The Philosopher's Pupil (25 page)

John Robert had not, in conceiving his project, worked it out in any detail; he had not for instance wondered what Pearl was to do when Hattie was at school, and had to have this problem brought to his attention by Pearl. Pearl had no home in Ennistone, and in any case John Robert had made it clear that he did not want her to sojourn, perhaps talk, in his native town. It was decided that Pearl should continue to live where she had been living in north London and, when not in attendance upon Hattie, to continue if she wished her part-time secretarial work, without any diminution of the generous salary which John Robert paid her. Hattie's boarding school was in Hertfordshire, and here it was also Pearl's duty to visit her, and see she was contented and supplied with all that she needed.

This idea of John Robert's, which might, for all the care or common sense that he exercised in setting it up, have proved disastrous, in fact turned out well. Hattie vividly recalled, and she and Pearl often talked it over later, Pearl's first arrival in Denver. John Robert had sent Hattie a short note to tell her that he had engaged a ‘companion' for her. Hattie tearfully anticipated the arrival of some gorgon. Pearl on her side was already beginning to regret what had at first seemed a miraculous adventure. What horrid neurotic little brat perhaps awaited her? Pearl went first to Margot's flat, then to the nearby cubby-hole where Margot had stored Hattie. Hattie's first sighting of Pearl was not reassuring. It could not exactly be said that Pearl resembled Ruby, yet there was something of Ruby's ‘Mexican' look in Pearl's hard strong face. Pearl was lean with very dark brown straight hair and a sallow complexion and a thin nose which came straight down from her forehead and thin fierce lips. Her eyes were of the greenish light-brown colour known as hazel. She glared nervously at Hattie, and Hattie vanished into the dim haze of her frightened childish face. Then Pearl smiled, and then Hattie smiled. They both said later that they knew at once that it would be ‘all right', although perhaps all that happened was that Hattie saw that Pearl was considerably younger than the person she expected (John Robert had failed to specify Pearl's age) and Pearl saw that Hattie was timid and harmless.

Pearl Scotney, born in Ennistone, had grown up in London whither her unhappy mother had transferred her. Pearl could not remember her father. Her mother had followed Diane's profession, only Pearl never told anyone this. She always said her mother was a dress-maker. The mother drank, then died. Pearl went to a foster home. Up to this time Pearl's connection with her ‘family' in Ennistone had consisted of ‘keeping in touch at Christmas', at least Ruby and Diane sent Christmas cards; giving evidence that they knew Pearl existed and where she was. Pearl sent nothing. Her mother had wanted no family ties, no remembrances, no connection with her nightmarish past. Pearl's foster-mother rather randomly initiated a
rapprochement
by writing to Ruby and Diane asking for money. Diane sent some. Ruby came to see the child and manifested some gruff affection. Ruby in fact would have liked to bring Pearl to Ennistone and install her at Belmont, only she could not think out how to suggest this to Alex. As soon as Pearl left school, her main aim in life was to get away from her foster-mother (the feeling was mutual) and Ruby found her a temporary job in Ennistone as a maid and child-minder with some visiting Americans. During this period Pearl taught herself typing (and spelling) and then became a secretary. She had some small messy love affairs and felt very confused and unhappy. However, she was able to earn her living and to begin to be, which she never thought as a child that she ever would be, a real person. She had an uneasy sort of relation with Ruby and Diane. Ruby was moodily affectionate, sometimes suddenly possessive, prompt in detecting rebuffs. Diane was (so Pearl thought) resentful, even envious of a sort of irresponsible independence which she attributed to the younger girl. So things had been going along when John Robert Rozanov interfered in the course of Pearl's life. John Robert judged that Pearl Scotney ‘had her head screwed on'; and it appeared that John Robert was right.

