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 said. ‘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?’
Tea-parties represented a normality of behaviour she had feared and avoided. Simon, normal and diminished, let them into the elegant, bleak house she had vaguely expected never to enter. Julia displayed a brisk familiarity with where to hang coats and the whereabouts of bread-knife and tea-pot stand. They had tea in a room which, Julia told Cassandra, had been Simon’s father’s study – book-lined, gloomy, with red leather arm-chairs and a mahogany desk with brass drawer-handles on which Simon stacked his uneven slices of utility bread and a dish of home-made jam. Over the hearth hung a huge Martyrdom of St. Sebastian; the saint’s limbs were elongated and female, his mouth somewhere between pouting and secretively smiling, his flesh precisely punctured by the arrows so that the wounds recalled the raised red mouths of rubber suckers. The enjoyment of pain with the pain taken out, she had thought. She made no attempt to communicate the thought. She could remember very little of the conversation, although it flowed easily enough; she had not gone there with any intention of conversing. Both the others eagerly directed their remarks to her, deferring to her opinions; she gave them brief, undeveloped answers, sat stiff, and looked remotely out of the window.
She wondered, now, what Simon had made or intended of that tea-party. He had smiled steadily through it, sitting easy and animated, talking with more apparent openness in the company of both of them than he did, at least, alone with her. He had seemed to find the situation he had brought about both comfortable and satisfactory. There had been a time when she had hoped that after a long and cautiously developed acquaintance – when both of them had changed – she would have been able at last to share normal things with him, and then tea-parties would have had the drama, the inevitability, the beauty, the freedom, of her other world. But meeting him in this way precluded for ever meeting him in any other. She watched him laugh with Julia, and thought she would not know him, and had not known him. A fine observation, however scrupulous, however impassioned, was no substitute for the desire on his part to communicate. Detaching herself, she allowed her contempt to flourish at last, remembering things she had ignored: awkwardnesses, inaccuracies, small unkindnesses, unnecessary fulsomeness with the Vicar. She held to that. She was prematurely resigned, indeed, almost indecently anxious, never to see him again. Her abdication was grim and complete.
Since that afternoon she had never spoken more than was in politeness required of her, either to Simon, or to her sister. She had evaded, with polite and apparent fictions, any further invitations, she had avoided Simon when, inevitably, he came to the house. She had left unanswered a letter he wrote her about Plato. The tea-party had been a concession to dignity. It was all she could do. Once, a few weeks later, she had opened the door to him by mistake.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Cassandra. Come up and see the snakes?’
‘I have to work.’
‘Don’t say that. You cut yourself off. It isn’t good for you.’ There was no answer to this; his kindness, since he had talked of her to Julia, was an insult. It always had been; she had chosen not to notice. At least he was incapable of a direct question.
‘You shouldn’t cut yourself off. You must make some contact with people.’
‘I do, in my own way. I know what I’m doing.’
‘I doubt that. Neither you nor I know that.’
She looked at him with a flicker of interest.
‘We don’t think it matters what we do. But it does. Now Julia —’ he said. ‘Julia —’
‘Julia is in the garden.’
‘No, wait, Cassandra —’
She did not see why he should preserve his good opinion of himself at her expense. It was refusing these small encounters that exhausted her; that, and fending off Julia’s attempts to confess, discuss, or clear the air. She walked away from him. She did not think he had expected this precisely; but all that was left, as she saw it, to do, was to uncreate him in her mind. If she could have worked through the relationship, unhindered, if she could have cast him off, and held him as an interesting memory when they had nothing more to say to each other, she would not now feel so stunted, so trapped in his view of her then, which he had shared, and modified, with Julia. There was nothing to do but behave as though he had never been.
Julia, on the other hand, was real and dangerous. In the beginning she had been merely inquisitive eyes, scuffling, proprietary curiosity the other side of the locked door. But lately she had come to see her as an almost impersonal menace, something which would infallibly take what she, Cassandra wanted because its only function was to want precisely that. She had the story. Which could be abandoned. She had Simon. Who could be forgotten. It was important to keep secret what she herself now wanted – whatever that was. At the time, the remorseless logic of this as a guide to behaviour had pleased her. She went back to Oxford ignorant of what the two, in each other’s company, were doing.
After another term and another vacation Julia trapped her at the end of the garden, where she was reaching up with the secateurs into the lilac, gathering branches for Easter vases on altar and Meeting-house table. Julia appeared purposefully at the end of the path. She had lately become a proper reporter and was rarely at home. Her face and pale eyes seemed more colourless than usual; as she came up Cassandra saw that her expression had a harshness quite different from her usual placatory grin. She had been very patient with Cassandra, had risked innumerable rebuffs, had persistently and gently reopened conversations, and allowed herself to be humiliated by silence. Cassandra thrust her head into the bush so that her vision was criss-crossed with twigs and close white flowers.
‘I want to talk to you. There is only you.’ Cassandra snipped two sprigs and inclined her head.
