The Game

by A. S. Byatt

  ‘He’s a fool,’ said Julia, ‘and he doesn’t know himself.’

  ‘Which of us do?’ said Simon. ‘I never know how much it matters. Clearly, one ought to know oneself well enough – not to destroy oneself through making immoderate demands on oneself. One ought to know other people enough not to expect the impossible of them, either. And so it follows, one ought not to live by a theory of human nature that won’t bear treading on, that caves in, under one’s feet. But I think he’s found that out, now. It only really applies to him. All the rest of us are probably too conscious of our limitations – we’d do better to expect more of ourselves, and know ourselves a little less thoroughly. As for him – if he goes out there now he’ll go knowing he’s a fanatic – and not bothering too about the element of self-aggrandizement in that – and knowing that small acts are something in themselves. Penicillin and milk, Deborah, facts, in themselves. I admire him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Deborah. ‘So do I.’

  ‘If it weren’t for you, Simon Moffitt,’ Julia said, ‘this would never have happened.’

  Simon avoided her eye. ‘I’ve had much less to do with it than you have.’

  ‘You go about, offering helpful advice and comfort. Are you so sure your own house is in order?’

  ‘All my life I’ve avoided having a house,’ said Simon, ‘for that reason.’

  ‘Simon!’ said Julia. She did not know what plea or confession should follow this: everything was out of proportion; she knew she should not be seeing Thor’s departure in terms of Simon, but this was how it was. But she was not seeing Simon clearly, either; she was too conscious of Deborah’s watching eye.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve really got to go.’

  Deborah held one shoulder of his raincoat for him. He looked dubiously at Julia.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ he said, ‘when I get back. I’m out of town for a few days. I don’t know how long. But I’ll come back.’

  He wandered towards the door.

  ‘You ought,’ he said to Julia, ‘to think out clearly what you really want.’

  Julia was momentarily lightened by the murderous rage with which this remark filled her; she said, briskly, ‘Well, if you must go, get on with it, for goodness’ sake,’ and strode into the kitchen. Here, from a need for martyrdom and activity, she began violently to wash the nappies. After a moment, Deborah joined her.

  ‘If I were you I’d make Mrs Baker do those. This is a nice mess, isn’t it? At least he didn’t tell us to look after each other. Did he?’

  Chapter 17

  CASSANDRA watched the gardener turn on the tap. The hosepipe jerked as though it was alive, flung itself from side to side, and gushed water. The gardener closed it off, partially, and headed it into the pool; the whole glass-house was filled with a slow, bubbling, dropping sound. Steam hissed faintly. The gardener stumped along the grating that surrounded the pool, glancing only cursorily at Cassandra, to whose presence he was now used. Outside it was raining steadily; the beat of water on the glass roof mixed with the bubble of the hose. Cassandra covered a sheet of paper with a recurrent ribbed pattern in charcoal, clear and then blurred, the hosepipe still and in motion. On the rim of the concrete pool, beside her, lay a packet of cooling fish and chips and her canvas satchel.

  In the pool a shoal of very small fishes moved, connected and purposeful, through the weeds, with hard little heads and tapered bodies. Cassandra was waiting for the big fish. When the gardener had gone she took out a cardboard pot of dried daphnia and sprinkled a little on the surface of the water. The little fish darted up and then wheeled away, as, from somewhere amongst the tangled roots and liquid mud, the big fish rose, pink and bulbous. Cassandra watched it. It was the size of a man’s fist and was pale and glistening. It had long, trailing, ragged fins and tail, sprouting from the rotund surfaces, and the dark coils of its entrails were visible through the walls of its belly. On the head its eyes stood out, straining, and the surface between them was cracked and crazed and patterned with little crevices and bloodshot streaks, iridescent, discoloured, white, apricot, rose. It was extremely ugly and Cassandra knew every line of its body. It was clearly very old and made no unnecessary movements; slowly now, trailing its tattered appendages, it razed the undersurface of the water, sucking in with horny lips the specks of food, adding a series of dry little gulps to the other sounds in the place. Cassandra decided to paint it from underneath, distorting it carefully so that it was seen elongated, cramped to the surface, where its cracked head was reflected. It looked stonily at her; a thin black ribbon of excrement dangled from it. Cassandra upended herself beside the pool and laid her head sideways on the stone, staring in. Then she began to paint.

