The Philosopher's Pupil (2 page)

It was the pile of his clothes, lying upon the floor. This was where they usually lay. But what was odd was that they were all soaking wet and black with mud.

George remembered. It was not a dream.
It had all really happened.
The car had fallen into the canal with Stella in it. Was Stella dead then?

He walked unhurriedly out of the bedroom door and across the landing to Stella's room. The room was bright with sun, the curtains pulled back, the bed not slept in. George sat down on a chair. No, Stella was not dead. Was he glad? Christ, what a lot of bloody trouble he had landed himself in, he would lose his driving licence. He recalled painfully, shamefully, remorsefully the way things had happened last night. He could see it all now.

When George had sat up upon the wet rainy cold stones of the quay, and found that the car had
gone,
he was at first confused. Where had it gone to? Some terrible ghastly frightening
noise
had taken place. His arm was hurting, strained somewhere by a violent effort. He jumped up and ran to the edge of the quay. The lamp light showed the canal waters, black with mud, foaming and churning and boiling as if the devil himself were rising up to the surface like a black whale. In the midst of this turmoil was a gleaming pale expanse which it took George a moment to identify as the roof of the car. George executed a sort of dance upon the edge of the quay as if he were about to walk straight out into the air; then he began to run along the edge and to descend a flight of slimy greenish stone steps of whose existence he had somehow known. He even put his hand confidently on to a great iron ring which was hanging from the wall half-way down the steps. The cold water took hold of his trouser legs.

George was a good swimmer. Yelping with fear and horror and the cold he reached the car. Down in the canal everything was confused and dark and terrible. No light seemed to come from above. He felt he was about to lose his senses. He had no conception of the shape of the car or what to do with it. He could not make out how high the water had risen inside. He held on helplessly to the rim of the roof. Even as he touched the car he could feel it sinking, slowly settling down into the mud. His knee touched something. A door was open. With what he remembered as a curious blind slowness George fumbled at the black aperture, holding on to the door with one hand and trying to bring his legs down at the side of the car. The end of the door struck him in the face. Stella came out like a creature sliding from a chrysalis, like a moist dark bat from a cranny, like a dream of a child being born. It seemed to George as if he had then led her back to the steps; he could not recall pulling her through the water. On the steps it was different. She was a heavy inert dripping sack which had to be hauled up step by step; and at that moment it occurred to him that she was dead. Up on the quay it was at once apparent that she was not. She lay on the stones, moving, gasping, writhing like a worm. George recalled without surprise what he had done next. He had
kicked
her soggy limp body, shouting, ‘You bitch! You bitch!'

An ambulance came. The police came. Stella was taken to the hospital. George was taken to the police station where he made a confused statement and sat moaning while it was established how drunk he was. He had not recalled then, but he recalled now the identity of the black-clad figure who had been passing across the bridge. It was the priest, Father Bernard Jacoby. He must have raised the alarm. He must have seen George pushing the car. Did that matter? Christ, what a mess.

‘How are we feeling?'

The questioner was Gabriel McCaffrey, Stella's sister- In-law.

Stella continued to cry, saying nothing.

Gabriel herself often cried. Not that she had anything very terrible to cry about, since she was happily married and had a lovely son, but she cried often for the anguish of the world because of its little vulnerable places, or because of the frailty of everything she loved. Stella on the other hand had always plenty to cry about. However, Gabriel had never before seen her crying or even imagined her crying.

The two women were not intimate friends and not allies but they liked each other. Stella might well suppose that Gabriel pitied her because Gabriel was married to nice Brian while Stella was married to awful George. On the other hand, Gabriel might well imagine that Stella thought that George was interesting, whereas Brian was boring. The relations of Stella and George were a mystery to Gabriel and Brian. Of course, Stella had been to a university and was educated and clever. Yet she had made nothing of her cleverness, while Gabriel, who had not been to university, had a more successful ‘life'. Gabriel was happier. But was not battle-scarred Stella ‘more real'? There were, indeed, further complexities, of which they were both aware and above which, usually, they were able to look at each other calmly enough.

