The Game (29 page)

When Simon came to the flat he talked, at length, to both Thor and Deborah.

He had embarked on a long argument with Thor about the nature and value of modern civilization, which they took up and nagged at all over again each time they met. This argument irritated Julia profoundly; although she had no ideas of her own to contribute to it, and felt the claustrophobia of any woman trapped in an impersonal male exchange, she thought she knew that they were not even talking about the same thing and would thus never, however much they reiterated their own points of view, get anywhere. Thor used words like escapist, judiciously and frequently; Simon talked about homogeneity and mechanical monotony; Julia, bobbing choppily on all sorts of cross-currents of thought, began to admire herself more and more for the realism with which she refused to commit herself to an attitude, for the penetration with which she remarked that they were, both of them, constructing theologies to support patterns of behaviour to which they were both driven by parts of their temperament remote enough from logical justification. But after a time she was irked by a similarity between them which she had not previously remarked; they were seeking each other’s company because they were both, in a sense, religious extremists, they wanted a way of life that would justify this world in terms of another. Simon was negative, that was all; all he was
certain
of was eating and sleeping; but he was, for this reason, a suitable testing ground for Thor’s practical moral views about the organization of these basic activities. She thought, sometimes, that they were both, although she admired them, curiously lacking intelligence; Ivan, for all his silliness, was more clever.

But Thor was out, a lot of the time, and Simon talked more to Deborah. Julia suspected that Deborah was telling him at
length those grievances against herself which she didn’t like to admit her own consciousness of, much of the time; his evasive character made him in many ways the ideal confidant, and he listened with an awkwardly benign expression. Only he seemed to be doing a lot of the talking himself – this Julia liked even less – and today, coming in from a lunch with her publisher, she had found Simon and Deborah solemnly side by side on the sofa discussing, she was sure of it, Cassandra, the phenomenon of Cassandra. She was worried about Cassandra, and a little worried about Simon himself; her publisher’s comments on the way she had, according to him, courageously ‘let go’, ‘explored in depth’, with these two characters in
A Sense of Glory
had troubled her; she had realized for the first time just how much she was depending on neither of the originals reading the book.

She put veal and peas together into the oven to warm and brought out the avocado cocktails; she still found herself cooking carefully ‘for’ Simon, who seemed to pay no attention to what was put in front of him. Deborah had laid a pile of cutlery haphazardly on the coffee table – they ate on their knees – and was sitting down again.

‘Oh, it’s all quite a business, it takes a long time,’ said Simon to Deborah.

‘Well, go on, tell.’

‘I don’t think,’ said Julia, ‘we’ll wait for Thor, we never know when he’s coming these days.’

‘I thought he was in the relief centre,’ said Simon. ‘Perhaps we ought to wait.’

‘He might not come at all,’ said Deborah. ‘He’s been known not to. He’s doing too much. Do go on, Simon.’

Mrs Baker, carrying a plate piled high with smoke-smelling fritters passed, puffing and muttering, behind Simon’s chair.

‘They examine the contents of my gut, that’s the essence of it,’ said Simon. ‘There are various parasites and things I might have picked up.’

‘How do they do
that?’
said Deborah.

Julia, since she seemed to be the only one interested in the
meal, took a spoonful of avocado. Its creaminess consoled her: she did not want to hear about Simon’s gut.

The front door banged.

‘That’s him!’ said Simon. He seemed pleased.

Thor took a long time to come in, and then stood, just inside the doorway, sagging slightly, his winged, staring look accentuated. He brought with him cold air and a tension of some kind. Julia gathered herself.

‘You nearly missed dinner.’

‘You look exhausted,’ said Simon, clinically.

‘I must change my trousers.’

‘Have your dinner first, won’t you?’

‘Someone’s been sick on them.’ Julia took a quick look and saw that somebody, fairly recently, had indeed been sick on them, across both knees and down the left leg. More dirt, more smells, Julia thought as he crossed into the bedroom; lately he had been coming home smelling of all sorts of things; stale beer, rough pipe tobacco, disinfectant and on several occasions the really foul decaying animal odour she associated with rotting upholstery. She dipped her spoon into the avocado again and took several mouthfuls; so, absently, did Simon. Mrs Baker crossed and recrossed with Julia’s Finnish peasant tureen full of disintegrating cauliflower.