  After a time the door opened and closed and steps clanged on the grating. Then the door ground again. Cassandra knew that someone else was inside; she could feel the faint sounds of clothing and breath. The fish goggled desperately under the surface of its world: Cassandra had to guard, these days, against a feeling that the glass-house was hers and that no one had the right to intrude or disturb her fish. She tapped her teeth with her tongue and looked up with a momentary frown through the curtain of steam and feathery foliage. He was leaning on his umbrella, watching her; caught out, on hands and knees, sandy hair springing about her face, she stared back. She was completely and really uncertain whether she had called him up. Either way, she knew now what madness felt like. She remembered that she had not known whether her father was alive or dead. He was wearing a white macintosh.

  ‘Cassandra?’ he said, dubiously. ‘Cassandra!’ His voice echoed against the glass. ‘I – I didn’t know you were a nature student.’ He began, with the same clanging steps, to come round the pool. Cassandra’s painting slid into the water and skidded across the surface. The fish backed several feet, stirring troubled fins. Cassandra struggled to sit upright. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Let me.’ He stretched out his arm, coat, jacket and all, across the pool and made a lurching grab. He retrieved the painting and began to dab at it with a handkerchief.

  ‘Am I doing damage? Am I making it worse?’

  Cassandra, clumsy with shock, shifted herself and knocked the fish and chips into the water. The packet sank slowly; they watched it; the newspaper unfurled and a chip and a film of grease bobbed to the surface.

  ‘Look what you’ve made me do,’ Cassandra snapped, savage. He started slightly, and then began, patiently, to retrieve chips and flakes of sodden cod in handfuls. His sleeves dripped.

  ‘I’m sure we ought not to disturb the balance. Or all the fish might die.’ He righted himself, and considered her. ‘Now, what are you doing here, painting hosepipes and fish? Julia said you were a don.’

  ‘I am,’ said Cassandra, strangled.

  ‘Do you know, I’ve got water running right into my armpits? Trickling down my ribs. I don’t suppose you want this fish and chips. Have they got a disposal bin in here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Cassandra had begun to shiver; her mouth was dry; she felt all the symptoms of panic fear. She had not called him up, but there was something wrong with him, something distorted, something not allowed for. ‘Why …?’ she whispered, swallowing. ‘Why …?’

  ‘Why am I here? I’m giving a paper. On toads. To a zoological group who kindly paid my expenses, and then there were some specimens I’ve been helping them with here. I came up from Liverpool Street, I’ve got a room in the Mitre. It’s all fixed. It’s a good paper but of course I’m a bad talker.’ He was not looking at her. Gathering herself to pay him attention she thought him, for him, garrulous. ‘I was going to look you up, as a matter of fact, in your college, almost immediately. Deborah told me where to find you. There was something I wanted to … I’ve been hearing about you. I thought …’ He looked at her, and waited for a response. Cassandra swallowed again. A cloud of little fishes had gathered round the remaining morsels of cod, sucking at them.

  ‘Yes, I meant to ask you,’ he said, still in the same bright
, conversational tone. ‘I knew a man who was eaten by fish. I saw it.’

  ‘Piranhas?’

  ‘Yes. I saw it.’

  Cassandra looked down at the pool and then across at his face. There were, in the softness of real flesh, the scars, the pockmarks, the protuberances. He was assessing her in some way, and still smiling. Cassandra’s imagination worked on the dead man and the fish: blood in water, flaps and shreds of flesh, eager toothed mouths. She saw, precisely, as though it was given from outside herself, stripped bones turning in water, drowned and floating reddish hair, torn tendons; the bones were not dry, but pearly and damp with life and streaked with red. She thought she saw what he saw; this was what, over the years, she had been training herself to do. No, she had not called him up, he was not her creature, but she shared what he saw.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see. I see.’

