by A. S. Byatt
Finally they were alone in the Reptile House. He looked down at her.
‘Well, that’s that, for today. A quick look round?’
‘If you want.’ He knew, and must be choosing to ignore, her dislike of reptiles.
The place had an unearthly glow, and was hot, damp, concrete and dark. Inside their little glass boxes of brilliance the snakes lay, heaped haphazardly together, almost all motionless. One narrow, stone-coloured, dark-eyed creature looped itself round the plastic foliage provided for it, and flickered its nervous tongue at the glass walls. It seemed aimless, poured along the leaves, leaned out and froze into a brittle twig; it gave no sign of further movement. Simon walked past it, heavily in his veldtschoen; Julia tapped two steps behind him. Around them, children squalled.
‘I shipped them this anaconda,’ Simon said. Together, in the dark, they leaned on the rail and stared into the box. ‘I had a battle with her in a tree. She just fell on me, suddenly – not what I’d bargained for her doing – we ended up wrestling. I had to be rescued. I came off lucky – a lot of bruises and a gnawed hand. She was slow and sulky – didn’t eat for nine months after she was shipped. They tell me she eats well, now.’
‘She looks rather scruffy,’ Julia said. This was an understatement. The anaconda was lapped about herself in one corner of her box, one great coil draped into her shallow concrete pool. The water in the pool was dirty, and looked as though someone had shredded tobacco into it. All along the snake’s back fragments of skin were raked up; the whole thing was fraying into transparent pieces and peeling away like old wallpaper. The head rested on the centre of the coils, the blunt, patient snout immobile. The eyes, which Julia had imagined would be black, stood out of the head and looked like opals – pinkish, with fine lines crazing the surface. For a long time the creature did not move, and Julia was almost mesmerized by the very slow rise and fall of the walls of the breathing trunk. Then, with no apparent disturbance of the extremities, the snake made a lazy attempt to hoist the fallen coil on to the ledge she lay on. The curve of the coil contracted, rose slightly, and began very slowly to slither back again. Behind the anaconda was a dark backcloth, perfunctorily painted with greenish fronds and dark roots. The olive-green underskin of the snake, and the black and creamy rings, gave the same impression of ageing oil-paint.
‘Moulting. They seem largely incapable of shedding a whole skin in captivity.’
‘Poor thing. She looks so appallingly tatty. Do you mind for her? Do you ever wish they weren’t in here?’
‘I don’t know. Yes, I think. She doesn’t look comfortable. As far as one can ever tell. There are all sorts of parasites that flourish only in captivity, too. And rots.’ He looked gloomy.
‘Si – can you get to know a snake? Can you love a snake?’
‘Oh, up to a point. I have kept snakes one could play with. In a very limited sense of the word. Long acquaintance does give one a – a quickness – one knows much more quickly when they’re hungry or angry or simply in need of exercise.’
‘And that makes you love them?’
‘Well, in a way. Partly it has the opposite effect. When I was young and kept adders – I knew them less, and loved them more.’ He laughed. ‘You put a bit of yourself into them.’
‘Like cats. A friend of mine had this cat that she thought had an enormous amount of character, and then she got a baby. And the cat suddenly became just cat again and didn’t have any feelings to be considered. I thought she did it to the cat – preparing herself to be able to have it put down, you know, without needing to feel she was destroying anything more than an animal.’
‘Yes,’ said Simon. He considered his anaconda. ‘I suppose anyone who works with animal life ends up like doctors – very much more aware in a factual way of what creatures do, how they react – but much more mistrustful of any feeling of knowledge that comes from identifying with them. Or maybe that knowledge just becomes unbearable. Doctors, of course, can’t afford to – to identify. But it’s funny going into something out of – well, love – and ending up with simple curiosity. Worse for doctors. Good, for me.’
‘Is that what you feel about love? That it’s – it’s impossible – because it’s either subjective or unbearable? Is that what you’re saying? Must it be? Is that what you feel?’
Simon looked impatient. ‘You could say curiosity was the beginning of love. And most of us would do best to stop there since we aren’t capable of anything better.’
‘But don’t you feel it’s impossible to stop there?’
