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.’
‘But normal with such an effort,’ Julia said eagerly. ‘Quakers are so self-consciously normal, there are no laws, only a sort of laissez-faire puritanism that means you’re always making scrupulous decisions about things other people take for granted. It’s a strain. And our house is so unsettled – we’ve always got refugees, and out-of-work miners, and prisoners on parole and unmarried mothers – and we’re all so reasonable and it makes so much tension. We just behave like a normal family. We know a – a hell of a lot about it, but we’ve no time left to spend being it. And living with Cassandra can’t be called normal.’
Much of this speech was something Cassandra had once said to her in anger. It was also her own considered opinion.
‘You are tremendously aware of what goes on,’ Simon said, changing back from the wildly confidential boy to the judicious student of character. ‘I like talking to you.’
He took her hand, clumsily, intertwining their fingers. His hand was slightly clammy; along the back of his fingers black hair grew thickly, in oblong patches, prickling slightly. She felt this was a dramatic moment – something had changed – and that she would much rather he did not touch her. She returned the handclasp warmly, caressed him briefly, stood up, and ran to the sea’s edge. It was a clear day, with bright December sunshine, and no wind. The sound of the long breakers and the smell of the sea made Julia feel as she supposed being drunk must feel. She had never, coming from this family, tasted drink.
She turned over flotsam with a piece of driftwood. ‘Sometimes we find lovely stones here,’ she said, throwing aside a clump of bladderwrack with a spatter of sand, uncovering, under its tangled meshes, a pile of damp and broken feathers and half a cod, whose eyeless head gaped, whose needle-fine teeth curved back from the plated oval jaw, whose insides spilled on the sand. Small creatures hopped and scuttled over feathers and scales. There was a smell; not a warm, decaying smell, but a cold, salt stench.
‘Oh, God,’ said Julia, ‘what a mess.’ She moved briskly along the black line of shells and seaweed. ‘What one finds.’ She gathered two flat stones and sent them skipping across the water. Behind her, Simon slowly turned over the fish, squatting on the sand, knees and shoulders pushed together. His confidences increased Julia. She ran along the beach, and hummed, and sang, feeling powerful.
She would do anything for him. He needed her. She looked at him with love.
Some, not all, of this Julia wrote into her letter. She finished ‘But all the same, Ivan, how could I ever know what I felt? I felt so pushed about, by what he wanted, by what she wanted, I didn’t stand a chance. It wasn’t only her that wasn’t quite real – he wasn’t, either, he never knew how much I just simply didn’t understand. Of course I was excited by him telling me things – I’d started out by thinking of him as taboo – and even at the end, long after it all came out, I got this funny, sacrilegious pleasure from it. I think I did love him. I think I could have loved him, if we’d met naked, as it were. But with Cassandra watching – I’ve always been scared stiff of waking up and finding out I was nothing but a thought in Cassandra’s mind.
‘We used to sit about saying, ‘Why don’t you stop talking about Cassandra?” to each other. He said that more. So I suppose I talked more.
‘You’d better read this as the first instalment of an unwritten novel. The bare, the thread-bare soul of Julia Corbett. Christ, if I didn’t have to be shut up in this house I wouldn’t think about it, I assure you. Do you know, we even sat together watching him on the telly. All her feelings are unreal, they are attached to unrealities, but they still affect other people’s lives.…’
Chapter 8
CASSANDRA turned on the television. Julia was not there. It was snowing again and the reception was bad. Metal flashes cracked across the pretty girl’s silly face. Simon, when he appeared, pottered about unconcernedly in his still, damp jungle, behind jagged thickets of lightning and growls of thunder, his voice rising only fitfully above the elemental pother. Cassandra put another log on the fire and turned up the sound.
‘We bring death to these people in the form of firearms and whisky,’ he said, suddenly clear. He could be seen, now, standing in the centre of a semicircle of women, most of them naked, some pregnant, some carrying nursing children, few of them taller than his elbow, all with the same flat noses and dark, incomprehensible stare. ‘We kill them off with V.D. and flu.’ He looked at his own feet with a faint, defiant embarrassment Cassandra remembered accurately. ‘We make use of them. We come and take photographs. They see this as a theft of the personality. These, however’ – he gestured to his companions – ‘have been regularly paid with beads, they come out and clamour to be photographed.’ He smiled.
‘We classify their sexual and religious behaviour and interpret our own by them.’ He looked up anxiously. ‘We destroy the rhythms of their lives and do them no commensurate good. Oh, we could do good, but not to them as they are now, only by so much changing that some would be lost in the process. At the moment we just make them self-conscious – conscious of themselves in our terms – and erode their basic dignity, their sense of themselves in their lives. I’m not being sentimental. We ignore differences – radical differences.’ He said desperately, ‘The brotherhood of man is so much more a myth than the opposite. I shall never know these people. In important ways – important ways – I am not like them.’
