The Game (35 page)

‘Julia Corbett has wrought a
tour de force
from apparently very unpromising material.’

‘Julia Corbett has at last broken out of the suffocating domestic prison where she was strangled with her own waste fertility, to write a study of that sterile, in some sense permanently retarded emotion we call hopeless love, felt in intelligent if cranky, middle age. The book is set in a semi-monastic academic community whose absurdities are presented with vivid immediacy. Julia Corbett has a gift for the surface detail that implies a moral judgement; she can sum up a whole woman by describing the precise bad fit of an ill-chosen magenta taffeta dress, or the distressing juxtaposition of a dangling crucifix and tinned college spaghetti and tomato sauce. Her world, hovering on the edge of the grotesque but never engulfed in it, is, to an outsider at least, appallingly convincing.

But this is not her main achievement. She has, against all the odds, succeeded triumphantly in calling up sympathy for her central character, Emily, the lady don, cherishing and repressing an imaginative life on the scale of Charlotte Brontë’s passion for the Duke of Zamorna. Emily’s Monsieur Héger is an unctuous, slightly silly television priest, one of the false, or at least inadequate prophets of our time. She knew him in childhood and has studied him and given him imaginary life ever since. It is absurd; it is also genuinely pitiable. Naturally the man in the flesh, finally encountered, fails pitiably to
measure up to the huge imagined expectations that have been built round him, the “sense of glory” he carries with him. Miss Corbett makes,
en passant
, some very intelligent comments on the adolescent religiosity of our modern devotion to the television idol. I have yet to meet a priest who fills her bill, but he is not inconceivable, and offers splendid opportunities for the exploration of the dubious roots of religious belief in emotionally starved women. We are left at the end with the question of whether the cold breath of reality on the glittering imaginative structure will prove absolutely destructive, or be the beginning of a more restricted, but more mature existence. Can Emily learn? The doubt is real, and that, too, is an achievement.’

‘Miss Corbett’s weird heroine sees everything with a steady, lunatic clarity.’

‘There are a galaxy of minor Oxford characters, all equally obsessed by the unreal, the unattainable, and their obsessions reflect and illuminate each other. There is the suave don who wants to be a television idol himself, and produces deliberately, as the epiloguer does naturally, a false charm. A spinsterly, vulgar passion for the erotic works of the Earl of Rochester balances, and lights up, the antithetical purity of Emily’s unreal world.’

‘Miss Gee had nothing on Julia Corbett’s Emily Burnett.’

Cassandra’s mind fumbled defensively with irrelevances. ‘Miss Corbett’ bothered her: it was her name, the only name she had. And it was not, she thought, morally possible, let alone morally or aesthetically admirable, to ‘sum up a whole woman’ by describing the inadequacies of her clothing. She opened her handbag again, closed it on Deborah’s fat letter, breathed deeply, and felt her guts thud and stiffen.

‘You said nothing to warn us,’ said Miss Curtess, in a thick, red voice, ‘of what your sister was springing on us.’

‘I could not have said anything. I didn’t know.’

‘I think it was ill-considered. There are moral obligations that come before self-expression.’

Cassandra stood up. ‘I don’t see it as a question of morals.’

‘No, of course you don’t. It seems to me unkindly meant, Cassandra. But beneath your notice.’

Cassandra could not, probably, have avoided recognizing the solidifying of the issue in the consciousness of those around her. Her feeling towards Miss Curtess was, however, rage, not gratitude. She could make no answer, and left the Common Room abruptly and silently: it was only on the stairs that she realized that her silence had effectively confirmed Vanessa Curtess’s view of the situation. She went, heavily and slowly, into her own room, taking each breath carefully, incapable for the moment of thought.

Someone rang the doorbell, and, not content with that, rattled the letterbox and banged with fists and feet. Julia came out into the hall, stared at the door and made no move to open it.

‘Julia!’ through the letterbox.

‘Go away.’

‘I shall just go on ringing the bell.’ The steady shrilling began. Julia opened the door.

Ivan came in, took off his coat, and settled into a chair. He extracted from his coat pocket a copy of
A Sense of Glory.

‘Well, how do you feel?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What does she say?’

‘She wouldn’t say anything. She may not have seen it, but if she has, she wouldn’t say anything.’

‘And Moffitt?’

