The Game (36 page)

‘You ought to learn to stand it. It’s a prerequisite of – what was your way of putting it – “occupying one’s space in the world”.’

‘No one could say I had ever been good at that. It’s too late to start.’

She had taken off all her rings, and made a little pile of them in her black lap. ‘Leave me alone, Simon.’ She looked at him with a mad, donnish, kindliness. ‘It isn’t your fault. Let it be.’ She looked down at her naked hands. ‘It’s kindest to leave me alone,’ she said, informatively.

‘I don’t particularly want to be kind. I want —’

‘Go away, Simon.’

‘You’re mad.’ She said nothing. ‘I shall come back,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ she said, with deliberate vagueness.

When he was gone Cassandra laid out the rings in a neat row on the desk-top, put her chains and cross with them, rearranged them so that the colour gradation followed that of the rainbow, drew the curtains, put on the light, climbed back into her chair and took up Julia’s book. It took her three hours to read it.

Julia caught Deborah with a suitcase creeping out of the front door.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘I’m leaving. I’ve had enough. I want a life of my own.’

‘Well, anyone who thinks they can have
that
is a fool. Are you going to your father?’

‘No, as a matter of fact. Because (a) I don’t want to live in the Congo. And because (b) he’d be better off without me.’

‘Well then, where?’

‘Oxford,’ said Deborah.

‘You’re not!’ said Julia. Deborah opened the door. Julia kicked it shut again and Deborah hit Julia, hard across the legs, with the suitcase. At this, Julia discovered that seeing red was a precise description of a physical condition. She wrenched away the suitcase and brought it down on Deborah’s head. ‘I say you’re not! You can bloody well stay here!’ Deborah twisted her hand in Julia’s hair, slapped Julia’s face, and made again for the door. Julia flew at her.

‘Get your coat off! Get those things out of that case!’

‘You don’t want me. Let me go.’ She ran back: Julia ran after her, into the silent flat. Deborah turned and screamed at her, ‘You take everybody’s life. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’ She launched herself at her mother.

‘I hate you, too,’ said Julia, between blows. ‘You are a censorious little bitch. You are only half-human. However, you’ve got to live with me.’

They were now fighting on their knees; Julia shook her
hair out of her eyes, pinned Deborah down with one hand on the carpet, and said, ‘It’s a pity if we don’t learn to live with people we hate. Cold hatred is
the worst thing
, let me tell you. I know I’m not one to talk. But you’re an idiot to think of Cassandra. She may not hate you, but she doesn’t like you. Does she? You need a bit of blood for Christ’s sake. You are my daughter, I love you. I do love you. I can’t let you go there.’

Deborah wriggled and bit and fought back; both weeping, they battered each other into a breathless and bleeding calm. Julia sat up, panting, and said to her daughter, ‘I can’t let you make a myth out of Cassandra. She’s no good, not for you.’

‘I know, really. O.K., I know.’ She looked at Julia gravely. ‘You shouldn’t have done that to her, though, Julia.’

Here was judgement.

‘I know.’

‘It’s different for me. I mind, too, but your other books, they weren’t really about
me
, they were about you, what you felt about me. But this was
about her.
It really was.’

‘I thought that made it better, at the time.’

‘You can’t have really thought that. Not knowing her.’ She paused. ‘Do you think I’ve got to stay?’

‘What else can you do? Listen, Deborah, make some allowances for me? Please? If I’d ever lived with people who made allowances –
real
ones – I’d not need to ask for so many.’

‘I’ve made a lot.’

‘Yes, well, it’s you that gains from them. Let that console you.’

They looked at each other with a kind of animal affection.

‘Julia, what will she do?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

Cassandra, heading out of the doctor’s surgery, was seen by Gerald Rowell, who called her name. She went away from him down the street so fast that he had to run, skirts flaring, to catch up with her.

‘Cassandra!’

She turned into an off-licence.

‘Cassandra!’ He followed her in.

She leaned over the counter. ‘I want a bottle of brandy, please. Rémy-Martin, if you have it. But anything will do.’

‘Cassandra!’ he said, more sharply.

She stowed the brandy in her knapsack, and faced him.

‘How are you, Cassandra? I haven’t seen you for some time.’

