The Philosopher's Pupil (35 page)

‘I'll be around,' said Pearl.

She hated this conversation, which stirred up her own fear with an exact and accurate touch, like a finger far outstretched to disturb a wound.

‘I don't think I'll ever grow up. I'll crawl into a crack and go to sleep forever.'

‘Hattie, stop, don't be so
feeble,
think how lucky you are, you're going to the university — '

‘Am I?'

‘And you'll meet lots of nice men there, gentlemen, not like the ones I knew.'

‘Gentlemen!' Hattie began to laugh, a sort of wild groaning laugh, tossing her silky hair all round her face.

There was a sudden screeching sound down below, then another. The telephone. The girls looked at each other in amazement and alarm.

‘Who can it be, so late? You go, Pearlie.'

Pearl darted down the stairs on her slippered feet. Hattie followed barefoot, her warm feet leaving sticky prints on the gleaming parquet which Ruby had polished so carefully.

Pearl in the hall was saying, ‘Yes. Yes.' Then, ‘Hattie, it's for you.'

‘Who —?'

‘I don't know, a man.'

Hattie took the telephone. ‘Hello.'

‘Miss Meynell? This is Father Bernard Jacoby.'

‘Oh.'

‘I'm the - did your grandfather tell you —?'

‘No.'

‘I'm the - the clergyman - your grandfather asked me to - to — '

‘Yes?'

I should have worked this out beforehand, thought Father Bernard at the other end, and I ought not to have had that last glass of port, and dear me, it's so late, and I do think he might have told the girl.

‘He asked me to have a talk with you about your work.'

‘My work - you mean - like a tutor?'

‘Sort of, not quite - don't worry, we'll invent something. I mean we'll work something out - just a talk really. Could I come round tomorrow morning, about eleven say?'

‘Yes. Do you know where —?'

‘Oh yes, I know the Slipper House, we all know the Slipper House!'

‘Oh - yes - thank you.'

‘Goodnight, my child.'

Good heavens, what a bungler I am, thought Father Bernard. He had even managed to chuckle in a suggestive way when talking about the Slipper House. The girl had sounded quiet and civil, but you never knew with Americans. He poured out another glass of port.

‘He said he was a tutor, a clergyman,' said Hattie. ‘He's coming round tomorrow.'

‘Well, never mind tomorrow, let's go to bed.'

‘Oh, Pearl, what's that noise?'

‘That's the fox barking. It lives here in the garden.'

Pearl opened the front door. A wave of silent moist warm fragrant spring air came with a great slow stride into the house. Pearl turned off the hall light and they looked out into the darkness.

‘Foxie,' said Hattie softly, ‘dear foxie - he lives right here in our garden — '

‘Would you like to go out, dear? I'll get your coat and shoes. We could walk on the lawn.'

‘Oh no, no, no. Foxie, oh foxie — ' Tears began to stream down Hattie's face and she gave a little sob.

‘Hattie,
stop.
You're not ten years old now! Go to bed, you silly idiotic baby.'

‘Yes, I will. Don't come. I'm going to turn out my light. Stay here a little. I'd like to think you were outside - only don't go far - and don't forget to lock the door.'

Hattie fled up the stairs.

Pearl walked out on to the grass. The shutters were closed upstairs, only a little light came dimly through the stained-glass landing window. A lighted upstairs window at Belmont could be seen through the trees.

Pearl breathed the soft fuzzy moist surprising spring air with its message of new life and pain and change. She stroked her hand down her straight brow and her thin nose. She thought, I have got everything wrong, I have played every card wrong, I've had luck, oh such luck, but I didn't understand, I didn't
think well enough
of myself - I had such mean small expectations, I wanted too little, and now it's too late.

