The Game (24 page)

‘Simon Moffitt has no immediate plans for another expedition. “I must write up results, house my creatures, and think.” Tall, black-bearded, romantic Simon Moffitt is unmarried, and says that as far as he knows he will stay that
way. How many of his ‘fans’ could really bring themselves to share his hermit life in the hot swamps with the crocodiles?’

Julia read this report over breakfast a day later. It was not from a paper she read, and had been cut out and sent to her in an envelope. Ivan, who had sent it, had decorated newsprint and picture with little drawings of curled snakes with bearded human heads in thickets of grass, an Adam and Eve recognizably himself and Julia with huge figleaves, and a border like those on illuminated manuscripts of rioting tropical foliage in fine red, green and black ball-point lines. Julia studied Simon’s face so closely that she could only see the newsprint dots; he might have been anyone; Ivan had looped a crimson snake round his neck and had a green one clambering up his body and two small black ones peering from the brim of his hat.

Deborah looked over her shoulder and cried, ‘Look what someone’s sent Julia.’ Thor looked up from his correspondence. Out of the kitchen Edna Baker shuffled in a hideous nightdress, followed by Trevor and Rosie. To reach the spare room, in which they ate as well as slept, they had to cross and recross the Eskelunds’ living-room. Deborah read out: ‘Tall, black-bearded romantic Simon Moffitt.…’

‘Let me see that,’ said Thor. Julia gave it to him. The baby screamed across the flat. There was a smell of stale nappies. Mrs Baker had nervously washed them twice a day when she first came, but this was no longer the case, and Julia was too much afraid of being looked at angrily to ask for improvement.

‘Who sent you this?’ said Thor, in that absurd, over-dramatic voice in which real passion often expresses itself. Julia looked up at him plaintively. Mrs Baker stopped, and turned back to watch, milk splashing from her wavering jug into Julia’s carpet.

‘Ivan sent it,’ Julia said. ‘It was Ivan.’

‘Why did he sent it?’

‘Well, why not?’ said Deborah.

‘And you be quiet,’ said Thor to his daughter. Julia grasped, suddenly, the precise cause of his displeasure. He was angry that she had told Ivan enough to put him into a position to send such a drawing. His own tolerance of her emotional vagaries was his pride; this was what he was for; that she should chatter so liberally outside was too much. She cried out of sympathy, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, you are always sorry,’ he said, ‘when you have caused trouble. But not for what you have done.’

‘Don’t,’ Julia cried, ‘don’t lecture me like a child. I’m not. I’m a responsible woman.’

‘That is not how you behave.’

Julia stood up and found herself screaming. ‘And in front of all these bloody dirty people you’ve dragged into the flat to persecute me.
Your
motives are above reproach, of course. Charity excuses anything. You should stop judging, or you’ll get judged, you’ll get judged.’ He said nothing. Julia thought, as her own face crumpled into tears, that he looked ill: he had the taut, staring look he had had when she first knew him, and his lips were sore with a dark line cracking the surface. She looked at him helplessly and furiously, turned and ran and slammed herself into the bedroom. Mrs Baker dropped the milk jug and sniffed; the children howled. Thor went and put his arm clumsily and heavily about Mrs Baker’s shoulder. Mr Baker lurched aggressively out of the spare room where the baby was now frantically and breathily screaming. Deborah gathered up the offending newscutting and carried it into her room.

The cutting reached Cassandra two days later. She found it on her way out to Holy Communion; she opened the envelope clumsily with black, kid-gloved fingers, and it fluttered to the floor. There was a letter with it.

‘My dear Aunt Cassandra, Julia’s television man sent her this. For some reason it has caused an almighty row at home. None of us speak, now. Except the baby, that screams.

‘I thought you were really the best person to have this,
though what I think may not be of much account.
I
would rather
you
had it. I hope you remain well; you never answered my last. I rather rely on getting letters from you. Now we have got a housefull of slum-dwellers my correspondence is all I can call my own; a pitiable state of affairs. I do feel you and I ought to be more informed about things – we ought to make it more our business what’s going on than we do. Perhaps I ought not to write to you. Unlike Julia, I am not able to write out how awful things are, but please believe they are awful. I do need to be believed, I think something awful’s brewing. People neither tell one things nor hide them from one, this is a terrible strain, if you know what I mean?

