The Game (13 page)

‘You wouldn’t have a penny, would you? I mean, could you change a threepenny piece?’

‘I think I could
give
you a penny.’ Julia turned out her pockets, clutching handkerchief, key, residual biscuit-crumbs. Her letter fell on the pavement. They bent down, together, both clumsily.

‘Coincidence,’ he said, holding out to her, one in each hand, her envelope and the one he had come to post. Both were addressed to Miss Cassandra Corbett, in Oxford. His was clean, and flat, as though it contained only one folded slip of paper. She held out her own wad of school-book scribble.

‘How funny,’ she said. ‘She almost never answers mine.…’

‘I’m a shocking correspondent myself. I hate writing letters; I don’t, often.…’

Julia handed him the penny. He stamped his letter and tossed it into the mouth of the box.

‘Aren’t you going to post yours? It looks much more exciting than mine.’ He laughed, rather disagreeably, Julia thought.

‘I don’t suppose
she’ll
think so. I write them for my own benefit really. One can’t talk to oneself.’

‘Well, go on, post it.’

‘But I’m always afraid she’ll laugh.’

‘Laugh?’

Julia gummed up the envelope and pushed it into the box. ‘Good for you,’ he said. Empty-handed now, they looked at each other.

He was much younger than she had expected, she thought immediately. His face, with the full, pouting mouth, had an unformed look, reinforced by a few pale purple scars where pimples had presumably been, and odd patches of hair sprouting at the mouth corners, along the jaw-line, silky, not bristling, as though this was all the hair he grew and he believed he need not shave often. A tangle of curls flopped on his forehead. His lack of assured physical presence encouraged Julia. At
the same time, it disappointed her; she had expected him formidable.

‘I can’t imagine Cassandra
laughing
at anyone,’ he said. ‘Such a serious girl.’

‘Well, she probably wouldn’t laugh at you.’ Julia swallowed her words. She had imagined this meeting so many times and was now at a loss about what to make of it or how to prolong it. He gave a deprecating shrug and said nothing to this; Julia began to walk away, rapidly, without having said goodbye. He came with her, falling over his feet, and then, catching her up, he took a swinging step that was too long and brought them into collision.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Sorry, damn.’

Julia brushed her skirt and laughed. He blushed.

‘Does she like Oxford then, Cassandra?’

‘I don’t really know. She’d be far more likely to tell you what she really thought than me, anyway.’

‘W-wait,’ he said. ‘W-we don’t know each other. Do we?’

‘I know who you are. I’m Julia.’ He waited. ‘Julia Corbett.’

‘Oh – Cassandra’s
sister.
I remember, she said she.… Why haven’t I met you?’

‘I’ve been away at school.’

‘But you know who I am?’

‘Oh, yes. I know an awful lot about you.’ She did not explain that what she knew had been gleaned from Cassandra’s diary. ‘All sorts of things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Nothing that’s not nice. How very clever you are. And understanding and wise. That sort of thing.’

She said this with a slight touch of mockery and he looked at her suspiciously. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, rapidly, frowning. Julia felt suddenly powerful. ‘It’s a funny name, Cassandra.’

‘I suppose so. We’ve had one in the family since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Every other generation. My name’s a family name, too. I used to call her Antimacassar. And Cassowary.’

Simon laughed.

‘Children are awfully mean,’ said Julia. He said nothing; Julia was afraid she had lost him; he stared moodily at the pavement, troubling over something; she walked calmly beside him, smiling slightly.

‘I say,’ he said, suddenly. ‘You wouldn’t like a cup of tea, would you? It’s a bit of a walk, I suppose. Not a bad walk.’

‘I’d love one,’ said Julia. ‘I’d love one.’

‘It’d be something to tell Cassandra.’

‘Yes,’ said Julia, meekly.

‘You both go in for long letters,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you find so much to say …’

Julia expatiated.

After that, he came to tea in the Old House, several times. They talked about Cassandra, and then about Life; Simon revealed a gossipy side that she would not, from what she had read of him, have suspected in him. Julia took care not to dress with care for him. On the last of these occasions, when they were sitting alone by the fire in the living-room, she said, ‘Cassandra comes back, next week.’

‘Good.’

‘Did you – mention these tea-parties?’

