The Game (19 page)

‘I saw you on television,’ he announced. ‘Talking about your art. Hacking away at your husband’s character. I wouldn’t stand for that if I was him. I’ve not read any of your books. I just turned the telly on to see what that chap had to say about
musique concrète
, but all he did was put on a funny act like a monkey with a hurdy-gurdy. Don’t you think that sort of programme hopelessly degrades art in any case? How can you take your work seriously and get mixed up in that sort of thing?’

‘Oh, I don’t think my work’s good enough to take seriously in that sense,’ Julia said slowly. ‘Except, maybe, intermittently. Honest comfort for the masses, that’s all it is, and fodder for the sociologist. But it is honest, and I’m not saying it’s negligible – sociologists need a bit of imagination.’

She thought she might go on and defend the television, and decided against it; there she must forfeit his sympathy. He was very young and his rudeness, she thought, covered not only uncompromising morals but a will not to be impressed, which suggested he might be impressionable. She told him, half-mocking, that he clearly held an orthodox Lawrentian
view about the subjection of women. As for herself, she had luckily found a way of life that could dovetail with normal female preoccupations without disrupting them. But this imposed limitations on her and he must allow for them. She claimed no more than the virtues of an accurate recorder; she did not write pretentious sub-literature. She spoke very seriously, with a kind of eager, wide-eyed honesty which at one level dispelled his fear of pretension or humbug and at another was direct sexual provocation. He expanded; he laid out his views on art and morals; honesty to the honest critic is always disarming. She could feel him enjoy a sense of coping with someone of her kind. ‘At least you’ve got drive,’ he said, with rough admiration.

Cassandra saw that Sylvia, one of the few students for whom she had felt affection, was looking distressed. She had suffered enough from Martin’s useful views on female subjection, Cassandra thought; it was too much that she should be further required to watch him admire Julia’s ruthlessness.

‘What became of your poetry, Sylvia?’ she asked abruptly.

Sylvia flushed. ‘Oh, nothing much. It wasn’t very good, really. It was frightfully adolescent.’

Martin looked as though he concurred. Cassandra was irritated. Sylvia had been writing a good thesis on images of the Virgin before child-bearing overtook her, and had brought Cassandra one or two long, faintly Christian poems about Glastonbury, or Dame Julian of Norwich.

‘They were very promising,’ Cassandra persisted. ‘Too many words, too much Dylan Thomas, but you’d have grown out of that. You had a real feeling for imagery.’

Sylvia hung her head and looked distressed.

‘Charles Williams more than Dylan Thomas, I’d have said,’ was Martin’s contribution. Cassandra saw that she had made things worse and was humiliated. She moved clumsily towards the dining table. Martin and Julia turned to each other and shrugged briefly; Cassandra was exasperated by the lack of logic behind this alliance. She arranged the seating to separate
them, which left Julia between Father Rowell and Professor Storrin, and Martin to continue his interrupted argument with Vanessa Curtess.

The dinner was the one the college offered for its student feasts. Grapefruit cocktails, roast chicken and sprouts, ice cream with chocolate sauce, a platter of cheeses: processed Camembert, Danish Blue, Edam. Julia turned her attention to Professor Storrin.

Storrin saw himself as a man of the world, and had decided already that, in this gathering at least, Julia was his foil. His reasons for being a mediaevalist were remote from Cassandra’s. He liked the don’s gentlemanly life, and had chosen mediaeval studies because they were largely untilled ground, where a clever man might rapidly make discoveries enough to establish himself. He did some solid and accurate linguistic work, wrote an elegant and emotive volume on the Dance of Death, and plunged into television, where he frequently put forward the views of the University on education, the nuclear bomb, pre-marital sexual intercourse, the degrading aspects of the current preoccupation with violence, child-rearing, and the ritual slitting of cows’ throats. Julia found him familiar. She had met his kind in London and could handle him. For some time they spoke with graceful dignity of buildings Julia had seen, and of the real value of responsible, televised, summings-up of serious issues. But when they had all had several glasses of the college’s good Riesling, and when Vanessa Curtess’s voice was raised high about the differences between Lawrence’s Dark Gods and Baudelaire’s real knowledge of our separation from light, he leaned confidentially towards her, and, resting his long, ascetic hand gently on hers, he murmured personal criticisms of common acquaintances, and later, whilst they were waiting for coffee, even of those present. He told her, in a beautifully pitched undertone, a history of an uninformed High Table rudeness of Martin’s which had been neatly twisted against its author. He gave her a gem of a lecture on the dangers of being a fat red woman and in love with
la vie Bohème
or Baudelaire. ‘What virginal deprivations
are there fed, Mrs Eskelund, what subconscious needs made respectable, what knowledge – precluded, one must suppose, by certain physical disadvantages – vicariously acquired and made, to quote Rimbaud out of context,
idéal
…’ His clear eyes behind the grey lashes were delighted; everything was ridiculous. Julia, intensely happy, responded to the familiar movements of the familiar dance. When coffee came the general conversation died and Storrin and Julia took over completely, making a sidling circus parade of the physical, emotional, sexual and intellectual oddities of a number of public persons more or less known to them. Martin laughed robustly. Vanessa Curtess found the atmosphere both repulsive and interesting. Sylvia watched Martin, and studied Julia’s deprecatory grin.