Arrived in Denver, and after her relief at finding Hattie so harmless, Pearl was suddenly filled with power. Challenged by a rather peculiar situation, she took charge of it. She felt all of a sudden free, competent, and (she noticed one morning) very nearly happy. Being a very long way from London, and from Ennistone, helped too. She was in a germless void, and she loved every minute, though also telling herself that it would not last. The first thing was to tackle Margot Meynell. Hattie could wait, and
did
wait, silent with admiration. Margot, whose love life was in a delicate and complex state, viewed the newcomer with dismay. Margot had not told John Robert that Hattie was not living in her flat. She feared Pearl as a hostile informer and agent of a superior power. However, Pearl had a frank conference with Margot which made the latter feel much better. It was clear, said Pearl, that she and Hattie must find a considerably larger, considerably better flat. John Robert had said nothing about flats. Perhaps he had assumed that Margot would house both the girls. Perhaps he thought Pearl would arrange things as she thought best. Perhaps he had not reflected on the matter at all. Pearl, in her new role, wrote John Robert a ‘business letter' over which she laboured long, saying that she thought that Hattie and herself should move into a flat near to Miss Meynell's, as quarters were a bit cramped. This, without lying, implied that Hattie had been living with Margot (not that Pearl minded lying half as much as, for instance, Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor did). John Robert, who was certainly not short of money, replied that he had opened an account for Pearl in a Denver bank and she was to do as she thought fit. After this Pearl took complete charge and Margot gratefully retired, though without forfeiting the allowance which John Robert continued to pay her.

After Pearl came, Hattie stopped hating Denver. The girls learnt to ski. (Pearl persuaded Margot to ski too, only she promptly broke her leg.) However there was now less of Denver and more of Europe. Pearl delivered Hattie to the ‘families' or accompanied her to some of the better-known monuments and museums. Hattie could now speak French, German and Italian. Pearl had learnt no language at school and been taught no grammar. For a time she tried secretly, and in vain, to teach herself French. Then regretfully gave up. When they went sightseeing, Pearl had a simpler cause of unease; she was afraid that something might happen to Hattie. She did once lose her in Rome and had a terrible half-hour. Back in the USA there was travelling too. Sometimes John Robert came to Denver, sometimes the girls flew to see him in California, once to Boston where he was spending a semester, once to St Louis, more than once to New York. On these occasions they saw little of the philosopher, meetings being still rather in the ‘having tea' style. John Robert would then question Hattie about her school studies and about where she had been and what she had done, but he would soon start looking at his watch. Once he asked her to read a passage of Racine. On these occasions John Robert was polite and grateful to Pearl but managed somehow (perhaps unconsciously) to mark the difference between the girls, who by now regarded each other as sisters. Hattie was ‘the mistress', Pearl ‘the maid'. Pearl put this away in a package of resentment which however remained fairly small. Hattie and Pearl were both rather afraid of John Robert. But during his absences Hattie, at least when she was younger, did not trouble her head about him, whereas Pearl did.

Pearl was an employee, one whose employment could be terminated. This fact which had not at first occupied Pearl's attention much, or Hattie's at all, now began to disturb them both. New feelings and understandings were bodying themselves forth in Hattie's mind. Pearl had been a mother, then a sister. This had never seemed odd before. Why should it feel so now? Once at school Hattie overheard one of the mistresses, talking about her and Pearl, say, ‘It's an unhealthy relationship.' Hattie, in secret tears, had been hurt and puzzled. Pearl was an employee, a servant. John Robert had established her by fiat. He could remove her by fiat. And now Hattie was leaving school, that too had been decreed. She supposed there would be more travel, more museums, more and different teachers, the university. Soon she would be eighteen. She felt unready for this or indeed any other future. Had she a future? Or was the problem rather that she had nothing else, an excess of future, white and unmarked and blank?
Her
future. Could she own such a thing? One of the teachers talked about a crisis of identity. Hattie had no identity and nothing as creative as a crisis. She thought, I am nothing, I am a floating seed which a bird will soon eat. ‘Lives of great men all remind us we must make our lives sublime, and departing leave behind us footprints in the sands of time.' So they sometimes sang in chapel, where Hattie had acquired some vague Anglicanism. The unprinted sand stretched ahead, making Hattie feel weary, weary, as if her life were already over. Her only positive feeling was a sense of her own innocence. She had not yet ‘become bad' as so many people, as she knew, became. Evil, that too was part of the white blankness of the future.

Such thoughts flitted in her head as she sat now on her white school bed, and held her warm brown-stockinged foot in her hand. They flitted around with lots of other thoughts, memories of snowy slopes mauve with aspens, of that melancholy lake in Texas, of her dear father frowning with anxiety as he prepared his lectures, of the awful little flatlet where she had cried so much before Pearl came, of the kindly nervous guilty face of Margot Meynell, now Mrs Albert Markowitz, and distantly distantly dimly of Hattie's mother, the unhappy dead lady who had once been Miss Rozanov.

