He smiled, a slow, diffident smile, which Cassandra in moods of irritation had been used to call smug. He always believed, she thought now, that he had discovered everything himself, at first-hand: the banal, the platitudinous, the startling truth, indiscriminately mixed. This occupation was a logical enough end-product.
‘And the scientist with a camera,’ he said urgently, ‘can, as it were, rediscover innocence. The innocent eye, not ignorant, but trained, detached, seeing everything for itself, for what it is, with no apprehensions and very fluid preconceptions. Once one has one’s own feelings in hand – once one’s fears are real fears and one’s needs are real needs – everything else can be seen with that pure curiosity which is one of the highest human qualities. And I would call it innocence. An achieved, an informed innocence.’
‘Consider the butterflies,’ he said. Cassandra’s mouth twisted slightly. The screen was alive with trembling wings, with that irregular vibrating beat of filmed leaves and insects, that seems never apparent when one considers an isolated leaf or insect alone in the open air; it is intense only in the still eye of the camera. The butterflies were settled in dozens on something which was revealed, by the human boot that entered the picture from above and scattered the insects in a beautifully filmed flurry of translucent wings, to be the darkened and raw body of some kind of small pig.
‘The colours are delicate and bright,’ said Simon. ‘Aerial. A hard blue, a brimstone – and many are transparent with a hint of milkiness, or palest blue, or faint red. They live on blood. I have seen them as big as pigeons.’
There was a momentary huge close-up of the trembling head and planted proboscis of the insect, straddling the flesh with its wire-like legs.
‘We achieve, with magnification, a new dimension of strangeness. We enter new worlds. Our own becomes less stable. Imagine seeing this butterfly with no preconceptions about its nature. Or imagine knowing about the way it feeds, about the structure of its wing-tissue, in microscopic detail. Our picture of reality is never fixed but can always be elaborated and made more accurate. And this changes us. The weight of the butterfly makes an iron bridge bend – in that it redistributes, ever so slightly, some molecules. Every new piece of knowledge – in the same way – enlarges our world.’
His face appeared, lugubrious, apparently awed by what he had just said; he was, he had always been, Cassandra thought, for a scientist, unduly given to the vague and loaded generalization. She cleared her throat; Simon disappeared again; one of the girls stood up and turned off the set. Another came up to where Cassandra was standing and turned on the light; all the girls blinked. Cassandra looked from face to face, detected, she thought, curiosity, saw one of her better pupils, a terrified, bright, incipient don with protruding rabbit’s teeth and gave her an invented message about R. S. Thomas. Another girl, curled up plump and lazy on the corner of the sofa, said:
‘What do you think of him, Miss Corbett?’
‘Him?’
‘Simon Moffitt. This naturalist.’
‘I thought it interesting.’
‘He’s so urgent about it,’ said the toothy girl.
‘Desperately attractive in a helpless sort of way,’ said the plump one. ‘I wonder what makes him go out there.’
‘Fear,’ said Cassandra. ‘Curiosity. An unexpected exhibitionism.’
‘Unexpected?’
‘I knew him once. I should have called it unexpected.’
‘You knew him? Was he like this?’
‘He kept snakes. In jars and tanks. An idée fixe, clearly. No, I shouldn’t have said he is much like what he was. Public appearance changes people, I suppose.’
‘Was he …?’
‘Good night,’ said Cassandra. She closed the door behind her, trembling; decidedly the S.C.R. might have been better. She felt like a secret drinker whose cache of bottles in the folds of the bedcover was in danger of discovery.
Back in her room, she went round touching the things. She rearranged a group of ivory chessmen on a shelf, laid silk threads of various colours neatly in the pages of the Malory, put all her pens and pencils in a row at the top of the blotter, their bases aligned with precision. She turned on the fire and washed her hands in the bedroom basin. Then she sat down at the desk, unlocked a drawer, brought out a polished box and unlocked that, in turn, with a key that hung on a chain from her person.
The box contained the current volume of the journal she had kept since childhood; she opened this now, selected a pen, and began to write. What she wrote was extensive and apparently unselective; she described, in accurate detail, every event of her day, meals, work, the contraction of the snake’s muscles as it moved across the sand. She gave more space to the peculiarly bulbous hairy legs of Miss Wood than to the kind note from Father Rowell. She was occasionally distressed by the extent to which the events and solid objects around her were only remarkable in so far as she ‘collected’ them for the journal. In moments of solitude she was increasingly obsessed by a sense that her life was weightless and meaningless; she told herself sometimes that she had made of the journal a moral compulsion to treat her life and its details as though they were real. But this was not what it felt like, however the journal gave solidity to round, hot girls in pink dressing-gowns and even noted, carefully, their cracked and dirty toe-nails.
It seemed, lately, that the journal was becoming an increasingly necessary means of distinguishing between what was real and what was imagined. Once she had used it for the opposite purpose, recording moorland rapes and battles alongside vicarage tea-parties with indifferent skill as though the one ran into the other as she had imagined Oxford ran into the past. Daily events had been landmarks, tips of icebergs useful for locating events in the inner drama. Empty rooms had been – were – peopled. Helen Waddell had once seen Peter Abelard peering in through a hospital window. Charlotte Brontë had seen the Duke of Zamorna leaning against a school mantelshelf and had felt exhilarated and faint. They had played with fear, too; they had deliberately blurred the edges that divided the real from the fantastic. It might be that they too had been hunted, in the long run, and had feared to be absorbed, submerged with no hope of return.
