The Philosopher's Pupil (47 page)

Yet, when he paused, what strange strange fancies crowded inside his mind! Tom fled or dead, John Robert comforting a Hattie now
safe
in secluded widowhood. Could he bear to see her in her husband's house? What sort of old clown's part would there be his? Could he conceive himself welcome ever? If he were capable of being jealous of Pearl, would he not go mad with jealousy of Tom? Did it come to this, that he had finally given up any hope of a relationship between himself and Hattie? Why was he in such a hurry to give her away? Surely he had not imagined the details?
From what horror in himself
was he so precipitately fleeing? His giddy and affrightened thought, shying away from this dark question, even at certain moments wildly imagined that having failed with Amy and Hattie he might be able at last to establish some perfect love relation with
Hattie's daughter
! Prone as he was to melancholia, there were times when John Robert Rozanov forgot that he was old.

John Robert blinked in the soft dim rainy light of the room where no lamps had been put on and where the pink gas fire quietly purred and fluttered. He was aware at once that Hattie had
grown.
It was nearly a year since he had seen her. He thought, so she can still grow? He glowered at her from under his hairy eyebrows. He thought, my God, she is like Linda, she is more and more like Linda, how is it possible? Hattie was taller, older, with her hair done in such a sophisticated way.

‘Do sit down,' said Hattie. She had never before felt like a lady in a house receiving a guest, and such a special guest. It had never been like this in Denver.

John Robert sat in one of the low-slung bamboo chairs which uttered a warning crack. He moved to the window seat. Hattie found an upright chair and sat down.

‘How are you?'

‘Very well, thank you,' said Hattie. They never managed names or titles.

‘You like the house?'

‘Oh it's lovely, lovely!' said Hattie with a fervour which warmed the conversation a little. ‘It's the nicest, sweetest house I've ever been in!'

‘I wish I could buy it for you, I mean I wish I could buy it, only I know Mrs McCaffrey would never sell it. You have met her?'

‘Yes, we met, she's very nice.'

‘Is she?' said John Robert absently. Hattie was facing the window and with his eyes now accustomed to the greenish light he scanned her milky-blue eyes, her palest-gold interwoven hair, and the unblemished smoothness of her face and neck. She wore no make-up and her nose shone a little pinkly. Her lips were pale as if simply drawn in with a light pencil outline. These were not Linda's colours, but the structure of her face was very like Linda's.

‘Yes,' said Hattie, continuing by an answer to his question.

‘Well, well. Are you glad to have left school?'

‘Yes — '

‘You're quite - almost - grown-up now.'

‘Yes, what am I to do next, please?'

This blunt question rather hustled the philosopher who was prepared to come to this, but not immediately. ‘We'll have to think about an English university. You've got those A level exams, haven't you? They sent me your marks. How did you get on with Father Bernard?'

Hattie smiled. Her smile was more of a grin than a young lady's smile, and expressed the amusement she felt at the thought of Father Bernard whom she found rather droll. ‘Very well.'

‘What did he tell you to do?'

‘To do?'

‘To study, to work at.'

‘Oh, nothing. He just told me to read.'

‘To read what?'

‘Anything.'

‘And what are you reading?'

‘
Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
' Hattie had, of course, investigated the lines of faded books which had been in the Slipper House since before the war. This copy of Laclos's masterpiece still showed the shadowy inky schoolgirl signature of Alexandra Stillowen.

‘Oh yes.' John Robert, who had not read a novel since he left school, had not heard of this one, which sounded rather improper, but he did not pursue the matter. He thought, what
does
she know? He hated to imagine. ‘What do you want to study at the university?'

‘Oh, languages I guess, that's all I know. I like reading poetry - and stories - and things — '

There was a silence.

Then Hattie said, ‘Would you like a drink?'

‘A
drink?
' John Robert now noticed on a glass-topped bamboo table toward which Hattie waved her hand, a bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth, a bottle of tonic water, a container for ice and a glass.