‘No, actually,’ he said. ‘Should I have?’ His long-legged body was laid diagonally across the arm-chair, so that parts of it sagged loosely into the cushion and parts were rigid. He did not look comfortable. ‘We don’t write that sort of letter, actually.’

He pushed at his mouth with one finger so that his lips bulged in an ugly scowl, and then released it again. Julia thought he was unattractive. She remembered, on later occasions, that this was what she had thought. He was also, she considered, neither direct nor honest.

‘Did you?’ he said.

‘Did I what?’

‘Tell Cassandra. I should have thought you might have, the letters you write.’

‘I didn’t think there was much to tell.’

‘No,’ he agreed.

‘But don’t you think we ought? I mean, it isn’t a secret. It oughtn’t to look like one.’

‘Well, if it isn’t, I’d just let it be, if I were you.’

‘But she won’t
like
it, Si.’

Simon folded up various limbs, and sat up, more or less normally.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, because.… Because she cares so much about you. About talking to you. You mean something to her.’ She had noticed that to tell him this always irritated him: nevertheless, it was surely necessary.

‘Well, what’s that got to say to it?’

‘Oh, Si, don’t be stupid. She doesn’t like
me
, that’s what I’m trying to say. She never has, for as long as I can remember. She – she doesn’t like sharing things. She won’t want me – sharing her particular friends.’

‘Why doesn’t she like you?’

‘Oh – because I – I don’t know. I – I used to worship her. I – I suppose I was always after her. Finding out what she was doing and trying to do it too. I can see it might have been maddening. She ignores me a lot. Tries to pretend I’m not there. Though at school – we didn’t really know anyone except each other. She – she isn’t easy to get on with. She despises people. Sometimes I think, if she were less prickly and proud, I might’ve made more friends and then I wouldn’t need her so.… It was all a bit awful, really. She hasn’t had much. I don’t want to – look as though I’m trying to – take anything.’

‘That’s my business,’ said Simon, with youthful judiciousness. ‘Why are you so frightened of her?’

‘Well, she’s so clever. So uncompromising. She sets impossible standards.’ Also, she conducts the Game.

‘Yes, but I shouldn’t have thought you need mind her. You’ve got all sorts of advantages she hasn’t. I can see she might be jealous of you, that makes sense. You engage with life, if I may put it that way. Cassandra – for all her cleverness
– Cassandra’s a bit silly. The thing about Cassandra is, you never feel she’s all there, do you? Sorry, I don’t mean that vulgarly. But she just doesn’t quite exist.’

Julia felt this was heresy, delicious and terrible. And Simon saw her, he saw she was someone. Simon wriggled, and flopped again in the chair. He gave her a sudden warm, questioning smile; tentatively, she smiled back.

‘I can’t see any use in making a point of telling her if you think it’ll annoy her. We’ll sort it all out.’

Since Julia had no precise desire to tell Cassandra anything she dropped the question.

The day before Cassandra came home he called and took her out, for the day, to Craster. At the Old House he talked for some time to Jonathan Corbett, vaguely, about the weather and the war. One of the things that was worrying Julia was the way in which her parents – and Inge, and Elsie – so clearly and tactfully saw Simon as Julia’s first boy-friend. They were glad for her; Cassandra had Oxford; she had worryingly insisted on leaving school to make tea for the local newspapermen. Inge brought out a packet of sandwiches and a Thermos flask of sweet tea. These they consumed on the beach, having walked northwards towards Bamburgh over stones and rocks slippery with seaweed.

‘I like your father, Julia. He thinks life’s worth making an effort with. I like that. I envy him that.’

‘I love him,’ said Julia. ‘He’s a good man. He does so much. Cass gets furious that he’s not with us more – she says he’s got no right to keep being imprisoned at the State’s expense, not in
this
war – and anyway, she just gets furious. But I like to see anyone care so much for anything. I really admire him.’

‘You know my father shot himself?’

‘Yes,’ said Julia. She added hastily, ‘That’s all I do know. Someone told me. In the post office.’

‘People do tell you things.’

‘Why did he, Si?’

‘Oh, all sorts of reasons. He wasn’t like your father. He
was gassed in the trenches in the last war, you know – he still had nightmares, absolutely regularly, about that. He used to go on and on about the trenches. Terrible detailed stories. You can imagine. No, you probably can’t. I don’t think anything was real to him that happened since. This war was a fearful blow. He – oh, in some way, he saw it as the end of the civilized world, all right. So it was bad enough for him, without my mother. Did they tell you in the post office about my mother?’