‘This amounts to a hysterical letter, Aunt C. – before you get too angry consider that I haven’t written you any such, yet, and have much cause. Do you know what I feel like? Something crawling in the undergrowth, hearing things crashing and fighting overhead, that daren’t move in case they put their feet on it but of course they may,
anyway
, put their feet on it. Consider the child, all the books say. Write and tell me I’ve got to stand on my own, I’ll believe it if
you
say it. My dear aunt, your loving niece, Deborah.’

Cassandra studied the cutting intently: Simon’s shadowed face, Ivan’s serpentine decorations, raincoat, figleaves. She folded it, brooding, and put it into her handbag. The letter she tore up and dropped into the waste-paper basket. She went on to church.

She was glad to sit down. She had felt unwell for some weeks, and was liable to misjudge distances, to kneel too far from pew to hassock, to trip against steps that had appeared to be some distance away. The inimical aspect of her surroundings had increased to hallucination. She had, in church, a real sense that the building was falling open like a flower, and then closing, one half over the other, driving pews together, impelling pillars athwart each other. Or, in Hall, the mock mediaeval crossbeams of the roof edge slowly down, compressing the girls’ din to a single intolerable shriek. She had added to the rising pile of studies of flora several very precise studies of
foreshortened roof-tracery, bosses and joists. These had a new harshness of line.

She peered distractedly at the pew-end, drew off her gloves, and addressed herself to God. In Meeting, in her youth, God had seemed something approached through clinging grey floss, a kind of insulation which thickened as she raised her thoughts painfully, until these thoughts were finally blunted against a ceiling of compressed asbestos. Her attempts had most often ended in a defeated return to indulge in her live mediaeval action. In the Church, the same effort was not imperative; God had been present enough in a harmony between sounds and words and objects created by others outside herself. It was as though the Church gave to God that secondary, more intense life that literature had given to her own aimless emotion in youth; neither decorative nor hopeless. But lately this harmony had not held her. She had returned increasingly to private wrestling with the asbestos. Colour and sound had faded. ‘We receive but what we give,’ she said crossly to God through floating lumps of flock, uncertain whether it was herself or Him she was accusing. This private struggle had always been waiting for her; she felt too unwell to take it on.

When Father Rowell held up wine and wafer Cassandra, with the old ladies, came unevenly out of her stall and made for the altar. When she was in motion vision did its worst. She saw flakes of asbestos clustering like dead butterflies on the heads of the columns, which sagged, as though melting, like giant candles encrusted with simmering grey. She put up her hands to ward things off her face, things which hung festooned from the rood loft and collected in the air as though the air had burned and solidified into floating ash. Something hummed and sang.

‘Miss Corbett!’ said Father Rowell.

Cassandra heeled over and hit her head against a pew foot.

‘Hysterical women dons,’ said one undergraduate to another.

Cassandra came round, hearing a liquid gasp in her own
throat, and found herself on Gerald Rowell’s sofa, peering at her own black-laced feet. She saw his pale eyes behind his fine, golden spectacles, and moved her head so that the light danced on the surface of the lenses. He waited for her to speak.

‘I’m sorry, Father. That was vulgar.’

‘Never mind that. Have you any idea why, Cassandra?’

‘I am very tired,’ said Cassandra, conventionally. He held out a cup of water; Cassandra sat up and sipped.

‘You have trusted me in the past.’

‘Yes,’ said Cassandra vaguely. She could make nothing of his expression.

‘You have no right to exhaust yourself. None of us has a right to destroy himself. You know what I am trying to say.’

‘Yes.’ Cassandra was barely listening. ‘I am suffering a kind of metaphysical distress. Probably insignificant. I don’t think it would be of much use to talk about it.’

‘You cannot be sure of that.’ He waited.

