The Philosopher's Pupil (24 page)

Father Bernard waved vaguely after her. He was feeling rather dismayed himself. He felt surprised, embarrassed, anxious, shy, and obscurely frightened.

‘I should like to ask you something,' said Rozanov, his voice coming through clearly now.

‘Surely, wait a moment, let's have some more light.'

The priest moved softly, with a rustle of his gown, to the nearest switchboard, and illuminated a side chapel containing a Victorian picture of Christ at Emmaus.

He combed out his girlish hair with his fingers and returned to John Robert who had sat down. Father Bernard settled in the pew in front of him, curled himself up with a swirl of skirts, and turned to face the philosopher.

‘I'd like to say “welcome back”, but then you have scarcely been away. Is it for me to say “welcome back”? At any rate, welcome to my church.'

This slightly complex speech seemed to interest Rozanov. He thought about it for a moment and seemed pleased.

‘Thank you.'

‘You never worshipped here, I think?'

‘No, I was brought up as a Methodist.'

‘Are you still a believer?'

‘No.'

There was silence for a moment. Father Bernard began to feel a burning anxiety. What did this strange creature want, and how could he, somehow,
keep
him? This was an odd thought. Odder still was the image which next came to the priest of Rozanov, large and quietly captive, sitting in a cage. He smiled and said, ‘If I can assist you in any way I shall be very glad to. You have only to speak.' Father Bernard found himself adopting this rather stilted style in addressing Rozanov, as if he were talking in a foreign language.

The philosopher seemed in no hurry to do as he was bidden. He looked about the church with curiosity, chewing his large lower lip.

‘May I show you round the church? Would you like that? There are points of interest.'

‘No, thank you. Another time perhaps.'

After another silence Rozanov, still gazing about him, said, ‘I want to talk to you.'

‘Yes - what about?'

‘About anything.'

‘About - anything?'

‘Yes,' said Rozanov. ‘You see, I have only lately ceased to teach, returned from America, and for the first time I have no one to talk to.'

Father Bernard felt a little giddy. He said, ‘But surely there are plenty of people— '

‘No.'

‘You mean -just talk?'

‘I should explain. I have always, over very many years, had pupils and colleagues with whom I could talk philosophy.'

‘I am not a philosopher,' said Father Bernard.

‘Yes, and that is certainly a pity,' said Rozanov. He sighed. ‘You don't happen to know of any philosophers in Ennistone? Not of course that any philosopher would do — '

Father Bernard hesitated. ‘Well, there's George McCaffrey, but of course you know him.'

‘Not McCaffrey. Do you know of any —?'

‘I'm afraid not.'

‘Then you will have to do.' The words had an authoritative finality.

‘I shall certainly do my best,' said Father Bernard humbly, rather dazed, ‘but I'm still not quite clear about what you want.'

‘Simply someone to talk to. Someone entirely
serious.
I am accustomed to clarifying my thoughts in the medium of conversation.'

‘Suppose I don't understand?' said Father Bernard.

John Robert suddenly smiled, turning towards the priest.

‘Oh
that
doesn't matter. So long as you say what you think.'

‘But I — ' Father Bernard felt it would be graceless to protest. Besides he was now in a fever lest his preposterous vistor should change his mind.

He said, ‘You want someone to, sort of, hit the ball back?'

‘Yes. An image which - yes.'

‘Not that I am in any way a match for you, to pursue the metaphor.'

‘That is unimportant.'

‘I'll try.'

‘Good for you!' said John Robert. ‘When can we start? Tomorrow?'

‘Tomorrow's Sunday,' said Father Bernard faintly.

‘Well then Monday, Tuesday?'

‘Tuesday - but look, what sort of - how often —?'

‘Could you manage every two or three days? As it suits you of course, I don't want to interfere with your parish work.'

‘No, that's all right - would you like to come to the Clergy House?'

‘No, I like to talk when I'm walking.'

Father Bernard detested walking, but he was already himself captured and caged.

‘Yes, fine.'

‘Could you call for me at my place, you know, 16 Hare Lane in Burkestown, about ten?'

‘Yes, yes.'

‘Thank you, I'm most obliged.'

Rozanov got up and marched off. Father Bernard rose too. The church door scraped and creaked and clanked shut again. Father Bernard sat down. He felt amazed, flattered, appalled, alarmed, touched. He sat still with his luminous eyes shinier than ever. Then he began, like Alex, quietly helplessly to laugh.