‘No,’ said Julia, mendaciously.

‘My mother is a very silly woman. Beautiful, in a girlish way. Very promiscuous.’

‘I see.’

‘We lived in London, a lot of the time, that’s why I’ve never met you. My mother – used to confide in me. As though,’ Simon shrugged and smiled, ‘I was a sort of girl-friend. She kept saying society is disintegrating and people are desperate and have a sort of wild freedom. I did things like hide letters for her. She’s careless. She thought I thought it was romantic. I thought it was all rather disgusting, really —’

‘It didn’t,’ Julia cried out of her own grievance, ‘give you much of a chance to grow up normally, did it? To have things children do have – ought to have?’

‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I —’

‘So you felt for your father.’

‘He didn’t make that easy. We were both – Mama and I – scared of him. He was a foul-tempered man. Disappointed. Not only with Mama – he wanted to be a serious politician, and never got on. Too reactionary. He didn’t like me. He didn’t know he didn’t, but I knew.

When I – when I decided to go into the Church, I did try, with him. He hated the idea of my going into the Church, he said it was for half-men. I hated him shouting. The more afraid I … the more angry he … Sometimes he drove me to tears, that maddened him.’

‘I suppose I partly think that about the Church. Because of this thing I have about coming to grips with normal life –
not cutting yourself off, at all costs. The church does cut you off. I’m sorry, Si —’

‘No.’ He paused. Then he glanced at her quickly and said, ‘Religion’s a funny thing. There are times when one needs it desperately, it’s all there is. When one needs a structure – some rules, some idea of what’s best to do, an end for one’s actions. And then, one morning one wakes up and finds the whole thing’s completely meaningless. Completely. One is just not the same person. It all seems absurd and forced and obscene. Above all, forced.’

‘I know,’ said Julia, who had never experienced more than a momentary religious twinge herself, and supposed serenely that the revelation of meaninglessness awaited every religious person sooner or later, in death if not in life. ‘I know.’ They shared a silence. Julia thought, poor Cassandra. She said, ‘So what happened then about your father?’ Her curiosity invigorated him; he said, eagerly, ‘Well, my mother got into a real mess. A classic mess. Father and I – we walked in – and caught her out in –
in flagrante delicto
,’ he finished up, with a pompous intonation that caused Julia to suppress an involuntary snort of laughter.

‘Evidence meant he had to do something, you see. So he brought me home, and we sat in gloom for a week. He wrote letters, and in the night he shouted, and I kept getting up, and …

‘Then he took me and the dog into the conservatory one day. Things were pretty bad by then. He said to the dog, ‘Come here, you,’ and he – dragged her a bit – she didn’t want – and then he, he shot the dog. So then he, he said to me, ‘Come here,’ so I – I hid behind the water-butt, and he stood – looking stupid – for a bit, and then he gave a sort of snort and said, ‘Oh, well, never mind,’ in a sort of puzzled voice and he – he shot himself. And then panes of glass fell in, and potted plants dropped off the edges of shelves. One hit me. On the shoulder.’

Julia spread one hand across her face to choke another involuntary burst of laughter.

‘Oh, poor Simon. How mean. In front of you – how beastly mean.’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought. Not only that, but —’ He bent to gather up two stones and flung them with wild inaccuracy at the surface of the sea beyond the foam-line; neither of them bounced, but spurted and sank. ‘Why did I tell you all that? You’re the sort of person people do tell things to, aren’t you? You accept what people tell you.’

His story seemed to Julia unreal, like one of Cassandra’s more Byronic inventions. For a moment she visualized Cassandra, listening dourly and with a tense respect to the same story and suffering every shot.

‘Nothing shocks you, that’s part of it.’

‘Well, one can’t afford to be shocked. I think you ought to think it was mean, and be angry. You’ve got your own life to live, you can’t give his back.’

He gave these clichés the same patient, slightly abstracted attention he gave everything she said. Then, stammering slightly, he told her, ‘You’re quite right about this need to be normal. I should have thought you
were
, on the whole. It’s one of the attractive things about you.’