‘He doesn’t read books.’

‘Doesn’t he?’

‘He doesn’t read my books, he said so.’

‘Well, I asked him if he’d read this and he said no, but he’d go out and buy it.’

‘I wish you’d keep out of my life.’

‘You let me in. You invited me in.’

‘To a tiny, not very important area of it.’

She decided not to tell him that Thor had left her. This and the other guilt were causing her, as far as she could judge, equally violent and differing pains.

Ivan grinned. ‘It’s not a bad book. Much more controlled and thoughtful than your usual stuff. I’d expected an outburst, I must admit. But this seems obsessive about the style and the structure. It even has that sort of lifelessness books have when they’re overwrought. Overwrought in a literary sense, that is. That’s rather a good pun, maybe the one causes the other, don’t you think I’m clever, Ju? Do you think you’ll write a good book, now?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I honestly don’t care. I —’

‘Oh, but you will care. You can’t help it. What’s biting you, love?’

Julia looked at her hands and did not answer.

‘Is it her? It beats me you can put off suffering so long if you’re going to suffer. You just can’t bear
facing
unpleasantness, can you, you never could? Listen, my darling, if your sister can’t shake this off, that’s her lookout, honestly. It isn’t a
mean
book; it’s not as though you’d screamed invective at her. And anyway I should think she deserved what she got. She must have been hell to grow up with. I get the feeling she’s much more awful than you make her sound.’

‘If she sounds awful at all you must have got the idea from me. It’s so silly, I love her, I love her really. I just can’t – couldn’t –
live with
her.’

‘The love,’ Ivan said, in a soothing voice, ‘comes out in the book. That’s why it’s so good, sweetie. Truly.’

‘Oh, hell,’ said Julia. This was not the judgement she needed. She began to cry. Ivan took her in his arms; it was not in his arms she wanted to be. Nevertheless she shifted her body against his, and stroked his face, sobbing wildly, whilst he kissed her on the eyes, and smoothed her hair.

In Cassandra’s room a clock ticked loudly; outside, for some
reason, Oxford bells were pealing. She had hardly, yet, begun to think it out. Almost anonymously her mind began the habitual motions: shrinking, rejection. She would not speak to Storrin again. Nor to Vanessa Curtess. It might be, it might well be, that Oxford itself was uninhabitable. There were, she supposed, other places.

Like certain reptiles she had learned to survive by leaving in Julia’s hand the dead stump of the tail by which she had been grasped. One could even, she thought, sacrifice a more necessary limb, a hand, a foot, which would not grow again, and still survive. One could do this for ever so long as one was not touched to the quick. Let Julia store and catalogue the limp relicts of what had been Cassandra. Successive skins, discarded hair and nails, the dead stuff of witchcraft, like the photograph, like the fiction. A thought, a story, a way of looking, a friend, a city. The image comforted her; she elaborated it; somewhere else, in the dark, she was coming to a decision.

What was necessary was to measure the extent of the damage and the extent of the requisite surgery. To tie up arteries – this image too, was capable of elaboration. Not to feel pain in an imaginary extremity.…

Someone banged on the door. She did not answer. After a pause, nevertheless, Simon came in. Cassandra peered grimly at him between the crimson wings of her chair. He had not been in her mind; she had not got round to him. He was going to have to go, too. Indeed, she saw, now, he was going to have to go first. She tightened her mouth, drew back into the chair, said nothing.

‘Cassandra —’

‘Well?’

‘Don’t make it difficult for me? May I sit down?’

She indicated, with her jewelled hand, the window-seat. He perched there, awkwardly.

‘Cassandra —’

She was reserving her strength. He took the book from his pocket and held it out; she made no move to accept it.

‘I take it you have seen this.’

‘No.’

‘But you know?’

‘Now, yes.’

‘I think it’s intolerable,’ he burst out.

‘It doesn’t matter what we think,’ she said, almost impapatiently. One had no power to change what was accomplished; one’s power lay simply in fitting one’s life to one’s new circumstances. In excising the affected parts. He was several steps behind her; he was less experienced.

‘What I think about this ought to matter. It’s aimed at me, as I see it. It concerns me.’

‘Not much,’ said Cassandra, coldly.

