The Philosopher's Pupil (18 page)

How far this plan of establishing a rival worked in practice was never clear; perhaps in a way it worked only too well. Brian was certainly annoyed, but his sense of duty consoled him here, as it had always done in his other trials. Brian, the owner no doubt of a difficult temperament, was actually capable of being cheered up by the exercise of rational activity. Tom was in danger from Alex's emotions, from George's ‘frightfulness'. Brian waded in, as if he had seen the child struggling in a river. He must be hauled out, shaken, dried, stood up, told what was what; and Brian could not help loving what he thus served and protected. George, in so far as he exerted himself
in loco patris,
did so with motives more obscure. Tom, as a child, was sometimes afraid of George, but only in a rather immediate sense. He was, on a few memorable occasions, at the receiving end of George's violence. He felt no resentment, however. The strange thing was that while Brian, who was certainly more like George than Tom was, simply did not understand George at all, Tom did somehow understand him. Tom had not in his being one iota of that which made George what he was, but Tom saw and apprehended
that,
not intellectually or theoretically, but with (for of course he loved George) a loving intuition. This led the now adult, or almost adult, Tom to fear George in a new way and to fear
for
him. Something in this understanding led Tom to make the only conscious move he had so far made in relation to his family. In the obscure machinery of the familial stars and planets it was time for George to move back towards his mother. They were two of a kind, Alex and George, and Tom's special task was in a sense done. The old pact between George and Alex had never really been broken. Tom began to move aside, to move away; and as he retired, George came quietly, loping on dark paws, into the space near Alex which Tom was leaving. As they thus passed each other, did they exchange a glance? Perhaps. If so, it was a very ambiguous one.

Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor was a comparatively new phenomenon in Tom's young life. In general, Tom liked everybody and was friends with everybody, and in so far as there had been closer ties, these had tended to be contextual. His love affairs, which he thought of as ‘romances', had been comparatively uncomplicated and unhurtful, largely because of the witty good sense of the girls concerned. (This was pure luck.) Tom did not yet possess the concept of a
deep
relationship except in the unconscious form of his connection with his family. The Irish boy was something of a novelty. He was two years older than Tom, at an age when two years counted for much. Tom had been vaguely aware of him as being a bit of an intellectual ‘grandee', tipped to get a ‘first', a gloomy proud solitary sort of fellow. He had a reputation for being arrogant and rude. He had never been rude to Tom, but then on the other hand he had never paid any attention to Tom whatsoever. When Scarlett-Taylor moved into the shabby and cheap lodging-house where Tom was living, Tom had felt dismay, even annoyance. However, his view of his fellow student soon began to change.

The first and most dramatic change had occurred on a drunken evening in December. Tom was setting out with some friends for a ‘pub crawl' in central London. As they were leaving Tom's lodgings they ran into Scarlett-Taylor. Out of an impulse of politeness and curiosity, since he still scarcely knew the Irishman, Tom asked him to join them. Rather to his surprise Scarlett-Taylor agreed, and accompanied them though with a silent and preoccupied air. The ‘crawl' was to begin at the Black Horse in north Soho, to proceed through the more riotous pubs of south Soho, through Leicester Square, and down Whitehall to the river. The pubs were decorated for Christmas, noisy and rather full. Scarlett-Taylor said little but drank, Tom noticed, a great deal. First beer then whisky. The final objective was the Red Lion at the far end of Whitehall, but by the time they got as far as the Old Shades most of the others had disappeared, leaving Tom, finally, in charge of his rather drunken fellow lodger. When they arrived at the Red Lion it was closed. Tom and Scarlett-Taylor went on to the river, on to the bridge, then along the embankment. The tide was in and, leaning over, they could almost touch the water which was being whipped into wavelets by the east wind. Scarlett-Taylor's spectacles actually fell off and were caught in mid-air. They began to walk back along Whitehall with their coat collars turned up. Tom, feeling the airy liberated bonhomie of the happily drunk man, took Scarlett-Taylor's arm, but was not put out when his friend, as he now thought of him, quickly detached himself. Then Tom began, rather loudly, to sing. He had a pleasant modest baritone from which he derived considerable pleasure and which, when it did not seem too much like showing off, he liked to exhibit. He began to sing an Elizabethan song:
If she forsake me I must die. Shall I tell her so?
In the second verse Scarlett-Taylor joined in. Tom checked his own voice abruptly, stopped in his tracks and held on to a lamp post. Scarlett-Taylor possessed a marvellous counter-tenor voice.