  She saw also that he had reached some limit of his self-control; she felt, and then saw, his wrists dance on his knees.

  ‘It’s a bloody funny fate. Oh, horribly funny. Guts and cock and all, Cassandra, do you hear, every little bit except the hair and teeth, it’s the sort of macabre joke I knew you’d appreciate …’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Cassandra. She could find only her old authoritative bark to speak to him in. ‘I’ve got no sense of humour. None at all. I know what you are saying.’

  He watched his hands tremble.

  ‘I’m wet. I’m as wet as anything.’

  ‘You will dry off.’

  ‘Listen – I wanted to tell you – extremity was always your business.… I want to explain, Cassandra. It’s not as though I wasn’t prepared. I – I thought I – could take anything like that, I’d allowed for it. Or why was I out there at all? Cassandra, Cassandra. I was taking it, I was over it. Only I didn’t know. I – I’m alive, I was over it, I was over it,’ he repeated. ‘And now it’s taken me over. Oh, can you see? Must I go through and through it? Like an expanding nightmare – literally, I mean – and who knows where it will end? I’m not out there any more. But there’s no – there’s no – Cassandra?’ He looked at her. ‘Lately I really don’t know whether I’m here or there. That’s not a way of putting it, it’s the truth. I thought you might —’ He repeated, ‘I didn’t know,’ as though he were offended as well as shocked.

  Cassandra knew what he was saying. She said, ‘Listen, I don’t know much about this. But so few things happen to us that we have to undergo. Most of the time we’re double, we can stand outside and see an event – hope, fear, anticipate, judge. And then something happens where – where we have no room for thought or imagining – where what happens is real and all that is real. We talk a lot about living fully, but the last thing we want to do is live anything through. We think that sort of single-minded grief is insanity, but it’s only an acknowledgement of a factual truth. An intolerable truth.’

  ‘You have thoughts about everything. Is that how you see it? We can’t afford – but sometimes we have to —’ He said, ‘I thought you might know. You take everything so seriously.’

  ‘Platitudes.’

  He acknowledged this with a weary shake of the head. ‘I’m tired,’ he said plaintively. His mouth hung slightly open. ‘It’s the nightmares. I don’t know why I have to live with it, I’m here, after all. Do you think I could come to where you live, Cassandra, I’ve got to dry off?’

  Cassandra passed her tongue round her dry mouth, nodded, and gathered up her satchel. She thought he had not noticed her own fear.

  She had not taken in her room as a whole for a long time. It seemed crowded; most of the chairs were stacked with paintings and the desk was piled across with drawings and manuscripts. She stood in the doorway and looked; Simon came past her, peeling off raincoat and jacket. He stood, dangling them; Cassandra approached nervously, took them, and carried them into the bedroom where she hung them over a towel stand. When she came back he had closed not only the door but the outer oak, so that they were locked in. He was propped in her crimson chair, head back, eyes closed; life seemed to run visibly out of his flesh, and he was shuddering. Cassandra laid on his chair-arm a lavender-coloured, lavender-scented maidenly guest-towel, one of a kind of trousseau provided by her mother many years ago and now never used. His teeth chattered.

  ‘I’d better light the fire?’ she said. He did not answer. Cassandra felt entirely at a loss; neither entertaining, nor caring for Simon had ever entered her thoughts and plans for him; her thoughts did not run that way. She felt gawky; she did not know what her acceptance of his confidence had committed her to; her own small, social terror increased. ‘I could make you some coffee.’

  He opened his eyes. ‘Haven’t you got a drink?’

  ‘No, that is, yes, a bottle of brandy.’

  She went down on her knees and, with a trembling hand, set a match to the gas fire, which made a small explosion, followed by a high, blaring sound.

  ‘I think I’d like some brandy. Can I?’ Cassandra poured him a glass, taking time over it; he swallowed it in large mouthfuls, listening to the hiss and roar of the fire. She had always known that one day he would sit there, and had always known that he would never sit there. He held out his glass for more. When this, too, was drunk, he said, ‘You live a sheltered life. At first sight.’

  ‘At first sight, yes.’

