The Philosopher's Pupil (3 page)

‘Yes.'

‘What did she say to you?'

‘Nothing.'

‘What did you say to her?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing?'

‘I told her nothing.'

‘I can't remember much about last night.'

‘I'm glad you can't, neither can I.'

‘If you can't remember, why are you glad I can't?'

‘It was a horrid accident, better to forget it.'

‘We do a lot of forgetting. How long will you be in here?'

‘I don't know. You could ask matron.'

‘Do you want anything, flowers or books or anything?'

‘No, thanks.'

‘I feel awfully tired.'

‘You're suffering from shock.'

‘Yes, that's it, I suppose I am.'

‘Better go home and rest.'

‘No, I think I'll go swimming, that always does me good.'

‘Yes, go swimming, that'll do you good.'

Pat-ball, thought George, pat-ball. It's either this or rows. Stella can't talk to me, that's her trouble; she can't make silly jokes or play about like other people, she can't really talk to anyone, she's cut off from the human race. She's grand like royalty, I married a princess. I hate seeing her crying, it's so unnatural, she looks like a wet pig. She hasn't any soft warm being, no haven there, no safety. Oh God, how much fear I feel now, how much help I need, with
him
coming. Why must I always suffer so, this is
hell.
Familiar black resentment rose in his heart, in his gorge. I
am poisoned,
he thought.

‘Here's Alex,' said Stella, and checked her weeping.

George rose quickly and made for the door. His mother stood aside to let him pass. They exchanged a quick bright look but no words.

PRELUDE

ii
Our Town

I am the narrator: a discreet and self-effacing narrator. This book is not about me. I knew, though not in most cases at all well, a number of the
dramatis personae
and I lived (and live) in the town where the events hereinafter recounted took place. For purposes of convenience, for instance so that my ‘characters' may be able (very occasionally) to refer to me or address me, I shall call myself ‘N'. But as far as this drama is concerned I am a shadow, Nemo, not the masked presence or secret voice of one of the main characters. I am an observer, a student of human nature, a moralist, a man; and will allow myself here and there the discreet luxury of moralizing.

It will be necessary to talk a good deal about our town, and as I would prefer, for obvious reasons, not to use its real name, I shall call it after my own, ‘N's Town', or, let us say, ‘Ennistone'. Ennistone is situated in the south of England, not exceedingly far from London. A fairly frequent train service increasingly takes ‘commuters' daily to their work in the metropolis and brings them home at evening to a green countryside. However, most of our people still work in and around Ennistone, and old-fashioned Ennistonians would certainly resent the idea of being considered a ‘dormitory town'. The place has a strong identity and, one may say, a strong social conscience. New housing estates have recently diluted our old community life, but strenuous efforts are made by ‘responsible citizens' (it is characteristic of our town to have many of these) to draw the newcomers into our many ‘worthwhile activities'. There are church groups, women's groups, drama groups, debates, evening classes, a Historical Society, a Fine Art Society, a Writers' Circle. There is a lively museum and a Botanical Garden. There is plenty of musical activity, including an operatic society, a silver band and the ‘Ennistone Orchestra'. We were (and to some extent still are) thus well able to amuse ourselves. I should also mention here a passion for playing bridge, though this is not now so common among the young people and the newcomers.

This account may suggest that Ennistone is a rather self-satisfied little place, and perhaps this is true. It was as if we pulled back our skirts from the sins and vices of London, which from here was seen as an exotic and dangerous playground. At one time even television was frowned upon, and some of the ‘responsible citizens' made a point of banning these corrupt machines from their homes. We have a strong and long-standing puritan and non-conformist tradition, one result of which is that there are even now very few public houses in Ennistone. An ‘Austrian Wine Bar' recently opened in the High Street occasioned a long controversy in the
Ennistone Gazette
(our worthy local paper edited at the time of this tale by Gavin Oare, an ambitious youth with his eye on Fleet Street). Ennistone was, in a rural way, a manufacturing town (I am speaking of the nineteenth century) and the fine Tweed Mill ‘as big as a palace' still remains as an abandoned remnant of commercial glory. Several old Quaker families (the McCaffreys are one of these) founded the fortunes of Ennistone at that time, and still (together with some Methodists) control various less prosperous commercial projects which now provide our main sources of employment. Many Ennistonians, I should add, work on the land, but big landowners have not figured in our recent history.