She looked at the Belmont lights. A curtain was blowing out below a sash window, frighteningly, like a ghost leaning out. Ruby was going to bed, watching television perhaps. Of course she was not going to be like Ruby. Hattie was a girl from the past. Ruby too belonged to the past. A life like Ruby's could not be lived now. Ruby was an anachronism, an old brown dinosaur. But had not Pearl made a similar mistake, missed a turning, taken a road that led not higher up, but into a low mean small life? It was the money, thought Pearl, I spent those precious years just being pleased that I had money! And even the other day I got
pleasure
out of going to see that poor old wreck my foster-mother and showing off in front of her! As if I
had
anything to show off really! I've just been lucky, and I enjoyed the luck in a stupid selfish way and didn't
use
it. I'm like someone in a story who is given a fairy wish, and wastes it asking for a pretty dress or a cake. I didn't use my luck when I could to
get up,
to
get out.
I could have learnt the things Hattie was learning, or some of them. I could have learnt French at any rate, or
something.
I let her do all the talking and the looking while I just packed the cases and mended her clothes. Well, I did
look,
but I didn't know enough and now I can't remember. It isn't that I'm lazy, but I have the soul of a servant and it didn't occur to me. I was so glad just to be travelling and using money and feeling like someone in an advertisement. I didn't see that the
door was open.
Why didn't I feel more resentment? That might have helped me. If only I had hated Hattie, as I thought I might. But loving Hattie - that's terrible - and now -

Pearl thought how in a very little while Hattie would change. Hattie was at the precious crystalline end point of her childhood, of her innocence. The sense of this was in Hattie's own confused pain, her tears, her cry of ‘Foxie - oh foxie'. And her wish that she and Pearl might stay forever in the never-never land of her own arrested youth, which time was sweeping on toward the rapids of absolute change. Hattie would remember with blushes the sweet silly words she had uttered tonight. She would
show
Pearl how much she had changed, she would have to.

But she won't show me, thought Pearl, because I won't be here. I shall be far away. We shall be separated.
He
told me to come, to be what I am, and for years I have obeyed him. Now, soon, he will simply tell me to go and be no more seen.

Loving Hattie. Ah, that was bad enough. But Pearl's predicament was even worse than that. She loved John Robert.

‘Let me have a look,' said George. He took the field glasses from Alex.

They were installed at the drawing-room at Belmont. Beyond the birch tree (whose droopy pose always reminded Alex of Gabriel) one of the upper windows of the Slipper House was clearly visible. The hazy budding April branches of the tree just brushed the lower right-hand corner of the image. The window was one of the windows of Hattie's bedroom. George was lucky. He saw what Alex had failed to see, Hattie in a white petticoat suddenly skipping across the room. It was the middle of the morning, and Hattie was an early riser, but she had suddenly decided that she wanted to change her dress. The clergyman was due to call in half an hour, and the subtle voice that tells a woman, even a careless girl, how to dress for a man had told her she must change. Hattie came back into view carrying the dress over her arm, and paused. Her hair was undone and was streaming about everywhere until, with her free hand, she slowly gathered it away behind her bare shoulders. Then she passed out of sight again.

George pressed his lips together and lowered his glasses.

‘See anything?'

‘No.' He turned away from the window.

Alex followed.

‘A maiden bower,' said George.

‘I doubt if they're maidens.'

‘Oh surely the little young one is.'

‘She hasn't had the courtesy to come and see me.'

‘Two sequestered girls. The town will be in quite a tizzy.'

‘The little cat will get out.'

George had arrived unannounced. Alex came down to find him standing in the hall. George had a way of standing, with his head slightly tilted, which suggested, simply by the way in which he occupied the space, that he had just been
slinking along
and was now
only partly visible.
So he stood, looking up under his eyebrows, at his mother. God, how
conceited he
is, she thought as she looked down on him. But, also, her heart turned over for him, it shifted and burned.

Now, in the drawing-room, he had wandered, touching things, moving the little encampment of bronze figures which had stood more or less in that same place on the mantelpiece since he had been a child.