When we suddenly learn that some unobtrusive fellow is a chess champion or great tennis player, the man is physically transformed for us. So it was with Tom. In the instant, Scarlett-Taylor was a different being. And in the instant too, deep in his mind, Tom made an important and necessary decision. He was interested enough in singing to recognize an exceptional voice and to covet it. There was a quick tiny fierce impulse of pure envy, a sense of passionate rivalry for the world. But almost in the same moment of recognition, making one of those moves of genuine sympathy by which we defend our egoism, Tom embraced his rival and drew him in to himself, making that superb voice his own possession. He would be endlessly proud of Scarlett-Taylor and take what he later called ‘Emma's secret weapon' as a credit to himself. Ownership would preclude envy; this remarkable sound and its owner were now his. Thus Tom easily enlarged his ego or (according to one's point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world: a movement of salvation which for him was easy, for others (George, for instance) very hard.

The immediate problem, however, was to stop Emma from singing. Tom's untrained voice had been loud. Emma's trained voice was resonant, piercing and so extremely
strange,
almost an uncanny sound. Windows opened in the Horse Guards Hotel. Several people crossed the road from the Old Admiralty Building. Others, leaving the Whitehall Theatre, stopped amazed, gazed about bewildered. Roisterers in Trafalgar Square approached like rats after a piper. A policeman appeared. Tom bundled Emma, still singing, into a taxi, where the Irish boy promptly fell asleep. Tom laughed quietly, profoundly, with tears of pure pleasure in his eyes, all the way back to the digs.

Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor as he was ‘in himself' was not soon known to Tom, though they became friends, and doubtless never entirely known (but then who is ever entirely known?). Some general account must, however, be briefly given of him who is Horatio to our Hamlet, or (for they often exchanged roles) Hamlet to our Horatio.

Scarlett-Taylor was born in County Wicklow, between the mountains and the sea. His father's ancestors had been landowners in the west of Ireland, but his father and grandfather, proceeding from English public schools to Trinity College, Dublin, were Dublin lawyers. His mother
(nee
Gordon) came from Ulster, the County Down, where her ancestors had been sheep fanners, her father a doctor. She had been sent to a ‘finishing school' in Switzerland and then to Trinity, where she met Emma's father. Both sides of the family were Protestants and horsemen. Emma was an only child. His father died when he was twelve, and his mother went to live in Brussels, near her sister who had married a Belgian architect. Emma began his growing-up in Dublin in a Georgian house near Merrion Square with a semi-circular fanlight and a shiny black door with a brass dolphin knocker, and continued it in Brussels in a big dark flat in a gloomy respectable street not far from the Avenue Louise, with pollarded plane trees and tall thin peaky houses made of pale yellow brick. His handsome sweet witty mother grew older. The Belgian architect and his wife were no more. Emma, vaguely destined for Trinity, declined to return to his native land. He liked Brussels, not the old grand parts, not the shiny new parts, but the melancholy bourgeois streets, still so quiet and full of a not inaccessible past, where suddenly on a corner there would be found a little bar with red check table-cloths and aspidistras and a black cat. He liked London too, and foresaw his future as a Londoner. He hated, with all his heart and soul, Ireland, the Irish, and himself.

Dr Johnson said that when a man says his heart bleeds for his country he experiences no uncomfortable sensation. With Emma it was otherwise. It had mattered little to him as a child that his great-grandfather's house had been burnt by ‘the rebels'. He had admired the men of 1916 and the fight for Ireland's freedom. Ireland, indeed, had made him a historian. His father never talked politics, lived in a narrow company of old friends, seemed more at home with his books. Sometimes it seemed as if his father had had a piece of his past removed; like losing a lung or a kidney, one had to ‘take things quietly'. He easily forgave Emma's indifference to horses, he wished he had been a scholar, he wanted Emma to be one. He died before the resumption of the ‘troubles'.

