The Philosopher's Pupil (37 page)

Hattie's simple pinafore dress made her look schoolgirlish, although her white-blond hair had been assembled, without Pearl's aid, into a large woven bun which climbed up the back of her head. She looked thin, almost ill (which she was not), untouched by sun, her pallid unmarked complexion damp like the stem of a winter plant. Her face, timid again, now after she had set Zed down, so lacked emphasis and colour that she seemed like a study in white by a painter whose whim it was to make a girl's face scarcely appear from the faint hues of a uniformly milky canvas. Only her lips, poised and pouting a little with some persisting question, showed a faint natural pink. And her eyes, marbled with whiteness, were a faint but very clear pale blue.

Brian, standing behind Gabriel and smiling, showing his wolf teeth, thought, what a funny little drowned rat of a thing. And yet in two or three years that could be a beautiful woman.

Gabriel was saying, ‘If you need anything, please just let us know. Our telephone number, I'll write it down, sorry I haven't got a - Brian, could you write down our telephone number for — '

‘It's in the book,' said Brian.

‘Oh, of course, anyway I expect Mrs McCaffrey is looking after you?' Even after years of marriage it did not really occur to Gabriel that there was any Mrs McCaffrey except Alex. She cast a glance toward Belmont. The figure of George had disappeared.

‘Oh no,' said Hattie, ‘we're on our own. I haven't even met Mrs McCaffrey. I suppose I ought to have done?' She turned for a moment to Pearl, who remained rigid with folded arms.

‘I expect your grandfather drops in to see you have everything — '

‘No, I haven't seen him either - we don't know, do we, Pearl - whether he's - where he is exactly — '

‘Oh dear!' said Gabriel, ‘I mean — '

‘What are you doing here?' said Brian.

‘I don't know,' said Hattie, not comically but awkwardly, making Brian's brusque question seem even ruder. Realizing this she added, ‘I expect I shall be studying.'

‘
We
shall be studying,' said Father Bernard smiling.

‘What will you study?' said Gabriel.

‘I don't know — I don't really know anything much — '

‘Can you swim?' said Brian.

Oh yes — '

‘Then I expect we'll see you at the Baths. Everyone in Ennistone comes to the Baths. Eh?'

There was a pause. Adam had withdrawn with Zed and was standing behind Brian on the side toward the back gate, looking as if he wanted to go away. He stood with his feet wide apart, wearing the corduroy knee breeches and brown jersey which was the uniform of his school. His round brown eyes scanned Hattie with the puzzlement of a young savage.

Hattie looked at him and said, ‘I like your togs.'

The word ‘togs' emerged from Hattie's lips betokening, in a way which all present obscurely understood, her curious unbelongingness, her statelessness, her lack of a native tongue and a native land.

Adam bowed.

‘It's his school uniform,' said Gabriel.

‘How nice — '

‘Well, we must go,' said Brian. ‘We must leave you two to your studies! Come on, Gabriel.'

‘You will, won't you — '

‘Yes, of course— '

‘Good-bye, then — '

‘So kind — '

Brian and Gabriel emerged from the back gate into Forum Way. Adam and Zed had run out before them.

‘Well, what did you think?' said Gabriel.

‘Was that
her
school uniform?'

‘Of course not! It was rather smart, I thought — '

‘She's an infant. She ought to be in white frills.'

‘What did you think of her?'

‘Nothing. She's a skinny little American.'

‘She hadn't much of an American accent, more English public school.'

‘Yuk!'

‘I thought she was sweet.'

‘Of course you did. She thought Zed was sweet.'

‘Why are you so cross?'

‘I'm always cross.'

‘You were quite rude.'

‘So were you, you were salivating with curiosity.'

‘Oh dear — '

‘And what on earth possessed you to give her our cake?'

‘We can get another.'

‘They'll all be gone.'

‘Did you see George?'

‘
George?
Has he got himself inside that house already?'

‘He was standing up near Belmont - I think — '

‘You imagined it. I didn't see him. You've got George on the brain.'

‘We ought to have said something nice to the maid,' said Gabriel. ‘No one spoke to her.'

‘I suppose she's American.'

‘No, someone at the Baths said she was some sort of relation of Ruby's.'

‘Of Ruby's? How perfectly horrible.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it makes things connect. I don't want things to connect.'

‘But why?'