‘How can anyone really bear another person?’ Simon said. ‘I don’t know.’ He shifted from one foot to another. Julia caught her breath.
‘But don’t you ever want to? Don’t you feel urged to?’
‘You and Cassandra,’ he said abruptly, ‘you were always collecting my feelings.’
‘Out of curiosity. Only out of curiosity, Si.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He looked almost angry, and Julia was shaken by the sudden reference to Cassandra. She was silent; the snake in her prison sagged farther into the pool, under the steady glare of the light. Julia felt oppressed.
‘She’s so exposed,’ she said. ‘She’s so horribly exposed. Oh, it must be awful to be so lit up and always watched.’
‘I don’t imagine that aspect of it bothers her. I should think she might really miss the freedom to move.’
‘Well, I think it’s horrid.’
‘You know, I really am moved, by the thought of pre-historic reptiles,’ Simon surprisingly said. ‘The first developed life, you know – well, that we would recognize – crawling out of the primeval slime. At first they were small, and hopped and skipped, and then they grew. They lived so long because, like these, if conditions were wrong they could just give up irrelevant things like eating and moving. Pythons and boas have vestigial limbs and pelvic bones, you know. Imagine the antediluvian world, full of slow, deliberate creatures who just gave up when there was nothing to be done —’
Julia touched his arm. ‘Can we go out of here? I can’t bear any more of this dark and heat and lying around …’
‘Did you know there’s a tribe that believes that in the night the anaconda turns itself into a boat with white sails? Now, why that?’
‘Yes, I know. You said. I saw you say it.’
He looked at her, brooding. ‘It’s a miracle – what we make, in our minds, of what we see, to fulfil what needs. What needs.’
‘We ought not?’
‘We do.’
Julia, whose desire to touch Simon had ebbed whilst they were watching the anaconda, was suddenly again overwhelmed by it. She shifted his brief-case and umbrella to the hand that already clutched her own leather bucket bag. Then she put her own hand over his, where it lay on the rail in front of the glass box.
‘Simon —’
‘Perhaps an ice-cream,’ he said, vaguely.
In the next tank a dirty brown boa constrictor had just eaten: it lay extended, the various unconnected swellings in its body like toys in a Christmas pillow-case. It breathed faster than the anaconda; the distension of its belly dwarfed its head and tail.
‘Eating and sleeping. Eating and sleeping. You made them look so very significant on those films. But here —’
‘Here,’ said Simon, ‘the possibilities are a bit limited. Would you like an ice-cream?’
Simon made for a dark corner of the cafeteria, settled Julia at a table and returned with silver bowls containing pink and white oblong slabs of ice. Julia was depressed; the place smelled of disinfectant and damp, there were floating sweet papers, cigarette stubs and ash all over the table. And there was only a certain amount of aesthetic pleasure to be derived from the sight of Simon in these incongruous surroundings. He, alternately, took teaspoonfuls of ice, grimaced and swallowed, and broke matchsticks into neat lengths, which he then scattered in the ashtrays. Julia watched him scrape up a bit of ice from the cuff of his jacket with the spoon. He had always
been a messy eater.
The air was heavy, Julia considered, with unspoken importances.
‘Simon,’ she said, deciding on direct attack, ‘why did you bring me here?’
He blinked. ‘I thought it would be nice for us to see each other, again. I thought you might like it.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, don’t you?’ he asked, nervously.
‘Of course. Of course I do.’
‘I’m glad. I – it’s nice when people haven’t become complete strangers. When one’s glad to see old friends. For me, that is, because I don’t know many people. Different for you, you have a very full life.’
‘You don’t seem a stranger at all. I can’t tell you how glad I am that we’re so glad to see each other. It makes a difference to the whole of my life in between.’
‘Well, hardly that,’ he began. He started to clean out a nail with one of the matchsticks and looked quickly up at her and down again. Julia wondered how she had come so wildly to desire someone so disordered. He was waiting.
‘As though we can – finish something. As though – something continued all these years,’ she said.
‘Do you know how many years?’
‘Yes, I know. And now – I’m ready for you.’ Julia wrinkled her brow. She could not be polite, she must plunge in or nothing, and he was waiting. ‘I do love you,’ she said, with a wildly light touch. ‘I’ve always loved you, you know, in a way, whatever that means.’
