The Philosopher's Pupil (30 page)

Anthea Eastcote was sitting next to her great-uncle. There was a bond of love between these two, though they were shy with each other. William was childless and awkward with children. Anthea, who turned so many heads and always looked so radiantly pleased with herself, had had her troubles. Her father, a talented mathematician, had run away to Australia with one of his students, her brother had emigrated to Canada and was no more seen, her beautiful mother had died of a wasting illness three years ago. Now, supported by a lifetime of such Sunday mornings, she sat quiet with folded hands, gazing with large wide-open pensive eyes above the heads of the McCaffreys opposite. Her smooth sweet face, luminous like a pale lighted lantern, glowed with health, her soft lips were pursed in a little bud of reflection, and her brown-golden curly rumply hair arched on her head, electric as silk. Used to employing such times for self-scrutiny, she was ruefully examining the way in which she was leading poor Hector on, while all the time she was vainly in love with a fellow student, one Joey Tanner, at York University where she was studying History.

Brian McCaffrey was thinking to himself, when I consider how much rage and spite and malice and jealousy and envy and lust I carry around inside myself, how can I blame anybody for anything? He inspected a tiny almost invisible dot-like insect which was walking slowly across the back of his hand, crushed it with a fingertip, then cast an anxious guilty look in Adam's direction. He raised his gaze once more, focusing on a point between William Eastcote's chin and Anthea Eastcote's mouth. He thought to himself,
Christ,
Tom could have that girl if he wanted to. He's only got to try, he could have that handsome clever sweet girl just by stretching out his hand. Well-off too. He must be
mad.
Why is he so bloody lazy and careless and stupid? If he exerted himself the least little bit he could get her, he could
marry
her. Oh
God!
She's so beautiful, she's so intelligent, she's so angelic, she's got everything, oh if only I were young again, if only I were free and young, as now I shall never be. I wonder if I should say anything to Tom? No, certainly not, I should go
crazy
if Anthea were my sister- In-law. Let her go away, since I can't have her, let her go away, I don't want to know she exists. Curse her, curse everything. My bloody job is on the rocks and I haven't even told Gabriel yet. Oh damn, damn, damn, he said to himself, as Alex used to say when he was a child, bending down awkwardly with her dustpan and brush. Anyway I'm getting old. Thank God I shall be out of the future of this rotten old planet. As everything is going to be blown up, what does it matter what I do? One gets bloody tired of morality. I would do what I want at last, except that I can't. Oh
hell.
Roll on nuclear war.

At this moment there was a commotion at the back, behind where Mrs Roach and Nicky were sitting, and Tom McCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor came in rather out of breath. They sat down noisily, audibly panting, then quickly composed themselves and put on solemn expressions. Several people smiled at Tom. Silence reigned again. After a suitable interval of glazed contemplation, Emma began to look about him with surreptitious curiosity. He had never been to a Quaker meeting before, and his historian's instincts were aroused. He adjusted his glasses and gazed about, impressed by the dense atmosphere of repose and feeling suddenly rather happy. Then Tom felt a little tickling and shuddering sensation beside him and heard a slight noise as the bench began to vibrate. Emma was silently laughing. He had noticed Zed peering out of Adam's pocket. He pointed, nudging Tom. Zed transferred his stare from Mr Osmore to Emma, gazing with an air of amused and rather impertinent attention. Tom began to laugh too. He stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth and closed his eyes upon happy tears. The next moment he was praying, as if he were lifted up and carrying others with him. Love flowed in his soul. He would love them all, save them all: Alex and Brian and Gabriel and Stella and Emma and George and … oh especially George.