‘Haven’t you? Did you want to?’

‘Have you time for a drink?’

‘Later. Later, I may have. Not just now. Thank you.’ She grinned. ‘Had you anything particular to say?’

‘I wanted your permission’ – he was white, stammering slightly – ‘to write a stiff letter to your sister.’

He watched her take this in. ‘I don’t mind what you do,’ she said.

‘Would it help?’

‘It would upset her, I imagine. She’s easily upset.’

‘I meant, would it help you?’

‘Please don’t worry about me,’ said Cassandra. ‘I shall be silent. I thought you were troubled on your own account. Indirectly, I owe you an apology for that.’ He was, indeed, she saw, possessed by a personal fury. ‘You have, as it were, lent your flesh and bones to a more irresponsible spirit. I have seen the book: decidedly, yes, I owe you an apology. I should have foreseen this. But it will come to matter less, you know. You will survive. It was so far from the truth.’

‘I should never have spoken to her,’ said Gerald Rowell. Cassandra looked at him with a flicker of remote interest; he went on, too hastily, ‘I wish you would come for that drink.’ He attempted to lay a hand on her arm; she leaned out, suddenly, and tapped his spectacle-lens with her thumbnail.

‘I never noticed they were bi-focals. What happens, if you take them off?’

‘Oh, everything runs into everything else, and the colours blur. I can’t move without them, I have to sit still.’

‘You should do it more often. Sit still and let everything run into everything else. We need a sense of being undifferentiated. Undifferentiated,’ cried Cassandra. ‘I keep chasing metaphors. Out of a desire for an impossible unity. Such effort, keeping everything separate all the time when under the sea, we are assured, no man is an island, we are all joined. You mustn’t think too hardly of Julia for her artistic effort, Father, it’s what we all do. We affirm that we can inhabit each other, body and soul, that’s all.’

He tried to understand. ‘We are all part of each other, in Christ, we are all made whole.’

‘That wasn’t quite what I meant. I think I had better go. Or what Julia meant. We overlap. I wish we didn’t. We could tolerate it if we were either separate or indistinguishable.’

‘You alarm me.’

‘Don’t be alarmed.’ She hoisted her knapsack over her shoulder. ‘Think about it. I must go now, I have to be alone.’

‘Cassandra!’

She let the door swing in his face and hurried away down the street. He saw her turn into the ironmongers. He thought a while, and then telephoned Miss Curtess, who promised to keep an eye on Cassandra, and was volubly indignant over Julia’s book for long enough to exorcise his own anger and replace it with pure embarrassment.

Cassandra’s Journal

So have I become a doll to stick pins in? Or a mirror on the wall to be asked what she, what either of us, means? At first I felt simply dirtied. My shoes, my nightdress, my pens, my papers, little dirty details of me lifted. Pinned out – oh yes, even my underwear – like a limp doll to be filled with puffs of her breath. What was missing filled in by her with dotted lines, pieces of new string to jerk the joints, or wood to replace limbs, as they do in museums, and never a footnote to say, this material is conjectural. This is an eclectic and conflated text.

Our normal intercourse is made up of this, all the time, I know. I know. We hide our knowledge of it. We could not live if we were made to see ourselves more than conjecturally as others see us. At best we translate their vision back into our own terms. But she does a little more than simply see me, and that little is intolerable.

When we were children, we were not quite separate. We shared a common vision, we created a common myth. And this, maybe, contained and resolved our difficulties. This is that primitive state that has been called innocence. We wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air.… But there is no innocent vision, we are not indistinguishable. We create each other, separate. It is not done with love. Or not with pure love. Nor with detachment. We are not simply specimens, under the bright light, in the glass case, in the zoo, in the museum. We are food for thought. The web is sticky. I trail dirty shreds of it.

I do not choose to stay to be pitied for that rag doll’s passions. They are not mine. But they were fed and watered by me, too much of my energy went into their growth for
me to be able to clear them away, or make myself a space to inhabit.

There is nowhere I shall not drag this grotesque shadow, our joint creature. I can choose, at least, to put out the light that throws it. I want no more reflections.

‘W
ELL
, where do we start?’