Gabriel did not feel calm now. She had always known and feared George's capacity to introduce absolute disorder into all their lives. George could destroy us all, she sometimes felt, and sometimes, George
wants
to destroy us all. Of course this was irrational, though it was equally irrational to regard George as simply ‘accident prone'. How I hate bullies, Gabriel thought, thank heavens I'm not married to one.

Father Bernard Jacoby had telephoned Brian and Gabriel on the previous night to tell them about the accident, the car in the canal, Stella and George safe, Stella in hospital, George gone home. He suggested (to Brian's relief and Gabriel's disappointment) that it was too late for visits, both of the victims would be asleep. It was now nine o'clock in the morning. Stella, in a private room, was propped up in bed. She had a black eye and a cracked rib and what the nurse called ‘severe shock'. George had not answered telephone calls. Brian was going round to see him.

‘Please stop crying,' said Gabriel, ‘you are tiring yourself and upsetting me.' This firm calm manner, unnatural to Gabriel, was how her sister- In-law preferred to be addressed.

Stella had been crying into a handkerchief. She now laid this aside and revealed her wet swollen bruised face, shocking to Gabriel. Stella began rolling her head to and fro upon the pillow, visibly trying to control her respiration. Gabriel touched her arm lightly. Stella did not like hugging and kissing. Gabriel had never kissed her.

‘Shall I stay, shall I talk to you?'

‘Tell me something.' The stream had abated, though Stella kept blinking tears out of her eyes.

Gabriel, who was good at decoding, knew that this meant: tell me anything. ‘It's a sunny day. You can't see from here, but the sun's shining.'

‘Did you come by car?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where did you park?'

‘In the hospital car park, there's plenty of room.'

‘You've got a new dress.'

‘I bought it in Bowcocks sale. Do you know, you can see the High Street from the window, and the Botanic Garden and the Institute — '

‘I haven't looked.'

‘How are you feeling?'

‘Terrible.'

‘What happened? Or would you rather —?'

‘George was drunk. He jumped out. Then he pulled me out.'

‘All's well that ends well,' said Gabriel, who hoped that this banality would irritate Stella into saying something more.

‘It was my fault,' said Stella.

‘I
know
that's not true.'

The family often discussed Stella's situation, how she put up with George's tantrums and his infidelity, how she persistently imagined that her love would cure him. She kept hoping, looking for little signs. Gabriel thought, it's odd how stupid a clever person can be. She feels that not blaming George will somehow make him improve.

‘I argued,' said Stella. ‘I said a particular thing that annoyed him. Then the car went out of control.'

‘He's easily annoyed!'

‘George was crazy as a fox last night.'

‘Always was, always will be. One day he'll go too far.'

‘If he ever does he'll get better.'

‘You mean repentant?'

‘No.'

‘You always make excuses for him, he can get away with anything, he's always forgiven and first of all by you!'

‘It's my privilege to be first.'

What a hypocrite she is, thought Gabriel, and yet she's sincere. Can there be sincere hypocrites? Yes, and they're the most maddening of all. There was no doubt that Stella was an odd fish, an alien, a changeling. She was a handsome tall strong woman. She sees him as a challenge, thought Gabriel, she sees it as a fight, and she thinks that's love. George ought to have married a gentle submissive girl, not this noble ridiculous person. And she thought, this is the most intimate conversation I've ever had with Stella.

‘You ought to go away for a while, have a holiday from George.'

‘Don't be silly.'

‘You should, you should go to some foreign city.'

‘He'll lose his driving licence.'

‘Poor George!'

‘He wanted us to walk away.'

‘You mean last night? Just walk away, after
that?
Before the police came, I suppose!'

‘I would have walked if I could,' said Stella.

‘Oh God, here he comes.'

Through the open door of the room Gabriel saw George approaching along the corridor.

