The Philosopher's Pupil (19 page)

Emma's first view of Tom was that he was a tactless nuisance. How had it come about that he had let Tom seem to ‘acquire' him? Tom was indiscreetly anxious to show off his friendship with someone whom he regarded as so superior and
difficile.
Tom's thoughtless assumption of the possibility of affection between them alarmed Emma, Tom's capacity for happiness amazed him. At Christmas Tom had unexpectedly given Emma a book (Marvell's Poems). To reciprocate, Emma had hastily given Tom a cherished knife. How had that come about? Tom positively wanted to look after him. The trip to Ennistone, awfully unwise perhaps, was part of this process. Emma could not help being moved by the sheer confidence of Tom's friendliness to him, but he was not at all sure that he wanted to be looked after, or that Tom had the faintest idea what his new friend was really like.

When Alex had returned with Ruby from the Institute, with John Robert Rozanov's letter burning away in her pocket, she had gone straight upstairs to the drawing-room but had not at once opened the letter. Standing in the bow window, looking out at the cold startled trees and the wet green roof of the Slipper House, she had given herself up to a tide of emotion. Or perhaps it was more like being on a slow dreamy switchback, flying down, then flying up, a sort of giddiness, a moment of anticipation felt in the entrails. There was slight nausea and a sense of being moved suddenly about as in some state of drunkenness. Alex was surprised at her sensations, yet she apprehended too that she had been in an emotional state for some time now, as if expecting something to happen. This was not just the melancholia of the ageing woman; there was something more positive, more like an exasperation with the world expressing itself as a desire for violent change. She recalled that she had dreamed of her nanny last night; that was a portent, not always a happy one.

She took out the letter, fingered it and at last hurriedly opened it. It read as follows:

16 Hare Lane

Ennistone

Dear Mrs McCaffrey,

I wonder if you could be so good as to come and see me? There is something I would like to ask you. Any morning would be suitable. Could you let me know when? I am afraid that I am not on the telephone.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

J. R. Rozanov

Alex stared at this text for a long time. It remained opaque, as disturbing and impenetrable as a message in a foreign tongue suddenly flashed upon a wall. Its immediate effect upon her was of disappointment. What had she crazily expected? ‘Alex, you have always been in my heart. I feel I must … etc.' This formal note ‘with kind regards' was cold indeed. ‘There is something I would like to ask you.' No passionate proposal would be heralded by such language. Alex felt, for a moment, intensely childishly let down. She crumpled the letter in her hands. Then she uncrumpled it again.

It was cool but was it not nevertheless sufficiently mysterious? After all, if John Robert did want to approach her in sentimental mood he would be far too proud to show his hand at once. In fact such a letter would be exactly the kind which he would write, suggesting a meeting, giving nothing away. He would want to look at her, converse perhaps with a show of indifference, make some estimate of
her
feelings. At the Baths he had seemed to be looking around in search of someone. Why had he come back to Ennistone? It could not just be to try the effect of the waters on his arthritis. Alex had met John Robert at a period of youth when deep and lasting impressions are made. Had John Robert, attracted by Linda, really loved Alex? He might well have thought that Geoffrey Stillowen's daughter was beyond his reach. Had he vividly and regretfully remembered her all these years? And in a moment Alex was saying to herself: how could he
not
!

She checked these speculations, however. A self-protective cunning made her deliberately calmer. She set herself to think more simply about the mechanics of the visit. He did not suggest visiting her, that was understandable. Alex had already devoted some imagination to the scene of her meeting with the philosopher. She had certainly not wanted to confront him at the Baths. She had pictured meeting him here, in her own drawing-room. Ruby would let him in. She would hear his heavy step upon the stair. She had even considered pretexts upon which she could invite him. She was fortunate to have the problem of the first move so promptly solved, though a walk through Ennistone in this weather would not improve her appearance. He too wanted the advantage of his home ground.

Hare Lane. She did not recognize the address. She rang the bell for Ruby. Ruby, with a tread as heavy as Rozanov's, mounted the stairs and presented her stony face and monumental incarnation.

‘Ruby, Professor Rozanov has written to me from an address in Hare Lane. Where is Hare Lane?'

