The Game

by A. S. Byatt

  ‘That religious phase we both went through. That was out of fear. Wasn’t it? I lost that, I lost any faith. But I was afraid of – of meaninglessness. Shapelessness, formlessness. Things like my father’s trench stories. The – the Amazon – I had a mystical feeling about it, it was the worst place. ‘I care for nothing, all must go,’ I’ve had that poem on the brain for weeks, for obvious reasons. So when I saw I believed in it after all – and when I saw I’d got to face it – I – I thought well, the only thing was to go and live with it. If – if one was afraid that life was only accidental survival – then one had better become familiar with the processes.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I thought you did. It worked in its way, you know, that’s what I’ve got to make you understand. I – I was religious about that, too. I had little tasks. Used to live off grubs and fungus – you’ve no idea, Cassandra, how little food one can come to need. I – I tried to neutralize it in me. I mean, facts were facts. You survived because you expected them. Or went under if you expected wrong. I used to try it on. At first. Impossible treks. Sort of endurance tests. I only got little breaks, at one stage two broken fingers and a broken toe. Then a series of scalds. I kept pouring kettles down my front, I don’t know why.’

  Cassandra had known about the fingers; she nodded.

  ‘It did get familiar. Oh, and neutral, almost nothing disgusts me now. I used not to be like that, I told you about my prissy childhood.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It must have been Julia I told. Sorry. And fear – it changes. It becomes – perpetual and nagging. But less vast. Less urgent, too. I was happy enough. I never went over the edge into loving what’s disgusting. Not like some medical missionaries. I’ve seen nuns touching running sores with a kind of sensual pleasure. In another day they’d have kissed them. To mortify the flesh. Well, I only wanted my flesh indifferent, not mortified. One told me once they’d made such strides with one really loathsome eating disease that soon there’d be no sufferers left. With a look of aimless regret. I said, oh well, something worse will probably crop up. It will, of course.’

  ‘Why must it?’

  ‘Balance of nature.’

  ‘We seem to proliferate, despite the balance.’

  ‘Oh, as far as nature as they used to understand it goes, humanity is the disease. Like a cancer. I see that’s a useless thought. You’d say precious, wouldn’t you? But it’s a thought I have.’

  ‘And the fish?’ said Cassandra. ‘Speaking of Nature?’

  ‘Ah yes, the fish. Do you remember Merton saying that we must not get unduly attached to anything? Out of the subdued lusts of his own flesh, I’ve no doubt, though he had the sense to indulge the smaller ones. There’s the root of it.’

  Cassandra was silent. His fingers moved restlessly over hers. Then she said, ‘Yes, but the fish?’

  ‘You used to lecture me about fish. Order, intention, patterns in the nervous system, planets, natural selection, movements of shoals of fishes. Shoals of bloody fishes.’

  ‘Simon, who was he?’

  ‘I thought you knew. He made the films. His name was Antony Miller. Well, I say he made the films. He did some of the photography, and I did some. He put it all together. He did most of the talking.’

  ‘It didn’t seem like that.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, I see. I mean, he teased thoughts out of me. He was a fearful talker. Brought all sorts of things to life I was used to living with dumbly. I knew he was dangerous,’ said Simon, ‘and then I forgot.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘I told you. A talker. Sort of man I take an instant dislike to. Imposed himself on me. I was living quite quietly on my own, just outside a village – I was mapping creeks. Painstaking and useless – they kept disappearing overnight. And the people from the Health Institute brought him up the river and just dumped him off in my village. He’s a book-maker – a glorified reporter – he’d been digging dinosaurs in New Mexico with a mad American who had some crack-brained theory about why they all disappeared overnight as you might say – Obsolete Monsters, that book was called, I remember.’ Simon settled more comfortably into the pillow. ‘Live reptiles was the logical next step. Climbing the evolutionary ladder. Only he never got further than savage fish.’ Simon gave a hysterical snort of laughter.