Nesta Wiggins was blushing scarlet as she always did when it occurred to her that it was her duty to rise and speak. She was a nervous public speaker, but, driven by conscience, a frequent one. She had realized that she ought to get up and suggest that the money voted for the repainting of the Meeting House ought instead to be donated to the recently opened appeal for the new community centre on the wasteland beyond the canal. (The treasurer, Nathaniel Romage, who loved the fabric of the House, was secretly hustling on the painting since he feared exactly this conscience-searching for worthier objectives on the part of some members of the Meeting.) However, as Nesta's breath came quick and she leaned forward to get up, William Eastcote rose to his feet. Nesta relaxed, satisfied. No one at Meeting ever spoke after William Eastcote had spoken. Bill the Lizard had been thinking about his wife Rose, and how Rozanov had remembered her as presiding over their ‘wholesome feasts' of long ago. He had been thinking too about something which Dr Roach had lately said to him. He had given himself a dispensation to lie to John Robert about his health. Something was wrong, but perhaps not cancer. He was to go to the hospital tomorrow. He thought about his father, who had used the Quaker ‘thou' and who now seemed to belong to an infinitely remote past, as if William's own life were itself being quickly transformed into history, and as if those who had formed him and taught him and given him their precious stainless examples, his parents, his teachers, his friends, were already gathering round.

When he felt the urge to rise, his heart, like Nesta's, beat hard. He was always a diffident speaker. He said, ‘My dear friends, we live in an age of marvels. Men among us can send machines far out into space. Our homes are full of devices which would amaze our forebears. At the same time our beloved planet is ravaged by suffering and threatened by dooms. Experts and wise men give us vast counsels suited to vast ills. I want only to say something about simple good things which are as it were close to us, within our reach, part still of our world. Let us love the close things, the close clear good things, and hope that in their light other goods may be added. Let us prize innocence. The child is innocent, the man is not. Let us prolong and cherish the innocence of childhood, as we find it in the child and as we rediscover it later within ourselves. Repentance, renewal of life, such as is the task and possibility of every man, is a recovery of innocence. Let us see it thus, a return to a certain simplicity, something which is not hard to understand, not a remote good but very near. And let us not hesitate to preach to our young people and to impart to them an idealism which may later serve them as a shield. A deep cynicism in our society too soon touches old and young, forbidding us to speak and them to hear, and making us by an awful reversal ashamed of what is best. A habit of mockery destroys the intelligence and sensibility which is reverence. Let us prize chastity, not as a censorious or rigid code, but as fastidious respect and gentleness, a rejection of promiscuity, a sense of the delicate mystery of human relations. Let us do and praise those things which make for a simple orderly open and truthful life. Herein let us make it a practice to banish evil thoughts. When such thoughts come, envious, covetous, cynical thoughts, let us positively drive them off, like people in the olden days who felt they were defeating Satan. Let us then seek aid in pure things, turning our minds to good people, to our best work, to beautiful and noble art, to the pure words of Christ in the Gospel, and to the works of God obedient to Him in nature. Help is always near if we will only turn. Conversion is turning about, and it can happen not only every day but every moment. Shun the cynicism which says that our world is so terrible that we may as well cease to care and cease to strive, the notion of a cosmic crisis where ordinary duties cease to be and moral fastidiousness is out of place. At any time, there are many many small things we can do for other people which will refresh us and them with new hope. Shun too the common malice which finds consolation in the suffering and sin of others, blackening them to make our grey seem white, rejoicing in our neighbours' downfall and disgrace, while excusing our own failures and cherishing our own undiscovered secret sins. Above all, do not despair, either for the planet or in the deep inwardness of the heart. Recognize one's own evil, mend what can be mended, and for what cannot be undone, place it in love and faith in the clear light of the healing goodness of God.'

William sat down and found his heart still beating hard. He bowed his head and folded his hands, which were trembling. He wondered to himself, whatever possessed me to utter all those high-flown words, wherever did they come from? Then the memory piercingly returned to him of what the doctor had said, and he shuddered with weakness and fear.

