The Game (6 page)

‘Let me take your coat,’ said Cassandra to Deborah. Deborah nodded, speechless, and struggled out. She was wearing a smart navy-blue knitted suit, with a red and white collar. She pulled off the blue woolly hat, revealing a head with her father’s bulging brow topped by a springing mass of gingery, wiry curls. Cassandra, taken aback, stared at her, and Deborah somewhat consciously, cast down her eyes. She followed Cassandra through into the little cloakroom in the corridor leading to the back of the house, where Cassandra hung up everything except her own velvet hat. Then she said, loudly:

‘Please, what are we supposed to
do
?’

‘I don’t know. Keep quiet. Lend moral support. Your father seems to know.’

‘It’s his job. Lending moral support’s his job. I – I’m – scared of – of people dying. I’m sorry.’

It was a long time since anyone had made any kind of a personal appeal to Cassandra. She thought again, crossly, Julia should not have brought this girl.

‘It is one of the things we all have to accept,’ she said.

‘Oh, that’s what we
say
.’

‘That’s what’s true.’

‘Yes,’ said Deborah. ‘But – but it’s still often something we just
say
.’

‘There are ways and ways of accepting.’

‘Yes. And one is always afraid one might not manage it. Don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cassandra slowly. She looked again at Deborah’s hair and freckled nose; it was uncanny that she had not noticed this at their earlier meetings. She said, ‘One
has to learn to cultivate detachment. Are you fond of reading? Let me find you a book.’

Deborah gave her, on this, an odd grin that could only have been called conspiratorial; the thought of this recurred uneasily to Cassandra at several moments during that long evening.

D
URING
the next week and a half, only one thing changed; the snow fell steadily, and blew and piled around the house, and out on the hills behind the house. It was one of those late, freak winters, and the family, held there initially by Jonathan Corbett’s unchanging condition, found that when it still did not change any decision to return south was postponed because the roads were impassable.

Before the snow fell, a nurse had arrived, who took over Inge’s room; Inge had come in her teens to look after Cassandra and Julia when they were children, had told them Scandinavian legends of long dark nights and ice mountains, and had gone home to marry, in her late thirties, a childhood friend who had suddenly made a fortune from hand-turned wooden furniture and bowls. It was through Inge, and the proximity of the shipping line to Oslo and Bergen that the Old House had become a centre for visiting Scandinavian Quakers, including Thor. Inge had left, but there was still Elsie, the maid, who had been there as long as Julia could remember and was part of the family; Elsie cooked, and cleaned, and carried things for Jonathan Corbett up and down the stairs. Julia spent some time chatting to Elsie in the kitchen, reminiscing. She remembered Inge and Elsie as the stable part of her childhood; her parents had been often away, and always busy; the house had been often enough full of visiting deputations and then, in the war, had been a depot for milling refugee children. Inge and Elsie had been constant; they had done the scolding and loving.

Thor and Julia slept in what had been her parents’ bedroom before they moved out into separate rooms. This always gave Julia a feeling that an adult, married state had been thrust upon her such as she had imagined it in childhood, and not as she had in fact experienced it in the warm muddle of her
Great Ormond Street flat. Thor, naturally enough, was quite unawed by this. He was very busy, and organized everything, ordered meals, ordered people to put on gumboots and go down into the village to buy food. On Sunday, when the nurse had her day off, he took his wife, his mother-in-law, and Deborah to the Quaker Meeting-house, whilst Cassandra, who had got up very early to go to the Vicar’s communion service took her turn at sitting beside the long, slightly bubbling body of her father.

There were only about six people at Meeting, besides the family. Julia, who, in spite of having married an active Friend, rarely went to Meeting now, found the Meeting-house, for all its scrubbed wooden bareness of benches and tables, distressing. She did not, as she imagined Cassandra did, find the house itself, or the daily routine, oppressive, but the Meeting-house, stripped for deep thought, was both the place where she had had time to examine her own moments of distress, and the place where, over the years, her family had burst out from time to time in embarrassing speech. All this formulation of thought, she said to herself, here without any framework of ritual as Cassandra has it, seems so far from the sort of thing most of us are really preoccupied with most of the time.

