‘I’ve had an awful time, Cass. I haven’t the slightest idea – really I haven’t – what I really feel about him. He’s so very odd. I don’t understand what he’s saying half the time. Or why he – Sometimes so desperate and insistent. Sometimes just standoffish and kind. I’ve never felt so uncertain in my life. And begging, and begging.… And then, just when you give in, just going off —’
Her voice rose. ‘Cass, you’ve got to listen, you’re the only person I know, you’re the only one who’d understand.’
‘Clearly I wouldn’t understand. That seems to me all that’s certain.’
‘No, you must let me talk, this time. We’ve got to clear this up. We’ve got to go on knowing each other all our lives. Cass, being friends with you is more important in the long run than anything Simon can ever mean to me.’
‘There is no good to be done by talking.’
‘Oh, there is, there is. Cassandra, I know – with Simon – you think I – only because you —’
‘Yes,’ said Cassandra. She stood with secateurs dangling and held her face together.
‘But you know that’s unjust. What about him, then? What about him? Isn’t he someone, doesn’t he want things and do things, didn’t he start it? I told him I couldn’t because of you. If only you hadn’t – But he does exist, I can’t just not notice him.’
‘Why must everything always be my fault?’ Because it was, Cassandra had thought. She had thought, too, that Julia needed to tell her the details because whatever they had done was not real or finished until she had been made to be the audience, fully informed. As though they were only acting out her fate, her story; their love, or whatever it was, was simply a function of her own fear. Well, it should stay that way; she would not lose what power she had by becoming involved as an actor, or suffering with Julia. That would be the final constriction, the final limitation. She would keep what freedom detachment, or ignorance, provided.
‘You must let me tell you.’
‘When you’ve learned you can’t have things both ways,’ said Cassandra, ‘you’ll begin to grow up. I don’t want to know.’
She walked round her sister, head up, her arms full of branches and flowers. Behind her she heard Julia running, stumbling, in the other direction. She thought that Julia knew where she was vulnerable but could never really believe it, and so was compelled to go on probing. This was only partly Julia’s fault. She felt – as she often felt when she had just parted from Julia – a kind of useless, accepting affection; an inactive understanding.
And then she had been hurt by the phrase ‘just when you give in’. She had, perhaps, after all, allowed herself to be told too much.
— "The Game" by A. S. Byatt