‘I still can’t see why you wanted to come.’

‘I wanted to help. If I could.’

‘It might have been better to come on my own.’

‘I don’t know. It might have taken more out of you. Besides there seems to be an enormous amount simply to carry.’

‘I’m not moving all that. Only the papers. The Oxfam people are coming to take what we don’t. Only they’ve no use for the papers. The police went through all those. As you no doubt gathered. Mother doesn’t want any of her things.’

‘And you?’

‘No.’

Simon took off his coat and hung it across the red chair. ‘Well, where do we start?’ he repeated. Julia wished, on the whole, that she had not brought him, although there was, absurdly, no one else she could have asked – no safe, ignorant stranger. And he had been genuinely helpful. He had hired and driven the car in which they would remove the papers. She had hoped he might provide protection against the college authorities, but he had left her to face these on her own. Her interview with the Principal had not been pleasant.

The papers had been stacked in the middle of the room. Academic files and boxes. Parcels of letters tied with string – Deborah’s, her own, Gerald Rowell’s. Cassandra seemed never to have thrown anything away. There was a shoe-box which proved to contain a rather haphazard collection of her own press cuttings. Notebooks full of remnants of narrative verse, blank, misty, decorated, concerning Morgan le Fay. The stack of paintings. Volumes of the journal. The last entry had been read out in court.

‘When we were little,’ Julia told Simon, ‘I used to annoy
her by taking all the books out of the book-case, piling them up in the middle of the floor, and sitting on them.’

‘King of the castle.’

‘She used to lock me out. When I stole the key she bought a bolt and screwed it on, herself.’

‘So she’d had practice,’ Simon said.

The deceased, the coroner had been told, had arranged matters with obsessive determination. There had been new bolts fitted to both outer and inner doors. A gap below the inner door had been stuffed with a gown, both doors had been sealed with cellulose draught-excluder and the window gummed up with wide strips of brown paper. The curtains were drawn and a bed of folded blankets arranged on the hearth near the fire. The deceased had swallowed a bottle of seconal and several glasses of brandy. She had also turned on the gas. There had been no note. The bolts and other precautions suggested, the psychiatrist had told the court, a degree at least of derangement; the deceased had been hysterically concerned to prove she was no gambler. It was, in these cases, just possible to assume that there was an obsessive attempt to ‘play fair’; any rescuer who had broken down those doors would have been a real rescuer. We could not tell. It was this evidence, in conjunction with Father Rowell’s, which had decided the verdict.

‘While you were talking to that woman,’ Simon said, ‘I met some of the girls on the stairs. One of them said they actually saw her from the lawn, sticking the windows up – ‘like a great black bird beating against the glass’ she poetically and inaccurately put it. Apparently, knowing her, they thought nothing of it. She said they all gathered at the foot of the stairs and watched them go up. The Principal, the chef in his white hat and apron, and the Senior Tutor. They broke the doors in. There’s a Miss Curtess who’s left in a state of nervous collapse because she suspected, and did nothing, except knock from time to time and get no answer. The girl thought I was the
News of the World.
She told me they’re all shocked. She says they all feel guilty, and resent this. A proper little psychologist.’

‘Don’t we all?’ Julia’s voice was sharp.

‘I don’t know what you feel.’

‘What you said, I feel,’ said Julia. ‘What she meant me to feel, but other things as well.’

Simon’s look flickered towards her and away. He crossed the room, and stood by the hearth, on that piece of carpet Julia had not yet looked at.

‘She always made the rules. She planned the story, and I fitted in, I carried it out. She made me what I am. She made perfectly normal behaviour into crimes – like borrowing books, like telling people things, like talking to you. She locked me out until I was crazy to get in. And then she saw to it I was guilty of real crimes, that what I’d done I couldn’t change or undo. She made me – take things – and then left me in possession. She wanted it this way. Why should I be guilty?’ She looked round the empty room, down at the books. ‘Why should I take possession? I don’t want her life. I never really did. Certainly not now.’

Simon said nothing.

‘She meant to finish me off.’

‘You see it simply as an act of vengeance?’

‘I’d do better to.’

‘You are still talking as though she were alive.’ Julia hesitated, did not quite contemplate what he was saying.