Ruby replied, ‘It's in Burkestown, near the level crossing.' She added, ‘It's the old house.'

‘What?'

‘It's his old house, his mum's place, where he was born.'

Alex considered this. ‘How do you know?'

‘Number sixteen,' said Ruby. ‘Everyone knows that!'

‘Thank you, Ruby.'

Ruby departed.

Alex felt annoyed that Ruby had known so much. Too much.

Should she reply to the letter at once? It might be a mistake to seem too eager. Suppose she waited a few days, then wrote casually as if his letter had slipped her mind? But she could not feign this. The idea of setting pen to paper was already too attractive. Her reply must catch today's post. Having decided this, she prolonged her reflections, luxuriated in them up to the neck as in the hot water of the ‘stew'. At last, with slow movements, she went to her desk and set out pen and paper and wrote as follows:

Belmont

Victoria Park

Ennistone

Dear Professor Rozanov.

Thank you for your letter. I could call on you about eleven a.m. on Wednesday (the day after tomorrow). I will assume that suits you unless I hear otherwise. With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

Alexandra McCaffrey

The tone of the letter presented no problem; her reply must be at least as cool as his request. She was only unsure about ‘kind regards'. Could it sound like a sarcastic parody? ‘Affectionate greetings'? Certainly not. ‘I look forward to seeing you'? No. She sealed up the letter and went out and posted it.

Now it was Tuesday; and tomorrow she would see John Robert Rozanov. She wished now that she could delay the meeting which her ridiculous mind was making so fateful. She was alone. When Tom had telephoned to say that he was not coming to stay at Belmont, Alex had felt a stab of black distress, as if it were a nudge from her own personal private death. Now, with this new thing to think of, she realized that it was better so. She wanted, in whatever battle (as she envisaged it) she might engage in with John Robert, to be alone in the house: visitable, available, unwitnessed. For this action, decks must be cleared. As for the incidental information that Tom's companion at Travancore Avenue was a male, Alex welcomed it. She affected to share the family anxiety about Tom's tendencies, but secretly she hoped that he was homosexual. Alex did not care for daughters- In-law.

As she stared once again out of the window at the wind-ravaged daffodils, a fox appeared. Alex saw at once that it was the vixen. The dog fox was larger and had a strong dark diabolical mark. The vixen was graceful, dainty, very feminine, with black stockings. She moved fastidiously, skipping a little sideways, then sat down among the daffodils. She lifted her head and gazed fixedly up at Alex with her pale blue eyes.

John Robert Rozanov was tired of his mind. He was tired of his strong personality and his face and the effect he had upon people. He often thought about death. But something still remained which bound him to the world. It was not philosophy.

He was sitting in the house in which he had been bom, in the room in which he had been born. He had a persistent illusion that as he emerged from his mother's womb he had heard his father and grandfather talking Russian. John Robert did not know Russian. He wished now that he had learnt it, but it was too late. It was too late for other things he wished he had done.

Now every morning as he assumed the burden of consciousness he reflected upon its strangeness: the mystery of mind, so general and so particular. Why do thoughts not lose their owners? How does the individual stay together and not stray away like racing water-drops? How does consciousness continue, how can it? Could the curse of memory not end, and why did it not end? Did not the instant, of its nature, annihilate the past? Was not remorse a fiction, an effect of a prime delusion? How could a feeling be evidence of anything? All those days and nights he had spent with the many and the one, how little wisdom they had brought him, now when thoughts were changing into living sensa, and appearance and reality contended inside his frame which seemed at times as huge as the universe, and racked with as large a pain. The point of solipsism, often missed, was that it abolished morality. So if the pain he felt seemed like a spiritual pain, must he not be the victim of a mistake? How little it all helped him now when he was pitchforked back into this mess of tormented being. The Other, whose hard fine edge he had aspired to trace, and in whose very absence he had sometimes gloried, was no more than an amoebic jelly, an unsavoury ectoplasm of wandering ideation. Truth was just a concept which had attracted him once.