Hattie Meynell was sitting on her bed in the dormitory at school. Girls were not supposed to be in their dormitories during the day except to change before and after games. Games were over and Hattie had changed and had tea and ought to have been at prep. However, since she was so senior and this was her last term she felt, although she had always had a great respect for the school rules which were ever so rational, that she might, just now for a bit, do as she pleased. Younger at school, when she had yearned for oblivion even more than she did now, she had regarded her bed as her home, and something of this sense of refuge still remained. There were two other beds in the room, with white coverlets like the one which Hattie was rumpling by sitting on (which ought never to be happening). The big Victorian windows showed outside, in a clear soft evening light, a lawn with coniferous trees, then tennis courts whose wire cages made a silvery geometrical fuzz, then the mild green hills of the English countryside. Two girls were playing tennis, but not ‘officially' since this was not a tennis term (they were allowed to play of course, but there was no coach). Hattie was wearing her changed-for-supper uniform, a silky light brown blouse with an embroidered collar and a round-necked dark brown pinafore dress of very fine corduroy. She had kicked off her shoes and was holding, lifted up on to her knee, one of her brown-stockinged feet. The girls were not allowed to wear tights, which were deemed bad for their health. Hattie was the ‘little waif' referred to earlier, John Robert Rozanov's grand-daughter. She was seventeen.

The school was a very expensive rather progressive rather old-fashioned boarding school. It was progressive in its political and social ideas, old-fashioned in its discipline and academic standards. Hattie had been a pupil there for five years, during which time her American accent had been overlaid by a very different English one. She had crossed the Atlantic more times than she could remember. She had wanted a pony, then ceased to want one. She had worn a gold band on her teeth, then ceased to wear it. She had plaited her hair in a pigtail, then put it up. She had passed a number of exams. At night she slept curled up with her hands crossed over her breasts. She was very unhappy but she did not recognize what ailed her as unhappiness.

Tomorrow she would have her hair washed by Miss Adkin, who came on Saturdays to wash the girls' hair. This hair-washing was a ‘funny time', which Hattie could not decide about; many things at school were like that. Miss Adkin established herself in one of the bathrooms, and the girls, dressed in their pretty dressing-gowns, queued, always laughing a lot; for some reason hair-washing was ridiculous and somehow thrilling. Miss Adkin was a rather jokey lady but looked like a priestess, as if she might suddenly have produced a pair of shears and cut off all the girls' hair instead of washing it. Her customers sat in turn with their heads over the bath, and Miss Adkin sprayed on hot water, soaped, sprayed, soaped and sprayed and soaped again, while the semi- Inaudible client complained that the water was too hot and the soap was getting in her eyes. Most of the girls had long hair, and there was something strange and shocking in the sudden transformation of dry fluffy tresses into long dark snakes swirling about in the water that kept rising in the bath, while Miss Adkin's strong claw-like fingers searched each bowed and suppliant scalp. Then a warm white furry towel was wrapped around each damp head and the turbaned victim ran red-faced and giggling away. Hattie disliked having her hair washed, but it excited her.

Beside each bed there was a chest of drawers, and on these the junior girls were allowed to place only three personal objects. Senior girls could please themselves so long as decorum was observed. Make-up was of course forbidden, as was jewellery and anything suggestive of display. Hattie had few possessions. On her chest there was a brown china rabbit scratching its ear, which had come up with her through the school, and which she could not bear to put away though other girls derided it; there was a long sleek Eskimo seal made of black soapstone, and a little pink-and-white Japanese vase (into which she never put flowers as that was not allowed). The dormitory was a weird place, though not terrible like the big dormitories in which, as a younger girl, she had cried herself to sleep every night. The stairs and landings, which were blurred by her little weeping ghost, stained by her tears, had always been strange haunted spaces to her, as if already removed into the brown haze of the past. Was it her
future
sadness which made the place so dim and foggy? It was hard to believe that soon she would be leaving it
forever.

Hattie, though thin and pale, was very healthy and hardy, good at games and gymnastics. She was a pale straight girl, neither tall nor small, with long straight white-blond hair and blue eyes of a disconcerting pallor, as if they had great blobs of creamy whiteness mixed into the blue. Her father, Whit Meynell, had had an Icelandic mother. Hattie had never met her father's parents. Her mother had died when she was a small child. After that she travelled with her father during his academic peregrinations. Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. No one would publish his book, however many times he rewrote it. He was a loving though extremely fretful and anxious and inefficient father. He set up his tents in various different universities, from all of which he was soon tactfully evicted. He never achieved ‘tenure'. His frightful anxieties about the future were mercifully ended by a fatal (entirely accidental) motor crash. Hattie was ten.