  Cassandra kept silent; she could not find another question; her imagination reached for Antony Miller.

  ‘He had a huge mouth. Always smiling. He was unsystematic. But curious, you know, genuinely curious. Followed me about with the camera, opening his mouth like a beak, and shouting, ‘And then? And then?’ when you thought you’d summed up. Quite indiscriminate. Always roaring ‘Oh, look!’ Things you’d seen a thousand times before. But not the way he saw them, I suppose,’ said Simon, gripping Cassandra’s hand painfully. ‘Everything was so real and important to him, he had so much spare power and spare attention. He was no fool, either, though it took me time to find that out. You thought he was a sort of fraud but after a bit you saw you could really rely on knowing where you were with him. I mean, if he liked you, he liked you, that was all there was to it.’

  He seemed to have come to a stop. Cassandra watched him. He began, then, to talk, rather faster, turning his face away from her.

  ‘At the time, I thought I was taking it. You know – Cassandra – I looked on in a sort of silly calm, telling myself, “I can take this.” I even felt a – a sort of triumph. And – you know – everything I’d learned – was a preparation, wasn’t it? I knew – there was nothing to do – but take it. So I – didn’t do anything. I don’t think there was anything I could do. That is, if there had been, I’d have done it, in my experience that comes automatically, if there is anything one can do, doesn’t it? Cassandra?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then – remembering took over. And the nightmares. And a silly game I used to play of seeing with his eyes that got to be not a game. I could see myself. From outside. Is that what they mean by beside yourself? And there were several of everything, like things going back, and back, in a mirror. And then hallucinations. I had to keep watching it happen again where I was. And other things. And now, God help me, I do think it might really go on for ever. At first I just knew it wouldn’t. Cracked. You know how words grow more and more important. I know now why people say cracked. I feel cracked. Don’t go away.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘Say something.’

  ‘What was wrong, you know’ – Cassandra thought aloud – ‘with this preparation you talk about. What was wrong, was that you were preparing for your own death. Even inviting it. But not his.’

  ‘Go on talking.’

  ‘I can only think in abstractions. But they have their uses? Things one must undergo – I suppose one thinks of them in terms of one’s own death. That, after all, one must undergo – one must come together, body and soul, imagination and senses, for one’s dissolution. I fear that. I think you’d learned not to.’

  She waited; he was silent.

  ‘But this has to be undergone in the imagination. It’s not like physical suffering, you can’t endure or end it. You watch and know and remain inviolate. But not really inviolate. There is a real sense in which you are both the suffering creature under the glass and the watching eye over the microscope. You can’t escape, but you are free to act in the rest of your life. And you are responsible. Real suffering would be easier: one would have a right to give up and suffer with dignity. That’s what we crave – in love, or death. The completeness. We want the watching creature to be given over, we want – as much as we fear – pure feeling, complete feeling. I suppose it’s a myth, this complete experience. But you and I suffer from it. We are extremists, in different ways, we will be destroyed or detached, but we will not meddle with half-knowledge, half-experiences, responsibility. No? I imagine we’re a little old now to change. So we aren’t,’ she told him, studying the marks on his forehead, ‘very resilient, when it comes to unavoidable
blows.’

  ‘Though good at avoiding blows?’

  ‘That, yes.’

  She thought, here she was, not only talking to Simon, but telling him what she had always wanted to tell him; she added, ‘Though I, of course, avoid facts, whereas you avoid having to imagine. Or remember.’

  ‘Not very well. You’re a strange creature, you only choose to know certain things, but you do know those. Cassandra—’ he sought for words, and then gave up. ‘I’m pissed.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cassandra, correctly interpreting a word she had not heard before. ‘You are. You should rest, perhaps.’

  He turned over again, lay on his back, opened his eyes, and looked directly at her. Involuntarily she closed her own. When she opened them he was still looking at her. He could not, she thought to encourage herself, be focusing more than hazily.

