The Philosopher's Pupil (44 page)

He walked on a bit, his feet softly printing the deep furry carpet. When he reached the door of number forty-four he stood and listened. There was only water noise within. He knocked softly. Nothing. Could his knock be heard? Should he knock more loudly? Should he enter? He turned the handle very gently and pushed the door a little. Nothing, except that the water noise was louder and the sulphur smell stronger. He pushed the door a little more and peered in. The room was lighter than the dim corridor, obliquely touched by the sun, and almost dazzling for a moment by contrast, even though a curtain had been half pulled across the window. George saw first a table piled with books and papers, then the bed and the great form of the philosopher lying upon it. He was asleep.

George released his breath and quickly, after a glance behind him along the empty corridor, slid into the room. The noise inside the room was considerable since Rozanov had left his bathroom door open. George closed the outside door. He was not unduly surprised either to find Rozanov in, or to find him asleep. John Robert lived by a rigid timetable which involved early work and late work and a deep sleep of about an hour's duration in the afternoon. (This sleep, he maintained, enabled him to live two days in the space of one.) He was lying, now, upon his back and snoring. George stood, his hand upon his heart, gazing. Then he moved quietly forward.

No young swain of twenty, as it might be Tom McCaffrey, as he approached the half-naked slumbering body, carelessly relaxed, of the young girl (figured perhaps as a shepherdess) whom he adored, could have felt a greater excitement than did George in thus surprising John Robert Rozanov asleep. John Robert was clothed, but with his shirt open and the waist of his trousers undone. He was not inside the bedclothes, but lay on top of them with the crumpled white bed cover pulled up roughly as far as his knees. One shoeless foot, clad in a thick blue woollen sock, protruded. One hand lay upon his chest, the other was extended, palm upward, over the edge of the bed, extended toward George in what looked like an amicable gesture. George studied the open hand. Then he looked at the sleeping face. John Robert's face did not look calm in repose. The open moist lips, through which the slightly bubbling snore emerged, were still urgently thrust forward in the dominating
moue
which was their customary expression. The closed eyes, in their stained hollows, were slightly screwed up. The cheek-bones still protruded upon the flabby face, and the furrows on either side of the large hooked nose were like violent scourings. Upon the forehead, above which the frizzy grey hair had not yet started to recede, the flesh rose soft and pink in little regular pipings between the deep lines. A dirty grey stubble covered the chin and the thick much-folded saurian neck. Only the chin seemed weaker, less formidably decisive. George realized with a little shock the reason for this. John Robert had taken out his false teeth, which were to be seen glinting upwards in a shallow white cup upon the bedside table.

George gazed, conscious of his own breathing and of the strained heavings of his chest. Then he backed away and, glancing often at the bed, inspected the room. The windows of the lower rooms (which on this side of the building looked across a private lawn to the trees of the Botanic Garden) had, after much controversy, been fitted with frosted glass. George felt in no danger of being seen, other than by the terrible sleeper, as he poked about. He went to close the double doors of the bathroom in order to decrease the insistent noise, then feared that a sudden change in vibration might awaken his teacher. He sidled into the bathroom and gazed on the exotic little scene, familiar to him since he had, in younger and more carefree days, treated himself to the enjoyment of the waters in this particularly intense privacy. The taps disgorged their thick noisy jets with fast aggressive violence, and the foot or so of water which constantly surged and frothed in the bottom of the curving blunt-ended bath was covered in tumbling puff-balls of steam. The tiles gleamed and moistly ran, and the place was filled with a faint warm fog which seemed to put a film over George's eyes as he looked with fascination upon the hot violence.

He stood again at the foot of the sage's bed, and his heart moved within him, twisting and turning like a hooked fish. He saw now, not the familiar features, but, even more familiar, the perpetual lowering frown of purpose and dominating insight which seemed, even in sleep, to be hovering on guard above them; and he felt in the crammed blackness of his soul remorse, regret, resentment, loss, anger and terrible longing, that composition of love and hate which can be the most painful and degrading sensation in the world.