After that, Hattie went to live for a time with her aunt, Whit Meynell's younger sister, who lived in a small town called Westfield, original home of the Meynells, situated in a woody desolation beside a muddy lake not far from Austin, Texas. Hattie missed her father agonizingly and wept longer than anyone thought at all proper. She got on quite well with Whit's sister Margot, but the arrangement only lasted a couple of years because Margot, who was unmarried, driven by a sudden and interesting desperation, decided to go and seek her fortune in New York, and could not see how to include Hattie in this enterprise. Margot wrote to this effect to Hattie's only other visible relative, John Robert Rozanov. John Robert had of course ‘turned up' in Hattie's life at intervals. He had never got on well with Hattie's mother, Amy, though he maintained the forms of communication. Whit he could not stand and was at pains not to see. (There were kinds of intellectual muddle so degrading that John Robert preferred not to be reminded of their existence.) If he was ‘giving a paper' anywhere near where Hattie's house happened to be, he would occasionally come and take the child out to tea. These ‘treats' were rather glum, since Hattie, who heard no good of her grandfather at home, was frightened of him, and both of them were thoroughly awkward. Here too, however, the proprieties were observed, and John Robert replied promptly to Margot's letter. His idea was that the best way now to dispose of Hattie was to put her in an English boarding school. (He had made himself financially responsible for the child since Whit's death.) He expressed the wish that Margot might ‘have' her in the holidays. Hattie was by now twelve. The holidays were at first a jumbled business, with Hattie dispatched to France or Germany to stay with strange families, on arrangements made by the school in accordance with John Robert's wishes, then whisked across the Atlantic to live in rooms near Margot's flat, since Margot's way of life could not just then be shared with an innocent young girl. Margot had by this time got as far towards New York as Denver, Colorado, where she finally married a Jewish lawyer called Albert Markowitz, and was able to establish a respectable home to which Hattie could come, but that was a little later.

Meanwhile something unusual, even odd, had happened in Hattie's life. An idea had germinated in the brilliant, but (in worldly matters) rather naïve and confused mind of John Robert. Perhaps he felt a bit guilty about having been inattentive, and wished to defend himself against a charge of wilful neglect. Perhaps he wanted simply to save himself the trouble of organizing and supervising Hattie's movements round the world. Whatever the reason, he decided that Hattie must have a permanent female companion, a person who in the old days could have been called her ‘maid'. And in order to find such a person John Robert came back to Ennistone. He wanted an English girl, he needed advice, he did not want to waste time on the operation. He arrived and established himself (at the Ennistone Royal Hotel, 16 Hare Lane being let at the time). He had written beforehand to William Eastcote (Rose Eastcote was already dead) but Eastcote happened to be away at a Friends' conference in Geneva. The only other person in Ennistone whom he cared to trust in this matter was Ruby Doyle. John Robert had conceived, not exactly an affection, but a kind of respect for Ruby in the old Linda Brent days when Ruby, then young but looking much the same, had been so discreetly helpful. There was a kind of monumental thing- In- Itselfness about Ruby which pleased the philosopher. Ruby, scarcely capable of speech, was incapable of lies. He felt that Ruby would do the few things that she could do without fuss and without the interference of any messy general ideas. She also knew how to keep her mouth shut. John Robert, by nature secretive, did not want his project discussed in Ennistone. He wrote to Ruby and summoned her to the hotel. Ruby could not read or write but, so I am told, she took the letter to the gipsy camp. She certainly said nothing to Alex. When John Robert had explained what he wanted, Ruby responded promptly and without emotion that she had a connection, a cousin, who was now unemployed and who might suit the professor. How exactly the young woman in question (Pearl Scotney, she was called) was related to Ruby, and to Diane, was a matter of speculation. Some said they were all half-sisters, probably none of them knew for certain. Ruby bore, she said, her father's surname, Pearl bore her unmarried, abandoned, mother's name, and Diane had borne her unmarried, abandoned, mother's name (Davis) until her marriage with the disastrous Sedley. It might even have been that the connection between them had been originally suggested by their being called Pearl, Ruby and Diamond. John Robert interviewed Pearl in London and decided that she would do. He gave her an airline ticket to Denver and instructions about where to find Hattie. He also wrote to Margot, who was surprised, annoyed and relieved. Pearl arrived and found Hattie spending her first summer holidays in a dim flatlet in the large complex where Margot lived, and trying to do her holiday tasks while suffering from agonizing loneliness and chronic tears. Hattie was thirteen, Pearl was twenty-one.