing those eyes. She began to shake all over, stumbled to her feet, and hurried out into the corridor calling, in a cracked voice, ‘Nurse, nurse.’

If Nurse could have gone out on her day off, she would, but the snow prevented it, so she was writing letters when Cassandra burst in. This wild irruption was something Nurse would describe to cronies for years; one of the moments of ultimate drama that made tolerable long periods spent by querulous sick-beds and hopeless death-beds. At least you saw life, Nurse would say. Miss Corbett had been a horrible sight; all necklaces flying, and open-mouthed and gasping, and
staring
eyes. One never knew how death would take people. Shaking like a leaf. And the poor old gentleman lying there, not even certainly dead. Though he had been dead all right, at least when
she
got there, and had probably known nothing.

Cassandra watched Nurse trot away down the corridor and then went to be sick in the bathroom. There she sat on the floor, legs outstretched, mopping her nostrils with a handkerchief. Death was such a fact. She ought to go back in there.
She ought to go and help Nurse. Her stomach heaved again. Even this, I can’t do with any dignity. And the father I was thinking about, all that network of love and responsibility, nothing left. The thought and the physical unpleasantness of the fact were somehow unconnected. I could manage one or the other.

After a time she stood up, and went out into the garden, which sloped up behind the house into the hills. She sat on the low wall that marked off garden from hill grass – today, all was indistinguishable thick snow – and clenched her fists on her knees. She thought she ought to pray. She felt trapped – as though her past was fixed now, and could not be remodelled, and her own behaviour had finished it with the largest amount of mess, and lack of warmth possible. I should have spoken to him, she thought, he might have heard. She began to weep, angry and choking, fighting back each sob; she sat there in the cold, until her face was purple and crimson and blotched.

When the others came back from Meeting they were met by Nurse, who had done what was necessary. Miss Corbett, she said, had been present at the end, but had gone out somewhere. Elizabeth Corbett went up with Nurse to look at the body; she stood a long time, in a decent silence, and went to bed, after Nurse had telephoned the doctor, where she wept for some time, and fell into a heavy sleep.

Deborah became hysterical. She was carried off, rigid and choking, by Thor, and put to bed. Julia said, ‘But after all you hardly
knew
him, darling,’ and Thor said, ‘Julia, please don’t be silly, be quiet,’ and appeared downstairs again only briefly, to tell Elsie to bring his supper and Deborah’s upstairs.

Julia found herself suddenly alone. She sat down in the hall by the fire and thought about her father. She had always been the one who could make him laugh: he didn’t mind what she said to him, they shared a whole world of private jokes. They had gone for walks by the river together, and she had amused him with stories, this side of malicious, about girls from school, and, later, not quite
risqué
stories about worthy Friends. He liked this, because most people he met respected
him too much and thought him too good to be amused in this way, and he did not want to feel isolated, or rarefied. Later, she had brought him all her novels and begged him to tell her what he thought of them, partly because she wanted to be assured of his approval, but partly because he was one of the few people she knew who found no difficulty in assuming that fiction was fiction. Other people tended, if they knew her at all well, to be a little embarrassed in her presence, as though she was given to constant indiscretion. Oh, she would miss him.

She became aware that she was admiring herself for her plucky reaction, and constructing a chain of near-sentimental thoughts about her father as though he was a character in a novel. Well, she told herself, either self-indulgently or practically, that’s natural enough, there’ll come a moment when I really take it in, I can’t expect to realize what’s happened, all at once. He wouldn’t expect me to …

She was suddenly completely oppressed by the sense that there was no figure now between herself and the end. She was herself the adult generation – a woman with a great daughter, in the last stretch of life. She wasn’t ready for that. She lived so much on the assumption that she was ‘still young’.

Perhaps she should go and see him. When she thought this, her scalp pricked; she could imagine the body only through Nurse’s restrained hints at Cassandra’s extreme reaction to it. Something vaguely hideous, something nasty … not her father, who had laughed. When she thought of Cassandra, running away, locked in the bathroom, she had a sudden sense of a real and monstrous event, and felt herself lonely and afraid. They had left her alone here, and this she could not bear.

Cassandra would be in the garden. She put on her red cape, and went out through the back door, following the blurred footprints through the snow. Once she saw how Cassandra was taking it, she would know what had happened.

She sat down on the wall, next to her rigid sister.

‘Aren’t you cold, Cass?’ Cassandra’s bony hands were blue.

‘No,’ said Cassandra. Then, ‘It’s still snowing.’ Snow was blowing in little clouds on the hill.

‘Cass,’ said Julia, ‘you ought to come in. Do come in.’

Cassandra shrugged her shoulders.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Julia desperately. ‘I need company, Cassandra.’ It had always been like this. Always asking, for something she should long ago have known better than to expect. Cassandra looked at her, silently; the muscles of her face were stiff, and Julia could see the swelling round her eyes. She was nobody you could comfort.

‘I know you don’t want – to talk.’

‘There’s nothing to say.’

Well,
some
sisters might bloody well talk to each other, Julia’s mind snapped, crossly. For company.

‘Mother’s gone to sleep. Out of exhaustion. Thor’s with Debbie. Debbie’s gone all hysterical. Probably I shouldn’t have brought her. But there didn’t seem much else.…
He
said better to bring her.…’

‘He seems to know what’s best,’ Cassandra said, entering the conversation with an effort. She added, flatly, ‘He seems good.’

‘I don’t know. He’s
too
good, do you know?’

Cassandra shivered.