Cassandra was not happy. She was not the sort of woman who would have called out in Storrin the lively malice he now displayed. She had always, with a kind of innocence, expected of him a scholarly seriousness which he effortlessly produced. She found his work, and therefore himself, slightly pedestrian. Cassandra had always, like Charlotte Brontë incurably romantic, nourished a vision of herself, the epic written, arriving with all her integrity in the literary world to be belatedly
fêted
by the Thackeray of the day. She saw now that this world was not what she had thought and was for ever closed to her, and, worse, Julia’s incursion into her own world revealed to her that that too had, and must always have had, dimensions she was incapable of apprehending. She looked at her brick-red colleague with Storrin’s and Julia’s eyes, and her stomach contracted with fear for herself. She remembered Simon’s tea-party.

Julia, as if she read this thought, suddenly produced for the company an imitation of a forthcoming imitation of Simon Moffitt on a satirical television programme.

‘We used to know him, didn’t we, Cass?’ she flung across at her, challenging, insistent on sharing. She pushed out her lower lip in a prettily ineffectual imitation of Simon’s pout. ‘We all have to suffer,’ she droned. ‘I have come out here at vast expense to expose myself to sleeping sickness, toothache,
damp, sheat fish, piranhas, squeezing snakes and biting snakes, just to make sure I don’t miss out on my share of it.’

Everyone laughed, even Sylvia. Cassandra fingered the velvet of her dress and forgot to offer second cups of coffee. The party, in consequence, broke up early.

Storrin said, ‘Well, you will have plenty of material for an authentic book about academic life, Mrs Eskelund.’ Julia invited him to a drink in London to meet Ivan, whom she had not been able to avoid mentioning from time to time with an intonation of special knowledge and affection. She was momentarily chilled by Gerald Rowell’s farewell.

‘Good night, er, Father,’ she said, brightly. He gave her a pale, preoccupied look and a command.

‘Good night, Mrs Eskelund. I trust to see you tomorrow, after Sung Eucharist. Good night.’

When they had gone Julia turned to her sister.

‘That was a splendid party,’ she said warmly.

‘I’m glad you thought so,’ said Cassandra, the old, closed, blunt Cassandra. ‘I must get to bed, if you’ll excuse me.’

Julia, who had been prepared for an agreeable, slightly drunken, between-sisters post-mortem, during which she trusted to efface any traces of a bad impression she might have made, felt cheated, and then hurt.

Cassandra did not breakfast on Sundays. Julia ate alone, and then went to ask whether she might go with her to church.

‘I shouldn’t have thought you would care to.’

‘Oh, yes I do. I want to.’

‘You must not suppose you will please me by coming.’

‘Oh, no. It isn’t that. But I do want to come, please. I brought a hat.’

She had indeed brought a kind of leather boater which she placed flat on her head when they set out together. Cassandra went fast and silently. Julia felt bad, and wanted to cry. They had lost yesterday’s ease, and were again suspicious. Julia was ready to take the blame; they had always so arranged it
that she took the blame. But she was given no opening even for that.

Inside the church she was stiffly embarrassed whilst Cassandra bowed to the altar; she sat in the pew, staring round, whilst Cassandra bent her head. In front of them was a row of deaconesses; to the left a group of severe-looking undergraduates; the rest of the pews were sparsely scattered with old ladies, black felt hats, grey, feathered hats, swathed turbans, murmuring lips.

