The Game (8 page)

Well, she had shaken it off, slowly, and felt impoverished for it. She had shaken off, that was, almost everything but the nightmares, which persisted; her own countryside peopled by Cassandra’s characters and events. It was easy enough to see what Cassandra had made of it all – an object for detailed examination, sterilized with footnotes and things.

She could guess, she thought, what Cassandra dreamed – and not only at night. As for herself, it could have been clear enough to Cassandra what use she had made of their stories. ‘In Miss
Julia Corbett’s first two novels an element of romantic fantasy was uneasily blended with a warm, human understanding of very real daily problems. In her later work she has consolidated her achievement in the second field – she is probably the best of that increasing number of women writers who explore in loving detail the lives of those trapped in comfort by washing-machines and small children – but with the fantastic romantic overtones some of the vigour has been lost. In the earlier books, clumsily conveyed, was a sense of possibilities and concerns outside domestic claustrophobia. I sometimes wish Miss Corbett could see her way to reopening, reinvigorating her fantastic vein; she might then have it in her to be a very good writer.’ This was from
The Guardian
; Julia had it by heart; it had both irked and vaguely encouraged her. She wondered whether Cassandra had ever read her novels, and whether Cassandra had written anything herself. She thought: she is not creative. She is critical. But it wasn’t the whole truth. It was strange how even now what she saw to be the childish clumsiness of the little figures seemed so much alive.

They began to play, very self-consciously, going back to the very early days of their partnership when the game had depended on the organization of the moves rather than on sustained imaginative effort. In the later days, they had sat and narrated the feelings of their characters in high romantic prose, with a certain formality. Julia was aware that they were both pretending to forget things; she herself ‘lost’ several characters in the Forêt Sauvage and could not remember how they could be extricated; Cassandra had to ask whether the Abbey grounds, as well as the Abbey, were sanctuary. Cassandra was smiling slightly – Julia, losing a slice of land and several soldiers cried, ‘Do you remember when we decided they were all immortal the day I cried too much to go on? Oh, I
was
a bad loser.’

Cassandra laughed, and settled the red knights in her dungeon.

‘At least they
are
immortal,’ said Julia, feeling a sudden rush of warmth towards Cassandra, the Game, her childhood
and herself, as a child, mourning and reviving the dead knights.

‘Immortal?’ said Thor from the gallery. ‘Who is immortal?’

He leaned over the banister, a pale figure in a thick white fisherman’s sweater, his blond hair gleaming. Julia stared up at him.

‘Characters,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t. They have gone to sleep. I am going to bed.’

‘It’s a bit early. I’ll come. I’ll come in a moment.’

‘As you will,’ said Thor, vanishing.

When he had gone, Julia said, ‘Oh dear. Oh damn. He makes me feel I behave so badly. At least, I just let him do all the things I ought to be doing. Oh God, Cassandra, I hate myself.’

‘Do you?’ said Cassandra. She added, ‘We all need to protect ourselves from thinking too much. We all have different ways. I should think he might understand that. He’s intelligent.’

‘You know it’s not only self-protection. It’s a kind of self-indulgence.’ Julia looked almost pleadingly at Cassandra.

‘Well —’ said Cassandra. Then, ‘In any case, what does he know? If he does know, he’s likely to forgive. He seems forgiving.’

‘
Forgiving?’
said Julia.

‘Not that I’m in a position to judge,’ said Cassandra, balancing the black Queen on the palm of her hand. The Queen’s face, by some lucky accident, had a real severity of expression, whilst her skirts were sculpted into real movement. Cassandra closed her hand over her; she was an object still so familiar that she was difficult to see clearly. Julia thought; that was almost a conversation with Cassandra. She bent her head over the network of paths and rivers on the carpet, traced one with her finger, and plunged.

‘Have you been watching the telly, lately, Cass?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you – would you mind watching?’

‘If you like,’ said Cassandra. Julia could not tell whether the suggestion had pleased or displeased her; nor was she quite sure what feeling had driven her to make it. Cassandra had behaved abominably over the whole thing with Simon; and to watch him, together, at that distance beside their own fire, might neutralize some of the bad feeling; clean something up. Though anything that had had to wait so many years to be cleared up might well take more than one television rite. She stood up and switched on the set, and put out the lights.