‘Everything I touch – everything I touch – turns to ashes.’ She smiled, privately, over the thought that he could not know how literally this was so. ‘After all, in this world, everything must turn to ashes,’ she said, in a tone abnormally matter-of-fact, a parody of his own preaching manner. ‘We must accept these trials.’

‘You make it impossible to speak to you.’

‘Speech alters almost nothing. We talk too much. We should keep quiet and concentrate on survival.’ She looked wildly past him, into the room beyond, and then stiffened again, smiling slightly. As though, even there, something lay in wait. She watched whatever it was, and Father Rowell watched her.

‘God has not put us, Cassandra, in any normal sense at a level where survival is of paramount importance. You and I are born civilized, self-conscious, intelligent, physically fortunate. We are required to live in the world. We are required to speak to each other. We are placed where we have abundant spare energy, which it is our
duty
to expend in love. Love for other people. Love for God.’

‘The glass,’ said Cassandra, swaying her head and peering at his spectacles and his eyes behind them, ‘and what is through the glass. I know, that is what we say.’

‘That is what is true.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said impatiently, ‘but there are other truths.’ She stood up abruptly and gathered up gloves and handbag. ‘As I said, it was a little vulgar. You will acquit me of making a habit of it. But let us not make it worse by speaking as if it were significant.’

‘What other truths?’ said Father Rowell.

Cassandra walked steadily to the door.

‘Let me at least call you a cab.’

‘No, no. I can walk.’

‘If you.… If you should have anything to say, if you should change your mind, I am here.’

‘I know,’ said Cassandra. ‘I know.’

In her room she took out the cutting again, and studied it. She supposed that it made little real difference to her that Simon was again in England and she had not known. But she had spent time imagining him in the jungle when he was not there; and this sapped her sense of her own presence a little further.

She had recently bought an easel; now, she set to work on another painting. She sketched in the broad outline of a man in a raincoat under a tree. Then, carefully, as though all her other work had been preliminary studies for this, she began to spread behind him an intricate network of twisting foliage with tiny, formalized, haphazard creatures from the dreams clutching with claw and feeler to tendrils, to fronds, to broad, spatulate leaves. She painted a square inch at a time, peering closely at it. The tree rose like a pillar in front of the deepening backcloth. Above it, in great flakes of paint, Cassandra laid a grey, thick sky that furred the branches and impinged heavily on the whole scene.

‘Y
ES
, you know, but I —’

‘It
is
an art form. Look what they said about the cinema. No, look, television’s the new art
medium.
All the other forms have got worked out –
worked out
– too bloody self-conscious. Even if they’re self-consciously unselfconscious. The artists seem to be playing with the forms. Fiddling about with the
form
all the time.’

‘You can’t —’

‘Now, the thing about television as an art medium – the real thing it’s got, or ought to have got, over
all the other art forms
is this
immediacy.
Great flexibility and variety, granted, but also this
immediacy.
It could stimulate all sorts of new discoveries. Why not? I mean, this cliché about bringing art into people’s homes, it’s a truth. Do you realize just what power an
art medium
that’s a casual part of almost everyone’s life has got? I mean, it’s
in there
, it’s in people’s lives. They get their thoughts from it. It’s a fearful responsibility.’

‘I hadn’t seen it that —’

‘No, listen. This programme.
The Lively Arts.
It’s an attempt to relate the work of artists at all points – with this immediacy – to the way people live. Now art – art is a function of man’s self-consciousness. Art’s what he makes of the fact that he’s
aware
of his life. Not like an animal. Or aware of more abstract things, like colour and sound. Now look, now look, television’s man’s self-consciousness now. I mean, how many people see life in terms of what the medium shows them? Many many more than ever saw it in terms of a Shakespeare play or a Tolstoy novel or even Charlie Chaplin. Now, what this programme’s for is to make them conscious of what we’re offering them. I’m not a dilettante don dishing out culture. I’m not committed – I don’t want to tell them how to better themselves socially. I’m not interested in the sort of art that needs a
lifetime’s training to appreciate. I just want to increase the ordinary man’s awareness. Of himself. Of the artists’ awareness of him. Of things around him. I want to
interweave
the artist’s sense of significance with people’s lives. Does that make sense?’