by A. S. Byatt
Whereas Simon seems to have abdicated the attempt to reconcile love and suffering; he regards the order of facts as the only available truth, and uses the imagination primarily as an instrument for scientific comparison. He perceives similarities in dissimilarities and produces, not metaphysical metaphors, but tentative scientific laws. We have both hardened, we are both more limited.
I think also, although this may be fanciful (God knows I have had long enough to work on it, and no distractions) that our present attitudes were implicit in the way we watched the snake feed, that afternoon. It was I, not he, who found the raw fact intolerable. I think his religion was more robust, a simpler need for immediate consolation. That – coupled with the usual adolescent rebelliousness – was why he left the Roman Church. He had no need for assent, but a need (apparently still unfulfilled and now abandoned) for human assurance. Oh, Simon, how we change. I should relinquish the possibility of knowing you with more ease and more grace if what there was had simply worn itself away.
He had given the snake – one of the larger grass-snakes – a live frog, from a tank full of the creatures which he kept for this purpose.
He explained to Cassandra what was happening, as though, she felt, the knowing accuracy of his description was a defence again the fact of the frog’s being swallowed.
‘They like,’ he said, proffering the frog, gathering its legs gently in his hand, cupping its body, ‘something bigger than their own heads, to get a grip on.’ The frog jerked. ‘Come on,’ said Simon to the snake, pushing it a little. ‘This one is used to being hand-fed.’
The snake suddenly stretched out and sank its teeth into the frog. ‘The teeth are very well designed. If we are talking about design. The backward slope gives it a good grip.’ Cassandra said nothing. He looked sideways at her, one of his flickering looks that rested on her face and ended over her shoulder. ‘I can’t get this one to take dead food yet.’
The snake began to walk its head, stretched and ungainly, over the frog. The frog wriggled a little and the teeth sank deeper.
‘Each half of each jaw can be moved independently. Like pulling a bag over something in separate tugs. When it gets to a wide bit, it can separate the lower jaw halves completely and push them right down. Then it pushes sideways with its throat muscles. It will take a longish time to swallow this big frog. All that saliva helps it down. You may have read somewhere’ – Cassandra had not – ‘that they cover their prey with saliva first, to soften it. People get that idea because if you frighten a snake that’s just fed, it will throw up whatever it’s swallowed.…’
The snake’s four jaw parts and its stuffed and choked mouth were still progressing.
‘It can digest one end of the frog whilst it’s still swallowing the other. For instance, it may digest the feet before the frog is dead. Frogs are very resistant to death.’
Cassandra sat still, and neither protested nor wriggled. She felt Simon was forbidding. Since then she had watched an anaconda swallow a small pig, on the television, under his surveillance, but both his commentary and her observation had become more remote, she thought, cooler. In the jungle he, perhaps, had sweated something off. Whereas the screen made him and his snake, for her, unreal somehow; her watching was pitiless. A loss? One cannot suffer with all frogs and pigs. One cannot. There had been on the stretched faces of both grass-snake and anaconda a kind of rigid, anonymous grin.
Chapter 7
‘As for what you call my obscure references to Simon Moffitt,’ Julia wrote, ‘they are obscure because my feelings are obscure. I suppose you might say he was my first love. (Are you interested in that, Ivan? Well, if not, you can always skip through this letter – you don’t even have to look as though you’re politely listening.) In those days I saw him as a sort of cross between Heathcliff and Sebastian Flyte. He had a romantic Bridesheady sort of charm – a rather sordid family history that was the object of much village speculation – and the sort of glamour that comes of having thrown over the Family Tradition – although only far enough to be flirting with the C. of E. in the person of our local vicar (also a charmer). You get the picture. Things were complicated because of my sister – whom I loved and was terrified of – having violent feelings – again obscure – about him, let alone me. It all got a bit like a cheap novelette. That upset her too, she hates even a hint of vulgarity. And whereas my life is like a novelette, I do like it to be the muted, not the melodramatic kind, lowest common denominator not highest common multiple of emotion, if I’ve got my terminology right, love?