And once the journal had been only raw material for some large imaginative work – something finished and formed, which would, like a magnet, polarize all these unrelated scraps so that they lay in concentric circles or stood and pointed all one way like fur. It was still a guarantee of possible significant communication; it existed and was fluent.
She spent some space on elaborating the physical differences between Simon Moffitt as she saw him now and Simon as she had known him. This was painful, but not without excitement. She ended. ‘He has achieved a professional mode of communication, and this has changed him. He is harder; this I expected; but he is also larger. Or so he seems. I find this distressing.’
She thought a moment and then added, ‘Notes on the winged snake. This is interesting. I should like to know whether you remember my views on this idea, put to you now nearly twenty years ago. I notice that you used some of my quotations last week. The serpent is traditionally, as I told you, a symbol for our horror at finding ourselves necessarily embodied. It is the brute. A creature reduced to a mouth and a stomach. On thy belly shalt thou go, etc. In the myth of Psyche, Psyche’s curiosity discovers Eros embodied as a serpent. The neo-Platonic interpretation is that this curiosity has transformed spiritual love to bodily lust. The limiting, debasing animal functions. Keats knew this feeling. There is a marginal note in his Paradise Lost at the point where Satan informs the brutal sense of the serpent which gives a feeling of distress at physical confinement quite in excess of what Milton meant to convey. He says something like “Whose spirit does not ache at the smothering and confinement – the unwilling stillness – the ‘waiting close’?” Do we not know this, Simon? So, of course, we give the creature wings.
“The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name —
br />
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life! For in this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.”
‘Coleridge. Psyche means both butterfly and soul. A nice comment, both on my myth, and on your butterflies, which, as you told us, feed on blood. Just as your serpents make greater speed the more manifold the motions. I wish I could tell you, Simon, how much I enjoy the irony of your self-projection as a scientific observer in a topsy-turvy Eden. Well, cherish your illusory neutrality; there is no love – as we both know – that does not deform and kill. We cannot combine butterfly and serpent without corrupting the butterfly. Not that I do not admire, dear Simon, what you are trying to do.
‘If, when we were younger, we knew how small were our stores of affection, and how, once they are dispensed, they cannot be retrieved, we should surely be less prodigal?’
She snapped the book shut on this, and locked it away again; she put on a coat and went out into the garden. It was cold there, and the river smelled, a strong smell of fishy slime with a thick, green, fresh overtone. Cassandra sat on a stone bench and stared into some rhododendron bushes. She was becoming more and more insomniac; night after night she paced garden and buildings, arguing with fear. Sometimes it was a vague weight; sometimes it took precise shapes. It could be defeated by changes of position, by concentration on one harmless object. She folded her hands in her lap, experimentally, and waited. Hidden in the river-bank a duck quacked, disturbed.
Chapter 3
TWO weeks later Cassandra got out of a train in the early evening, at Newcastle. She carried a suitcase and a brief-case, and looked round momentarily for familiar faces, although she had not thought about whether she would be met. She had not thought very much, and was unprepared for the curiously unreal familiarity of her childhood surroundings, which she now almost never saw; sometimes at Christmas, and not every Christmas. She had stood on these platforms, gaunt and humourless, comparing herself as she waited for the train that would take her south to school, to the yelling cattle packed in trucks in the siding. She still felt a vague need to re-assert a private will in some way; to do something here that proved she was her own mistress. Childish, at thirty-eight. She came back as little as possible.
She drifted with the other passengers, up over the footbridge, choking in a sudden cloud of grit and steam, down towards where the crowd was thickening around the ticket-collector’s bottleneck. Here, she leaned patiently against a barrier, waiting. She was in no hurry.
‘Cassandra!’ She turned her head, looking abruptly over the barrier. ‘Cassandra! Pass me over your things. And the brief-case. Do you realize, we must have come by the same train? We are complete fools, not to think.’
It was Thor, in a navy-blue duffel coat; he stretched over a long arm and swung away her cases, smiling gently.
‘They do not mind, it is not as though we were smuggling. I cannot get over what fools we are. Did you have a good journey?’
‘Excellent, thank you,’ Cassandra said, somewhat huskily; she had not spoken since she left London. She cleared her throat.
‘When they let you out,’ he said, ‘we are under the clock. We’ll wait.’
Cassandra cleared her throat again, and nodded rapidly, once or twice. She wished he had left her the brief-case; without its weight she felt clumsy and at a loss. She thrust her hands into her pockets, and began to advance towards the ticket-collector, moving a dry tongue in a dry mouth. He seemed very friendly. Of course, she hardly knew him. He kept smiling, which was unnerving.
