The Philosopher's Pupil (36 page)

Alex, who had wandered to the window, turned her back on him.

‘Good heavens!'

‘What?' George got up and joined her at the window.

There were people in the garden.

Alex had lived her life with the view from the window, the drooping birch tree, the copper beech, the fir tree whose noble reddish shaft on which the sunlight glowed soared up so high, the furry lithe awkward ginkgo, and down below the perfect lawn, mown to a shaven sleekness by the gardener, more often now (since he was grown so old) by herself. She had been a child, looked at, in that garden, where she had later looked at her own children. But after, for years and years, there had been no one in the garden, it had remained as the Slipper House. No one, that is, except, when Brian and Gabriel came visiting, Adam and Zed whose presence there she so intensely resented.

Now in fact the first person whom she saw was Zed, right in the middle of the lawn, quite near to the house. She thought, what is that white thing, has someone left a bag there? Then, as she recognized the dog, Adam walked across the grass in the direction of the garage, touching the birch tree and the fir tree on his way. Never before had Adam entered the garden except under licence from Belmont. The back gate had always been kept locked. Now beyond there were figures under the trees near the Slipper House, even a sound of voices. Alex recognized Brian, Gabriel, Pearl Scotney, and coming into view the ill-omened priest in his cassock.

‘The damned impertinence,' said Alex.

‘Well, you let the place,' said George. ‘Why did you let it if you hate it all so?'

‘I thought Professor Rozanov would be there.' Alex immediately regretted this entirely unnecessary revelation.

George said, ‘Oh,' and then, but without intensity, ‘Don't mess with Rozanov, he's dynamite.'

‘Of course they came in through the back gate,' said Alex. ‘Anyone can come in now. They'll wear a path across the grass. Oh damn, damn, damn.'

George laughed. He said, ‘The defences are breached. Everything is deep but nothing is hidden. There are meanings in the world.'

The door behind them opened and Ruby came in.

Ruby stood there mute. She was wearing a long white apron, not spotless, over her long brown dress. She stared, not at Alex, but at George.

George said, ‘Hello, old Ruby thing!' He went forward and touched her shoulder.

‘Ruby, could you get some coffee?' said Alex.

Ruby vanished.

‘Why should she come in?'

‘She came to look at me,' said George.

‘Who invited her? She just comes into rooms now, she just
walks in.
'

‘Maybe she reckons she lives here.'

‘She takes things. I think she takes and hides them and then finds them again. She's becoming very peculiar. I had to ask for the coffee to get rid of her.'

‘You ought to pet her a little. She wants to be touched.'

‘Really —!'

‘Plato said that everything you say to a slave should be an order. You carry out that advice pretty well. Now I come to think of it, I've never heard you say
anything
to Ruby which wasn't an order, not even something like “It's raining.”'

Alex felt suddenly that she might burst into tears, weep bitterly like a child in front of her eldest son. Everyone was against her, everyone criticized her and attacked her. She said, ‘Why don't you go and join them at the Slipper House.'

‘And spoil the fun?'

‘You want to see the girl. Go and see her.'

‘And seduce her? What about my còffee?'

Alex was silent, calling up old allies, rage and hate, to blunt her grief and dry her tears.

‘All right,' said George, well aware of those mounting emotions. ‘I'll go. And when Ruby comes with the coffee ask her to sit down. I'd like to think of you having coffee together.'

He picked up his coat and jacket and faded from the room.

George went downstairs and into the garden by the back door, but he did not go to join the ‘intruders' who were standing outside the Slipper House. There had been, at this juncture, no glimpse of ‘the little one'. He stood near the garage looking down the garden. Adam, who had been sitting in the Rolls, heard the sound of the opening and shutting door. Standing up on the seat of the car he could watch George through the dusty window of the ‘motor house'. He had never observed George like this before, at such close quarters, unobserved himself. It was exciting. George's face at that moment was worth observing, being like that of a tragic actor registering indecision together with some deep emotion, then clearing and becoming round and benign. He was carrying his mackintosh and his jacket over his arm. He dropped the mac on the grass, put on the jacket, then slowly put on the mac, still gazing down the garden. Something like what Alex saw as his ‘conceited' look had returned. Then he turned and went away along the path which led to the street in front of the house (Tasker Road). Adam sat down again and took hold of the steering wheel of the car. Somewhere, he heard Zed utter a bark.

