The Game (2 page)

The screen flickered. Julia had a momentary, jumping vision of a huge sheet of water in a haze of heat, and then, superimposed on this, the rounded, superlatively normal face of a girl whose cultured voice above her cultured pearls quavered, came into being, and continued. ‘… This is the first in a series of late-night programmes, largely with a scientific emphasis, although there will be plenty of glimpses of the exotic and the dangerous. There is something for everyone: scientists, geographers, animal-lovers, arm-chair explorers …’

Julia was annoyed; she intended to respect the television and here was this girl addressing her millions of audience with
a prepared, gentle condescension – as though they were all very slightly mentally deficient. Also, Julia didn’t like travel programmes. She was urban to the depths of her country-bred soul, and couldn’t imagine living, or communicating anything to anyone, anywhere outside London. Travellers with travellers’ tales were always so jolly, their deserts and jungles so parochial, almost as though they had been built, or at least touched up, in the studio. A lorry-load of sand, a few plastic fronds, a dozen or so Negro extras.… The young woman tossed her smooth blonde head, was seen deliberately to restrain herself from touching her pearls, announced brightly that there would be a few words from the Reverend William Borran after this programme, and was suddenly swallowed into the jungle. Trees, and then water. Tunnels of water, wastes of water, an aerial view of the great, formless river, broken into innumerable little tributaries, bushy islands, dense clumps of vegetation, yielding again to water which slapped this way and that, sucked in and out of creeks, spread, swelled.

‘The Amazon basin,’ said the commentator. ‘It was first explored in 1500 by Vicente Yañez Pinzon, who referred to it as the Marañon – a name now generally reserved for the Upper Amazon, although geographers differ as to where the Marañon ends and the Amazon begins, or whether both names apply, in fact, to the same river. The Brazilian historian Costancio maintains that
Marañon
is derived from the Spanish word
maraña
– a tangle, a snarl …’

The voice was not orotund; there was a hesitance, a kind of suppressed urgency about it, as though these simple facts, maybe, would be misunderstood, or not believed.

‘In the rainy season the average depth is a hundred and twenty feet. But it may rise, suddenly, fifty-six feet, and transform the landscape. Nothing is fixed: maps are approximations. What we learn to recognize, or begin to study, one week, may not be there the next. The camera can only give a bare idea of the power, here, of physical flux – weather, as well as growth and decay …’

The smooth rapidity of the camera-work was good, Julia
thought, as the eye left the water and stared up and out through row after row of huge trees, straining smoothly towards the sky. Only, as the camera made plain, they were not rows, there was no pattern, they were a mass. Julia’s eye was bewildered by a series of changes in focus – close-ups of knots of creepers or areas of powdery bark, vistas into the depths of eternally extended, haphazardly cluttered cathedrals, between whose pillars the sun occasionally burst in long, white, hissing stars which rested on the leaves – a phenomenon the camera can hold, as the eye cannot. It was alien and enveloping, in no way pretty.

‘A great effort of slow growth. Aldous Huxley said once that if Wordsworth had been familiar with tropical forests he would have found Nature less benign and illuminating. There is something here, he said, which is “foreign, appalling, and utterly inimical to intruding life”. A German traveller, Burmeister was distressed by the vegetation here because, he said “it revealed a spirit of restless selfishness, eager emulation, and craftiness”. Well, we take, from what we see, what we bring to it. “In our life alone does Nature live,” as Coleridge said. I would hope to approach these forests more neutrally. We are to observe unchecked, unchannelled growth, and the concomitant destruction. I believe we can learn from this; in civilized countries we have suppressed, or rigidly limited, our consciousness of these processes. But they are part of us, however decently we may tuck away, behind curtains, birth and death. We forget what we are …’

The voice faded on a possibly querulous note as the camera began suddenly to run over the ground, picking out patterns, breaking them.

‘The jungle floor. Dead leaves, reddish, yellowish, pinkish, darkish brown. Decaying, in innumerable layers, back into the soil. Springy to walk on, often treacherous. Patterns picked up by the camera.’

Long lines of dead leaves sagged together, falling into formlessness. Julia could almost smell decaying earth mould. The picture steadied; she was watching a path of ground,
raised circles of overlapping leaves, lighter lines of fungus or pale grey mould.

