The Game

‘That,’ said Deborah, ‘will be a hundred guineas from the New Yorker when it’s written up. She always writes up rows.’

  ‘Deborah!’ said Cassandra.

  ‘That was not a row, dear,’ said Mrs Corbett, reprovingly. Cassandra thought, she always slides away from any mention of real antagonism; she always did. She asked Deborah, ‘Would you like to go to the Congo, then?’

  ‘No. I should loathe it. But someone ought to see how much he wants … how much he needs.…’ She stared at Cassandra with an undisguised appeal. ‘I do see things,’ she said meaningfully.

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ said Cassandra, and met her look squarely and without smiling.

  Julia went up to their bedroom. Thor was not there. She walked up and down, looking into the mirror and out of the window at the snow. She wondered if she ought to go after him; but she was, in a way, afraid to. Since they had been closed up all day together, always falling over each other, she had begun to notice certain things. He showed what she considered a disturbing tendency to humour her, take burdens for her, treat her as though she was not quite responsible. As though, she thought, he had some time ago decided, without her noticing it, to stop taking her seriously.

  When they had married it had been understood that Thor was waiting for her to grow up, forget and settle. He had, in a sense, ‘taken her on’ as a problem; it was a relationship that suited them both peculiarly well. He had been staying in the house in the hot summer of 1947, breaking a pilgrimage across the north of England to Pendle Hill, where George Fox, that irate and driven man, had had his vision. But he had never got there, on that occasion. He had taken Julia for walks, and she had told him, in a confidential outburst, all the trouble with Simon and Cassandra. She was hysterical; she had been needing someone to tell for nearly a year, and had rehearsed to herself explanations of her own conduct until she was silly. She had told two young farmers and a journalist on the local paper for which she worked but none of these had treated the problem with the proper gravity. Julia always told everyone everything, holding nothing back on the principle that however much one tells there will always remain some ultimate mystery that cannot be imparted anyway, and thus privacy cannot finally be betrayed.

  ‘I know you will understand,” she had cried, undaunted and hopeful, to the serious Scandinavian; many people would not have risked it. She knew whilst she told him that he was not a man in whom people naturally confided, and that he wanted desperately to be. He was both too formidable and too apparently simple, like most men professionally concerned with goodness. He was flattered and moved that she should speak to him with such intimacy, without premeditation. And she was flattered and moved that he should allow her to impinge on his withdrawn austerity, to shake his dignity. He was a man with real purposes, about which he was reticent, an adult; he had none of her own confessional sloppiness as Simon, disconcertingly, had. But she suspected him, at first, of a respectable innocence, born of ignorance; she did not decide to marry him until the night he appeared, silent and unexpected, in her bedroom, his face desperate, green and white striped pyjamas hanging in folds about his body, long, pale, bare feet protruding under them.

  This episode had seemed to her a guarantee that he was neither simply respectable, nor innocent; it was an explosion of secret violence within the peaceful order of her parents’ house; the silly, respectable look of the pyjamas, the familiarity of her own room, wooden floor, circular pegged rug, tall wooden bed, only emphasized what she found decisively romantic about it.

  And so she had come to be married, and wondered sometimes, vaguely, whether she had been silly to rush into it so young and ignorant. Deborah had been born unexpectedly just under a year later; suddenly, with no breathing-space, there had been too much responsibility, too little sleep, no privacy, no time to talk. Both of them tried; Thor worked hard with the baby, Julia complained as little as possible. But she had had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, a year later. Deborah had come to the Old House, Julia had written her first novel during convalescence; surprisingly, it was accepted. Julia was insanely happy, Deborah came home; they juggled with charity, writing, pot-training, telephone calls, teeth, tight schedules, occasional conversation. It was still mutatis mutandis, like that.