The silence continued, ringing now with the echoes of what William had said, and each person present promised himself some amendment of life. Brian thought, what a skunk I am, and how
lucky
I am to have such a dear good sweet wife and such a marvellous son, I must go and see Alex
soon,
and bloody stop hating everything and everyone. Gabriel thought, dear, dear William, how much I love him, yes, I must stop being so feeble and silly, and I must not think those mean spiteful thoughts about Stella, and I must think differently about George, but how? Adam thought, I must stop imagining those funny things about Rufus and I must be kinder to my father and talk to him and not tease him. Anthea Eastcote thought, I must be frank with Hector Gaines and I must
give up
Joey Tanner. Nicky Roach thought, I must work harder and not go to bed with girls all the time (but he felt rather sad about this). Mrs Roach thought, I must stop spending these crazy amounts on clothes. I must be mad! Nathaniel Romage thought, perhaps I ought to reconvene the committee before I have the house painted? Mrs Romage thought, I had better stop cooking the books. Ought I to confess to Nat that I've been cooking the books? No. Miss Landon thought, I must prepare my lessons better and, quite simply, stop
loathing
the children. Nesta Wiggins thought, I ought to go to Mass now and then to please my father and stop being so ridiculously pleased with myself. I'm just a stinking sinner. Well, I am, aren't I? Mrs Bradstreet had a very serious sin, not unconnected with her late husband, upon her conscience. Sometimes she felt she was damned, sometimes she felt she should tell everything to the police (how much did they know?). She decided that for the present she would follow William Eastcote's advice and lay it all before God. However, she had done this before to no avail. Emma thought, I must go and see my mother, I must go and see my singing teacher, and I must … just somehow … try to become .. less
awful.
Tom thought, I'm innocent, I'm good, I love everybody. I shall go on being innocent and good and loving everybody, oh I feel so happy! What Zed thought is not known, but as his nature was composed almost entirely of love, he may be imagined to have felt an increase of being.

‘A chair does a lot for a picture' was one of Alex's sayings. At this moment she was trying out this guidance in the Slipper House, as she moved a bamboo chair with a pink cushion on it and placed it underneath a contemporary print of the eighteenth-century ‘bath house of transcendent beauty' which had been pulled down to make way for the Institute building. The effect was good. It was Sunday evening. The bells of St Olaf's, distinctly audible in damp weather with a west wind blowing, were decorating the muzzy soft brown twilight. All the lights were on in the Slipper House, the central heating was on, the shutters were closed. Every window had inside shutters, all of which had been decorated by the young painter, Ned Larkin, Geoffrey Stillowen's discovery. The most ambitious scene, representing the family in Belmont garden, was in the sitting-room downstairs, but each room had its window into the fantasy world of Mr Larkin. The main bedroom, where Alex now stood, revealed in the space of the shuttered window above the window seat, a blue sky traversed by a silver airship, and down below looking up a dog, a black-and-white terrier whom Alex dimly remembered, but not his name. The upstairs shutters and curtains had not been touched for some time and turned out to be full of dust and moths and spiders. With Ruby, she had cleaned the whole house thoroughly, and could now enjoy it by herself. Working silently with Ruby had been a strain. How easily her mother would have chatted all the time, encouraging the servant, cheering her on.

Alex looked at the bed, a plain strong single bed with handsome plain ball-headed posts at each corner made of a grainy gleaming nut-brown wood, a fine piece, a relic of its time. In the centre of the headboard an incised oval design was carved, representing perhaps a seed or the cosmos. This carving had excited Alex when she was a girl. Here John Robert Rozanov would sleep. In the little room next door, in a plain handsome nut-brown matching wardrobe, he would keep his clothes. In the sitting-room downstairs, or perhaps in the second bedroom which Alex had prepared as a study, with a light oak desk and a lamp with a leaded-glass shade, he would write his great book. In the evenings when he was tired he would talk to Alex, first of old times, then of other things. Further than this Alex did not allow her thoughts to wander, at least with any clarity. Indeed much was unclear. The kitchen was scrubbed and accoutred, but who would cook his meals? Ruby and Alex had worked hard. A few pieces of furniture had been brought in from Belmont, but the house still had the airy, empty, rather pale, faintly provisional look which somehow suited it. It had never really been occupied. It had been a place for summer parties and populous fêtes of Stillowens long gone and scattered. Had her father, after her mother's death, ever slept in this room, with the silver airship and the little dog and another woman? Alex could not believe it. The house, which the Ennistonians believed to be such a strange ambiguous place, was somehow innocent and unstained and unused, like her golden-haired brother who had died in the war, blown to pieces by a shell near Monte Cassino. She had seen his neat clean white little gravestone among hundreds of others in a beautiful Italian cemetery.