She remembered her father, labouring at length, so scrupulously, blowing out his long moustache, to define the precise moral position of those who were not pacifists and believed killing was justified, then repudiating this position, equally scrupulously, absolutely finally, and, still not finished, exhorting Friends to tolerate those who killed, and ending with a flourish ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do’. She had looked across at Cassandra, on this, who had closed her eyes and tightened her mouth in pain. Both the girls had intensely disliked the way in which Friends familiarized the terrible and made it a comfortable possession. She supposed that this might be inevitably true of all Christians. Cassandra, herself, might now be less intolerant; she had always had a proprietary interest in the terrible which might, in terms of the Church, music, painting, litany, have become in its turn another
kind of domestication. As for herself, she was not sure how much good it did to expend a lot of thought on death and suffering at a distance. It could so easily lead to an ignoring of the little daily agonies which were all that deeply affected the fabric of her own life. She felt both determined and vaguely guilty about her shelving of the whole problem.

She remembered Cassandra’s last appearance in the Meeting-house. By then, they were not speaking to each other, and she had been largely unaware of what Cassandra was thinking. Indeed, when she had risen pale and shivering to her feet, Julia had had a moment of fear that she was about to utter an indictment of her own duplicity with regard to Simon. But Cassandra, with what the Quakers agreed tolerantly later to have been excusably unhelpful bad taste, had lectured them with abstract passion on her reasons for leaving the Society of Friends. They had, she had told them, too simple and idealistic a view of human nature. She had been twenty at the time, with a curious maturity of phraseology and an unformed, over-expressive girl’s face. After speaking for five minutes or so she had begun to weep, pushing the tears away clumsily with the sides of her hands and still pouring out the same long, formed, urgent sentences. Julia, who agreed with her, whose views had in this area been formed by Cassandra, had been horribly embarrassed.

‘You never question that it is possible for us to become good,’ Cassandra cried. ‘You believe that if we try to be good we shall affect things, make other people good. You appropriate the story of the Roman senators who sat so still that the Goths and Vandals dared not touch them as a pacifist triumph. I’ve heard it told so in Meeting. But this was no triumph of anything but empty dignity, the Goths beat out the brains of those senators on the marble pavement. You always talk as though passive resistance could convert violence to love. But it can’t, and it doesn’t, and we ought to admit it. There
will always be
people who will slash open the other cheek when it is turned to them. In this life love
will not
overcome, it
will not
, it will go to waste and it is no good to preach anything else. We
need God because we are desperate and wicked and we can find Him only through Himself. The Inner Light doesn’t necessarily shine, and doesn’t illuminate much. You will find no
meaning
by simply examining your consciences, maybe, ever. What I am saying is, we have got to find a way of
living in
a world that eats and destroys and pays nothing back.…’

Julia had had the illusion that no one was listening but herself because they were all too embarrassed by her sister’s tears. Cassandra had brought public humiliation on them yet again. And her wild words, like most statements of faith, overstated her case horribly and alienated sympathy. She could have done it better herself, and made the Quakers much more uncomfortable by producing partially sympathetic examples of their state of mind. When she heard Cassandra speak of God intimately, as Him, Himself, she knew she did not believe in it. Not, at least, in any way that would ever be practically meaningful in her life. When Cassandra sat down she had felt a mixture of relief, and pity, and anger, at the Quakers because she was sure that simple pity was what they would feel, at Cassandra because she couldn’t be subtle enough to avoid this. Cassandra had no understanding of people’s reactions. She had felt, also, release; Cassandra would never talk to her about these things again, and this was humiliating, and left her lonely – but at least she had a view of her own, and could live from it. After a bit, stooping, her face in her hands, Cassandra had got up and left the Meeting-house. Everyone had agreed that this was unnecessary.