‘Good-bye, Gabriel, thank you for coming to see me.' With a little wave to Stella, Gabriel moved out of the room. George advanced, walking with a characteristic self-conscious deliberation as of someone fairly confidently walking on water. He leaned forwards as he walked, setting his feet down noiselessly on the thick, soft, spongy pale grey hospital linoleum. His arms swung in a light poised manner. He looked like an athlete, off duty, aware of being photographed. When he saw Gabriel he narrowed his eyes and smiled a faint amused smile. Gabriel, disturbed by mixed emotions, made an impatient gesture with her hand. She frowned, but her mouth could not help smiling in an involuntary nervous spasm.

George McCaffrey had been spared the visit of his brother Brian by having left the house before Brian arrived. Before leaving, George had telephoned the hospital and learnt that Stella was ‘comfortable'. He set off, but went first of all to the canal.

The canal was no longer in use. It ought to have been beautiful, as it curved into the town, with the cobbled road beside it and the huge square granite slabs at the edge of the quay and the great rings upon the walls where the painted barges used to tie up. The elliptical foot-bridge was reproduced (reflected in still water) upon postcards, and the small elegant container (still in use) of the nearby gas works, with its fretted cast- Iron coronet was a period piece prized by industrial archaeologists. But somehow the sluggish brown stream looked dirty and melancholy, and attempts to rejuvenate it for purposes of pleasure always failed. The canal remained in mourning for its useful past, expressing the grim puritanical character of local history rather than any desire to be reborn as charming. The area on the far side remained derelict, except for a scattering of poor post-war housing, mostly condemned, and was known as ‘the wasteland'. Against the rusty railings which fringed the road only the uglier weeds grew; the grass between the tilting cobbles was flabby and sad, and the glittering points in the square granite slabs looked like symptoms of a post- Industrial disease.

It was beginning to rain when George arrived. Several people were standing looking down at the car. (The drama had of course been reported in the
Gazette.)
Aware of being recognized, George joined them. Several of the on-lookers walked hastily away. Those who remained removed themselves to a little distance.

The car was upright, its white roof just breaking the surface. It must have settled down in the mud since last night. The brown rain-pitted canal water, very slowly passing it by, possessed it as if it were a rock or a clump of reeds. It looked peaceful.

George had never had any fantasies about driving cars over quaysides, though he had had plenty about drowning, death by water, his own or another's. He had fantasies, or were they dreams, of drowning someone, as it might be Stella, and burying the corpse in a wood and visiting the quiet grave regularly as the months passed and the years passed and the seasons changed and the wild flowers grew upon the place and no one ever suspected. Sometimes he dreamt that he had killed Stella and then suddenly met her again alive and then realized that it was not her, but a twin sister of whose existence he had never known.

How could I have done that, he thought, looking down. As on similar occasions in the past, he felt a cleavage between himself and the George who did things. Yet he was that person and felt easy with him, chiding him gently. What a damn
stupid
thing to do, he thought, now that he was in the land of consequences. I was fond of that car. What will the insurance people say, I wonder. God, if only we could have got away before the police came.

Stella had started crying again when George arrived. She was very anxious indeed to stop. She regarded crying as a kind of rather shameful and unusual disease. It gave her no relief. She rolled her head about, trying to breathe slowly, but could not stop her lower lip from shuddering convulsively and her heart from racing. She put her hand to her damaged side and panted, turning her wet mouth away from her husband.

‘How are you?' said George.

‘OK.'

‘Are you feeling OK?'

‘Yes.'

‘You've got a black eye.'

‘Yes.'

‘So have I, at least it's swollen, can't think how I got it.'

‘Oh — yes — '

‘The people here seem nice, the nurse was nice to me.'

‘Good.'

‘You're not in pain?'

‘No.'

‘That's good.'

‘I can't stop crying.'

‘Not to worry.'

‘I suppose it's hysterical. Not like me.'

‘No. Gabriel got here early.'