  ‘Don’t go away. Don’t leave me. There’s so much we haven’t said, and better not, don’t you think? We ought to have known each other better.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, I think so. And differently.’ He pulled her hand gently towards him. ‘I never thought I’d have the courage.… And I know well enough that isn’t what you … not this way.… But …’

  Cassandra detached her hand.

  ‘And we couldn’t take it, could we? We couldn’t have taken it? I’ve had enough of your brandy to break down a few.… But probably too much to …’

  This last was lost on Cassandra, who was nevertheless more or less aware of what he was talking about. He was asking her, by indirections and negatives, for something she had often and improbably enough imagined him asking for more boldly. He was asking her out of a need for comfort? a feeling of duty? a sense, comparable to her own, of something old and unfinished? Cassandra had always despised Jane Eyre’s prudery.

  ‘You would be sensible to go to sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Yes I would. Of course I would. You won’t go away? Nowadays, sometimes’ – he turned his face away, huddling – ‘I shout in my sleep. Let me apologize in advance.’

  She sat there until she was sure he was asleep. He might have been asleep for some time when she decided – his hand twitched loosely, suddenly – that he must be. Then she stood up. She ran her hands down her body: man’s shirt, corduroy trousers, bones: then, with an uncertain repetitive searching, over her face: bones, lips, prickle of lashes, softened wrinkling skin round the eyes. She went round the bed and looked at his face. He snored. She could see the wet inside of his mouth.

  I wouldn’t be too old, she told herself, if I didn’t know so little. I can imagine ways it would be, I have imagined them. But there are so many practical things I’m too old to learn with any dignity. She remembered Julia’s voice from childhood, righteous, complaining. ‘Cassandra won’t be part of anything she can’t run all on her own.’ As for him, she thought, mixing love with contempt as she had accustomed herself to doing, he’d be happy if I exacted it from him, he’d know where he was. He was always an emotional meddler. This is not something he’s just thought of, but he’ll be able to behave later as though it was. He will behave as though it had never happened. So better it does not happen. It would inevitably be too little and too much.

  She collected the nightdress from under the cushion, folded it, and put it away in a drawer. Simon muttered wildly. Cassandra stopped, and ordered him, under her breath, ‘Hush.’ He was quiet. She went into the other room, leaving the door ajar, and sat down in the red chair. She looked round her room; here, across all the shining snail-trails of her thoughts about him he had left dark, invisible, real footprints. Indeed, indeed, she told herself, we are afraid of the moment when what we can imagine becomes inextricably involved in what is actual. What I could ceaselessly invent, because it was out of the realm of possibility, has become possible – limiting, actual, finally, after all, impossible. Nothing will be the same. When the prince kissed the princess, the forest of brambles shrivelled and vanished. Alternatively, when the lady looked out of the tower – seeing, simply, a lump of flesh and blood and a patch of sunshine – the mirror cracked and the web flew out.

  We create each other. Through hard glass, one comes across the Red King, snoring and dreaming. Wake him, look him in the eyes, break his dream and you vanish. Apparently this dead man was the Red King; Simon and the programmes were his. And thus myself? And Julia? Again, I pursue metaphors. Nothing is as we see it, as we imagine it. But we must go on seeing and imagining.

  Cassandra put her head back and waited.

  He slept seven hours; after this, Cassandra heard, without moving, the sounds in her bedroom which indicated that he was getting up, dressing. He came out into the room, still knotting his tie; she looked at him dumbly out of her chair; it was almost dark.

  ‘Shall I put the light on?’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  He found the switch. ‘I must have slept and slept. Did I shout?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked at her quickly. ‘You look tired. You look as though you haven’t been very well.’

  Cassandra nodded. She did not want to have to speak to him. He seemed lighter, now, as though he knew what he was doing. She was afraid, and rigid with it.

  He went round the room, turning over paintings, and leafing through drawings. He uncovered the figure in the raincoat under the tree. He considered this.

  ‘Me?’

  In a sense.’

