The Philosopher's Pupil (15 page)

Gabriel, also gazing at the phenomenon of Stella lying on the sofa, was also at a loss. It had been her idea to bring Stella here; she had wanted it very much, she could not now remember exactly why. She too loved Stella. She wanted to help her and protect her and
spoil
her, to tend her and cherish her. She wanted to touch that proud head with a sympathetic hand. She wanted to rescue Stella, at least for a while (or perhaps, why not, forever) from her dangerous life. She wanted to give Stella a holiday from being bullied, a holiday from fighting. She wanted to get Stella right away from George. She wanted George to be isolated and accursed. She wanted Stella to be vindicated and rescued. She wanted to condemn George to loneliness, she wanted to think of George as being alone, she wanted to think of him as absolutely shut away in that tragic solitude which she had so much felt when she last looked down at his dark unconscious wet swimming head which scarcely broke the surface as he turned. Such thoughts and feelings, half-conscious and thoroughly mixed up together, conflicted in Gabriel's bosom as she gazed at her handsome clever afflicted sister- In-law. Gabriel was of course aware of Brian's admiration for Stella, and it caused her a very small local pain, but there was nothing dark or ill in her sense of this connection, and she too would have liked an ordinary happy family life wherein Stella would come to supper and talk and play bridge while Gabriel made sandwiches in the kitchen and listened to them all laughing.

Standing watching Stella from near the door was Ruby Doyle. Ruby had been ‘sent over' by Alex to ‘help out' in ‘settling Stella in'. Alex might have been expected to come herself, but she did not want to and did not. Instead (as on other comparable occasions) she sent Ruby, as a monarch might send a diplomat or a valued craftsman. In fact Ruby, at Como, was rarely of any use at all and Gabriel did not know what to do with her. Gabriel had no servant, no maid, no char; she was temperamentally incapable of having an employee, she did everything herself. She did not want help. Brian sometimes vaguely and insincerely exhorted her to improve her mind: ‘Take up some study,' ‘Do a degree or something.' Nothing came of this, and to persuade herself of its impossibility Gabriel liked to be fully occupied. She enjoyed housework. She had enjoyed preparing and arranging Stella's room and putting in daffodils. There were three bedrooms at Como, two middling-sized ones and one little one. Adam occupied the little one so as to leave a decent ‘guest room', and because he preferred it. Although they hardly ever had guests, since Brian detested them, Gabriel had taken pleasure in making the guest room attractive, choosing ‘guest books', arranging reading-lamps, writing-paper. When Ruby arrived, there was nothing relevant to Stella which Gabriel could think of for Ruby to do. Gabriel had already washed up breakfast and cleaned the bathroom. She could not ask Ruby to weed the garden. She made Ruby a cup of coffee.

Ruby liked Gabriel, though mutual shyness made them speechless with each other. She did not like Brian, since she regarded him as hostile to George, and she had ‘taken over' Alex's view of Brian as somehow not quite a member of the family. Ruby liked Adam, with whom she had a silent semi-secret friendship. As a small child he had held on to her skirts, and sometimes still touched or twitched her dress as a remembrance of old times. She did not like Zed, a tiresome yappy little rat-like thing upon which she was always in danger of treading (she was short-sighted); but she inhibited her irritation for Adam's sake. She did not like Stella, whom she regarded as the sole cause of George's misfortunes.

Stella, lying on the sofa and looking at the way her upturned feet made a bump in the chequered rug, felt altogether alienated from her customary reality, or was perhaps realizing that she had not, and for some time now had not had, any customary reality. She looked past Brian at the tiny garden, the overlapping slats of the fence, some horrible yellow daffodils jerking about in the wind. She very much wanted to cry. She lifted up her head and hardened her eyes and wondered what on earth she,
she,
was doing in this place among these people.

Vanity, she thought, not even pride, vanity. I am stiffened by it, it is my last shred of virtue not to be seen to break down. I married George out of vanity, and I have stayed with him out of vanity. Yet she loved George. She had often wished George dead, painlessly removed, blotted out, made never to have been. Her father was right, George was a vast mistake, but he was
her
mistake, and in that
her
was all her vanity and all her love, jumbled together into something mysterious and valuable. If she could have done so she would have taken him away, would even now take him away, to some other place where no one knew the old George, where he was not surrounded by people who licked their lips and thought they understood him better than his wife did. Stella would like to have been alone, shipwrecked on a desert island with George, amid dangers.