  Julia did not really think she could have done much better; she was sane, and productive; she owed this to Thor. She was anxious to do things for him – she wanted to believe she would do everything for him – everything, that was, that she could rely on herself realistically to carry out. We must know our own limitations: this was a theme she often wrote on. Julia was very well acquainted with her own limitations. She wished, now, she dared go and look for him – but what was there, on this topic, to say to him? She took out Ivan’s letter and re-read it. Then she re-read it again.

  At this point Thor came into the room carrying a sheaf of letters and a typewriter. He intended, clearly, to deal with her mother’s correspondence; she might have done that herself. If he had not been there first to do it.

  ‘What are you doing, Julia?’

  ‘Reading a letter. From Ivan.’ Julia always told him the truth; this was a point of honour.

  ‘You write a great many letters.’

  ‘I know, it’s a nuisance. If we could only get out of this place.…’

  ‘I don’t think we should speak like that.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’ She paused, ‘I get a bit worried about the programme.’

  ‘When that was first suggested, I remember you did not want to take part.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Julia, not sure what the issue was. ‘Yes, I know. But when I do take anything on, I like to do it thoroughly. It’s my conscience.’ She smiled, faintly.

  ‘Conscience!’ cried Thor. He struck the desk violently with a heavy fist, rattling the typewriter keys. ‘Conscience! Oh, for Christ’s sake, Julia …’

  He swore very rarely. Julia jumped at the noise and trembled. Then he was silent: one of the things about him for which Julia had initially been grateful and which she now found unnerving was his capacity to swallow abruptly any momentary anger.

  ‘Thor,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry I was stupid. I mean, I didn’t realize, I just didn’t realize how seriously you.… Look, darling, if you really want to go, that makes it different. If it’s something you really want, then I – I really don’t mean to stand in your way. I didn’t know you’d talked to Friends.…’ She swallowed nervously, believing herself partially. His face tightened.

  ‘What I want? You see it as a question of what I want? You are probably right.’

  ‘I want you to be happy.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘happy.’ He sat down on the bed. ‘Julia, I need help. I should have talked to you earlier. I keep things too much to myself. I know it’s a fault. I – I feel a need, and a duty, I don’t know – to use myself. To do something fully. Can you understand? To expend all my – my power. Julia? The world is so full of – of heavy tasks to which one man’s energy would make some difference. And we leave them undone. I feel, often, I have failed. Sometimes I feel I shall go mad. I – I have always seen – heroism – as something the situation – a situation – called up. Seeking it out can be wrong. I’ve thought of that. It could come from a childish desire to assert oneself. Or a need for glamour. Or a childish need to shake off restrictions. Morality – means recognizing restrictions. One must live within the duties one acquires, I know. I know I have responsibilities which make violent action impossible. It may be that God does not intend me to live violently. I have to see that I am not called. I do see that I am not called. But, Julia, it beats in my head. It is not admirable. But —’

  He stared out of the window with an expression Julia found unnerving. She thought: how the religious man is separated for ever from the irreligious because there is a whole set of moral problems created for him by the assumption that there is a God whose meaningful intention placed him where he is.

  ‘It frightens me that you feel me and Deborah as a restriction. I didn?
??t know you felt that.’

  ‘You feel me and Deborah as a restriction. You write it.’

  ‘Oh, darling, yes. But I’m a woman, and women are restricted. Men have so many more choices. Almost any – except this dangerous kind. And my books do try to say we must accept things, I hope, they do come down to acceptance. Love is a prison, it’s unrealistic to suppose it’s not. Everybody’s possibilities solidify round them and become limitations. It’s common.’

  ‘Acceptance? Sometimes I think we pride ourselves too much on that. Psychologists have taught it to us. With their “normals” and so on. Their “adjustment”. Oh, never mind. Never mind.’

  ‘Thor, if you really want to go out there.…’

  ‘No, I shan’t go. You know I won’t go. What would Deborah do?’ Suddenly, without warning, his anger flared. ‘How could I leave Deborah to you?’

  ‘Thor!’