George turned at last to look at the table. Here, it seemed, John Robert had been at work. There were books: George noticed Plato, Kant, Heidegger; minds inside which John Robert had expended, perhaps wasted, his whole life. Hume's
Treatise
was there too, and Schopenhauer's
Well als Wille und Vorstellung.
There was also a number of thick notebooks, one of which was open at a page which was written in John Robert's inky hand which looked so much like looking-glass writing. George thought, it's the great book, it's all here! He peered at the page, knowing well how to read John Robert's scrawl.

If at a certain point it becomes impossible, for the sort of reasons suggested above, to maintain the conception of personal ownership of inner presentations, it is admittedly difficult to continue to attribute to these anything recognizable as ‘value'. The notion of the
possibility
of placing every perception (even) upon a moral scale was argued to be inseparable from the concept itself. But in what sense can value be asserted in the absence of the person? I must refer back at this point to my discussion of Husserl's reduction, and to the peculiar sense in which his method denies transcendence.

George heard a faint sound behind him and swung round in fright; but all was well. John Robert had turned slightly on his side and was snoring less loudly. George stood a moment, while his senses whirled in a wild kaleidoscope, unable to focus upon the room after looking so intently at the white page. Then he tiptoed swiftly to the door and, without looking back, let himself quietly out into the corridor, where again he was blinded by the dimness after the subdued sunlight of the bedroom. He blinked and looked both ways. There was no one there. Yes, there was someone, a woman, standing against the wall down near the door marked
PRIVATE
through which he had come in. It was Diane.

Ever since the moment when she had started away ‘like an otter' from the watery presence, and the so-forbidden
touch,
of Tom McCaffrey, Diane had been in a state near to madness. She could no longer sit patiently at home, taking modest trips abroad and returning like a soldier to her post, waiting for George to come. She had to go now and
search
for him, however fatally displeased he might be when she found him. The desire to see him, to be with him, made a dark sick pain which gradually assumed the aspect of fate. Within this great pain there was a tiny sparklet of joy, which joy was presumably hope. George was unhappy, outcast, alone.
Only she
really loved him and could save him from himself. Diane had, of course, heard (Mrs Belton had seen to that) the Institute rumour that George had killed Stella and hidden her body (some said in his back garden or on the Common, some said in the canal, some in the deep intestines of the Institute itself, where the old workings which went down to the source contained many abandoned chambers and old shafts, some going back perhaps as far as Roman times). The people who eagerly passed this rumour around less than half believed it, and Diane did not believe it at all. But what had made her leap away in anguish from Tom's stupid, thoughtless jest was a deep and wretched desire that something like that might be true, that Stella might somehow be dead,
even if
this meant that George would go to prison for life. Then their parts would be reversed,
he
in prison and wanting to be visited, while she roamed mysterious and free. Out of this poisonous seed had grown the agony which drove her out to look for him.

Diane was so desperate that she set off at first for Druidsdale. She got no further however than the Roman bridge.
Suppose Stella were at George's house;
suppose she had been there all the time, not in a shallow grave in the garden, but living there as part of some
conspiracy,
laughing with George at what the town might think? That this made no sense did not prevent Diane from supposing it. With George, anything was possible. She turned back and made her way up Burkestown High Road to 16 Hare Lane, where she knew Rozanov lived, because at least that was somewhere to go. She walked up and down a bit on the other side of the street watching the door and trying to believe that George might at any moment emerge. She had to cling to one hope after another, each bringing with it a delusive fading gleam, succeeded by the unmitigated pain. When it became as clear to her that George was not there as it had previously been that he might be, she
ran
to the Institute, arriving moaning with breathlessness and fatigue, and installed herself on the Promenade, close to the long window, whence, pacing about, she kept a restless watch, not caring whether people saw her and stared. At last she purchased a cup of tea and sat down in a daze of misery. She awoke from this to see quite plainly the figure of George passing quite close to her (he did not see her) and disappearing through the door into the Baptistry. It was now a slack time of the afternoon and no one saw George, silent as a fox, slink in through that partly open door, and no one saw Diane with equally wary little padding steps follow in after him. She passed the hot bronze doors of the source and came out into the long carpeted corridor which vibrated with water sound and smelt of water. She arrived in time to see George disappearing into one of the rooms. She tiptoed down a little, but did not dare to try to listen outside. She had never been inside the Ennistone Rooms and the mystery of them appalled her, together with the fear of George's finding her, and the impossibility now of going away without seeing him. She retreated toward the door through which she had entered and stood there in aching indecision. She gazed and gazed until her eyes ached and flashed and she could almost believe that he could have gone away without her seeing him.