Thor came out of the bedroom in a pair of jeans and his cream-coloured heavy sweater. He sat down on the spare bed and pushed his hands over his head, kneading his scalp.

‘Who was sick, Daddy?’

‘Have some avocado.’

‘In a moment, Julia. In a moment.’ He said. ‘I miscalculated. I think it was only to be expected, but I —’

‘Was it one of your suicides?’ asked Deborah, knowledgeably.

Thor nodded. His fingers worked. ‘It was the fourth attempt. I miscalculated. Three – the others – they were no good, they were never meant to be any good, they were only for the attention’s sake. And it wasn’t as though … that is … she would ring me up, and threaten, oh, innumerable times
things that never happened. At first I always went, to listen. Later, well, one grows to feel one is doing more harm than good – setting up a habit, that is, she depends on an interest captured by threats – I felt – that was – no good to anyone. No good. No good depending on me. One feels one should listen and care, or not listen at all. That’s a luxury, too, feeling that …’

‘Is she dead?’ said Simon.

‘No, no. Not yet, at least. I used emetics. She has a chance.’

‘You did your best,’ said Simon.

‘Not a good best.’ He looked stricken; Deborah poured him a glass of tonic water.

‘
Why
did she, Daddy?’

‘This time,’ he said, slowly, cradling his head in his hands, ‘she left a long letter – a long letter – saying it was because I would not come.’ He shuddered. ‘A sickening letter,’ he said, surprisingly, in his toneless voice, ‘a most unpleasant letter. But she had certainly taken enough to kill herself. The letter, that is, was not simply a – an appeal. It was to make me sorry.’

‘They always are,’ said Simon.

‘Well, I am sorry.’ He screwed up his smooth face, and said, to Simon, ‘These are the sicknesses of this – civilization – you won’t have. She must have been nearly fifty – sold lace collars, she said – always dressed, when I saw her, like a – like a whore.’ He gestured grimly at Julia. ‘Emerald eyelids like croquet-hoops,’ he said, ‘and a wet scarlet mouth. Scarlet nails, jagged at the tops. Very tight black dresses, shoes with spikes, varicose veins, smelled sweet and rich and stuffy. Lived in a bedsitter with an electric ring. No relations. Had some anatomical defect she couldn’t bring herself to tell me of, but she knew she wasn’t “normal”. I couldn’t get her to the doctor. She only told me this
after
the last bid. She’d known she wasn’t “normal” since she was ten. “I’ve lived with it all these years,” she said to me. “Lived with what?” I said. “Oh, I couldn’t say,” she said, “only I’m not quite normal,” and she laid her hands – on my knees. You see?’

‘I see,’ said Simon, comfortably. ‘There was little you could do.’

Julia was faintly excited by Thor’s description; like most men, he had never been able to tell her in any detail what anyone looked like, yet here was an appearance that had impressed him to the point of simile.

‘It would be good to think that,’ said Thor, ‘if I could think it. If I could think it. But I have seen too many people tell themselves that. You, for instance.’ He looked at Julia. ‘Or you. Or you. You ought to know about all the misery – all the loneliness … the
real
suffering …’ He looked at the three of them with flat hostility. ‘Any of you – any of even all you – could go out and relieve some of this, even one night a week.’

Julia felt this as the sort of practical truth that could not in fact be a truth because it seemed so simple and obvious, and clearly did not work in the world.

‘I’d be no good at it,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble.’ She thought a moment. ‘Most of us’d be no good at it. And the professionals seem to be such weird people.’

‘The maimed helping the maimed,’ said Thor. ‘I’ve thought that often over the last few months. But as for you – with all your friendship and imagination – if you’d been where I’ve been …’

‘I wouldn’t have them any more. The friendship and imagination. They feed on comfort.’

‘This woman,’ said Thor, ‘is comfortable enough.’ He dropped his head completely into his hands. ‘I shall never –I shall never – I shall never
like
all this bored and empty brooding on imagined slights and fantastic illnesses.’

‘
You
want,’ said Julia, almost angry, ‘to be able to watch sores disappear after shots in the arm, or blindness lift, or starved limbs round out, you can
see
that.… And after
that
, what? What?’

The telephone rang.

‘When you’ve cured it, what?’ said Julia.