John Robert was a habitual abstainer, having never felt the need to reject the sober habits of his family. However, he was not a fanatic and occasionally at parties, to please his host, took a glass of tonic or soda with a tinge of vermouth in it. John Robert looked with displeasure at this worldly little scenario. ‘
You
don't drink, do you?'

‘Good heavens no!' said Hattie with a laugh. ‘I've never had an alcoholic drink in my life!'

Rozanov thought, she's never had one. But she will. And I won't be there. Then he thought, but I
could
be there. Why not now? I can witness her first alcoholic drink, even if I can't witness … He said, ‘Tell Pearl to bring another glass.'

Hattie darted up. In the hall she cannoned into Pearl who was continuing her opera-maid act by listening outside the door and even stopping to peer through the keyhole. ‘He wants another glass,' said Hattie breathlessly. Pearl fled to the kitchen and returned. Nothing in the nature of a wink or a nod or a smile or a glance passed between the two girls. It had always been a rule between them, equally willed by both, that they never made jokes about John Robert or spoke of him other than with the most solemn respect.

Hattie returned with the glass and stood beside the bottles holding it in her hand. She said, ‘Shall I mix you a Martini? I know how it's done!'

‘
How
do you know?'

‘Margot showed me once. She thought it might be useful.'

John Robert did not like the idea of Margot teaching Hattie things, yet he found himself smiling. There was something so infinitely touching and moving in the spectacle of Hattie so eagerly holding the glass, and for once, for a moment, his feeling for her expressed itself simply as pleasure. He heaved himself off the window seat. ‘I'll mix the drinks.' He went to the table and took the glass from Hattie. He put ice into the glass, then a very small measure of vermouth and a lot of tonic water. It was the mildest drink which could possibly be called a drink, but it
was
a drink. He handed it to Hattie and made a similar mixture for himself. They continued to stand, and this was significant.

John Robert took a sip of the mixture. It seemed to go instantly to his head. Hattie still stood, rather wide-eyed, holding her glass. ‘Drink,' he said; and as he said it he felt like some old enchanter.

Hattie sipped the drink. It went straight to her head too. ‘Oh!'

John Robert rambled back to his place and they both sat down.

Hattie said, ‘It's nice.'

‘Do you miss America?' he asked her. He did not often ask such direct, even such interesting questions. He felt as if he had never
really
questioned her before.

Hattie considered. She took another sip of her exciting drink. ‘I don't think I believe in America. I think it's a fiction. I mean it is for me. I imagined it.'

This was the most thought-provoking observation John Robert had ever elicited from her, it seemed to him very meaningful. ‘Yes. I feel that too in a way, though I've lived there much longer than you, of course, I grew up in England. Why is it, do you think?'

‘I don't know - I've only just thought of this idea,' said Hattie. ‘Perhaps it's just a sort of transferred image of the largeness of it and the empty spaces - as if a human being couldn't survey anything so huge. It's as if one has to make a special effort on its behalf for it to be there at all. One would never feel like that about Europe. And then there's the lack of past. I suppose all this is obvious really.'

The notion that Hattie was very intelligent had never figured in John Robert's obsession about her. Of course she was not a fool. But she patently did not regard herself as particularly clever, and John Robert had never speculated on the point. Perhaps she
was
clever, perhaps (the terrible thought came to him) Hattie might one day
become a philosopher.
Was philosophical talent inherited? He could think of no examples. Keeping his head he said, ‘The physical being of the country has always seemed to me unconvincing, as if for real landscape we had to go elsewhere. That may be a matter of scale or because the country hasn't been worked for so long. We recognize ourselves in our work.'

‘But it applies to the wild places too. I mean the Alps are more real than the Rockies. I've always felt the Rockies are a kind of hallucination. I wonder if it's to do with the sort of paintings we've looked at.'

John Robert never looked at paintings but he was prepared to pick up the point. ‘Artists offer us shapes. European art had a good start. Is it the apparent shapelessness of America that strikes us here? That could affect us as a transferred image, to use your good phrase. What is shapeless is unreal.'