‘Well, hardly that,’ he said again.
‘I do want us to be able to talk to each other.’
‘Yes —’ He hesitated. ‘Yes. But don’t make too much of me.’ His face took on a look of analytic helpfulness. ‘I’m not that interesting. You and Cassandra had this gift for making things interesting. I always felt – both of you – were trying to make something of me. There wasn’t enough of me to stand up to it.’ He looked at her almost shyly. ‘You won’t start again? I mean, you don’t need to. You’ve got so much.’ His voice was almost hopeful. Julia rallied. Whatever he was saying, he had clearly given her some thought. Moreover, a man will not embark on an abstract discussion of love, in a reptile house or elsewhere, with a woman with whom he feels no pull of intimacy.
‘All I’m saying is, meeting you again makes all my life more solid. More real. I was awfully put out by your going off. Shaken. You don’t mind me saying this?’
‘No, no —’
‘You can’t understand. Since – since Daddy died – I – I’ve been finding out just how much of me isn’t involved in any way in the life I have. I’ve kept going over and over —’
Simon pouched his face into an agonized frown.
‘Julia! I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Look, you can’t let a shock make too much difference to you. It does have that effect, but you can’t afford to let it, that’s one of the things I do know. One of the few things.’ He put his hand over hers, gently. ‘I’m glad you’ve done so well. I’m glad you’re happy. It means a lot to me that you should be happy. You ought to be.’
He was being kind. This was how he had always been; he would provoke what was apparently a moment of real contact, he would do nothing decisive to avoid it, and then he would slide away into priest-like kindness. He tightened his hand on hers.
‘Don’t be kind. You’re not in a position to. You’re part of my life, you’ve changed me.’
‘Oh, yes. And you me.’ He stared at the tea-urns. ‘But don’t make too much of it. Your imagination always frightened me.’
He too was speaking with abstract clarity out of past thoughts, rather than this present encounter. Julia could not reconcile the handclasp with what he was saying.
‘But, Si, what do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘But it’s nice for us to see each other.’
‘Is it?’
He gave her hand a final pressure and released it. ‘Well, I think so.’ He glanced at her, nervous, questioning, almost grinning. Julia’s guts contracted. She thought: the truth is, he doesn’t know what he feels. And then, if that is so, he can be made to feel. She did not formulate to herself precisely what she wanted of him, but she was suddenly energetic, with a sense of bright possibility.
‘Well,’ she said gaily, ‘shall we look at some more animals?’
Chapter 16
‘So what will you do now, Simon?’ said Deborah. ‘Will you just go off again?’ The baby squalled. In the kitchen Julia was attempting to cook veal in marsala on half a gas-stove. Thor was out. It was three weeks since Julia had gone to the zoo with Simon. On the other half of the gas-stove Mrs Baker was deep-frying fritters of corned beef; the kitchen was full of pungent smoke off the fat. Through this Julia could detect the insidious and now constantly pervasive sweet rotten smell of the nappies. She supposed she would have to speak to the Bakers about the nappies again. The presence of the Bakers filled her with the kind of female, housewifely rage which she mocked, sympathetically, in the heroines of her novels.
She wished Deborah would not call Simon Simon. She supposed it was the penalty she had to pay for never having been called Mummy, but she could not like it. Nor did she like Simon’s pleasantly avuncular personality: the long travellers’ tales he produced so effortlessly for Deborah, the way he settled into her chairs.
‘Not for a bit,’ said Simon. ‘I’ll stay put for a bit. I’m committed to various lectures in this country – zoos, zoological societies, things like that. And in Europe too – flying visits. And the doctors want to watch me for a while. A bit of intestinal trouble. Only what you might expect.’
He doesn’t bother to tell me about himself like that, Julia thought, shaking frozen peas out of a packet into a copper pan. Mrs Baker, who had temporarily quelled the baby, shuffled through the living-room.
‘Good evening, Mrs Baker.’
‘Thank you, Mr Moffitt.’
Julia was wedged against the walls of her kitchen by the wide hips of Mrs Baker.