‘Simon doesn’t look as though he’s a straightforward man; he was certainly anything but a straightforward boy. A sexual twister, and an (unconscious?) cajoler.… The sort of man who makes women feel, erroneously, that they can do things to bring him out or straighten him up. Hence your teenagers, which I find absolutely understandable.…’
They met outside the post office. Julia pushed her pennies into the stamp machine and watched the stamps uncoil through the slit. She stuck them on, and took the letter out of the envelope to read through, partly in case she had said something embarrassing, partly out of a giddy pleasure in her own eloquence.
‘You wouldn’t have a penny, would you? I mean, could you change a threepenny piece?’
‘I think I could give you a penny.’ Julia turned out her pockets, clutching handkerchief, key, residual biscuit-crumbs. Her letter fell on the pavement. They bent down, together, both clumsily.
‘Coincidence,’ he said, holding out to her, one in each hand, her envelope and the one he had come to post. Both were addressed to Miss Cassandra Corbett, in Oxford. His was clean, and flat, as though it contained only one folded slip of paper. She held out her own wad of school-book scribble.
‘How funny,’ she said. ‘She almost never answers mine.…’
‘I’m a shocking correspondent myself. I hate writing letters; I don’t, often.…’
Julia handed him the penny. He stamped his letter and tossed it into the mouth of the box.
‘Aren’t you going to post yours? It looks much more exciting than mine.’ He laughed, rather disagreeably, Julia thought.
‘I don’t suppose she’ll think so. I write them for my own benefit really. One can’t talk to oneself.’
‘Well, go on, post it.’
‘But I’m always afraid she’ll laugh.’
‘Laugh?’
Julia gummed up the envelope and pushed it into the box. ‘Good for you,’ he said. Empty-handed now, they looked at each other.
He was much younger than she had expected, she thought immediately. His face, with the full, pouting mouth, had an unformed look, reinforced by a few pale purple scars where pimples had presumably been, and odd patches of hair sprouting at the mouth corners, along the jaw-line, silky, not bristling, as though this was all the hair he grew and he believed he need not shave often. A tangle of curls flopped on his forehead. His lack of assured physical presence encouraged Julia. At the same time, it disappointed her; she had expected him formidable.
‘I can’t imagine Cassandra laughing at anyone,’ he said. ‘Such a serious girl.’
‘Well, she probably wouldn’t laugh at you.’ Julia swallowed her words. She had imagined this meeting so many times and was now at a loss about what to make of it or how to prolong it. He gave a deprecating shrug and said nothing to this; Julia began to walk away, rapidly, without having said goodbye. He came with her, falling over his feet, and then, catching her up, he took a swinging step that was too long and brought them into collision.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Sorry, damn.’
Julia brushed her skirt and laughed. He blushed.
‘Does she like Oxford then, Cassandra?’
‘I don’t really know. She’d be far more likely to tell you what she really thought than me, anyway.’
‘W-wait,’ he said. ‘W-we don’t know each other. Do we?’
‘I know who you are. I’m Julia.’ He waited. ‘Julia Corbett.’
‘Oh �
� Cassandra’s sister. I remember, she said she.… Why haven’t I met you?’
‘I’ve been away at school.’
‘But you know who I am?’
‘Oh, yes. I know an awful lot about you.’ She did not explain that what she knew had been gleaned from Cassandra’s diary. ‘All sorts of things.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Nothing that’s not nice. How very clever you are. And understanding and wise. That sort of thing.’
She said this with a slight touch of mockery and he looked at her suspiciously. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, rapidly, frowning. Julia felt suddenly powerful. ‘It’s a funny name, Cassandra.’
‘I suppose so. We’ve had one in the family since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Every other generation. My name’s a family name, too. I used to call her Antimacassar. And Cassowary.’
Simon laughed.
‘Children are awfully mean,’ said Julia. He said nothing; Julia was afraid she had lost him; he stared moodily at the pavement, troubling over something; she walked calmly beside him, smiling slightly.
‘I say,’ he said, suddenly. ‘You wouldn’t like a cup of tea, would you? It’s a bit of a walk, I suppose. Not a bad walk.’