‘No shape. Lumps, bumps …’

In the centre, on top of the slight mound, something moved and raised itself. The camera caught the momentary black brightness of an eye; triangular, flattened, smooth yet knobby, a shape appeared, a snake’s head, staring. A tongue flickered in and out.

‘Not a camera pattern, but a life adapted to the jungle floor. This is the bushmaster.
Lachesis muta.
Very venomous. They can grow to twelve feet – this specimen is not so long. The pattern on these coils is in fact a regular pattern designed to melt into the irregular pattern of the leaves, solid dark rhombs on a paler ground, with tubercular ridges, a rough surface. A beautiful creature.’

Julia, who hated snakes, had been trying to neutralize the slight shock this cleverly manoeuvred apparition had given her by telling herself, as she did during unbearable films, those about executions and torture, that the camera-work, the selection, was excellent. Now she was struck, not for the first time, by the phrase. Whatever one ought to think, she told herself, it was not true, snakes were not beautiful creatures; they were mutilated and ugly; their faces were evil. As a man could be ugly and one could so define him and no one would dispute it, so could a beast. We can recognize human beauty, she thought, for reasons. Our traditional horror of the serpent has something behind it. Snakes are dangerous and ugly, we are
meant
to be repelled by them. This thought, of course, led back to the idea that an ugly man must be bad or dangerous, and this, given qualifications for
beauxlaids
, for those whose beautiful thoughts moulded and transfigured their horrid features, Julia was prepared to believe. Things were so much more often than was likely what they seemed. One should not be over-subtle, and to call snakes beautiful was a perversion. Simon – Simon had done that. Simon had —

Julia reached for the
Radio Times
, turned her head back towards the television, and saw him.

He stood a little stiffly beside his snake, holding it down now at the base of the skull with an iron implement that looked as though it had been fetched from some mediaeval torture chamber. He had a long, mournful face, with concave planes spattered with the beginnings of a black beard. His hair was long and sprang away from his head in wiry curls. His expression was both pompous and deprecating, as well as in some way secretive; he had changed, he had changed, but Julia remembered that look. He was long and spindling, and looked at home in bush clothes, peering out from under a kind of floppy sun-hat. Julia remembered that he would fling his arms around himself from time to time as though he had extra joints. His voice was unrecognizable, until he was visible; it had acquired a new clarity and authority, a dry showmanship. With her he had always muttered huskily, directing his remarks away from her.

The man manoeuvred the snake so that its head was turned with the open mouth exposed to the camera. Against the dark leaves the mouth-tissues were white, bright, clean.

‘This whiteness of the mouth is the reason for the name of the cotton-head snake,’ he informed them; he went on to expatiate, soberly, technically, on the fangs, the venom, the ducts, the hooking and striking of the creature.

‘This snake is a rapid mover; it does not hesitate, or make frenzied manoeuvres for position, as the rattlesnakes do. It strikes on sight …’

He paused, looked puzzled. ‘It’s a much less horrible death than many. I’ve never understood why people find it so peculiarly distasteful. Compared, for instance, to pig-sticking. Or, for that matter, to being hanged. People get very emotional about snakes. It’s a kind of emotion I think we can’t afford – in any area of life – to feel. Not many of us feel that motor-cars are evil. But they are equally lethal. And occasionally possessed by murderous rage. I don’t know whether people think snakes are evil because they are venomous, or fear the venom – disproportionately – because they think the snake is evil. I hope – after a time – to make snakes seem familiar. Familiar.
One ought to live neutrally. To see these as a form of life, simply. One
form
of
life
, yes.’ He put a weight on the words, almost desperate with unexploded implications; this, too, was a trick Julia remembered; but the public, impersonal intimacy of the television exaggerated it. ‘I am a professional herpetologist so we shall be greatly – not exclusively – concerned with snakes.’

The camera left him to settle, suddenly and irrelevantly, on a flock of white water-birds, wading and calling. Then it was over; the Reverend William Borran smiled fluently, and began to speak of how we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. Julia stood up and switched him off. Her hands were sweating. The room seemed damp and hot, like a greenhouse. It seemed logical, in retrospect, that he should have come to this; ironing out the knowledge of good and evil in a scientific way, in the jungle. She had never understood what drove him. She had never come to terms with him. She sat for some time, her head in her hands, knotting her red hair with her fingers, looking at the blank screen.