  ‘I’m sorry. You should learn to be honest. You cannot tell me you will come if I want it and then tell me I have all sorts of choices but this. It has not entered your head to come. Probably it should not. It doesn’t matter. Let it go.’

  ‘Oh, God, I feel wicked.’

  ‘You must not feel wicked. Because you are right. So there is no need.’

  Momentarily, he buried his face in his hands. Julia was ashamed to have been caught out manipulating the argument, and was keenly aware of the disproportion between the relief of the starving and a television parlour-game. But there was nothing to do, and she wished miserably that he would go away. After a few moments’ silence he stood up and went to the door.

  ‘You know, you can be just as much use, over here,’ she said timidly; on this he got out, silently and fast, pulling the door sharply behind him.

  Oh, Christ, Julia thought, how horrible I am. She was always capable, after the event, of seeing what she had done with some clarity and not too much evasion. She admired herself for this, and felt her lack of self-deceit as a strength in reserve.

  On this occasion she was disturbed and pleased to note that she felt strongly that at all costs she must not go away from Ivan. Her life consisted of a series of passionate encounters with, and evasions of, a series of potential perfect friends. She had only once been unfaithful to Thor, some years earlier, because the situation as she saw it seemed absolutely to demand it, and Julia always submitted unquestioningly to the beauty of a situation. It was true that she had taken care, in an elaborately unconscious way, that the situation should not be repeated. But she alternated, normally, between an overexcited readiness to fall slightly in love and a weary scrambling out of the complications resulting from the last love into which she had fallen. She thought fleetingly of Simon, who was different, and began a letter.

  ‘Dearest Ivan, it is getting intolerable to be snowed up here for so long. You can’t possibly believe how primitive things get in a place where supplies of coal and milk, even, things one thinks one has a right to, become blocked. You know, this house has always been a bit like that. A great air of normality, but it doesn’t quite run. Supplies of things I think are essential are blocked, and one has to exist on resources one finds one hasn’t after all got. My sister Cassandra lives naturally at that level – she’s appallingly self-contained, she’s a genuine brooder, unlike me, I hope, whatever you say. At the moment I die for a good joke, a real bawdy companionable joke. Even after a funeral. Thor thinks I take to jokes as other people take to drugs, but I can’t be any different, I need a good belly-laugh to remind me I’m human. I miss nice fallible human beings, like you, dreadfully. Oh, why are you not here?’

  She stopped, and crossed out that sentence. She began again. ‘Rather a row has arisen, which it may amuse you to read about, since I have, as usual, Behaved Badly.…’

  Chapter 6

  CASSANDRA climbed up to her bedroom; as she went past Julia’s door she heard raised voices. She closed herself in and turned up the window-seat. She was reading, in the spare hours, with a kind of illicit excitement, all the past volumes of her journal, and the other manuscripts – exercise books of blank verse and heroic dialogue, notes for an unwritten epic. There were wads of it, limp and compressed now, so prodigal of energy then. We were fearfully articulate, she thought. When she started reading, she noticed with detachment the rawness of the feeling; after half an hour she was invariably absorbed.

  Someone knocked. Cassandra jumped as though caught out in an indecency, pushed the papers together and called, ‘Come in.’

  Deborah closed herself in almost conspiratorially, and looked down on her aunt. Cassandra stood up. ‘Yes?’ she said.

  Deborah walked over, closed the window-seat, climbed up on it and looked out. This air of taking possession irritated Cassandra, who was reminded of the times when she had found Julia seated there, reading her books with apparent composure, flushing and laughing when told to get out.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said crossly, somewhere between her angry adolescent self and the minatory don she had become.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you. But not if you’re busy.’

  ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘Oh, as for that.… I hoped it might develop.… I don’t like Julia crying.’

  ‘She always has,’ said Cassandra, before she could stop herself. ‘Do you always call your mother by her Christian name?’

  ‘She says the thought of being called Mummy made her feel sick.’ She looked out of the window. She wore a mustard-coloured polo-neck sweater, a pleated navy skirt, and thick tartan stockings which Cassandra thought ugly. She said, ‘Have a cigarette?’