Her husband stood up without answering and seemed, for a
moment, to steady himself on his legs. Then he went out into the hall.

‘He ought to have been Albert Schweitzer,’ said Julia, furiously, to Simon.

‘I think so, yes.’

‘But you’re not going to tell me that’s any answer, Si?’

‘No. I didn’t think you were looking for an answer.’

‘Well, he is.’

‘You don’t have to make it difficult for him.’

‘I’ve never met such a slippery character as you are, Simon Moffitt,’ said Julia. Thor re-entered the room.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘She is dead.’

Simon said, ‘Have a drink, that’s best.’

Julia imagined, for a flickering moment, the dead woman on a hospital bed, jagged red nails and drooping red mouth, crumpled fifty-year-old flesh. Everybody I know keeps seeing dead people; I always just miss them. ‘You can’t afford to mind, darling. These things have got to happen. You did your best. You are too thin-skinned.’

‘I really do think you should have a drink,’ said Simon, with a kind of miserable anxiety. ‘Honestly, I think you should.’

‘No,’ said Thor. ‘Thank you.’

He turned his head from side to side, as though he was searching for air; Julia saw that his eyes were full of tears. If he were a child, she thought, I could slap him, and he would break.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why?’ He was speaking to Simon. ‘Why must we behave as though only extremity gives meaning to our lives?’

‘Because, often, only extremity does.’

‘She was sure she – was someone – with those pills and that glass in her hand. Wasn’t it so? And I would notice her. Why do you go out where you go?’

Simon did not answer.

Thor said, ‘It’s a bloody lie.’

Julia stood up and walked into the kitchen; she came back
with her warmed casserole of veal, and peas, the potatoes, the warmed plates.

‘At least, we might as well eat dinner,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go on, we’ll be better with food inside us.’

Thor stood up. He had a dazed frown, and no one quite knew in which direction he meant to move; then he crossed to Julia’s dishes, and emptied them out on to the table. ‘I won’t have this, I won’t have this,’ he said; Julia could hear him grinding his teeth. He said, still with a choked reasonableness, to Simon, ‘You see, I wanted to break her neck.’ He gave the standard lamp a violent blow with the side of his hand, and said through its rocking, ‘All I thought was, I want to, I want to finish this whining once and for all …’

‘I can see that,’ said Simon, carefully. Thor hooked his foot under the coffee table and overturned it. ‘It was pointless, you see,’ he said, as though involved in a theological argument, ‘pointless. Like all this.’ He gave the table a violent kick, which drove it into the bed on which Julia and Deborah were sitting; the crashing and splintering sound of this drew out the Bakers, in whose lives violence was the only relief from monotony; silent, watchful, grinning involuntarily, they hovered in the doorway on one side of the flat.

‘It’s all right,’ said Julia to them, ‘go away, will you, please.’

‘No, it is not all right,’ said Thor. He was breathing heavily, but his voice was still cold; he bent, suddenly, gathered up Julia’s smoky tumbler, hurled it at the window, listened to the small glass explosion, trembling slightly, and walked stiffly into the bedroom. Julia followed him; behind her, Simon and Deborah padded as far as the doorway; across the flat, the Bakers edged out into the living-room. Julia, at this stage, was still calm; she thought, since we have all got to settle down again after this, it seems a little unreal to have actually to live through it, and it goes on so. She said:

‘Look, darling, you’ve got all this out of proportion, you’ve got it out of proportion, you can’t go on like this.’

‘What do you know about proportion?’ said Thor. ‘What
do you know about anything?’ Each of his careful sentences was followed by another abrupt, muscle-bound, violent movement: this time, he raised his leg and attempted with his foot to shatter Julia’s dressing-table mirror; he did indeed catch it a glancing blow and for a moment was suspended in an absurd hop, his buttocks straining, his white flesh bulging between the tight cuff of his jeans and his socks. Julia gave a snort. He turned on Simon again and repeated, ‘I wanted to break her neck. I knew how to start, I wanted to …’ He turned round again, and with an outstretched arm swept away all Julia’s silver-topped bottles, and little pots of cream, hair-brushes, tissues, false eyelashes curled in their plastic case, tweezers and hairpins, and, for Julia was untidy, little balls of copper hair combed from the brush, round balls of cotton wool stained flesh and grey.