‘W
E
shall do better,’ Cassandra wrote, ‘to think of chastity as purity, a scrupulous purity, and to associate it with innocence, if we are to apprehend at all the moral force either of Lancelot’s sin or of Galahad’s virtue in the
Morte d’Arthur.
Chastity as the supreme virtue is not an automatically acceptable idea. Most of us would preserve our brother’s life before a maiden’s maidenhead, or decide, if faced with the alternative of the immediate suicide of not only one but twelve ladies that the preservation of our own virtue in these circumstances is perhaps a little selfish and a little prudish. We shall do better if we think of “that which the maiden would never have again” as an original innocence – and extend the meaning of “intact” to the whole spirit, uninvaded and complete. If we remember that to a true Christian death is not dreadful, we shall face Lionel’s death with greater equanimity, even before we discover that it is an illusion of the fiend.’

She laid down her pen and considered these things. About chastity it was difficult to think clearly, if, as she did, one enjoyed it in an occupational and accidental way. It did not appear to her to be either purity or innocence; largely ignorance, perhaps; occasionally the source of a hot, devouring curiosity she had felt as a child and hoped to grow out of. As for death, that seemed increasingly dreadful, and her Christianity made sadly little difference to her imaginings. She looked surreptitiously at her watch. It was ten, not time yet. She had completed her prescribed hours on the Malory edition; she marked these off, in red, in her desk diary, and began a letter.

‘Dear Father Rowell, I agree entirely with you about the arrangements for R. S. Thomas’s reading. Naturally the Ladies will come. It should also be publicized as far as possible amongst all undergraduates; this must be one of the rare
occasions when Church and secular world have a genuine and useful common area of interest. I agree with you also that the Welsh nationalism is an irritant. But clearly the poet is in need of it, if not the poems, many of which I would not be without.’

She stopped again for some time, thinking that she had now made enough conversation but did not know how to open the other topic. She looked at her watch again. She wrote: ‘It was kind of you, Father, to write as you did of my nightmares and fears. As you will have guessed, I have regretted intermittently what I told you of this. It was a moment of weakness, but not one for which I can ultimately be sorry since you can write to me with such untroubled understanding.’

She paused again, to reflect that this was not quite true. Father Rowell had expressed only a limited understanding, and what he had said was not entirely untroubled. She should have said nothing: she had lost dignity, exposed herself, forfeited, perhaps, some of his respect. Still, what was done was done. ‘I have prayed as you directed,’ she continued, ‘and I may truly say things are better. We are all afraid of being overwhelmed in one way or another; but I have lived with these fears for many years now and I meet them, to a certain extent, with the ease of familiarity.’

Also not true. Or at least, what familiarity brought was not necessarily ease. She wrote a few carefully relaxed sentences of parish gossip and signed her letter. Then she took up an essay on
Troilus and Criseyde
, written in obvious haste on three sides of paper torn from an exercise book, and clearly largely cribbed from C. S. Lewis.

‘If this essay were cleaner,’ she wrote, ‘it might be possible to read it with closer attention. You seem unaware that the statement of Criseyde’s feelings you quote from Lewis, without acknowledgement, on your second page, directly contradicts what you say
in propria persona
on your third. Your work has been consistently of this poor quality. I shall find it almost impossible to report well of it to your Scholarship authorities at the end of the term.’

She looked at this for some moments. She remembered the author of the essay very well; a large, hairy-legged, lumpish girl, the first from her obscure Welsh grammar school to be admitted to the College, and then against Cassandra’s advice. She sat almost silent through tutorials, her huge white face staring with carefully black-rimmed eyes out of a Lake-dweller’s hut of cross-woven colourless hair, over the shapeless bulk of a dirty white mohair sweater. When Cassandra spoke to her she twisted fat white hands in agitation and pulled at hang-nails. Another don had told Cassandra that she was having an unhappy love affair; last year’s work had been markedly better. It happened to all of them, Cassandra thought with distaste, even those apparently
hors de concours
through ugliness. It seemed to reduce them all to the same state of incompetent, inattentive weariness. It was not as though cuddling – or being deprived of cuddling – on a lodging-house sofa made them any more sensitive to the subtleties of Chaucer’s portrayal of the protracted decay of affection. It simply made them weary. Whereas her own generation, deprived of such inept experience, had had time to become aware of what was possible, of the subtleties of passion, through the imagination.