The Philosopher's Pupil (10 page)

George had come her way many years before, but casually. They met at the Baths. He had come to her once or twice unmarried, then once or twice married, aloof and sardonic, as if carrying out some private wager. The polite precise way in which he treated her as an instrument maintained a distance between them, which was also an easy bond. Then he fell in love with her. Well, surely he
did
fall in love? George was rewriting history so fast, it was hard to remember what had really happened. What was now taken for granted between them was that she was in love with him. George had certainly become extremely possessive. He announced that she was to have no other clients. He moved her from her tasteful flat to a smaller flat in Westwold of which he paid the rent. George gave her money and visited her, though he never spent the night. (‘If I did I would detest you in the morning.') Diane tried to think that she was no longer a common prostitute, she was George's mistress. Even the phrase ‘kept woman' could console her a bit. But she knew in her heart that she was not George's mistress. That was not how it was between them. She was just a reserved prostitute, like a reserved table.

Diane knew that George was supposed to be ‘an awful man', though equally she had the fascinated forgiving feeling about him which she shared with other Ennistone ladies. She felt nervous with him at first and awaited the sudden uncontrolled rages for which George was famous. They did not come. George and Diane, it appeared, simply got on well together. George was often moody and irritable and sarcastic, but never seriously angry. Diane, it must be admitted, knew how to keep her head down. She did not contradict. He spoke of how he could rest with her, find repose. They chattered easily. George disliked ordinary expressions of tenderness. Profound or sentimental topics were equally banned. There was a sort of lightness and hardness in their converse. Diane learnt a new language, a new kind of banter, which was their usual mode of communication, and it was in teaching her this that George might reasonably have claimed that he had ‘awakened her intelligence'. For a time, and although his visits were entirely irregular and whimsical, their ease together was such that Diane had dreams of a ‘real life' somehow to be realized with George. Time would perhaps change their relationship,
redeem
it, and in doing so redeem him. If she had been a shrewder woman, and if she had been less afraid of him, for she remained afraid of him, even though he behaved so quietly with her, she might have tried to prompt the redemptive process and encourage him to leave his wife by threatening a withdrawal of her favours at a time when he was most addicted to them. However, Diane did not do this. Such blackmail would sort ill with the ideal role which she planned for herself in George's life, and anyway she lacked the nerve and the wit. Meanwhile she was gratified to know that George, so outrageous elsewhere, was a lamb to her, and this gave her a comforting sense of superiority. In this she paused and rested. She knew that she was envied by women who would of course never have admitted it. (Though neither of them spoke of their relationship it had become common knowledge.) However, Diane also knew that George's kindness to her depended on her good behaviour. At first she had embraced his monastic ‘rule' as one in hopes of heavenly joy. Later the narrowness of her life irked her and although her love for George did not diminish, she had less hope of salvation. She lived in a world of idleness and waiting. She smoked and drank. She watched television. She had once hoped to gain some sort of education from George, but now if she got an ‘improving' book from the library he just laughed at it. She experimented with cosmetics and altered her clothes. She went to Bowcocks and to Anne Lapwing's Boutique and bought scarves and cheap ‘accessories' to cheer herself up. She went to the Institute, then hurried back. George came less often now and it was some time since he had made love to her, though he remained as possessive as ever. Once, recently, he had said to her in a gentle tone, ‘If you ever have anything to do with either of my brothers, I will kill you.' He smiled and Diane laughed.