A distant bell rang. Hattie thrust a clean handkerchief into her knickers, and emerged substanceless as a seed into the brown spaces of the landing and the stairs which she was destined to dream about for the rest of her life.

John Robert Rozanov was floating like an enormous baby in the hot flowing waters of his private bath in the Ennistone Rooms. His bath was a large boat-shaped affair made of white tiles with blunt ends. At each end there was a seat which was under water when the bath was full. There was a fan which expelled the steam, but John Robert had not put it on; he liked steam. The hot curative waters flowed in, indeed roared in, from the fat glistening brass taps which were never turned off by day or night, so that the Rooms were full of a ceaseless roaring to which the inmates were quickly accustomed and said to deafened visitors ‘I don't hear it!' ‘They may not hear it, but it affects them,' someone said darkly to the Director of the Institute, Vernon Chalmers, who quickly prepared and kept in reserve a little monograph on the therapeutic powers of sound. Dazed, almost drowsy, with unheard noise John Robert floated, his white-skinned whale-belly huge before him. His big flipper-like hands kept him buoyant, moving slowly to and fro in the space of the bath, while the steaming water fell from the taps at a controlled temperature of forty-two degrees Centigrade. The bath could be filled by turning a brass handle to close the plug at the bottom, after which the water rose to an outlet vent near the top. When the plug was lifted, the water subsided to a uniform level of about a foot, spitting and gurgling under the violence of the jets from above.

Last night John Robert had dreamt that he was being pursued by a lot of squealing piglets who turned out to be human infants running very fast on all fours. Later he saw the same creatures lying on the ground as if asleep, only now they were dolls, and he thought, ‘they were dolls after all.' Some of them lay quiet, and these he took to be dead; others were moving and twitching slightly, and these he took to be dying. He thought, but surely dolls
must
be dead. He picked up one of the dead ones and put it in his pocket. His mother came and asked to see it. When he brought it out he saw with horror that it was alive and in pain. In the morning he woke up early and went out for a walk. He looked into the big bright clean Methodist church where he had worshipped as a child. He had not been there for a long time and felt a weird shock when he recognized the numbers of the hymns. He then visited the little corrugated- Iron Roman Catholic chapel where his mother had once told him that they worshipped a goddess. Why had she frightened him by saying that, was it meant to be a joke? He looked inside into the dark which was full of images. An aged priest appeared who said that he remembered his grandfather. People in Burkestown all knew John Robert, smiled at him and said, ‘Good morning, Professor.'

John Robert propelled himself to one end of the bath and adopted a sitting position, his head and shoulders now above the water. He mopped his red swollen steamy face with an adjacent towel, and began to go through the exercises which his Japanese doctor in California had recommended for his arthritis. When John Robert went to Texas and Arizona his arthritic symptoms disappeared. Since his return into the English spring he had felt old familiar pains together with new strange ones. As he rotated his head and twitched his shoulders and turned his arms into snakes he sighed, then groaned into the hurly-burly of the roaring stream. The warmth was kind to his bulky pain-ridden body. As he swayed himself gently in the waters he could not but believe in their therapeutic power. But for the weary diminishing cells of the mind there was no alleviation, unless it might be a strong electric shock to shake them all up again like counters in a game. He was so tired and so old, and he had so much to decide and such terrible things to do.

Meanwhile outside at that very moment the sun was shining on the Outdoor Bath, which was less steamy today because the air temperature was higher. The sky was blue, clothes and bodies looked bright and hard-edged and clear, and the cries which people always utter in swimming-pools echoed in the sunny northern light. In Diana's Garden Ruby, Diane and Pearl were standing together, a rare conjunction, not marked since few people in Ennistone knew Pearl by sight. Pearl had been to visit her foster-mother who lived in Kilburn and who had written to her asking for money. Pearl could have sent the money by post, but decided to visit the old lady at least partly so as to exhibit her own affluence and sophistication. The foster-mother, visited, made a point of not being interested in Pearl's life. Then she wept self-pityingly. Pearl left, upset and cross. Unhappy stirred up memories then made her suddenly want to go to Ennistone, where there was no particular reason for her to be and where she rarely went, since she knew that it was out of bounds under John Robert's rules. She came to the Baths looking for Ruby.