‘You knew Simon had gone?’ Julia informed her abruptly. Cassandra swallowed and did not answer. ‘He went to London, a week ago. Now he writes and says he’s off to Malaya with a zoological team. He must have known he was going for weeks – for months. Secretly fixing. He wrote me a sort of apologetic letter. A final letter. Just cutting off contact.’ She said, ‘You know, Cass, he’s an awful emotional dabbler.’
‘He’s afraid of committing himself. And afraid of feeling,’ Cassandra said. ‘He explores other people’s emotions partly to see if he’s got any himself – he fears he may not have – and partly just to keep other people off him. To distance them.’
The contempt was coming out finely. This was the first thing Cassandra had said to Julia about Simon: Julia clearly found it encouraging.
‘Oh, yes,’ she cried, ‘that’s exactly what I feel.’ She added, unfortunately, ‘I’m so glad you know. I thought you didn’t know.’
Cassandra plunged back into the bush and made several well-directed slashes with the secateurs; lilac stems fell and tangled round her feet.
‘I’ve had an awful time, Cass. I haven’t the slightest idea – really I haven’t – what I really feel about him. He’s so very odd. I don’t understand what he’s saying half the time. Or why he – Sometimes so desperate and insistent. Sometimes just standoffish and kind. I’ve never felt so uncertain in my life. And begging, and begging.… And then, just when you give in, just going off —’
Her voice rose. ‘Cass, you’ve got to listen, you’re the only person I know, you’re the only one who’d understand.’
‘Clearly I wouldn’t understand. That seems to me all that’s certain.’
‘No, you must let me talk, this time. We’ve got to clear this up. We’ve got to go on knowing each other all our lives. Cass, being friends with you is more important in the long run than anything Simon can ever mean to me.’
‘There is no good to be done by talking.’
‘Oh, there is, there is. Cassandra, I know – with Simon – you think I – only because you —’
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra. She stood with secateurs dangling and held her face together.
‘But you know that’s unjust. What about him, then? What about him? Isn’t he someone, doesn’t he want things and do things, didn’t he start it? I told him I couldn’t because of you. If only you hadn’t – But he does exist, I can’t just not notice him.’
Cassandra winced.
‘Why must everything always be my fault?’ Because it was, Cassandra had thought. She had thought, too, that Julia needed to tell her the details because whatever they had done was not real or finished until she had been made to be the audience, fully informed. As though they were only acting out her fate, her story; their love, or whatever it was, was simply a function of her own fear. Well, it should stay that way; she would not lose what power she had by becoming involved as an actor, or suffering with Julia. That would be the final constriction, the final limitation. She would keep what freedom detachment, or ignorance, provided.
‘You must let me tell you.’
‘When you’ve learned you can’t have things both ways,’ said Cassandra, ‘you’ll begin to grow up. I don’t want to know.’
She walked round her sister, head up, her arms full of branches and flowers. Behind her she heard Julia running, stumbling, in the other direction. She thought that Julia knew where she was vulnerable but could never really believe it, and so was compelled to go on probing. This was only partly Julia’s fault. She felt – as she often felt when she had just parted from Julia – a kind of useless, accepting affection; an inactive understanding.
And then she had been hurt by the phrase ‘just when you give in’. She had, perhaps, after all, allowed herself to be told too much.
After she had walked for some time Cassandra lay down on her bed, her hands folded under her face, her nose pressing her knuckles. She had done this since childhood. It was not relaxation; she put effort into it; but after a time she could usually reduce herself to being conscious of nothing but black space in the head and peripheral, defining discomfort; coldness, or pains in the ankles. In the dark behind the closed lids aquamarine plants grew, and shattered into splinters of light; crimson fluid welled up and held momentary globular shapes; in a dancing network of green glass threads apparitions like Simon’s caerulean butterflies spread and were disembodied. Cassandra pressed her body against the bed. If she released the pressure of the knuckles, the patterns of light became gentler, and then still.
Julia had assumed that they must be more real to each other, more durable, than anything else. Well, there was a partial truth to that. At best, or at worst, they had been too real to each other, sharing the same thoughts. Not defined, setting up, therefore, a struggle to separate. In an ideal state they should be no more and no less real to each other than anyone else. Thor, for instance. Or Simon.
What I do, what means most to me, she thought, in a moment of panic, is patterns created by the pressure of my own hands on my eyes. She had been allowing herself to forget how Julia’s touch had made Simon seem for ever inaccessible. The television screen was like the Looking Glass, beyond which was a different space, where certain laws did not obtain. She had entered this world, she had hacked creepers and trodden trails, she had analysed the hum of insects and the screech of macaws, she had suffered flies and heat and scoured pots on stones by the river. In the literature she studied, the dream was a mode of knowledge. Beyond Simon were the remote knights, in their thickets, and the lover, in the knee-high, delicate, grass-green forest, set within its sheltering walls, reaching out at last, with his serious, anxious expression, to pluck the rose.
It is no accident, Cassandra told herself, that I chose a field of study where the great images are those of unsatisfied desire, formalized, made into a mode of apprehension.
She shifted her body, and the lights all ran together inside her head, white.