The picture jiggled into shape.

‘Don’t you hate that girl?’ said Julia. ‘All coy and routine. Having to do all that smiling. Awful job. Ugh, I
hate
her. Do you know, Cass, I’m going to be on the telly myself, on a rather highbrow sort of quiz programme thing, called
The Lively Arts.
Run by a
lovely
man called Ivan Rostrevor, who has all sorts of super ideas and loves
me
, which is always nice, isn’t it? We’re going to be a sort of panel, of all different kinds of artists, and study our different reactions to different sorts of things – Ivan wants to show how daily life affects the artists, and how the artists’ daily lives are affected by
being
artists. I mean, he might show us a film of a road accident. Or a rocket. Or children at nursery school. Or a revivalist talking about C.N.D. He’s got all sorts of ideas. He says the artist’s both different from and the same as the common man … some weeks we’re going to examine our own daily lives.…’

Nervousness, Julia thought, is making me talk to her as I talk to people in the studio, or something. The cultured girl bent the bow of her smile for the last time on the details of the new series of broadcasts of genuine religious services.

‘I suppose they pay well,’ Cassandra said. Julia twisted her rings.

Simon appeared at a distance, pushing a hollowed log canoe down a slight slope, into water that rippled and splashed. For some time he paddled silently across the screen; first across a pool of open water, then into a dark tunnel of arching creepers. Then they watched a caiman, on its bandy legs, hoist itself out of the water on to a narrow beach, where it lay, staring. Simon
explained, precisely, how it breathed – ‘the air enters the raised nostrils at the end of the snout and passes over the palate into the throat, which can be closed by a flap of mucosa. Thus, when it opens its mouth under water to seize its prey, this does not interfere with its breathing.’ He expatiated upon its teeth, which, before he had explained how one tooth slotted into the other jaw had seemed to sprout haphazardly, stump-like, all along it. ‘This is a smooth-fronted caiman: it and the dwarf caiman – the smallest alligators – appear to violate the rule that two very similar species are not found closely associated in nature. Normally, we find that some kind of “competition” for survival does appear to operate: exact studies of apparently similar species which do coexist seem to suggest that they are in some ways importantly separated – one may live in the trees, the other on the ground, one may – must – eat food entirely different from the other. And so on. In other words – except in the case of the smooth-fronted and the dwarf caimans, you will find that crocodilians in the same area are either of the same species, or so dissimilar that there is no clash of interest between them.

‘A naturalist,’ Simon said, as the camera held him and his caiman together in one picture, ‘has to be making constant distinctions between the individual and the species, between form and the apparent breaking of that form. Between general laws – like the one about competition – which explains certain facts, and the particular exception which may teach one something about both the law, and the species which does not conform. I am making a detailed study of the habits of these two species of caiman. But the individual caiman is of interest in himself, and because of what he adds to our knowledge of his species. This one, for instance, will have stomach contents not
precisely
the same as any other. We are delighted both by the inevitable recurrence of patterning – the veining of a leaf – and the fact that no two leaves, no two faces, no two alligators are ever the same. In the case of faces, we are trained to observe differences – though we are less skilled in the case of people not of our own race. But what I have to teach myself is
to attend so sharply to these creatures as to pick up differences even in their scale formation.’

The caiman was raising itself to its feet. It lifted a slow, clawed foot, amongst folds of skin, and then rested, in mid-motion: the camera insisted, for a moment, on the ticking pulse of life in the soft skin of its throat, under its immobile stare. Then, heavy and slow, it began to walk away, raised, almost strutting, on its disproportionately thin legs, its huge tail stretched out like a weight behind it. Simon explained that it was an illusion to think that they dragged themselves; they walked, as the crocodilians had walked in the early days of the earth, though some of those had leaped on two legs. ‘Living fossils,’ said Simon. ‘A form of life that really flourished in another climate, and on the whole couldn’t adapt. But again, the individual fate – the fate of the species, or of the individual creature – is different from what may seem laid down by general laws of change or fate. We don’t know why almost all reptiles died. Nor do we know why these did not.’