The flat faces wavered and a black hole appeared and spread in the centre of Simon’s face. Little silver lines, spearheads, threads of water, moved against and dissected his limbs. A low buzzing hum appeared and increased in pitch. Simon mouthed at them – presumably about the limits of human communication – from a horribly distorted head; the hole spread to include his mouth and his body swelled and jiggled uncontrollably. Cassandra continued to stare at him, unmoving.
Thor, who had come unremarked down the stairs, sat in the arm-chair next to her.
‘You persist in contemplating even broken images.’ He smiled briefly. ‘Or may I turn him off?’
Cassandra stood up and turned the switch, diminishing Simon to a line and then nothing.
‘I am at a loss to understand his fascination. He produces all our current clichés. Exaggerated respect for what is primitive and animal. Coupled with the current fashionable hopelessness. We find our roots and they are violent and savage, but we respect them. And so give up. World wars and serpents will always be too much for intelligence and charity. He is simple-minded.’
‘Simple-minded may also be right-minded,’ Cassandra said slowly. ‘As far as it goes.’
‘I am at a loss to understand his fascination,’ her brother-in-law repeated doggedly, as though he liked the phrase.
‘I should have thought you had just excellently described his fascination,’ Cassandra sa
id. ‘Simon Moffitt was never an original thinker. It’s what he is – it’s the fact that these things so patently affect him. I wouldn’t have thought he would have gone in for – this kind of popular dissemination of – of spiritual musings on physical facts. But now he has, I see of course that he always had it in him.’ She warmed to her subject. ‘You see, he panders to a need that’s slowly reached the surface of our consciousness in our time. A need to relate the mind and the body. To see ourselves connected to, in terms of, the primitive: animals, blood and food, the eternal rhythms, inevitable destruction – we do feel, don’t we, fatally out of touch?’ She shivered. ‘And just as society as a whole – oh, through things like all this jungle music I understand they listen to – has become generally aware of this need, here is a man who can be seen living it. I think he does it quite well.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Thor. ‘He is a personality. He bares his soul for other people. As those savages bare their bodies for his camera and he despises them. Albert Schweitzer – that I can understand and admire. But this is conceit.’
‘No, I don’t think conceit,’ Cassandra began judiciously. Her love for Simon had always included a certain contempt for his simplicities. In the early days, when she had needed to worship, this contempt had been a private and unconsidered pleasure. Later she had needed it to comfort herself and had elaborated and explored it. ‘Not conceit. I think he’s probably not fully aware of the public nature of what he’s doing. He’s a natural because he’s not deliberately appealing to an audience. Which is not to say he doesn’t appeal …’
Thor cut across this with a remark which, Cassandra decided later, he had come downstairs prepared to deliver.
‘But what good is there in this for you and Julia? Don’t you think you had better let it lie?’
Cassandra’s skin prickled. She looked sharply across at him and surprised on his polished, slightly flushed face a look of determined helpfulness, a deliberate, clerical kindness.
‘I don’t know what Julia thinks. That is her business.’
‘I think you should make it your business.’
‘We rarely see each other.’
‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?’ Cassandra closed her mouth, tightly, and sat, exploring the implications of this. Thor said, in a rough, judging tone, ‘Why don’t you let go? Julia is afraid of you. Let him go, let Julia go. Make – some gesture – to Julia. You could free yourself, as well as Julia. This Simon has really nothing to do with it. Forgive me speaking so openly, someone must. You know yourself I am not making something out of nothing.’
Cassandra stood up. ‘I see you and Julia have been talking me over. I should have expected that. But I dislike thinking about it.’ She paused. ‘I sympathize with you to a certain extent. Being told things, over and over, by Julia, can be very exhausting. But it should make you careful what you say to other people.’
She walked over to the stairs and then looked back.
‘You will neither of you face facts,’ he said, making no effort to detain her. In the firelight his face had the same look of petulance and indignant judgement it had had over Julia’s refusal to go to the Congo. Trembling slightly, Cassandra went silently up the stairs and into her room.
She drew the curtains, lit the gas-fire, sat for a moment or two, her hands crossed and working on her knees, and then lit a cigarette and began to pace, round the end of the bed, turning with military precision on her heel.
‘Haven’t you done enough damage?’
What did he mean, damage? She had protected herself, simply, and she had left Julia a clear field to act. It must be galling for him, she thought with distant malice, to be so anxious to go to the African jungle to do good and have his wife hanging nervously on every word of some charlatan in the American jungle, out for money and exhibitionism. She wondered what he had been told, and was seized by the sharp, futile pain of remembering past embarrassments, so that she shook her head, and gasped, and said aloud, ‘No,’ once or twice. This was a pain she had supposed, wrongly, she would grow out of. As she had supposed that she would grow out of Simon, and her humiliation over Simon. Since the television appearances, which gave his pronouncements the illusory appearance of privacy and intimacy, Simon had become again accessible to the imagination, to dispute, to thought, to dreams. It had created a clearing in which thinking about him was not intolerable. But the house, Deborah, and Thor, made her realize that she was just as much as ever an object of Julia’s speculation, Julia’s tale-telling. She had tried, God knew, to avoid that. At all costs. She wheeled and shook unnecessary ash from the glowing cigarette into the waste-paper basket.