‘All connections are sinister. I don't want
anything
to connect with
anything.
'

‘Did you like her, the little girl, Miss Meynell?' Gabriel asked Adam whom they had just caught up with.

‘No.'

‘No?'

‘No.'

Gabriel thought, Oh
dear,
he's
jealous!
And he wasn't really pleased because I'd bought the cracked jug, well, he was pleased but not
enough.
And Brian thinks I think about George. And I
do
think about George. I suppose that
was
George I saw and I didn't imagine it? I do wish I had more children. I'd love a little girl like Hattie. I wish George was my child too. Oh what
nonsense
my poor head is full of. She said, ‘Let's invite her round.'

‘Who?'

‘Miss Meynell of course. She must be lonely — '

‘She won't be lonely for long,' said Brian. ‘Mark my words, that girl will be a troublemaker.'

‘I can't think why you — '

‘And we will
not
invite her round. For heaven's sake, don't let us mess about with anything to do with Rozanov. Everything about that man brings bad luck. And do take that bloody ribbon off your hair, do you want to look sixteen too?'

After the Brian McCaffreys had disappeared out of the back gate and Hattie and her ‘tutor' had gone into the sitting-room, Pearl Scotney was left alone. She put Gabriel's impulsive cake away in a tin and put on her coat and went out into the garden. Near the Slipper House the lawn, broad and tree-dotted near the house, began to narrow to a meander of green, coming to an end in the thicker maze of trees and shrubs at the end of the garden. Here there was a garden shed, a space for a bonfire, and an area which had once been a grass tennis court. There was also the remains of a small vegetable garden. (The old gardener no longer came regularly.) Pearl walked this way, away from Belmont, and threaded between lilac and viburnum and buddleia and azalea and rhus and small Japanese maples which were putting out vivid curly red buds which looked like decorations made out of coral. Here and there were some taller trees, fir and chestnut and an old ilex. This region, which mixed higher and lower vegetation, was sometimes called ‘the shrubbery', sometimes ‘the copse'. The paths were grassy, or else of sad dark earth grown over with green moss.

Pearl, who liked plants and trees, noticed her surroundings and, as human beings can, took a little pleasure in them in the middle of her general large unhappiness. She felt as she walked, giddy, suffering one of those fits of non- Identity which probably attack most souls at some time. As she had stood at attention behind her ‘young mistress' at the door of the house she had felt, in her apron uniform, invisible. Well, the priest had noticed her; but she had not liked his notice. That young Mrs McCaffrey had thrown her one or two of her vague over-sweet smiles, but that meant nothing. Hattie's ‘we' meant nothing too. Well, it meant something just now in Hattie's heart; but Hattie's heart was entering a danger zone, vulnerable to the world, soon to be public property. Her heart which now hugged its little world in a small space, curled up as in a womb, would soon be enlarged to welcome many, perhaps very many, new loves. New desires, new attractions, new knowledge must come now. Hattie was at the end, the very last soft inaudible breath, of her childhood. It was the time, the
logical
time, for Pearl to let go, indeed to be forced to let go. A mother might feel like this, she thought. But after all a mother is forever. I am not Hattie's mother or her sister or even her second cousin. Hattie has no conception of my relationship to her, and will easily begin to feel it to be unreal and to belong to the past.

Pearl had thought these thoughts many times before, prophetically. Now that the time had come to think them for real, she was so tired of them that she could not regard them as posing any problem she could possibly solve. She had wondered whether, in putting Hattie and herself into the Slipper House, like two dolls put away in a doll's house, John Robert had had any particular end in view. Pearl had imagined, continuing her unremitting guesswork about John Robert's mind, that he had intended Mrs McCaffrey to ‘keep an eye' on Hattie, perhaps to take her over. But this peril, which Pearl had been determined to resist, had not so far materialized. Meanwhile she discouraged Hattie from seeing Alex. It seemed that they were really ‘on their own'. After all, had they not always been so? Only when Hattie was a child ‘on their own' had had a different sense. Hattie had survived marvellously, they had both done, without a social world. They knew a few of Margot's (new very respectable) friends. They had made, in their tramping about Europe, no permanent acquaintances, and this had been partly, Pearl now recognized, because of Pearl's possessiveness as well as because of Hattie's shyness. Hattie had school friends (Verity Smaldon, for instance) to whom Pearl had surrendered her for brief visits. But these were fragile attachments, mere contextual connections. Hattie, so infinitely and emptily ready for the world, was still, unless Pearl possessed her, unpossessed.