  ‘Padded in with paper. I’d imagined it all rather like this. I shan’t ask if you’re happy. The more I thought, the more there was only you I could – tell. You don’t mind, do you? I know so few people, I — Can I have some more, is there any? Such small glasses. There was never any room, with you, for things not being at the worst. I – I didn’t like that about you. But now, things look different. And you look different. I don’t know why you should let me go on like this. Do you understand?’

  Cassandra poured more brandy, and said, ‘Yes, I understand.’

  ‘You haven’t changed. Or have you?’

  ‘No, I don’t change much.’

  Simon was drinking brandy almost absently, as though gulping water. She was not sure that this was good for him; shock and terror she could recognize, and to these, in him, she responded; but she had no idea what effect brandy would have on these states. It was also surprisingly painful to be in a position to consider what was good for him; she trod on shifting sands.

  ‘Simon,’ she said, using his name, for the first time, awkwardly. ‘Simon, do you think you ought —’

  He looked at her with a kind of shy cunning.

  ‘Yes, I do. I’m all right. I know what I’m doing, don’t worry.’ He did not look as though he knew anything of the sort. His face wavered.

  ‘You are shocked,’ said Cassandra. ‘You should rest.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I should. You’re right. Is there anywhere I could lie down?’

  ‘Only the bed.’

  ‘I think I’ve got to. Where is it?’

  Cassandra led him into her bedroom. Simon supported himself on the bed-foot, and circumnavigated it. Then he sat down on the edge. Cassandra stood over him. At any moment, she thought, he might discover her real poverty and helplessness.

  ‘I’ve really got to lie down, Cassandra, I’m sorry about this.’ He unlaced his shoes, shivering, and took them off. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’

  ‘No. No.’ She leaned across him, tugged out her nightdress from under the pillow, and pushed it under a cushion in a chair. Then she turned back the covers.

  ‘Do you mind if I get right in?’

  ‘You ought to keep warm,’ said Cassandra. She looked away whilst he undressed further; he slipped, in shirt-tails, under the blankets, drew them up to his chin, and shut his eyes. Cassandra moved.

  ‘No, don’t go. Don’t go. I shall start thinking again. I shall start going over, that is. Stay here. Sit down, why don’t you? I’ll feel better in a moment, I feel better already, lying down. Then we’ll have a talk.’

  Cassandra perched carefully on the very edge of her own bed, and considered the sprawling fe
atures on her pillow. They were not unfamiliar; she would have been hard put to it to describe the differences between what she saw and what she had imagined. She could hear, however, his stomach churning.

  ‘I wish I was sure you didn’t mind this intrusion. There’s no reason why you should welcome me or want me, I do see. It was a bit melodramatic, but I thought I’d risk – I thought you’d let me talk. I know you wouldn’t once, but we were so much younger.’

  ‘It’s good for you to talk.’ Cassandra was producing all kinds of opinions she had not known she held. ‘If you want to talk to me I – I’m grateful.’

  ‘Really?’ He put out his hand; Cassandra laid her own on it; his thumb travelled over her rings.

  ‘I liked what you said about having to undergo things. It’s funny how long it takes one to recognize these things – the things one can’t get out of, the things that really happen to one.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s surprising how rarely it happens, maybe. Most people can digest almost anything.’

  ‘Oh, digest, yes. Even – even unpalatable truths. But what do you do – what do you do Cassandra – when something happens – that you’re seriously afraid you might not – survive?’

  Cassandra played with the metaphor; you reject it, or it poisons you, she thought.

  ‘You can only keep still and concentrate on surviving. Better to let yourself know what’s happened.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘In your case.’

  ‘I thought I was past that point. I’ve been thinking out why I went out there. Why did I – why should a man like I was go out there?’

  ‘Out of fear,’ Cassandra offered.

  ‘That’s something you know about, don’t you? You always did, it didn’t make you easy company.’

  ‘Explorers,’ Cassandra pursued her point, ‘are statistically unusually accident-prone. Some of us invite what we are afraid of.’

  Simon flattened his hand against hers, interlaced their fingers, and gripped. He muttered something indistinguishable; then his voice came clearly.