The Game Read Online Free Page B

butterflies,’ he said. Cassandra’s mouth twisted slightly. The screen was alive with trembling wings, with that irregular vibrating beat of filmed leaves and insects, that seems never apparent when one considers an isolated leaf or insect alone in the open air; it is intense only in the still eye of the camera. The butterflies were settled in dozens on something which was revealed, by the human boot that entered the picture from above and scattered the insects in a beautifully filmed flurry of translucent wings, to be the darkened and raw body of some kind of small pig.
    ‘The colours are delicate and bright,’ said Simon. ‘Aerial. A hard blue, a brimstone – and many are transparent with a hint of milkiness, or palest blue, or faint red. They live on blood. I have seen them as big as pigeons.’
    There was a momentary huge close-up of the trembling head and planted proboscis of the insect, straddling the flesh with its wire-like legs.
    ‘We achieve, with magnification, a new dimension of strangeness. We enter new worlds. Our own becomes less stable. Imagine seeing this butterfly with no preconceptions about its nature. Or imagine knowing about the way it feeds, about the structure of its wing-tissue, in microscopic detail. Our picture of reality is never fixed but can always be elaborated and made more accurate. And this changes us. The weight of the butterfly makes an iron bridge bend – in that it redistributes, ever so slightly, some molecules. Every new piece of knowledge – in the same way – enlarges our world.’
    His face appeared, lugubrious, apparently awed by what he had just said; he was, he had always been, Cassandra thought, for a scientist, unduly given to the vague and loaded generalization. She cleared her throat; Simon disappeared again; one of the girls stood up and turned off the set. Another came up to where Cassandra was standing and turned on the light; all the girls blinked. Cassandra looked from face to face, detected, she thought, curiosity, saw one of her better pupils, a terrified, bright, incipient don with protruding rabbit’s teeth and gave her an invented message about R. S. Thomas. Another girl, curled up plump and lazy on the corner of the sofa, said:
    ‘What do you think of him, Miss Corbett?’
    ‘Him?’
    ‘Simon Moffitt. This naturalist.’
    ‘I thought it interesting.’
    ‘He’s so urgent about it,’ said the toothy girl.
    ‘Desperately attractive in a helpless sort of way,’ said the plump one. ‘I wonder what makes him go out there.’
    ‘Fear,’ said Cassandra. ‘Curiosity. An unexpected exhibitionism.’
    ‘Unexpected?’
    ‘I knew him once. I should have called it unexpected.’
    ‘You knew him? Was he like this?’
    ‘He kept snakes. In jars and tanks. An
idée fixe
, clearly. No, I shouldn’t have said he is much like what he was. Public appearance changes people, I suppose.’
    ‘Was he …?’
    ‘Good night,’ said Cassandra. She closed the door behind her, trembling; decidedly the S.C.R. might have been better. She felt like a secret drinker whose cache of bottles in the folds of the bedcover was in danger of discovery.
    Back in her room, she went round touching the things. She rearranged a group of ivory chessmen on a shelf, laid silk threads of various colours neatly in the pages of the Malory, put all her pens and pencils in a row at the top of the blotter, their bases aligned with precision. She turned on the fire and washed her hands in the bedroom basin. Then she sat down at the desk, unlocked a drawer, brought out a polished box and unlocked that, in turn, with a key that hung on a chain from her person.
    The box contained the current volume of the journal she had kept since childhood; she opened this now, selected a pen, and began to write. What she wrote was extensive and apparently unselective; she described, in accurate detail, every event of her day, meals, work, the contraction of the snake’s muscles as it moved across the