But what about John Robert? Throughout the years of Pearl's regime the philosopher had manifested an extraordinary combination of absolute correctness and absolute indifference. Money and plans and instructions materialized with prompt effective clarity. Go here, go there, do this, do that. But mainly the great man had remained invisible, and when he did appear his attentions to Hattie were vague, distracted, absent-minded and reluctant. He was always ‘elsewhere'. He notoriously ‘did not like children', and had never made any serious attempt to ‘get on' with his grand-daughter, whose wordless diffidence matched his own monumental awkwardness and lack of tact. His relations with Pearl had been even more, though correct, without substance. John Robert had taken one look at Pearl and had decided to trust her absolutely. It seemed to her that he had never looked at her since. How much he must have understood in the first look. Or more likely, how carelessly he had gambled with Hattie's welfare and her happiness. If Hattie had detested Pearl she would never have told John Robert. Did he realize this, did he care? The absoluteness of the trust, the large sums of money involved, the larger sums of more important matters, sometimes stunned Pearl and
touched
her with a terrible deep touch. At the same time, once the trust was given, she became invisible, she received only
instructions,
never encouragement or praise. These she would more cheerfully have done without if she had felt that John Robert thought of her even sometimes as something other than an efficient instrument of his will.

Pearl had, at the start, been frightened of John Robert and of the whole situation, though also, of course, excited and elated by it. It was later, when Pearl felt calm and secure enough to
observe
Rozanov, herself unobserved (and since she was ‘invisible' she had many such chances) that the terrible ailment began. How charmless that big, awkward man was, careless about Hattie, egotistically absent-minded, consulting always his convenience and oblivious of theirs. How ugly he was too, fat and flabby and wet-mouthed with jagged yellow teeth. (This was before he had acquired the false ones commented on by George.) His big head and big hooked nose made him look like a vast puppet in a carnival. His movements were graceless and clumsy. His stare was startled and disconcerting as if, when he looked at someone, he simultaneously recalled something awful which had nothing to do with the person looked at. With all this there went a certain decisive precision which Pearl, reciprocating his trust, relied upon. Where the girls' arrangements were concerned, he meant and did what he said. But what he said to
her
were only orders. They never had a conversation.

How differently, two years later, did Pearl feel about the impossible being in whose hand their fates rested. She mistook, at first, her warmer feelings for protectiveness, even pity. She ran to fetch his coat, though she did not presume to help him on with it, an operation which his arthritis had rendered difficult. His stick was not only in view, but polished. She also cleaned his shoes. (He never commented.) Sometimes he told her to make telephone calls to hotels. Once he asked her to go out and buy him a hat. (‘What kind?' ‘Any kind.') That had caused Pearl a lot of joy and pain. She used to say to herself, though never to Hattie, ‘the poor old chap'. He was a shambling eccentric who needed to be looked after. Too late she realized that her heart was involved.

If he had really just been a ‘poor old chap' she would probably have loved him too, but differently. As it was, there was an extra spice of fear and admiration. Not that either Pearl or Hattie had ever read any of his books, but they took it for granted that he was ‘awfully distinguished'. Pearl actually got one of his books out of a library once, but could not understand it and hurriedly took it back for fear he should suddenly arrive and find her reading it: which she knew would displease him very much indeed. Also, she wanted to disguise her obsession from Hattie, and had so far succeeded. It was not Pearl's ‘place' to love John Robert. Meanwhile he walked in her dreams, surrounded by the joy and fear which had been dimly presaged in the adventure with the hat. She must do
everything right,
she must be perfect and
not fail.
Above all, she must not be discovered. It did not occur to her to console herself by taking a heroic stance; her situation was without choice, her course the only possible one. She lived inside a love so improper and so hopeless that she felt sometimes almost
free
to enjoy herself therein. Love, even without hope, was a joyful energy. When John Robert wrote to her she blushed under her dark complexion. Before he came she imagined his coming a hundred times. When he came she was scarlet, faint, but invisible, always efficient. As she stood at attention and awaited his instructions she longed to seize his hand and cover it with kisses. She loved his orders. That was all that he gave her, and it was much. She trembled and he looked through her with his preoccupied and distant eyes.