‘I’d love one,’ said Julia. ‘I’d love one.’
‘It’d be something to tell Cassandra.’
‘Yes,’ said Julia, meekly.
‘You both go in for long letters,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you find so much to say …’
Julia expatiated.
After that, he came to tea in the Old House, several times. They talked about Cassandra, and then about Life; Simon revealed a gossipy side that she would not, from what she had read of him, have suspected in him. Julia took care not to dress with care for him. On the last of these occasions, when they were sitting alone by the fire in the living-room, she said, ‘Cassandra comes back, next week.’
‘Good.’
‘Did you – mention these tea-parties?’
‘No, actually,’ he said. ‘Should I have?’ His long-legged body was laid diagonally across the arm-chair, so that parts of it sagged loosely into the cushion and parts were rigid. He did not look comfortable. ‘We don’t write that sort of letter, actually.’
He pushed at his mouth with one finger so that his lips bulged in an ugly scowl, and then released it again. Julia thought he was unattractive. She remembered, on later occasions, that this was what she had thought. He was also, she considered, neither direct nor honest.
‘Did you?’ he said.
‘Did I what?’
‘Tell Cassandra. I should have thought you might have, the letters you write.’
‘I didn’t think there was much to tell.’
‘No,’ he agreed.
‘But don’t you think we ought? I mean, it isn’t a secret. It oughtn’t to look like one.’
‘Well, if it isn’t, I’d just let it be, if I were you.’
‘But she won’t like it, Si.’
Simon folded up various limbs, and sat up, more or less normally.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, because.… Because she cares so much about you. About talking to you. You mean something to her.’ She had noticed that to tell him this always irritated him: nevertheless, it was surely necessary.
‘Well, what’s that got to say to it?’
‘Oh, Si, don’t be stupid. She doesn’t like me, that’s what I’m trying to say. She never has, for as long as I can remember. She – she doesn’t like sharing things. She won’t want me – sharing her particular friends.’
‘Why doesn’t she like you?’
‘Oh – because I – I don’t know. I – I used to worship her. I – I suppose I was always after her. Finding out what she was doing and trying to do it too. I can see it might have been maddening. She ignores me a lot. Tries to pretend I’m not there. Though at school – we didn’t really know anyone except each other. She – she isn’t easy to get on with. She despises people. Sometimes I think, if she were less prickly and proud, I might’ve made more friends and then I wouldn’t need her so.… It was all a bit awful, really. She hasn’t had much. I don’t want to – look as though I’m trying to – take anything.’
‘That’s my business,’ said Simon, with youthful judiciousness. ‘Why are you so frightened of her?’
‘Well, she’s so clever. So uncompromising. She sets impossible standards.’ Also, she conducts the Game.
‘Yes, but I shouldn’t have thought you need mind her. You’ve got all sorts of advantages she hasn’t. I can see she might be jealous of you, that makes sense. You engage with life, if I may put it that way. Cassandra – for all her cleverness – Cassandra’s a bit silly. The thing about Cassandra is, you never feel she’s all there, do you? Sorry, I don’t mean that vulgarly. But she just doesn’t quite exist.’
Julia felt this was heresy, delicious and terrible. And Simon saw her, he saw she was someone. Simon wriggled, and flopped again in the chair. He gave her a sudden warm, questioning smile; tentatively, she smiled back.
‘I can’t see any use in making a point of telling her if you think it’ll annoy her. We’ll sort it all out.’
Since Julia had no precise desire to tell Cassandra anything she dropped the question.
The day before Cassandra came home he called and took her out, for the day, to Craster. At the Old House he talked for some time to Jonathan Corbett, vaguely, about the weather and the war. One of the things that was worrying Julia was the way in which her parents – and Inge, and Elsie – so clearly and tactfully saw Simon as Julia’s first boy-friend. They were glad for her; Cassandra had Oxford; she had worryingly insisted on leaving school to make tea for the local newspapermen. Inge brought out a packet of sandwiches and a Thermos flask of sweet tea. These they consumed on the beach, having walked northwards towards Bamburgh over stones and rocks slippery with seaweed.