  ‘I see. I see. Well wrapped up, waiting for the sky to fall. Well, it fell, didn’t it, you were right. So you’ve been thinking about me.’

  ‘As you see.’ Cassandra made a brief gesture in the direction of the television and the paintings. She compared herself to an old woman, locked in with a thief, stripped of her possessions and waiting for the coup de grâce. ‘It needn’t concern you.’

  ‘Are you apologizing for having thought about me?’

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘Oh dear. No, don’t do that. Don’t do that. I’ve thought about you, too. I’ve even dreamed about you.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Cassandra. She did not ask what he had dreamed. Simon dislodged a pile of creeper studies and the cutting Deborah had sent fluttered to the floor. Simon studied it and laughed.

  ‘Who did this?’

  ‘A friend of Julia’s, something to do with the television, I am told.’

  ‘The one she sleeps with.’

  ‘I don’t know what she does.’

  ‘Don’t you? I suppose I don’t, really. I’d have thought so, that’s all, he meant me to think that when I met him.’

  ‘I don’t know him,’ Cassandra said wearily. She had not, perhaps fortunately, seen Simon’s brief appearance on The Lively Arts; his expression puzzled her. Simon replaced the cutting and sat down – he did not ask who had sent it to Cassandra.

  ‘All these stacks of painting. Such industry. Is this recent?’

  ‘Fairly.’ She did not want to have to watch him think out her themes, her subjects; his look flayed her.

  ‘Will you come out to dinner with me, Cassandra?’ She hesitated. ‘I need you to, I don’t want to be alone just yet, I feel so much better for having told you. And you were so unsurprised. I was grateful for that, and you talked so solemnly.’

  She looked round her room again, feeling trapped; how could he have seen what he had seen and not know what she had made of him? She would not take his kindness.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve been thinking about me. No, really. Don’t look so – so reticent. I’ve been in the habit – for years – of wondering what you would think of things. Antony, for instance. You wouldn’t have liked Antony. You’d have thought he was dangerous, as I did.’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Do you want me to go? I will go, I don’t want to annoy you.’

  ‘You never used,’ said Cassandra, ‘to talk about yourself.’

  ‘I don’t remember you being particularly anxious to encourage me.’ He looked at her, direct and earnest. ‘You were so prickly and terrifyi
ng, among other things. Now, Julia —’

  Fifteen years ago he had begun this sentence; today, having given up the thought of him, she would let him finish it.

  ‘Julia was rather like him, I suppose. She liked you and let you be; you could talk about anything to Julia and she’d be so interested it would feel real. It’s a gift. One I haven’t got, and always – always fall for. You know?’ He thought. ‘She’s changed, of course.’

  ‘It was never the whole truth. About Julia.’

  ‘I know. You two are more alike than you seem, straight away. I used to think there were people who knew how to live. You and I, we didn’t did we? But she did. Silly, really – she was terrified of you, and she loved you. She talked about you. I started taking you seriously, then. I had to. I developed a tremendous curiosity about you. A bit late.’

  ‘It’s a curiosity I could have done without.’

  ‘Of course, of course. An insult. But then – the uses you both made of me were insulting enough, too. Nobody likes to be a missile in a battle they didn’t start. One can’t afford to spend too much time being insulted.’

  Cassandra bowed her head, silent and exhausted. That Simon should voluntarily stay in a room with her and tell her what he felt about their past had never occurred to her: still less would it have occurred that she could endure the listening. The romantic moment of recognition would not happen – although she had come closer to that than she could possibly have considered likely, and she had refused it. But what she had now, though not absolute, was more than that grey recognition of defeat, of pure limiting impossibility, that was the romantic recognition reversed. Simon, chatty, gossipy, nervous, kindly – which?, having made of her pictures – what? and of herself, too – what? was asking her out to dinner. And she had preached to him that the complete, the absolute feeling was not desirable. She did not know what he thought, and would not know. But she would take what was offered. Painfully, deliberately, still terrified, Cassandra, for the first time in her life, rose to an occasion.