Under the clock were Julia, and a tall, thin early teenager, Julia’s daughter, Deborah. Deborah Jane, an over-fashionable name for her generation. Cassandra had not seen Julia for some time – not for three or four Christmasses, since the last time they had coincided. She thought Julia much changed; she had developed a sleekness. She wore a circular scarlet tent of a coat, with little sleeves like folded wings, and a huge white fur cone on her head. The sisters looked at each other, and nodded. It was Thor who spoke.
‘You see, here is Cassandra. We should have thought, she would have been told too, Oxford to Newcastle is often easier by London. We could have travelled together.’
They looked at each other again, with a certain complicity. They would not, left to themselves, have thought of travelling together.
‘Of course, how silly,’ cried Julia. ‘But it has all been so rushed.’
‘You look very well, Julia,’ Cassandra brought out, and coughed. Then she coughed again; Julia watched her fight it down into a series of little chokes, and then silence.
‘I shall go and make telephone calls,’ said Thor, ‘and find out what is best to do. Naturally, with all their trouble, they will not have thought …’
Julia watched Cassandra press her lips together over the cough, and felt the minutes run past whilst she tried to think of something nice to say about Cassandra’s appearance. Cassandra’s eyes were watering a little, with effort. Well, why the hell doesn’t she cough then? Julia thought. She wore a long – very long – sealskin coat, and a drooping black folded velvet beret, transfixed by a silver dagger with a yellow stone embedded in the hilt. On the corner of her mouth was a faint smear of ink. She wore thick black stockings, elegant enough on her good legs, and a pair of those shoes affected by women dons, cuban-heeled, punched, laced, high in the instep. The sight of these filled Julia with a kind of panic which she could not quite convert into mockery; why does she have to, she thought, and looked down momentarily on her own knee-high black boots, with their tassels swinging from the cuff. She was both apprehensive and complacent about her own girlish appearance.
She said, ‘Oh, Cass, here is Debbie,’ and pushed forward her lanky daughter, who wore a gaberdine raincoat, pulled in very tightly round the waist, a powder-blue woolly hat, and fur boots. Cassandra surveyed this child, whom she did not expect to like, neutrally. They had never spoken much. Each year Cassandra sent her a girls’ book for Christmas, but she did not suppose they were read, and chose them on the advice of one of the church ladies. Deborah always sent back accurate, colourless, uninformative thank-you letters.
She was freckled, had a large nose, and looked tired.
‘How do you do?’ said Cassandra, in a don’s bark.
‘Hullo,’ said Deborah, on a vanishing note. Her teeth were chattering. ‘It’s cold,’ she said apologetically.
‘It’s going to get worse,’ said Cassandra.
Deborah, apparently finding no answer to the tone of voice in which this was said, looked at her feet, and settled her features, a little ostentatiously, into a grim patience. Julia shrugged her shoulders and wriggled her toes. Cassandra took two steps to the right, leaned down, and defensively repossessed herself of her brief-case, which contained her journal; when she looked up again, Julia was watching her. Julia grinned. Thor came back from the Booking Hall.
‘Apparently Mr Merton is waiting for us,’ Thor said. ‘He has had business in Newcastle, and is driving back. They cannot think how they neglected to tell us.’
When he mentioned the Vicar, Cassandra and Julia looked at each other, and for the first time their mouths lifted together with a smile. They knew they were remembering the same things, and the smile flickered with embarrassment.
Thor raised his head and cried, ‘Porter!’ Two porters immediately came; Cassandra, who had never had a man to look after her, and who was, despite her firm manner, always confused and ignored on stations, looked at Julia to see how she took this. Julia inclined her head, and smiled benignly. Maybe, Cassandra thought, with unexpected surprise, Julia is happy.
The Reverend Edwin Merton was waiting under the heavy portico beside his cream-coloured Rover; he opened doors, ushered them in, and slammed doors with a great deal of brisk and graceful bending of the body. Julia sat beside him; Cassandra, Thor and
Deborah were all crowded into the back. Cassandra, immediately behind the Vicar, noticed that his neck, above his collar, had grown thicker and redder, and that he had a real bald patch amongst the iron-grey curls. This was normally not noticeable, because of his great height; he was still a very handsome man. When he had turned the car out into the main streets, with a great deal of swelling shoulder-muscles and creaking of seats, he said, ‘I’m glad you were able to come. I think it was necessary. This was all completely unexpected, I understand, and a great shock to your mother.’
Julia looked out at grey Newcastle, trolley wires and blackened churches. Carrick’s café, where her first packet of cigarettes and ice-cream in one of those grained silver goblets had been symbols, more or less fantastic, for the real, sophisticated city life she was going to lead. The Theatre Royal, all pillars and round lamps on iron chains, where coming out from a pantomime in a cinnamon velvet dress with a lace collar, and a silver purse dangling on a ring from one finger, she had imagined herself one of a furred and scented London crowd about to go on to dance in some night club, vaguely wicked, vaguely risky. She still didn’t know very much about night clubs, but was able whole-heartedly to enjoy being part of a crowd outside a London theatre in the dark simply by remembering her own feelings at ten, eleven, or twelve in the cinnamon dress. I was hungry for life, she thought, wherever I look in these streets I remember wanting something; they were images of London. She looked sideways at Cassandra, who had certainly shared this dream, and wondered what she was thinking.