Suddenly George erupted from the room, stood a moment, then began to
run
towards her. This dreadful
running
made Diane utter a little bird-cry of helpless terror. She flattened herself against the wall. George approached her like a terrible huge deadly animal, not like a lion so much as a towering gorilla, a huge ape with immense swinging arms. As he approached her he raised an arm as if with one blow he would sweep her from his way. Diane sank to her knees and closed her eyes.

‘Kid, kid, get up, don't be frightened.'

In a moment he had lifted her and held her sobbing against him.

‘Stop it, don't make a noise, let's see if that door's still open, yes it is, good, go now, go home — '

‘I'll go - I'm sorry - I'll go.'

‘Look, you go on first - I'll come after - I'll be with you in half an hour - go, go, stop crying, you silly baby!'

Sobbing now with joy, Diane made her way home.

Clothed again, Diane lay upon her sofa in the elegant (though not entirely comfortable) pose which George liked. She had put on her black silky dress and her glittering metallic necklace with the long teeth which George called her ‘slave's collar'. George in his light-grey check trousers and his pale blue (finely striped with dark blue) shirt, which he still wore unbuttoned and untucked, walked about the room, picking his way, kicking the stuff on the floor out of his path. He walked fast in the small area as a man might walk in a large area, or as a strong wild animal might move in a small cage, walking with unnecessary energy, turning round abruptly, jerkily, at the end of every few steps. Diane looked up at him anxiously, her brief joy still smouldering, fear and panic again at hand. His movements made her feel tired and full of foreboding.

George, having reached the piano, picked up a little black metal monkey, very small, which Diane had had with her in her wanderings since before she could remember. The little things, her substitute children as the man had unkindly said, were, like magical charms which survive into another scene to
prove
that one did not dream the previous one, proofs to Diane's unconscious mind that innocence existed, her innocence and no one else's. George too responded unconsciously in much the same way to the presence of the little things, old and new, which were a visible extension of Diane's soul. He respected them. Now, however, he frowned at the little monkey because it reminded him of one of Stella's netsuke.

He put the monkey down and opened the piano and struck two notes. (He could not play the piano any more than Diane could.) ‘The call of destiny'. He turned and looked at her and smiled showing his little square teeth. His eyes, so wide apart, looked rather mad. It had never occurred to Diane that wide apart eyes looked mad. His eyes glowed and gleamed with imminent laughter, but the laughter did not come. He seemed to be in extremely high spirits.

‘Hello, kid.'

‘Hello, darling. Long time no see.'

‘Hey nonny nonny. No? OK?'

‘OK.'

‘Thank God you're here.'

‘I'm always here. I wish you were always here.'

‘Oh me - the plough has passed over my back and I have survived. But it is no matter.'

‘What isn't?'

‘Anything, everything. However, it's going to be
all right.
'

‘What is?'

‘Anything. Everything.'

‘I wish I thought so. Do sit down and hold my hand.'

‘I see my way through, I see the light shining beyond, Eternity's sunrise.'

‘Am I there - in the light?'

‘You? Why are you so self-centred?'