Alex's unease about George's arrival blended with a baneful memory of a dream which she had had last night. She dreamed she was in Belmont, but the house had become enormous like a palace, and rather dark and twilit as if pervaded by a yellowish fog. Alex was walking through the house, sometimes accompanied by a woman who seemed to know it better than she did. In the course of this walking, Alex found herself alone in a gallery from which she looked down into a large dim room, almost like a hall, which was full of all sorts of lumber. The room was obviously abandoned and, Alex felt, had not been entered for a long time. Tables and chairs and boxes and piles of things like lamp-stands and old clocks lay about in disorder, and near the middle of the room there was an old-fashioned gramophone with a huge horn. Alex, looking down into the silent abandoned foggy room, felt terrible fear. She thought, but there is
no such room
in Belmont. Where could such a large secret derelict room
be
in my house? She hurried away and told her discovery to the woman who seemed to know the house so well. The woman said, ‘Oh, that's just the old downstairs sitting-room, remember?' and threw open a door to reveal a shabby disordered room which Alex recalled as a former housekeeper's room. Alex thought with relief, oh yes, that's all it is! Then, looking, she realized that this ordinary room was not the room that she had seen.

George had taken off his black mackintosh. He was wearing one of his light grey check suits with a waistcoat and, today, had put on a tie and combed his hair. His head had its sleek hair-oil look. He took off his jacket and stood before Alex in his shiny-backed waistcoat, staring at her and showing his little square separated teeth. It was not exactly a smile.

Alex thought, he's different, he's the same yet different. He
smells
different, sort of sour. And then she thought of the room in her dream. And she thought, he's the same, yet he is
mad.

Alex looked at George with her cat-look, while with clever quick fingers she adjusted the collar of her blouse. She was wearing an old coat and skirt. If she had known George was coming she would have changed. She noted the little instinctive movement of her vanity.

‘How are you, George?'

‘Fine. How are you, Alex?'

‘All right. Would you like some coffee?'

‘No, thanks.'

‘A drink?'

‘No.'

‘Any news of Stella?' Alex said this, and indeed at that moment felt it, as if it were the most ordinary sort of inquiry after someone's wife.

‘No,' said George after a moment, almost thoughtfully, in a kind of dreamy pensive manner, as if seeing a truthful vision, ‘
Stella
is all right.'

‘You've heard something?'

‘No. But you may be sure … that
she
is
all right …
'

‘Good,' said Alex. Sometimes she and George quarrelled in such an odd painful senseless way because their conversation
went astray
at some point,
took a wrong turn.
It was as if George, from a position high above, had decided how the conversation ought to go if it were not to break some law. When the hidden law was broken Alex, punished by pain and confusion, always felt it was her fault. Was their talk, this time too, going to become something awful? She must try hard, she must
keep in touch
with George. She wanted to place her hand upon his arm, just above the shirt cuff, but of course that was impossible.

‘
We
may be dead, and indeed perhaps are …'

‘Are you coming with us to the seaside?' said Alex.

There was something crude, almost pointless in this appeal to a family tradition, just a substitute for touching George's arm.

‘Lordie, are we going?' said George, and smiled. He had stopped moving about and sat down near the fire-place, looking up at his mother with his wide-apart eyes and wrinkling his small nose.

‘Yes, I don't care, but Brian and Gabriel insist.'

‘It isn't yet anyway. Why do you bring it up? Isn't it time we stopped going there? You know, we shall never forgive you for selling Maryville.' George was still smiling.

‘Well — '

‘How's your friend Professor Rozanov?'

So that's it, thought Alex. He has come to
find out …
And of course I too want to find out … A dull stale sadness came over her.

‘I don't know. He asked me to come to talk about letting the Slipper House, that was all.'

‘You haven't seen him since?'

‘No.'

George seemed relieved. He now leaned back in his chair, letting his attention wander.

It was Alex's turn to walk about the room.

‘How are
you
getting on with Rozanov?'

‘Me?' said George. ‘He loves me, he hates me, he pushes me, he pulls me. It's the old story. How will it end? He'll be dead soon anyhow. The
old people
are being cleared away.' He cast a malevolent look at Alex. ‘We who remain will have other troubles. Hey nonny nonny-
no.
'