Would George be able to ‘afford her' now that he had lost his job? She was poorer, kept by George, than when she had plied her trade freely. Would she not, for him, face poverty, destitution? For him, with him, yes. But as it was? Would it not have to end, must it not end, yet how could it end? She had made loving George her sole occupation. She had no friends, no social life. There were a few women with whom she talked at the Baths, but these were not the women she would have chosen to talk to. Nun-like, she did not look at men, and they avoided her. She did not envisage running away, it was impossible to vanish, it was too dangerous and too expensive. Besides she did not want to, she had given her life to George, thoughtlessly, stupidly, but just as tenderly and devotedly as if he had been her dear husband. A Women's Lib group in Burkestown had made themselves known and indicated that if ever she needed help they would ‘stick by her', hide her, spirit her away, they appeared to suggest. They seemed kind and sincere but Diane did not pursue the acquaintance. They thoroughly disapproved of George and she was afraid he might think she was plotting with them. She began to be afraid of things he might imagine, lies people might tell him. She was aware that people eyed her in the street, stared at her at the Baths, but Diane pretended not to notice, not even caring to know whether the looks were friendly or hostile. In the past Gabriel McCaffrey had smiled at her. So had Tom McCaffrey. They certainly knew of her relation with George, yet they had smiled. Diane could not be glad since she could not respond and these mysterious tokens increased her sense of isolation. She did not from day to day imagine that George intended to leave her. Yet lately she had begun to feel that a time of crisis was at hand. Perhaps this was simply an expression of her own unconscious desire for a crash, a final solution. Did she not sometimes, darkly, fear that in spite of everything George would kill her in the end?

‘I'm more popular than ever now that I've killed my wife,' said George.

‘I am not amused.'

‘Well, I had a good try. Better luck next time.'

‘You ought not to speak like that about her,' said Diane. Her mission to ‘save' George scarcely now extended beyond such improving remarks, which pathetically hinted at a complicit superiority. Who was she to tell George how to behave, or to indulge in cries of ‘poor Stella'? Sometimes it seemed as if George were prompting just such admonitions so as then to crush them with violent sarcasm.

‘I hoped she'd drown, but alas it was not to be.'

‘Don't talk silly.'

‘I've had several more of those letters from women. Bash your wife and get sympathetic letters from women. Shall I read you one?'

‘No.'

‘“Dear George McCaffrey, I feel I must write to express my sympathy. I have thought a lot about you and feel I know you well. People are so unkind they don't try to understand. I know you are a lonely unhappy man, and I feel sure that I would be able to —”'

‘Oh stop!'

‘“Please feel free to telephone me —”'

‘Horrid, stop!'

‘Why horrid? It's well meant.'

‘Well meant!'

‘Maybe a kind word does help. Maybe we don't say enough kind words.'

‘You despise kindness.'

‘You would like to think so.'

‘I don't mean — '

‘Lonely women sitting in lonely rooms. You ought to be sorry for them.'

‘I am a lonely woman sitting in a lonely room. I am sorry for myself.'

‘I think I'll ring her up.'

‘Go on then, there's the telephone.'

‘God bless women, they never write a man off. Men judge, women don't. What would we do without them? That women's world of quietness and forgiveness to which we return battle-scarred. You soothe and animate our images of ourselves.'

‘What about our images of ourselves?'

‘You have none. Yours are illusions.'

‘You think that women — '

‘Oh don't, women's problems are so boring, they even bore women.'

‘When you get those letters — '

‘Oh damn the letters. It's no fun, I can tell you, being the local
âme damnée.
What's the matter with you, kid? You seem nervy today.'

‘Nervy! God!'

Diane wanted to cry, but she knew that George hated tears. Curled into a little black ball like a disturbed spider, she tucked her black-stockinged feet in and fingered the jagged metal necklace which they laughingly called her ‘slave's collar'.

‘When is Stella coming home?' she asked.

‘Buzz buzz. Hickory Dickory Dock.'

‘I suppose she is coming home?'

‘You dream that one day she won't. You dream that she will get fed up and leave me one day. That day will never come. Stella will never leave me. She will cling to me with the little steel claws of her love until violent death ensues for her or for me.'

‘Violent death?'

‘All death is violent.'

‘I've stopped expecting her to leave you.'

‘Stella would like me in a wheel chair and her pushing it.'

‘Do you really think — '

‘Oh shut up about her, I told you to, didn't I? Say something interesting, for Christ's sake.'