Stella felt her particular Jewishness as an alienation from English society, as a kind of empty secret freedom, as if she were less densely made than ordinary people. She had perceived, but had never understood, George's alienation, which she had seen first as a virtue, later as a charm. He had charmed her, he charmed her still. But what an ugly graceless mess it all was, and what a doom was upon her. She lifted up her handsome Jewish head and smoothed down her strong dark hair which grew up like a crown or turban above her brow. Her father had made her feel like a queen. Why on earth had she
talked
to dear well-meaning Gabriel and allowed herself to be brought to this house?

For the first time in her life Stella was feeling really ill and tired. She must be unusually weak to be, as she now was, afraid of George, afraid that he might actually kill her, of course by accident. He might, on seeing her, become, for an instant, mad with rage because of the car accident, which had been her fault, because she had needled him into a frenzy, because she had survived. Disgust at what had happened might work in George as a sudden irresistible urge to ‘finish it off', and by this well-known method to destroy himself. Stella felt too weak and too confused to go back, too weak to fight George physically as she had sometimes done in the past, to hold him off until the impulse of rage should fall back into dull self-hatred. People who thought that Stella lived in hell were not wrong; but like all those who do not, they failed to understand that hell is a large place wherein there are familiar refuges and corners.

Lately a new and poisonous growth had developed in Stella's mind: jealousy. Of course she had known for years that George ‘frequented' Diane Sedleigh, and some ‘well-wisher' had made it her business to inform Stella that George had ‘set up' the little prostitute in a flat for his own exclusive use. Something of Stella's own original respect for George had made her virtually ignore these tidings. She knew how low George could sink, but there were ways and ways of sinking, there were styles of it. She saw George as proud, even in his own manner fastidious, and with this she connected her own conception of how high, in spite of everything, he placed his wife. (Some of those who intuited these thoughts of Stella's considered them completely daft.) He and she remained, Stella felt, above and apart from anything which George might do with a whore. Now, perhaps as a result of physical shock and debility, this agnostic magnanimity was shaken. Stella began, like any crude ordinary person, to imagine George with another woman. That way real madness lay, and a kind of ignoble detestation of her husband which she had never yet allowed herself to feel. When she felt this poisonous pain she became weak, with the weakness which had made her come to Gabriel to be safe and looked after: the weakness which made her sometimes yearn to take a taxi to Heathrow and a ticket to Tokyo. She pictured her father's wise clever gentle loving face, and she felt the accursed wild tears again trying to flood her eyes out.

‘I've made your room so nice', said Gabriel, ‘and we'll get you any books, won't we, Brian, and you must just
feel free
and on your own and not mind us at all. You know you must rest, I think you should play the invalid for a while, stay in bed and be waited on. Don't you think, darling, that she should stay in bed?'

‘Certainly not,' said Brian, smiling.

Stella, who longed to stay in bed, to lie quiet and sleep for a week, echoed, ‘Certainly not.'

There was a tap at the door of the room and Father Bernard, who had come in through the kitchen, put his head round. ‘Hello, can I come in?'

‘Why, here's Father to see you!' said Gabriel.

Brian said ‘Oh God!' just audibly, grimacing to Stella who, he thought, shared his view of the ‘creepy priest'.

‘I heard you were here,' said Father Bernard to Stella. ‘Hello, Ruby.'

‘Oh,' said Stella, ‘does everyone know then? Is it a topic of conversation at the Baths?'

‘Mrs Osmore told me,' said Father Bernard, smiling his charming smile. In fact Gabriel had told him by telephone, but he thought it more tactful not to mention this.

‘How does she know?' said Brian crossly. ‘We don't want Stella bothered with bloody people dropping in.'

‘I just thought a little offering,' said Father Bernard, and handed over a long thin package wrapped in newspaper which turned out to contain half-a-dozen daffodils, still in earliest bud, entirely straight and green and cold, like six little rods.