Emma had been brought up as a vague Anglican. Both his parents were vague Anglicans, occasional church-goers, whose sacred text was Cranmer's Prayer Book. Emma's mother taught him to pray, then left him alone with God. Emma and God parted company, but he felt an attachment to the Church. He went to an English public school where he sang in the choir and obtained his nickname. He had never been anti-Catholic. He envied the ritual, he loved the Latin mass, he approved of the full churches. Religion was history, and history taught tolerance. Then the shooting started. Emma watched the slaughter taking place in the gratuitous untimely cause of a ‘United Ireland'. He saw with unutterable grief the emergence of Protestant murderers, as vile as their foes. He felt guilt and misery and rage. The little town near his mother's family house was blown apart by a bomb placed in the sad little main street with its white houses and its six pubs. Protestants and Catholics died together. He visited Belfast and saw the handsome city wrecked, its public buildings destroyed, its abandoned streets turned into bricked-up tombs. As it seemed to him nobody cared much, not even the decent English taxpayers who paid the bill, not even the Protestants in the South. So long as the bombs stayed in Ulster, there was even a mild satisfaction in hearing about them. For the first occasion in his own lifetime Emma had a close-up view of human wickedness; and in his very private confused self-rage he rejected his Irishness, he tore it to shreds in sick futile anger, sometimes scarcely knowing what it was he detested most in the stew of hatred for which he so despised himself. He never mentioned Irish matters to his mother, and she never spoke of Ireland either. When their native land was named by others he saw on her face the same frozen look which he felt on his own. He had no country. He envied Tom who had no sense of nationality and did not seem to need one. (That, presumably, was the essence of being English.) Yet when in his mind Emma tried to resolve himself into being English, it was impossible, he was utterly utterly not English. When people said (for his voice, damnably, betrayed him), ‘You're Irish?', and he replied, ‘Anglo- Irish', and they said, ‘Oh, so you're not real Irish,' Emma Scarlett-Taylor smiled faintly and said nothing. He felt equally bitter and even more taciturn over another problem to do with his sense of identity. He was not sure whether or not he was homosexual. Perhaps this did not matter too much, however, since after a few unpleasant little adventures he had decided to give up sex.

Scarlett-Taylor's given name had a double meaning, so that he had even entered the world with a dual nationality, under two flags. His father was thinking of the great philosopher, his mother of the Redeemer. His father had regarded Anglicanism as a religion of the Enlightenment, at any rate as a rational protest against the foul superstition with which, in Dublin, he was surrounded. His mother was romantically pious and still attended the English Church in Brussels and sang the old hymns in her sweet fading voice. (She had a pretty soprano and used to do amusing imitations of Richard Tauber.) Emma resembled his father, whom he loved very much: the shock waves of that loss still stirred him. He was, like his father, tall, with straight straw-coloured hair and delicate pale lips and narrow light-blue eyes. He dressed, like his father, in smart old-fashioned suits with waistcoats. (Only, whereas his father had had the best tailor in Dublin, Emma bought his clothes second-hand.) He wore butterfly collars and cravats, and possessed (his father's) a watch with a chain. He wore narrow rimless glasses in imitation of his father's pince-nez. He looked like a scholar and a gentleman. He was also athletic. His father had been a good tennis player and had organized ‘the cricket game' in Dublin. (For Emma's father cricket, like Anglicanism, was a protest activity.) Emma was also good at tennis, and at school had been able to hit a cricket ball harder and further than anyone else. By now, however, he had given up athletic games, partly because he had become increasingly short-sighted. He had also, more lately, given up chess.

The next thing to give up was singing. Emma was not timidly modest about his accomplishments. He knew that he was, in the academic sense, very clever. He did not need to be told by his tutor that he would get a good first-class degree. Then some time after that he would
become a historian.
He also knew that he had an exceptionally good voice. Various people had urged him to become a professional singer. Emma regarded the exercise of his gift rather in the light of a temptation. He knew, and part of him clearly loved, the remarkable unique personal sense of
power
which a good singer experiences, something more psychosomatically
personal,
perhaps, than the exercise of any other talent. His pleasure in his vocal triumph at school seemed to him sinister, quite unlike the clean satisfaction of academic work. In any case, he now simply had no time for singing. Whenever possible he kept his talent a secret, and was angry with himself for having got drunk (which he rarely, but then extremely, did) and given himself away to Tom McCaffrey, whom he had thereafter sworn to secrecy. However, he had not yet broken off relations with his dangerous and charming gift. He still went to see his singing teacher, a gloomy man, a failed composer, once an opera singer, who lived near Harrods, and from whom he continued to take lessons, and conceal how little he practised. Emma had learnt some harmony from the music master at school; this represented another and different temptation into which also Tom tiresomely entered. Emma had first met Tom when Emma's piano, being lugged up to his room by some cross removal men, had stuck on the stairs. Tom had never yet heard a sound out of the piano, but invented by himself the idea that Emma could compose music. Tom's next idea was a pop group, music by Emma, lyrics by Tom, to be called ‘the Shaxbirds'. Emma certainly did not, even momentarily, hate music the way he hated Ireland; but he could not come to terms with it any more than he could with his sex life.