‘I’m awfully sorry, Mrs Eskelund. If I’d known you wanted to cook just this minute I’d have waited of course, but you do usually eat a bit later, when he comes in, and I’m always particular to keep out of the way at those times —’
‘Please don’t worry. There’s plenty of room for both of us.’
‘It’s a question of veg,’ said Mrs Baker. She shook her chip pan aggressively and embarked on a further apology.
‘Deborah!’ cried Julia, shrilly. ‘You might do a bit more than just sit there! You could get some knives and forks and things.’
Her voice sounded in her ears, middle-aged and irritable. In the flat Simon, because he was unmarried and a wanderer seemed to belong to a younger generation than herself, simply because she was a wife and Deborah’s mother. Nothing in me has changed, she thought furiously. But he enjoys this. And Deborah enjoys it. She likes to feel he’s sorry for her.
‘Oh, hell,’ she said, curtailing Mrs Baker’s continuing apology. Mrs Baker shifted her hips fractionally, offended into silence again: both of them wielded fish slices, grimly.
She spent a lot of time trying to understand Simon’s behaviour. He had stayed and talked, tardy, affable and nervous, the evening after their visit to the zoo: then he had disappeared for another three days. Since then, from time to time, he had come back to the flat – once indeed, he had come back three times in one day – and had hung around, there were no other words for it, simply waiting to be invited to lunch or supper. He had not asked her out alone again, and made, as far as she could judge, no attempt to be alone with her, or to return to the ambiguous intimacy of their first two meetings. On the other hand he looked at her, when they did find themselves alone together, with what she could only describe as an expectant expression, and followed her from room to room, watching her silently and falling over the furniture or the crawling children. ‘Alone’ by now, in Julia’s vocabulary, included the presence of the Bakers. Perhaps that was what was wrong. She herself was unbearably aware still of his presence; she had to turn her ey
es away from him when she handed him coffee, she could feel his stare pricking the back of her neck and her spine when she bent over the stove. As though at any moment he would lay his hand on her and the waiting would be finished: but he did not. She was still avoiding Ivan; and Thor seemed to be avoiding her, or exhausted.
When Simon came to the flat he talked, at length, to both Thor and Deborah.
He had embarked on a long argument with Thor about the nature and value of modern civilization, which they took up and nagged at all over again each time they met. This argument irritated Julia profoundly; although she had no ideas of her own to contribute to it, and felt the claustrophobia of any woman trapped in an impersonal male exchange, she thought she knew that they were not even talking about the same thing and would thus never, however much they reiterated their own points of view, get anywhere. Thor used words like escapist, judiciously and frequently; Simon talked about homogeneity and mechanical monotony; Julia, bobbing choppily on all sorts of cross-currents of thought, began to admire herself more and more for the realism with which she refused to commit herself to an attitude, for the penetration with which she remarked that they were, both of them, constructing theologies to support patterns of behaviour to which they were both driven by parts of their temperament remote enough from logical justification. But after a time she was irked by a similarity between them which she had not previously remarked; they were seeking each other’s company because they were both, in a sense, religious extremists, they wanted a way of life that would justify this world in terms of another. Simon was negative, that was all; all he was certain of was eating and sleeping; but he was, for this reason, a suitable testing ground for Thor’s practical moral views about the organization of these basic activities. She thought, sometimes, that they were both, although she admired them, curiously lacking intelligence; Ivan, for all his silliness, was more clever.
But Thor was out, a lot of the time, and Simon talked more to Deborah. Julia suspected that Deborah was telling him at length those grievances against herself which she didn’t like to admit her own consciousness of, much of the time; his evasive character made him in many ways the ideal confidant, and he listened with an awkwardly benign expression. Only he seemed to be doing a lot of the talking himself – this Julia liked even less – and today, coming in from a lunch with her publisher, she had found Simon and Deborah solemnly side by side on the sofa discussing, she was sure of it, Cassandra, the phenomenon of Cassandra. She was worried about Cassandra, and a little worried about Simon himself; her publisher’s comments on the way she had, according to him, courageously ‘let go’, ‘explored in depth’, with these two characters in A Sense of Glory had troubled her; she had realized for the first time just how much she was depending on neither of the originals reading the book.