‘Let's go to France, I've never been out of England, let's go to that hotel in Paris, the one you mentioned, where you used to go as a student, I always remember that hotel, I think of it in the night — '

‘Well, don't. You'll never go there. Forget it.'

‘Oh do sit down, darling, wild beastie, stop walking like that, stop padding and pacing, you make me want to scream, come and hold my hand. I'm full of darkness today.'

‘I'm always full of darkness.'

Westwold, where Diane's flat was situated, is a ‘mixed' area of small shops and modest suburban houses and cottages, tucked in between the river Enn and the railway, with Druidsdale on one side and Burkestown on the other. The railway, I should explain, passes beneath the common in a long tunnel, another feat of Victorian engineering. It emerges on the Burkestown side of Ennistone where the railway station is situated, most inconveniently for the inhabitants of Victoria Park, whose ancestors insisted on this remote siting. Westwold, together with the part of Burkestown round St Olaf's Church (fourteenth century, Low Church of England), contains some of the oldest houses in Ennistone, none unfortunately of any size or interest. There is also a pub called the Three Blind Mice. Diane's flat was not far from here in a quiet street of two-storey terraced houses, above a small Irish-linen shop where an elderly man quietly unfolded large white towels for infrequent customers.

The area in which George was now walking was cluttered up not only by Diane's clothes, her ‘corsets' and things which he was treading on, but also by her possessions, little things bought to console her, stools, baskets, plants, a leather elephant, a yellow china umbrella-stand full of walking-sticks, a rack for shaggy magazines, objects which filled the interstices between the larger articles of furniture. Among the latter was an upright piano with an inlaid floral pattern and brass candle-holders. Diane, who could not play, had bought it cheap for the use of some hypothetical pianist client. She had pictured a tender scene, candle-lit. (There were occasional tender scenes.) But no piano player had come and the piano was, even to her ear when she idly strummed it, patently in need of tuning. The top of the piano was crowded with small objects, miniature dolls, bits of china, toy animals. ‘These are your children,' one of her clients once told her, ‘you express your frustrated maternal feelings by taking pity on these bits of junk in shops!' The speaker had a wife and four fine children, Diane saw them at the Baths. After he went away she cried for a long time.

George brought a chair near to the sofa and sat and held her hand, facetiously at first, then seriously. George was wondering whether it mattered that the priest had (had he?) seen him pushing the car. Not that he imagined that the priest would tell the police or say anything which George could not safely deny. What troubled George was the bond which had now come into being between him and the priest. He had sometimes felt that the priest was ‘after him', though in just what way was never clear. All sorts of baneful and inauspicious bonds joined George to the people who surrounded him; almost any incident could make a bond, create an enemy. These bonds were the cords with which people tried to tie him down, to net him as a quarry to be killed. He was the doomed maypole round which people danced to truss him as a victim. The priest, as witness, was but one more symptom of the mounting crisis in George's life; of course George's life had always been in crisis, in the sort of crisis where ordinary morality is felt to be abrogated, as it is in wartime. But now he felt at moments that it was the
lutte finale.

He looked down at Diane's little nicotine-brown hand, like a child's hand with tiny bitten finger-nails. He lifted it and smelt it, then kissed it and continued absently to hold it.

‘What is it?' said Diane. ‘Is it Professor Rozanov?'

George had briefly mentioned his teacher's return, Diane was guessing.

George did not answer this, but said, ‘You spend time gossiping at the Baths, you hear what people say. Who will he come to?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Who are his friends here?'

‘What about N?'

‘He quarrelled with N.'

‘William Eastcote?' (This was Bill the Lizard, Brian's godfather and the man who saw the flying saucer.)

‘He's about that age, he's the sort of person Rozanov might tolerate — '

‘Is Rozanov as old as that?' said Diane.

‘That's not old.' George let go of her hand. ‘What made you think of Eastcote?'

‘Someone said he'd had a letter from Professor Rozanov.'