George, though he was indeed curious about ‘the little girl', decided not to join the group at the Slipper House. Something almost like shyness deterred him, a sudden sense of how it was becoming harder and harder to communicate with
anyone.
He had visited Alex partly to find out the meaning of her visit to John Robert (of which he believed her account) and partly to reassure himself that, confronted with his mother, he could actually talk to her. Alex would have been surprised to know that in some way his talk with her had fortified him. George was also deterred from going to the Slipper House by a very special feeling of fear which came to him quite suddenly, a sense of taboo. The image of Hattie in her petticoat came back to him with intense vividness. He had thought: that girl,
his
grand-daughter, is dangerous, she's the most dangerous thing in the world. It was as that thought came to him that his face had cleared; for he had not at all liked the sense of being, almost, too
embarrassed
to walk up naturally to those
strangers.
As he neared the front gate some movement caught the corner of his eye and he saw that he was accompanied by Zed. The little dog, as George's head turned, barked at him, then retreated and posed, front feet down, back up, the rump and plumy tail aloft. Then he sprang up, stamped his tiny paw, whined eloquently, then barked again. George lifted a threatening fist and Zed snarled, showing white pointed teeth. George thought with satisfaction, even the dogs bark at me now. He went out into the road, banging the front gate after him. He thought, shall I go to the cinema? No, I'll go and see Diane. She'd better be in.

Zed ran past a viburnum bush and came face to face with a fox.

Zed had not meant anything in particular by barking at George. He had followed George from the garage, sniffing at his heels. George always smelt different from other humans; but today there was a new smell, stronger and more exciting, but also rather nasty. It was an animally smell, yet also it offended Zed in some fastidiousness of his soul, which was clothed in white plumage and burning with ecstasy and love. Zed was endlessly interested in George. He smelt him, when he could get near enough (which was not often) with a special nose-wrinkling fascination. If he had seen George buried he would have dug him up. When Zed saw the front gate he began to run on toward it, but was startled by George's sudden turning and his threatening gesture. This gesture wakened an old feeling in Zed that George was dangerous to Adam. So he had snarled (which he very rarely did) and then, satisfied with his performance, scampered back toward his master. As it happened, Adam, who was still in the garage, had shut the door, so Zed ran on down the garden; and it was then that he came face to face with the fox. It was the big dog fox.

Zed had never seen a fox but he had smelt the strong frightening odour and he knew what the apparition was. He recognized, as he had never done before, an absolute enemy. Cross humans and snappy dogs were hazards. But this was different. Zed, as he came to an abrupt stop, felt suddenly his solitude and with it the completeness of his doghood, only in which lay now his salvation. It did not occur to him to bark for help. Indeed as his black eyes stared at the fox's blue eyes he felt incapable of barking.

The big fox looked down at Zed with its cold pale eyes, which were sombre and ruthless and sad, awful eyes which knew not of the human world. The fox's face, with its heavy black marking, looked macabre and wild, a face that devoured other faces. Zed knew that he must stand. If he turned and ran the fox would pursue him and in a few steps those jaws would crack his back. Zed could see the fox's teeth, wrinkling a little the soft black lip of the muzzle. And still they stared, the fox's black paw still raised in the attitude in which Zed had surprised him. They were so close that Zed could feel the warm current of his enemy's breath. He stared up. There was no movement he could make to assert his doghood. At any movement the fox might think he was about to flee, and leap. Zed measured the terrible strength and the more terrible will that confronted him. He stared, calling up his own will and the strange authority which his species derived, alone among other animals, from the society of the human race.

