Read Online The Game by A. S. Byatt - Free Book Online

clenched her fists on her knees. She thought she ought to pray. She felt trapped – as though her past was fixed now, and could not be remodelled, and her own behaviour had finished it with the largest amount of mess, and lack of warmth possible. I should have spoken to him, she thought, he might have heard. She began to weep, angry and choking, fighting back each sob; she sat there in the cold, until her face was purple and crimson and blotched.
    When the others came back from Meeting they were met by Nurse, who had done what was necessary. Miss Corbett, she said, had been present at the end, but had gone out somewhere. Elizabeth Corbett went up with Nurse to look at the body; she stood a long time, in a decent silence, and went to bed, after Nurse had telephoned the doctor, where she wept for some time, and fell into a heavy sleep.
    Deborah became hysterical. She was carried off, rigid and choking, by Thor, and put to bed. Julia said, ‘But after all you hardly
knew
him, darling,’ and Thor said, ‘Julia, please don’t be silly, be quiet,’ and appeared downstairs again only briefly, to tell Elsie to bring his supper and Deborah’s upstairs.
    Julia found herself suddenly alone. She sat down in the hall by the fire and thought about her father. She had always been the one who could make him laugh: he didn’t mind what she said to him, they shared a whole world of private jokes. They had gone for walks by the river together, and she had amused him with stories, this side of malicious, about girls from school, and, later, not quite
risqué
stories about worthy Friends. He liked this, because most people he met respectedhim too much and thought him too good to be amused in this way, and he did not want to feel isolated, or rarefied. Later, she had brought him all her novels and begged him to tell her what he thought of them, partly because she wanted to be assured of his approval, but partly because he was one of the few people she knew who found no difficulty in assuming that fiction was fiction. Other people tended, if they knew her at all well, to be a little embarrassed in her presence, as though she was given to constant indiscretion. Oh, she would miss him.
    She became aware that she was admiring herself for her plucky reaction, and constructing a chain of near-sentimental thoughts about her father as though he was a character in a novel. Well, she told herself, either self-indulgently or practically, that’s natural enough, there’ll come a moment when I really take it in, I can’t expect to realize what’s happened, all at once. He wouldn’t expect me to …
    She was suddenly completely oppressed by the sense that there was no figure now between herself and the end. She was herself the adult generation – a woman with a great daughter, in the last stretch of life. She wasn’t ready for that. She lived so much on the assumption that she was ‘still young’.
    Perhaps she should go and see him. When she thought this, her scalp pricked; she could imagine the body only through Nurse’s restrained hints at Cassandra’s extreme reaction to it. Something vaguely hideous, something nasty … not her father, who had laughed. When she thought of Cassandra, running away, locked in the bathroom, she had a sudden sense of a real and monstrous event, and felt herself lonely and afraid. They had left her alone here, and this she could not bear.
    Cassandra would be in the garden. She put on her red cape, and went out through the back door, following the blurred footprints through the snow. Once she saw how Cassandra was taking it, she would know what had happened.
    She sat down on the wall, next to her rigid sister.
    ‘Aren’t you cold, Cass?’ Cassandra’s bony hands were blue.
    ‘No,’ said Cassandra. Then, ‘It’s still snowing.’ Snow was blowing in little clouds on the hill.
    ‘Cass,’ said Julia, ‘you ought to come in. Do come in.’
    Cassandra shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said