Here, too, Julia had first seen Thor, who had come to speak to Friends at Benstone in 1947 about Quaker witness to peace in occupied countries. She had felt, with him as with Cassandra, for opposite reasons, that the force of what he had said was dissipated by his incapacity to present it persuasively. He had told, in a slightly choked voice, faltering occasionally and repeating himself, a string of the sad little Quaker stories of the moral victories gained by passive resistance that she was used to; the soldier who threw down his arms when ordered to slaughter the schoolmaster and his patiently waiting family;
the men of faith who had survived the concentration camps without hatred. He had told them in rather a hurry, as though they were simply additional evidence to prove a main point; it was only at the end of his talk that Julia herself made the imaginative effort to see that the choking was real emotion, that the stories were told flatly because they were facts and he was the witness, and he believed passionately that facts should speak for themselves. She had looked at him and wanted to shake him for deliberately draining his stories of their urgency, for not stressing his own personal reactions, for making his people into examples, not individuals. In those days – he must have been twenty-four – he was gaunt, so that his cheek-bones, which were very pronounced, almost shone through his skin, and his pale eyes slanted deeply back above them as though the whole surface of his head was being forcibly tugged towards his crown. This had given him a slightly staring look, almost unbalanced. Julia, remembering this, and how she had approached him after the talk so gingerly, stole a glance at his solid, clean-cut face beside her. He had rounded out, he had a heavy look now, a supremely sane look. She had not the slightest idea what he was thinking.

The faces in the Meeting-house were mostly familiar, still; she looked from one to the other, and then up at the single high window, with its dangling cord in the gable; outside was a smoky sky pocked by falling white snow. In here an attempt had been made to reduce life to its elements, an attempt increasingly compromised, over the centuries. Well, she had never spoken here, she had only watched, and now she came back out of politeness and nostalgia. She didn’t want life reduced to its elements. She didn’t want simplicity. She wanted the complicated, irreducible social world outside, where it was possible to believe in people who really cared more for their motor-cars than for anything else, people who spent
most of their time
thinking about who had snubbed whom at whose party in what dress, people the Quakers would have reduced to a formula and simply judged, or would perhaps have defended on the grounds that they were not as they
appeared. Well, they existed outrageously, and, as far as Julia could see, they were as they appeared, and that was enough for her. She needed them, she wanted them, she wrote about them, she fed off them. She expected nothing, and this seemed to her the only possible form of moral activity. She leaned back against her bench with a certain defiance, on this thought, as the first Friend stood up to pay his tribute to her father. ‘Our prayers go with him in his suffering,’ he said. Julia thought there was a short story somewhere in a Quaker meeting, but wasn’t sure that she was detached enough to write it.

Cassandra sat still beside her father, trying very hard to take her own advice to Deborah, to detach herself, not to think. She had a book open on her knee, but was not looking at it. Above all, she thought, she must not sum up in her mind her father, who was not dead, and might not be dying. His skin was yellowish and opaque, like cheese, and the white moustache was draggled by sweat. His eyes were open and motionless. Cassandra had no idea what he knew, or felt, whether he wanted to communicate, whether he was aware of her presence.

Cassandra had loved him, at first passionately, and then with hopeless devotion. He had loved her, too, certainly. One of her mother’s favourite sayings had been ‘Our children cannot doubt that they are loved,’ and they never had doubted, they had never, Cassandra thought, surprised at the image her mind naturally produced, had a foothold for doubt. It was only that she had had to share his love with so much else: prisoners, a model village, refugees, lepers, delinquents, prostitutes.…

He was, Cassandra thought sadly, an infinitely tolerant man, and took everything as it came. Because of this, unfairly, she never quite trusted him – she found herself striving to shake this inevitable love into admiration. She felt that he affectionately tolerated her chosen pursuits – Oxford, Malory, the Church – with a simple refusal to judge her which blunted any
attempt she might make intellectually to shake him, or emotionally to touch him. She could not tell him her life was not arid because he had never allowed himself to form the opinion that it was. She suspected him of finding more human value in Julia’s domestic novels than in her own work, and resented this vaguely, without ever tackling him about it. She was aware that he tolerated Julia, too – she had watched him amusedly ‘loving’ one of Julia’s intense enthusiasms for new friends.