‘Like Father was too good,’ Julia went on. ‘He will give and give and think he can change everything.’

‘It might be best at least to live like that,’ Cassandra said, with a touch of her old authoritative tone. Julia wanted her to go on talking, to make their father real, by talking. But Cassandra said, more faintly, ‘I’m sorry about Deborah. She seems highly strung.’ A teacher’s assessment. Julia said with a rush. ‘She reminds me of
you
, Cass. All nerves and sharp edges and will-power. She’s clever, too, school-clever. I wish you’d
talk
to her. She needs … I wish …’

Cassandra’s hands plucked at her skirt. She fills me with embarrassment and a kind of respect, Julia thought. Why do I always lie? I don’t want her to talk to Debbie at all. I said that because I always think I need to make contact, somehow;
anyhow, make her see I exist, make her
care.
I want her to take me into account. I want to be nice to her. Foolish. Useless.

‘Cassandra, nobody’s left us anything to do. Come in now,
please.
We could play cards, or something. Like we used to do, remember?’

‘If you like,’ said Cassandra, who was now beginning to feel the cold.

So, all afternoon, whilst Thor made telephone-calls, and held his daughter’s hand, the sisters sat in front of the fire in the hall and played games. They played snakes and ladders, chequers, bezique and piquet. Then they played chess. Julia had changed into tight black velvet trousers and a Swedish rough woollen overshirt, square, high-necked, patterned in purple and scarlet. Round her neck she wore a hammered lump of silver on a chain, from a Knightsbridge crafts shop. Leaning across the chess board, moving the pieces with ringed fingers, they looked surprisingly in keeping with each other, as though Burne-Jones or Rossetti could have used them for models for a painting of a mediaeval lady and her page; Julia’s hair dropped forward in a long, pointed curve along her jaw. She was winning; both of them were accurate players, but Julia was more courageous. They played almost silently.

At supper-time Julia went to see if she was needed and found that she was not; she came back to Cassandra with a plate of ham and tomatoes, and announced this to her.

‘It seems funny we’re not needed, Cass.’

‘Tomorrow, maybe …’

‘Have some bread. Cass … do you think they’ve kept the Game?’

‘It was in my room. It must still be there. I haven’t looked.’

‘Would you look? Do you think we could get it out? We’ve played everything else, it would be exciting to see if we could remember.…’

‘If you like,’ said Cassandra.

‘I’ll come up with you.’

When they were children, there were rules which governed
Julia’s going into Cassandra’s room – passwords, which changed with bewildering frequency, and all sorts of locked drawers, and locked boxes. She had expended some ingenuity on getting into these; she considered Cassandra laid herself open to espionage. For years she had kept secret the fact that the drawer which held Cassandra’s journal could be worked open with the key of her mother’s sewing-machine. Indeed, she did not know now whether Cassandra had known this.

She had still a slight feeling of sacrilege on going into Cassandra’s tiny dark room.

‘It was in the window-seat,’ said Cassandra. ‘As I remember.’ She knelt down in the bay of the window and turned back the lid. There were armfuls of the Game; an enormous roll of oilskin, several shoe boxes of clay figures, more boxes of little cards, which were written over with rules and forfeits laid out like laws, long, heavy ledgers written up alternately by Cassandra and Julia; move by move chronicles, increasing in length and complexity over the years. It had all begun when they were seven and nine, with the personification of a pack of cards which they had divided into four armies – the red were Julia’s, the black Cassandra’s. From day to day they had expanded the account of their battles, rounding out characters and creating rules for movement – the oilskin map had come next with a whole countryside laid out on it, castles, rivers, cottages, chapels, glued and varnished largely by Cassandra who was capable of producing fine and delicate lines with a paint brush and pen. This oilskin map covered a good half of their hall area, when unrolled now; they had wanted to make it three-dimensional, but had run into storage problems.

The clay figures had been a later development, when the armies had expanded beyond their original thirteen men, and when Cassandra had discovered Morris, Tennyson and the
Morte d’Arthur
indiscriminately together. In the early days, they had worked entirely together, and the plots they created had consisted largely of the machinations of organized military antagonism. Later, the emphasis shifted from the moves on the
board to the chronicling of intrigue, misguided love and eternal hatred: Cassandra wrote long poems in ballad metre about the affairs of Queen Morgan, and Julia chronicled every stage of the hopeless passion of Elaine of Astolat. Both sisters at this stage were aware that the other’s imagination was also vigorously working in private on what was discussed less hotly in public, over the map. Julia had what she read of Cassandra’s journal to prove it. But it had been completely absorbing, Julia thought now, it had taken up almost all her attention between the ages of seven and seventeen: they had worked out already attitudes to all sorts of adult problems which she for one had found alternately percipient and fantastically thwarting – how did one ever rid oneself of a longing for a devouring love which one saw, wisely, to be impossible, but had enjoyed in such verisimilitude and detail when nothing else was happening to one at all? She looked at Cassandra, who was silently, with pursed lips, deploying her black forces across the map. The things
she
had imagined had frightened Julia, who as a child had had nightmares, and woken screaming and sweating to be comforted by Inge on account of things she had lived through with Cassandra earlier in the day. Cassandra had always seen the nightmares as a simple manoeuvre to gain credit for herself and put Cassandra in the wrong; but for days together Julia had walked up and down the village streets pursued by vague fears and a sense of doom. Her attempts to palliate Cassandra’s dramas with happy endings, or innocent affections, had been no use – Cassandra paid little attention, and when she did twisted Julia’s stories towards her own grim conclusions.