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

her coat, dropped it over a chair, and ran forward to sit at her mother’s feet.
    ‘I
wish
we had been here to – to be with you,’ she said. Elizabeth Corbett looked down on her with a face momentarily creased towards tears.
    ‘I’m sorry to fetch you all this way, Julia. There may have been no – no need. But —’
    ‘I know, I know darling,’ Julia said. She took her mother’s hand and held it against her face. ‘We’ll do all we can.’
    ‘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, ‘Onehas 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.

Chapter 4
    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