‘I like your father, Julia. He thinks life’s worth making an effort with. I like that. I envy him that.’
‘I love him,’ said Julia. ‘He’s a good man. He does so much. Cass gets furious that he’s not with us more – she says he’s got no right to keep being imprisoned at the State’s expense, not in this war – and anyway, she just gets furious. But I like to see anyone care so much for anything. I really admire him.’
‘You know my father shot himself?’
‘Yes,’ said Julia. She added hastily, ‘That’s all I do know. Someone told me. In the post office.’
‘People do tell you things.’
‘Why did he, Si?’
‘Oh, all sorts of reasons. He wasn’t like your father. He was gassed in the trenches in the last war, you know – he still had nightmares, absolutely regularly, about that. He used to go on and on about the trenches. Terrible detailed stories. You can imagine. No, you probably can’t. I don’t think anything was real to him that happened since. This war was a fearful blow. He – oh, in some way, he saw it as the end of the civilized world, all right. So it was bad enough for him, without my mother. Did they tell you in the post office about my mother?’
‘No,’ said Julia, mendaciously.
‘My mother is a very silly woman. Beautiful, in a girlish way. Very promiscuous.’
‘I see.’
‘We lived in London, a lot of the time, that’s why I’ve never met you. My mother – used to confide in me. As though,’ Simon shrugged and smiled, ‘I was a sort of girl-friend. She kept saying society is disintegrating and people are desperate and have a sort of wild freedom. I did things like hide letters for her. She’s careless. She thought I thought it was romantic. I thought it was all rather disgusting, really —’
‘It didn’t,’ Julia cried out of her own grievance, ‘give you much of a chance to grow up normally, did it? To have things children do have – ought to have?’
‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I —’
‘So you felt for your father.’
‘He didn’t make that eas
y. We were both – Mama and I – scared of him. He was a foul-tempered man. Disappointed. Not only with Mama – he wanted to be a serious politician, and never got on. Too reactionary. He didn’t like me. He didn’t know he didn’t, but I knew.
When I – when I decided to go into the Church, I did try, with him. He hated the idea of my going into the Church, he said it was for half-men. I hated him shouting. The more afraid I … the more angry he … Sometimes he drove me to tears, that maddened him.’
‘I suppose I partly think that about the Church. Because of this thing I have about coming to grips with normal life – not cutting yourself off, at all costs. The church does cut you off. I’m sorry, Si —’
‘No.’ He paused. Then he glanced at her quickly and said, ‘Religion’s a funny thing. There are times when one needs it desperately, it’s all there is. When one needs a structure – some rules, some idea of what’s best to do, an end for one’s actions. And then, one morning one wakes up and finds the whole thing’s completely meaningless. Completely. One is just not the same person. It all seems absurd and forced and obscene. Above all, forced.’
‘I know,’ said Julia, who had never experienced more than a momentary religious twinge herself, and supposed serenely that the revelation of meaninglessness awaited every religious person sooner or later, in death if not in life. ‘I know.’ They shared a silence. Julia thought, poor Cassandra. She said, ‘So what happened then about your father?’ Her curiosity invigorated him; he said, eagerly, ‘Well, my mother got into a real mess. A classic mess. Father and I – we walked in – and caught her out in – in flagrante delicto,’ he finished up, with a pompous intonation that caused Julia to suppress an involuntary snort of laughter.
‘Evidence meant he had to do something, you see. So he brought me home, and we sat in gloom for a week. He wrote letters, and in the night he shouted, and I kept getting up, and …
‘Then he took me and the dog into the conservatory one day. Things were pretty bad by then. He said to the dog, ‘Come here, you,’ and he – dragged her a bit – she didn’t want – and then he, he shot the dog. So then he, he said to me, ‘Come here,’ so I – I hid behind the water-butt, and he stood – looking stupid – for a bit, and then he gave a sort of snort and said, ‘Oh, well, never mind,’ in a sort of puzzled voice and he – he shot himself. And then panes of glass fell in, and potted plants dropped off the edges of shelves. One hit me. On the shoulder.’