Ennistone is situated upon an attractive river (which I shall call ‘the Enn'). The Romans were here (there is a Roman bridge over the Enn) and some interesting remains attest earlier inhabitants. There are some megaliths upon the common which are known as ‘the Ennistone Ring' although there are only nine of them and one a mere stump. Professor Thom visited our stones and made some calculations but could make nothing of them (we were rather proud of that). Of the medieval village little survives except St Olaf's Church, situated in the poorer part of the town. There are some good eighteenth-century buildings, including the Quaker Meeting House, the Crescent, and the Hall, and an eighteenth-century bridge (alas much altered) still called the New Bridge. Although so ancient, we cannot alas claim to have produced any very famous sons. History knows of a bishop who got into trouble in the seventeenth century for being a Cambridge Platonist. And there was a poor non-conforming fellow in the eighteenth century who, after becoming a famous preacher, suddenly declared that he was Christ and occasioned some sort of little revolt. His name was Elias Ossmor, and the Osmore family of today claim descent from him. On these and other matters see
Ennistone, Its History and Antiquities
(published 1901) by Oscar Bowcock, forebear of our Percy Bowcock. Oscar's younger brother James was the founder of our one big shop, Burdett and Bowcock, usually known as Bowcocks. I think the book is out of print, but a copy survives in the public library. There used to be two copies but one was stolen. At the time of this story I can mention only two Ennistonians who are at all well known outside our gates; the psychiatrist Ivor (now Sir Ivor) Sefton, and the philosopher (about whom more will be heard in these pages) John Robert Rozanov.

I have not yet mentioned the feature for which Ennistone is most famous. Ennistone is a spa. (The town was called Ennistone Spa in the nineteenth century, but the name is no longer in use.) There is a copious hot spring with alleged medical properties, which of course attracted the Romans and their predecessors to the site. Shadowy historical evidence suggests that the worship of a preRoman goddess (perhaps Freya) was associated with the spring; a rudimentary stone image in the Museum is supposed to represent this deity. A beautiful Roman inscription, also in the Museum, more solidly suggests a cult of Venus. The Romans honoured the spring with a handsome bathing establishment, of which unfortunately only foundations and a piece of wall remain. The idea that the waters had an aphrodisiac effect was periodically popular. Shakespeare's sonnet 153 is said to refer to Ennistone, wherein the Bard's lively fancy pictures the spring deriving from a prank of one of Diana's nymphs who cooled the fiery penis of sleeping Cupid in a cool spring which thence became hot, and whose waters were said to cure the ‘sad distempers' and ‘strange maladies' which attend imprudent love. A seventeenth-century medical pamphlet makes an ambiguous reference to the Ennistone waters (see Bowcock's book, the index under ‘venereal disease'). Our ancestors in their folly pulled down most of the fine architecture with which (as we see from prints) the spring was surrounded in the eighteenth century, including a Bath House of transcendent beauty. A minor eighteenth-century poet called Gideon Parke wrote a masque called
The Triumph of Aphrodite
which was to take place in the Bath House, and included a scene where the goddess emerges from the steam of the hot spring itself. This work survives and was performed in the nineteen-thirties with music written by the Rector of St Olaf's. (There was some disagreeable fuss about it at the time.) Of the eighteenth-century buildings only the Pump Room remains, now no longer connected with the waters, used for assemblies and concerts and known as the ‘Ennistone Hall'. The spring has been the victim of a kind of periodical puritanism, and Ennistonians had, and to some extent still have, oddly mixed feelings about their chief municipal glory. Before the first war a Methodist minister even managed to have the establishment closed for a short period on an allegation, never proved, that it had become a secret centre of heathen worship. A vague feeling persists to this day that the spring is in some way a source of a kind of unholy restlessness which attacks the town at intervals like an epidemic.

Let me try to describe the spa buildings as they are now. The main edifice is Victorian, a long tall lamentable block of glazed yellow brick with a lot of ‘Gothic' ornament upon it. At the time of the erection of this pile the establishment was christened ‘the Bath Institute' and is still referred to as ‘the Institute', though many people more familiarly call it ‘the Baths'. The Institute building contains, as I shall explain, together with the ‘machine room' of the spa, a refreshment area, changing-rooms, offices, and two indoor pools. Next to the Institute, and divided from it by a garden about which I shall also speak shortly, is the Ennistone Hall (1760), beautifully proportioned and built of the local stone, a powdery golden-yellow, full of fossils and unfortunately rather soft. Ladies representing the virtues, reduced to four for convenience, who adorn the corners of the roof, have weathered to shapeless pillars. A pediment at one end contains a reclining god, said to represent the river Enn, who has been similarly reduced. Beyond the Hall is the park, or Botanic Garden, containing many rare and interesting plants and trees. There is a lake, and a Victorian ‘temple' which houses our small but well-arranged Museum with its treasured collection of Roman antiquities. In the same building there is a modest art gallery containing nineteenth-century romantic paintings and some prettyish work by Ned Larkin, an Ennistonian follower of Paul Nash. The open space which separates the Hall from the Institute, and forms part of the premises of the latter, is known as Diana's Garden. This garden contains an excavated area showing foundations of Roman walls and some water pipes. (A mosaic found here is in the Museum.) Also to be seen is the only ‘natural' manifestation of the great spring which is visible to the public, a steamy stone basin (perhaps the site of the exploit mentioned in sonnet 153) where scalding water spits up at intervals to a height of three or four feet. The basin is not ornate, it is even rudimentary and of uncertain age, suggestive of the country shrine of some little local god. It is traditionally called ‘Lud's Rill' but is more popularly known as the ‘Little Teaser'.