Then a strange thing happened. The fox turned his head a little and lowered it right down until his muzzle almost touched the grass, still keeping his blue pale wild eyes fixed upon Zed. Then he dropped his black paw and sidled a little, as in a slow dance, moving round the dog. Zed moved slightly keeping his face resolutely toward the fox and staring with his blue-black eyes in which there was reflected so much of the expression of man. The fox continued to move round Zed with his head lowered and his eyes gazing, moving as in a very slow rhythmic dance, and Zed continued, upon the same spot, to turn. Then, quite suddenly, there was a noise nearby, human voices. The fox turned and in a second vanished. Zed sat down where he was. He felt so strange, as if he pitied the fox, or almost envied him, and did not want to return to the world of happiness. After a moment or two, avoiding Brian and Gabriel (for it was they), he ran back toward the garage, where the door was still shut. Outside on the gravel he began playing with the stones, tapping them with his little white paw as if they were his ball, and he forgot about the fox.

‘He's
sweet,
' said Hattie, holding Zed in her arms.

On entering the garden from the back gate, Adam and Zed had run straight on toward the garage, passing the Slipper House toward which the grown-ups wended their slower way. Adam had sat in the Rolls, turning the wheel this way and that, stood up to observe George, sat again, then emerged to find Zed waiting and had inspected the colony of martins underneath the eaves who were busy renovating last year's nests. Later in the summer the baby birds would be closely visible, propped up in the nests like little dolls with white faces. Then Brian and Gabriel had come to find him, and he had run back with Zed to find Hattie and Pearl standing outside on the grass with Father Bernard. Zed had run straight to Hattie, who had picked him up and was pressing her nose into his furry shoulder while he licked her forehead. The combination of the dry coolish tickly fur and the warm round small body agitated with slightly struggling but trustful doggy affection and the smooth wet tongue caressing her brow quite overcame poor Hattie. She could feel Zed's heart beating fast and her own heart beat fast too. She wanted to hug the dog and cry. She put him down hastily. ‘What's his name?'

‘Zed,' said Adam. He touched the skirt of Hattie's dress. Hattie had put on a flowery summer dress earlier in the morning, but had changed into a straight many-buttoned navy blue shift over a blue-and-white striped shirt blouse when she decided to put her hair up.

‘They are alpha and omega,' said Father Bernard smiling.

The cool April sun was shining out of a cool blue sky, making the green tiles of the Slipper House glisten as if they were wet. Dew upon the grass, newly come into the moving sunlight, flashed like diamonds; and a trail of dewy footprints across the lawn from the little copse which occupied the bottom of the garden presaged the footpath dreaded by Alex.

Pearl, who had persuaded Hattie to emerge, now stood behind her in the doorway of the house. She was wearing over her brown dress an apron which she had deliberately failed to remove when she saw from the window the advancing ‘company'. She had folded her arms in front of her and stood at attention, wearing her calm dour Mexican look, brown as her dress. She was aware of the priest casting curious glances at her and trying in vain to catch her eye with his nervous girlish smile.

The Brian McCaffreys returning from a shopping expedition (it was Saturday) had met Father Bernard who had proudly announced his destination. Gabriel was at once anxious, with this excuse, to ‘drop in' and catch a glimpse of the famous girl. The news that John Robert Rozanov's grand-daughter was installed at the Slipper House was the talk of the Institute. Her appearance there was eagerly awaited. In a sudden gust of possessive emotion, about which she felt secretive and almost guilty, Gabriel felt that she must see the waif and establish a special relation with her before she became the property of everybody. She tried to conceal the quality of her interest from Brian and Adam. She also wanted to find out whether John Robert had committed Hattie to Alex's care. She had suggested a subsequent visit to Alex, but Brian was in no mood to see his mother. Although he complained he was, however, not unwilling to demonstrate his independence of her by visiting the Slipper House, and he too wanted to look at the girl.

Gabriel had impulsively handed over a cake (purchased for Leafy Ridge tea-time) which Hattie had handed to Pearl who had put it inside the front door on the floor. Gabriel's earnest wet eyes were fixed with diffident sympathy upon Hattie. Gabriel had today had the infelicitous idea of tying her floppy hair back with a ribbon. Her face looked strained and shiny, her nose red in the April wind. Arrived, she felt embarrassed and apologetic, having awkwardly refused Hattie's suggestion that they should come in. She now regretted this refusal, but could think of no way of retrieving the blunder which kept Hattie out on the grass shivering slightly in the cold wind. Gabriel was also upset because she had seen for a moment, just as she arrived at the Slipper House, the figure of George standing near the back door of Belmont and looking down the garden.