‘Some people like that,' said Hattie. ‘I mean they think what's shapeless is more real, more sort of informal and spontaneous, like a wild garden or dropping in for lunch.'

‘Good,' said John Robert appreciatively, ‘but perhaps we should put the problem the other way round. Isn't the trouble with us too that we don't quite feel American. Do you feel American?'

‘No. But I
am
half American, and I value that. I've got an American passport.'

‘Perhaps what we're feeling short of isn't the landscape at all, it's feeling American, and that makes us feel unreal. And then if there are two things, one real and one unreal, we have to take it that we are the real one, so we transfer the unreality to the other.'

‘Feeling American is terribly special. It's such an achievement. It's so miraculously solid, like something demonstrated and proved.'

‘Whereas being English isn't. So
we
are the ones who are turning out to be unreal!'

‘No, no,' said Hattie. ‘I won't let you turn it round like that! America
is
something imaginary. California is imaginary.'

‘Oh California — '

‘Of course I love the Rockies, I love Colorado, the lovely feeling of the snow at night and the aspens red and then mauve, you know, and the light - but I think I like the ghost towns best — '

‘Not the wild country or the big cities but the ruins.'

‘Yes - somehow those derelict places - the old empty broken houses and the old mine workings and the wrecked wagons and the wheels lying in the grass - because it's all so sort of recent and yet so absolutely gone and over, it seems somehow more touching and more past and more intense and more - real — '

‘So you'll believe in America when it's all over!'

‘It's ridiculous,' said Hattie. ‘After all I've been - happy - In America.' She paused here as if about to add wistfully: haven't I?

‘Do you feel English?'

‘Oh no, how could I? I don't feel I'm anything; that is to say, I suppose
I'm
unreal, whatever I am!'

John Robert saw for a moment, as in an insipid wedding photo, the strained anxious faces of Whit and Amy. Perhaps they had actually given him such a photo once. I could have made things different, he thought, and yet could I; it always seemed, for everything I ever thought of, too late. I left her in an empty desert of a childhood, that is her unreal America. And must she not now be recompensed? But not by me. Pain which had been mercifully and briefly absent returned. Then he remembered Tom McCaffrey. He had forgotten his mission, his plan, his final solution. Should he now hesitate, wait, reconsider? He had not rehearsed any speech and everything came out vaguely and casually. Later on he thought that this was probably the best way.

‘I must be off. By the way, you've got an admirer.' He rose to his feet as he spoke.

Hattie, who was not expecting him to go, jumped up too, putting down her glass which was now almost empty. ‘Oh really, what sort of admirer?'

‘What sort do you think? A young man. Tom McCaffrey. He'll probably ring you up. That's what young men do these days.'

‘McCaffrey! He must be related to Mrs McCaffrey.'

‘Her son, well, step-son, the youngest one. Anyway I thought I'd warn you! I'd like that. He'd make you a nice husband!' The last bit was intended to sound jocular but could not help seeming a bit portentous.

However, Hattie did not take it in, she was trying to imagine how he knew she existed. ‘But he can't even have seen me!'

‘A lot of people have seen you, a lot of people are
interested
in you.'

‘How horrid.'

‘Anyway, I thought I'd mention his name in confidence, you know, as an introduction, so that you won't just send him away.'

‘But I don't want an admirer! It must be a joke!'

‘
You
are not a joke,' said John Robert, and all his awkwardness returned. He said, ‘Well, if you don't want an admirer, what do you want?'

‘I want a black cat with white paws!' Hattie said this in a jesting tone, but now she was maladroit and awkward too. She added, ‘But of course, that's not serious, I couldn't have one, I mean unless I lived somewhere like here, and I don't, and even here - there are foxes in the garden - did you know? - I wonder if a fox would attack a cat?'

‘Better no cat,' said John Robert.

‘Better no cat.' Suddenly for a moment it looked as if Hattie was going to cry, there was a kind of little gauzy hazy cloud in front of her eyes. She said, ‘You asked me what I missed. I miss my father. But that's different. The cat made me think of him.'