At the other end of the Institute and joining it at right angles is a long concrete structure, now a little strained and battered, built in the nineteen-twenties in the Bauhaus style and at that time considered a model of modern architecture. Between the end of this building (called the ‘Ennistone Rooms') and the end of the garden runs a wall made of yellow glazed bricks, similar to those of the Institute building, and decorated here and there with mauve and blue tiles made up into pictures of dolphins and such. The large rectangle enclosed by these four sides contains the Outdoor Bath, an expanse of natural warm water (26° to 28° Centigrade at all seasons) over which in winter there hangs a thick pall of steam. The Outdoor Bath is said to be the largest swimming-pool in Europe, but this may be an exaggeration. It certainly meets Olympic standards and is frequented, especially in the colder months, by athletes in training. A large clock with a second hand at one end records the speed of the swimmers. Between the brick wall and the pool at the Diana's Garden end runs a row of sizeable round concrete wells filled with water at a series of temperatures running from 36° to 45° Centigrade. Into each of these wells, which are tiled at the bottom, a stairway descends, and there is a seat round the edge upon which bathers can sit and soak, with their heads a little above the water level. Each well can in this way contain some ten to fifteen people. These hedonistic places of meditation are known as the ‘stewpots' or just ‘the stews'.

This completes my account of the outside of the Institute. I now move inside. Through a doorway like that of a Renaissance palace, above which in Roman mosaic style is inscribed the Institute motto,
Natando Virtus,
one gains access to the first public area, the Promenade. This is a large rather shabby place, painted a melancholy green, dotted with tables and chairs where simple refreshments may be obtained, such as tea, lemonade, bars of chocolate, sandwiches, and of course (free of charge) the famous water. The healing stream flows from the brass mouth of a marble lion, but the filled glasses stand upon the counter. No alcohol is served in the Institute. This rule is maintained in spite of periodic protests by younger citizens. It is held that a bar would radically alter the atmosphere of the place, and no doubt this is true. At the end of the Promenade opposite the main door there is access to the changing-rooms. There is also a long observation window looking on to the Outdoor Bath. (Those who want to watch but not to swim pay a reduced entrance fee.) On the right of the Promenade arc situated the Indoor Bath and its facilities and beyond it the Infants' Pool and the Institute offices. The Indoor Bath replaces (but unfortunately does not copy) its eighteenth-century predecessor. The latter, built of local stone, felicitously (as we see in pictures) imitated the classical through a natural affinity. Our Bath is built of marble, and its architect, who also thought he was imitating the classical, has produced something resembling an indifferent Victorian picture of a bath in a harem. (Some such idea seems to have haunted a local painter commissioned to paint some frescoes of classical scenes, but whose designs were turned down by the Committee.) However, the place, with its double row of columns and marble steps descending into warm clear water has a certain charm, though spoilt by unsightly masses of potted plants. The Indoor Bath used to be hired out for private parties, but after a gathering which was reported in the national newspapers this custom was discontinued.

On the left of the Promenade a door leads to a large and curious octagonal room known as ‘the Baptistry'. This room enshrines the entrance, complete with pseudo-classical pillars and pediment, to the great ‘machinery' or ‘engine room' to use the traditional terms, of the installation. These machines, now modernized of course, were the pride of a well-known nineteenth-century engineer, and the huge subterranean area which they occupy used to be on show to the public. Now, however, for a variety of reasons (thought by some who canvass the matter regularly in the
Gazette
to be sinister) this area is closed off and the way into the Baptistry is marked
PRIVATE
. The Baptistry is used as a store-room, and the great hot bronze doors, studded with pseudo-nails, which guard the access to (as we say and imagine) the hot spring itself, are locked against all except ‘authorized personnel'. Even to glimpse these doors, through which steam eternally seeps, is a rare treat for citizens managing to peer in from the Promenade. A door on the far side of the Baptistry leads to the Ennistone Rooms, but the public entrance to the Rooms is of course on the street, and not through the Institute.