The camera rested for a moment on a whole floating group of the animals, thick bodies floating indistinguishably together.

‘Reptiles are fairly well classified,’ said Simon. ‘I spend time studying the water, too.’

He was shown, dipping jars, measuring, paddling a little farther along the creek, dipping, measuring. They saw his face, peering mournfully at them over the side of the boat, shadowed by beard-stubble, with the ungainly shoulders hunched behind it. He gave a snort of discomfort. Cassandra tied a knot in a gold chain. Julia said:

‘Cassandra, who takes the photographs?’

‘I have asked myself that.’

‘I mean, it must be somebody bloody good with a camera. They don’t seem to mention whoever it is. It’s funny, how it’s all presented as though there aren’t any other
people
there, isn’t it? I mean, most of these explorer bods have whole
teams
of bearded workers, don’t they? And Indians, and chaps with bales on their heads.’

‘Hudson,’ said Cassandra. ‘No camera. Whoever it is, it’s good, I agree. So good – so fluid – it all seems unreal, somehow. I mean, unreal, because so much an image for man observing – his origins? His animal nature? The roots of life? I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing.’

‘No, but it is all a bit self-conscious, Cass, you’ve hit it exactly. A bit
produced.
I mean, he’s pretending to be a naked hermit, but we can all
see
it’s been put together with fantastic skill for the telly – all those magnifications and things.… I mean, it makes all the appeal he has somehow dishonest.…’

‘Has he appeal?’ said Cassandra.

‘Oh,
enormous.
He’s a sort of popular symbol of what’s got crowded out of our urban lives. In certain circles. A nature image in their very own drawing-rooms. He doesn’t go in much for fertility, unfortunately. He’s got a vogue. Women think he wants cuddling and domesticating.…’

‘My undergraduates like him.’

‘
Simon
,’ said Julia, and laughed.

‘I know.’

‘That means – there is someone out there – to whom he talks.… Someone whose idea all this is, perhaps. What does he do when the camera’s off him?’

‘Charm snakes,’ said Cassandra. ‘We shan’t ever know.’

Simon said, ‘Here is a magnification of the things in the kind of water I just bottled. The kind of activity outside our normal consciousness. Outside our sense of proportion. Like the speed of grass growing. Or the spread of cancer. Things we have to make an effort to be aware of.’

He peered at them for a moment almost crossly, as though troubled by his own natural inadequacy. A shot of the normal cloudiness of the glass beaker of water was followed by a microscopic expansion of it, a bursting open of vague specks into things alive, transparent, reticulated, shapeless, with waving tentacles and gaping mouths, which jumped and squirmed and floated and writhed across the scene. Something like a parasol, ribbed and frilled, ballooned gently down from the top right-hand corner to the opposite lower corner. Somewhere
else a strange string of long beads broke apart and reformed. A flabby blob of jelly made itself a long mouth, ingested a black speck and closed over it, swelling slightly, whilst the scar of the mouth opening slowly disappeared. For a moment Simon lectured them on the alien movements of this unfamiliar life; what was known about the pattern of it, what was not. He told them some names, and pointed out with elation nameless scraps of life. ‘No wonder we lose our sense of our own place,’ he said, reappearing, and fading. ‘We shall never know very much about all this: this is what draws us. As it should.’

A large white bird strode through the water, peering elegantly this way and that, leaving behind it a trail of wavering liquid arrows, that lost their directness in the weeds at the water’s edge. Cassandra could almost feel the packed, silky texture of the feathers.

Julia said, ‘Shall I turn it off?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t
bear
the clergymen. Sorry, Cass – but I just can’t.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘No. It’s been a – a funny day. Do you think it was a good thing for us – playing – and so on?’

‘We do the best we can,’ said Cassandra, dubiously.

‘Do we?’

‘Apparently. I don’t know what else we could have done.’

‘I’m glad we —’ Julia had been going to say ‘talked’ but they hadn’t really. ‘I enjoyed the Game. I hope.… We can have a long talk tomorrow?’