Stella thanked him, adding, ‘I'm not an invalid, you know.'

‘I'll just put them in water,' said Gabriel. ‘What darlings, they'll soon come out.' She bustled off with the flowers.

Stella did not in fact dislike the priest, she might have enjoyed an intellectual conversation with him, but she mistrusted his role and avoided him. She was a little bothered by his being a converted Jew. She discerned in him a desire to see the strong made weak and the lofty made low, and to make those thus afflicted his spiritual prey. This was what Brian saw as the vampirish aspect of the priest's character. Stella was sickened by the idea that Father Bernard might want to ‘help her' and that Gabriel had perhaps asked him to come along with this in view.

Father Bernard looked at Stella with his gentle inquisitive light brown eyes and stroked back his fine girlish dark locks. He understood her attitude to him perfectly. His visit, motivated by curiosity, was at least partly pastoral as well. He did not think it impossible that he might somehow at some time be of assistance to this interesting woman. He did not mind running the risk of seeming an intrusive fool. In his view, people in such matters erred more by not trying than by trying too much.

He said in answer to Stella's remark, ‘I know,' and ‘I just came by to look at you, and to be looked at, like in the hospital. I too exist. A cat may look at a queen.'

‘What's that supposed to mean?' said Brian, thereby playing into the priest's hands.

Stella laughed and returned Father Bernard's smile.

The priest did not press his advantage. He snapped his fingers noiselessly and said to Brian, ‘I hear Professor Rozanov has arrived.'

‘Has he?' said Brian. ‘Hip hooray.'

‘George will be pleased,' said Gabriel, who had just come back. ‘Won't he.'

‘Delighted,' said Stella.

‘I've put the flowers in your room,' Gabriel told Stella.

‘Will he stay long?'

‘Oh, I don't imagine so,' said Gabriel quickly, as Brian was opening his mouth.

‘Someone said he was going to stay — '

Somewhere elsewhere Zed could be heard barking. Then the door flew open and Tom McCaffrey came in. Zed ran in, Adam ran in.

Gabriel cried, ‘Oh Tom!' Tom, knocking into Ruby as he entered, shouted ‘Ruby' and kissed her. Gabriel kissed Tom. Brian slapped his shoulder. Adam hung on to his jacket. Tom said, ‘Hello, Father,' and then scooped up Zed and tried to stuff him inside his jacket pocket. Stella watched the family scene with loathing and sick despair.

‘How super, all of you here, well, lots of you. Where have you hidden George? It's so nice to be back. Is this a conference? What's up with Stella, why isn't she booted and spurred? Are you all right? Have you got the 'flu? I had it, there's an awful variety going round London.'

‘Stella had an accident,' said Brian.

‘Oh I am sorry, are you OK?'

‘Yes, yes, yes.'

‘I mean really OK, please nothing awful?'

‘Nothing awful, really not.'

Tom, even more than Adam, made Stella think of Rufus. She wanted to escape to her room, but wondered if she could climb the stairs unaided.

‘Oh good, poor Stella, I'm so sorry. Let me kiss you. Here, I'll give you Zed, he'll cure anything.' Tom came and kissed Stella on the brow, stroked her hair lightly, then put Zed down carefully on the chequered rug in the warm depression between Stella's legs and the edge of the sofa, where the little dog settled down quietly as at a post of duty.

Tom McCaffrey, then twenty years old, was certainly the tallest and arguably the best-looking of the three brothers. He was neither sleek like George nor wolfish like Brian. He was slim but not skinny, with a soft almost girlish complexion. He had a great deal of curly brown hair tinted with gold which fell down on to his shoulders. His upper lip was long and smooth, his sensuous mouth glowed like a child's. He had the bold blue innocent eyes of Feckless Fiona.

‘Oh good, what luck to find you all! How is old George, by the way? I'm quite out of the picture. How's Ma?'

‘Ma's fine,' said Brian refusing to catch Gabriel's warning look. Tom evidently knew nothing of ‘George's latest'.

‘I think I'll go upstairs,' said Stella. She wondered if she would be able to rise. She rose. The rug and Zed descended to the floor. Stella made for the door. Gabriel followed her out.

‘What's wrong with Stella?' said Tom.