The service was more alien than she had expected, and large expanses of it were inaudible. She found Gerald Rowell, bustling to and fro in a stook of vestments, more than a little absurd; she winced when he intoned. A choir sang, shrill and sweet, the clear sound floating on a sea of cracked and lagging and troubled notes from the old ladies. Julia would have liked to be moved by the words, but could not. Her response to them resembled too much the easy-flowing sentiment she bestowed on Christmas card crinolines and candles. She tried to think what they meant to Cassandra. Form, certainty? She could remember Cassandra’s chanting voice from their childhood. Cassandra had always been one for ritual, although it was herself, in her simplicity, who had worshipped the saintly Galahad. Cassandra had early recognized the dramatic value of the tormented Lancelot. She asked herself: what sins does Cassandra confess to?

Cassandra felt Julia’s scrutiny like a sharp light on her thoughts and was superstitiously afraid to pray in case her prayer might be read. She looked up at the carving in the roof, curving, lacing, twisting, crossing, and slant across at a carved pew-end which sprouted, from a round wooden head, a feathery profusion of leaves, tumbling grapes, threading stems of vines. She tried to imagine how the church must appear under Julia’s questioning gaze. The smell of incense, a little stale, a little sickly. The ruffled flock of old women come in for refuge from the cold. She was becoming one of them herself, despite the jewels in her hat and on her hands. Julia would judge it coldly, vestments, singing, clattering of
bells, a tatty substitute for glory. We make these symbols from our own sense of glory? For a moment, not for the first time, Cassandra was fiercely hungry for the simplicities of the Meeting-house.

Afterwards, Cassandra was absorbed into the flock of deaconesses, and Julia found herself standing alone with Gerald Rowell just inside the churchyard gate. He had on a flat, rounded hat, rather like her own.

‘Mrs Eskelund, good morning. When are you leaving us?’

‘This afternoon. I’ve enjoyed my visit.’

He paused. ‘And how do you find Cassandra?’

‘Well,’ said Julia. ‘Isn’t she?’ She pulled at her rings.

‘There was something I had hoped to say to you.’ He paused again. ‘I wonder.’

‘You can’t tell, until you’ve said it.’

‘No. You were not very considerate, as far as Cassandra is concerned, yesterday evening. Forgive me.’

Julia stiffened.

‘I know you are not particularly friendly But I do not know who else …’

‘We see very little of each other, that’s all. I’m sure you know her better than I do.’

‘She is not a woman who allows herself to be known. Or liked. I wish I knew, Mrs Eskelund, whether I were asking you for help, or warning you. In any case – yes – I think you should know. Cassandra is – not well. She has not been well for some time.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I am not as well acquainted as I should doubtless be with psychiatry. I believe a psychiatrist would diagnose some form of – schizophrenia. Which covers many ills. Cassandra has’ – he sought, overtly, for a proper delicacy of phraseology – ‘only a very tenuous connection with reality. She is aware of this, which makes it, in some ways, worse. It is of course, partly, an occupational hazard. But her world is – remote enough from the usual cloistered abnormalities of college life.’

‘She always had a powerful imagination,’ said Julia, looking the priest directly in the eye.

‘Precisely. I do believe she is in some danger. She is a courageous woman. And does not make things easy for herself.’

‘What am I to do, Father?’

‘Now I see you – I don’t know. I had hoped you might – draw her back a little, as it were, into daily life. I don’t know. Extend her possibilities? Although too much of the wrong sort of reality might endanger – a very delicate balance. Yes.’

‘I do love her,’ said Julia with simplicity. ‘She’s very suspicious. I think there’s almost nothing I can do. But I do love her, and I’ll do what I can. I do mean well.’

‘It was perhaps impertinent to speak to you. I am sure – your sister – would consider it a betrayal of confidence. But I felt you should know.’

‘Thank you,’ said Julia gravely. She cast down her eyes. ‘And you were right to tell me I behaved badly. I’m sorry.’

‘It was impolite of me to mention it,’ said the priest, and turned away to greet a parishioner.

Julia went to sleep almost immediately in the train and was woken, as it gathered speed, by the rattle of her teeth and the knock of her bones on the glass against which she rested her face. She sat upright with a struggle. She was given to thinking deeply in trains; the necessary loneliness and unrelatedness drove her to taking stock. She thought: I can’t go on as I am. This was the thought with which she had come to Oxford; now she was more troubled, nothing was settled in her mind. Lately, at home, she had more and more obsessively related her fears to Cassandra – both her lack of self-confidence, and her feeling that the life she had was flimsy and meaningless. It all went back, it went back to the veiled subtleties of the Game. The train clattered on and her body shook.