‘Ah, Cassandra, don’t. I was afraid you would be hurting yourself over this. Of course anyone would be hurt by it. Anyone. I was annoyed myself. And I know you. I know you. I came to say, don’t …’

‘Don’t what? What are you afraid I may do?’

On this he swung his head, down and up again, stretched out his awkward arms in what could have been a gesture of despair or a broken-off embrace, twisted his sorrowful mouth and his scarred and fading face into an expression of extreme agony, levered himself to his feet and began to pace her room.

‘I know you,’ he said again. ‘I know how proud you are. I – you don’t mind me saying this? – I’m afraid you may just cut yourself off. From Julia. From me. I’d be sorry for that. And I don’t think you can afford to. Forgive me if I’m wrong.’

‘What do you suggest I do?’

He seemed discouraged by her tone, but went on. ‘You’ve got to fight. You’ve got to stay in the open. Read this book. You weren’t going to, were you? And then, if you feel angry, write and tell Julia so – give her a chance to reply, but attack her, face to face.… I think she’d be glad of that. There’s sympathy and understanding in this book, as well as …’

‘I don’t want sympathy. Or understanding.’

‘No, of course you don’t. That doesn’t stop people extending them. Not only Julia. You can’t brush yourself entirely clean of them.’

Cassandra smiled, thinly, evasively.

‘Read it now,’ Simon said urgently, ‘and then come out to dinner. With me.’

‘No,’ she said, to this last. As he talked, her sense of the situation crystallized. It was worse, she saw, than she had thought.

‘No?’ He wrung his hands and turned on her. ‘Do I count for nothing in all this? May I not feel? Do I have to be the rock against which you choose to dash yourself and have no choice? I think you ought to live in the world with Julia, you ought to be magnanimous in her direction, and I’ve said so, but I can’t
make
you do anything, clearly. But, as for me.… Listen to me, Cassandra, it cost me something to come here. That book – that book does make me feel a bit of a fool. Of course it does. But I don’t think you and I can pay any attention to that, we can’t afford to. Is it boorish of me to point out – since you don’t seem to see it – that it makes some difference that I’m here? With you?’

Cassandra looked at him blankly.

‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘I want to help. I want to help. I don’t want to be responsible for any more damage. Please —’

‘You were never very good at helping. You had no gift for it. You are too much’ – she produced, judiciously, their joint conclusion – ‘an emotional meddler, Simon. You should let things be.’

She said, less guarded, not looking at him. ‘Don’t you see, above all, I can’t take your pity?’

‘I’m trying to say, it isn’t pity. Or not only pity.’ He was not used to fighting; the scrupulous, brave words had a note of defeat. ‘And pity doesn’t necessarily smear you, as you seem to think. It’s meant something to me, to see you, these last few weeks. And to you, I think. Not much, maybe, but something. It was real. Wasn’t it? It can still be real. This,’ he tapped the book, ‘this isn’t real. This is a lie, at worst, and – and a piece of imagination at best. You can’t destroy a reality with fiction. Can you? Oh, for God’s sake, face up to it, Cassandra.’

Cassandra did not look at him: she said, ‘It seems sufficiently
clear – to me – that you can both destroy and create reality with fiction. Fictions – fictions are lies, yes, but we don’t ever know the truth. We see the truth through the fictions – our own, other people’s. There was a time when I thought the Church had redeemed fiction – that the Church’s metaphors were truths – but lately that’s seemed meaningless. Dangerous even, like any other fiction. We feed off it. Our fictions feed on us. ‘And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.’ I don’t know quite why Coleridge should have found the serpent’s method of ingestion so peculiarly repellent … but it’s a powerful metaphor.…’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Julia does. I imagine that’s the theme of her book. What Dr Johnson called ‘the hunger of the imagination that preys incessantly on life’. She’s saying, I assume, that I made too much of you. I lived off you. Well, that’s true. So I’m peculiarly vulnerable to – to the imagination.’ She smiled.

‘Don’t be melodramatic. You spin ideas, Cassandra, so you can’t see for them. After all, here I am. Here I am.’

‘Yes, but what can we have to say to each other? What can we ever say to each other now that won’t be seen in terms of Julia’s fiction? Our course is plotted for us in it, I understand.’

‘Does that matter?’

‘To me, yes. As you should know, I don’t like,’ Cassandra sighed, heavily, ‘to be watched.’