Who could fathom Plato's mind? Unless one is a genius, philosophy is a mug's game. There were not even any books any more. All the books were inside him now. Even the familiar act of reading had been taken from him. It had been his fate not to be interested in anything except everything. If he could live another hundred years, could time reverse its sense and lead him gently into a precious clarity? As it was, he saw through every notion that he had ever had, the ‘insights' won by a sustained asceticism appeared to him now as so much vacuous rather nasty stuff which he had made up out of nothing. Artists have beauty and nature at their side, but a philosopher must contain his world inside his head until … it be unified, clarified … until he can become a god … or else perceive that his all is nothing. Once long ago John Robert had believed in
that
which lies beyond. He had felt himself confronted by a thin thin film, something paper thin, through which, if he would, he could pass his hand; and which, in his precious philosophical faith and his precious philosophical patience, he did not yet presume to touch. Now he could see through it all as through some substance which had rotted away into scraggy fibres; and beyond was chaos, the uncategorized manifold, the ultimate jumble of the world, before which the metaphysician covers his eyes. Even some last lingering belief that someone, somewhere, at some time had had a pure unlying thought was, in
his
mind, a festering sore.

Speculation about Rozanov's return had not limited itself to conjecture about his arthritis. John Robert did indeed retain an old childish faith in the efficacy of the waters. In America he had gained much benefit from the hot baths at Saratoga Springs. He had already reserved himself one of the Ennistone Rooms for a prolonged treatment. But many Ennistonians preferred the more touching view that the philosopher had ‘come home to write his great book'. (‘Returned like a priest-king to his people', as Nesta Wiggins's father, who belonged to the Writers' Circle, was heard to say.) It was held to be deeply significant that Rozanov had never sold the family house in Burkestown which he had inherited from his parents. In fact, the ‘great book' (containing the ‘secret doctrine' if any) was already in existence. Of course no philosophy book is ever finished, it is only abandoned. John Robert could well have settled down in the little terrace house to rewrite his book. But to this he had not made up his mind. Looking at his early childish writings, he could see how much he had learnt in fifty years. Oh for another fifty! If human life were longer, art and science might be much the same, but philosophy would be
an entirely different matter.
Why had he not written
this
book when he was younger, and able to go on past it, into the light? But, younger, he could not have. He had formed no intention of publishing it; but there it was, and he knew that if he left it behind it would be published after his death. Half of him, the more authoritative half, hated it. It was extremely long, his final philosophy. Sometimes he told himself he would condense it all into a hundred exquisitely lucid pages.
To write down nothing but the truth;
had that ever seemed a simple, even an intelligible, project? The crystalline truth, not a turgid flood of mucky half-truths; not even half-truths, but desecrating obfuscations, harryings, muddyings, taunting vilifications of the truth. But here the book itself lay in his way as a major obstruction. He knew how bad it was. Unfortunately he also knew how good it was, how superior to what was being done by others, by lesser men. John Robert was sometimes, puzzled, almost childishly puzzled, by the extent to which his life was still ruled by vanity, even though he had recognized this fault long ago, and had passionately wanted and passionately attempted to overcome it. He had long since stopped resisting the obvious view, to which he was driven by experience, that he was superior to his contemporaries. But his vanity far outpaced such comparisons.

When John Robert Rozanov surveyed his big flabby handsome-ugly face in the mirror and when, as he often did now, he considered his life retrospectively as if he were already dead, he concluded that what he had mainly lacked was courage. He left it to others to charge him with ‘solipsistic dottiness' or ‘ruthless selfishness'. Courage was the name he chose for that virtue which should have cured his quite particular lack of nerve, his crucial compromises and shilly-shallyings, the imperfection of work which could have been far far better. He ought never to have got married. No philosopher ought to marry. He had loved Linda Brent, he still loved her and could quake for her. But that was just something personal which he ought to have had the strength to toy with and then pass by, as he had done in later fleeting relations with women. The self- Inflicted pain of her loss
then
would have strengthened him. The pain of her loss later, inflicted by fate, weakened him, wasted his time, and impaired his work over a long period. He had not been a good father. He had resented the little burdensome girl who was left behind, and had never made terms with her. He was widely quoted as saying ‘I detest children,' an observation which George McCaffrey used to quote with relish.