  Deborah slewed round. ‘Thanks. I don’t – I don’t smoke. But I’d like one.’

  Cassandra tossed her the cigarette packet and the matchbox; Deborah clumsily lit and sucked.

  ‘I’ve always had a sort of picture of you as the person I could talk to.’

  Cassandra thought. ‘I see that. But I think you’re probably wrong.’

  Deborah sighed. ‘I can’t cope with this family.’ She tapped non-existent ash off the end of her cigarette. ‘I certainly can’t cope with Julia crying.’

  ‘Do you have to cope?’

  ‘She likes moral support. I always end up comforting her. That’s the funny thing. Once I was invited to stay with a girl from school – something that doesn’t happen to me often, I may say and she rang up the second day and said would I come back, we didn’t see enough of each other, she said she thought we ought to be together. That was the time they said The Silver Swan sounded one plaintive note of self-pity all the time. So I went home and told her that there comes a time in every writer’s life when the critics think they’re important enough to slate —’ She looked at the floor and twisted her hands. ‘But she doesn’t like me,’ she said.

  ‘We all believe that, at some stage in our lives.’

  ‘No, she specially doesn’t. It’s partly this thing – why she’s crying now. I – I wish she didn’t always write books about how we – Father and I – how we diminish her, stop her living.… I don’t want to stop her living. I want to live myself. But she – but she – You know what she’s like, you might understand.’

  ‘We all diminish each other. We all impinge on each other. It’s natural.’

  ‘And I remind her of you,’ said Deborah. ‘I can’t help that. She’s always telling him – writing letters to people – She doesn’t let me exist. I thought – you might see I existed. I’ve been thinking, if I met you, properly —’

  It was all clearly so well thought out. Cassandra shivered slightly. She said, ‘You don’t know me. One should never exercise one’s imagination on people one doesn’t know. It’s a kind of theft. Savages believe photographs are a theft. So are expectations. What can I do?’

  This puzzled Deborah, who wrinkled her face, and returned to the attack.

  ‘She steals, too. She says I never tell her anything, and when I do, she puts it in books. And gives me copies. So that my thoughts aren’t mine. Look – Once – once I
told.… Once one of the mistresses at school wrote her a letter saying she ought to respect my confidences. That I was an unduly secretive child.’ She laughed. ‘So Julia showed me the letter, and burst into tears, and I had to comfort her about that. I had to tell her it was all silly and I knew a book was a book, and life was life … and I didn’t mind.…’

  ‘What do you want me to say? Of course your confidences should be respected.’

  ‘Of course.’ Deborah’s assurance was suddenly shaken. She said uncertainly, ‘Of course they’re very good books. I know they’re very good books. I know Julia’s a creative writer. A person has to write what they know …’

  ‘I think that no one has any necessary right to publish what they know – however good it may be for them to write it. Or even if what they have written is very good. That a piece of writing is good doesn’t override other considerations – moral considerations – when it comes to damaging others. That’s an absurd overvaluation of the printed word.

  ‘And as a Christian I mistrust your use of the word “creative”. Only God creates. Our works are imaginative, at the highest. If we imagine our experience we transmute it – rearrange it, meditate on it, light it differently, change it, relate it to the rest of the world. Stories in themselves have no necessary imaginative value. They may be simply therapeutic for the author. They may be positively dangerous – not a lighting up of facts but a refusal to face facts, a distortion. This always happens, not usually to a harmful degree. But the imagination can be violently dangerous. Not enough – mere recording – is valueless. Too much is an evasion of truth. I know this.’

  Deborah appeared very puzzled by this speech, which was delivered in a harsh, lecturing voice. Cassandra turned the garnet on her finger. ‘Even in my work – the discovery of facts isn’t enough. One has to imagine them – think about them, light them up – and one inevitably intrudes one’s own personality. Ideally, one should not. Facts should speak for themselves. But they never do.’