‘Cass, being friends with you is more important in the long run than anything Simon can ever mean to me.’
That was not true for her. But it had had to be. Slowly her own sentences came back at her out of the past, in other contexts. ‘Being told things by Julia can be very exhausting.’ ‘You and Julia have been talking about me; I find that intolerable.’ ‘More important than anything Simon can ever …’ Oh, no.
On the day of her return from Oxford she and Julia had tea in the kitchen. The house was otherwise empty: Inge, Nelly and a flock of refugee children were at the W.I. Christmas Bazaar. Cassandra came in, made certain all her papers were reassuringly cold and dusty, locked her journal into her desk, gathered, in the hall, a letter from Simon and thrust it into her pocket to read later. Cassandra never seized the moment.
Julia was putting the kettle on the Aga. She looked very young, and was wearing a yellow polo-neck sweater and Black Watch tartan skirt. She did not look round as Cassandra came in, which irritated Cassandra vaguely; for once, fairly sure of who she was, Cassandra was simply glad to see her. She offered to help; Julia with downcast eyes said no, it was all nearly ready; Cassandra sat at the kitchen table and told Julia about Oxford, Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knight, mediaeval pronunciation, rivers, bells, college customs, rationing. Their relationship was always easiest when Cassandra was offering information; she became almost animated. Julia sliced bread, laid it on the round grid of the Aga toaster, saying, in a muted voice, ‘Gosh’ and ‘Oh, Cass,’ from time to time. When Cassandra ran to a stop, she said:
‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
‘Well?’
‘I – I’ve been seeing quite a lot of Simon.’
‘Well?’ more sharply.
‘He asked me to tea. Once or twice. And came here.’
Cassandra said nothing.
‘I’m sorry, Cass.’
‘You’ll burn that toast, for God’s sake be careful.’
‘It was funny really, we met because we were both posting letters to you.’
Cassandra closed her eyes, like a child which gives itself, through closing out its surroundings, the illusion that it is not there. When she opened them Julia was looking at her with gentle concern.
‘He only came because he likes to talk about you. Because he knew you.’
‘I don’t like being talked about. I don’t like being thought about. I know it is not a human right, not to be talked about.’ Cassandra stood up and set out for her room.
‘Cass – no, wait – Cass, listen – he asked me to ask you, will we both go to tea there tomorrow. He wants to see you.’
She gathered herself. ‘Well, then, we must go.’ She got out of the kitchen, somehow. Behind her, to seal, she thought, the real importance of the occasion, Julia burst into tears.
Simon’s letter thanked her for her two last, apologized for his dilatory reply, made a good point about the essentially predatory nature of little boys being a clear evidence of original sin, and ended, ‘I have asked Julia, too. Love, Simon.’
At Oxford she had had a recurrent nightmare all term. She still had it. It combined bright colour with black and white. Only the carpet was coloured – grass-green, expansive, bedizened with pink and silver roses and trellis-work it extended across a room round whose remote edge, in black and white, on sofas
, on arm-chairs, with tea-trollies at their elbows and nests of tables opened out and scattered, her family sat, still as photographs. The door would open slowly, and Simon would come in, awkward, graceful. At this point she always struggled close enough to consciousness to express to herself surprise that she should have called him up with such solid authority; as though he should have been vaguer or more oblique. He would smile at them with impartial friendliness, take their hands, kiss Julia, her mother, Inge, and turn to her. She would disgrace herself by crawling away on hands and knees over the vivid carpet to lie, panting and hunted, face down behind the sofa. She heard sounds: a disconnected hum of conversation, the twang of the springs on the sofa, jaws moving, masticating sandwiches, the quick gulping of tea. She supposed now that this horror derived from some childhood tantrum that her conscious mind had suppressed. At some stage in the dream she always saw Simon, full face, eating and smiling politely, his Adam’s apple rising and falling.
Cassandra did not, even at their best, like tea-parties. About Simon’s tea-party she thought, now, as little as possible; she had gone there only in order not to be asked why she had not gone; to make certain that she should never be asked questions of that kind in the future. They had walked there in their Sunday dresses, Julia, two steps behind, stopping occasionally to expostulate. Cassandra felt the constant adjustment of pace as a bursting in the diaphragm.
‘Honestly, Cass, I don’t want to come if you don’t want me to. Don’t think I shouldn’t understand, if you wanted to talk to him on your own or anything. Cass, you do know I’d do anything rather than upset you.’
‘He asked you,’ said Cassandra. ‘Didn’t he?’