The Philosopher's Pupil (56 page)

The shutters closed and the lights went out on the lawn just as George was making his way down the garden. Someone rose up from the grass and gave him a glass of wine.

Pearl said to Hattie, ‘Look, if you're so upset I'll go out and ask him in.'

‘No!'

Then I'll go and talk to him and find out what's happening, I'm sure he didn't mean to — '

‘No, don't go away!'

Nesta said to Diane, ‘Come back to my place tonight. Just as a beginning, just to show you can — '

Sitting on a seat embowered in bushes Bobbie Benning, who had had a great deal to drink, was starting to feel sick. He thought, I'm no good, I must resign my job. I'll never get another, I'll be on the dole, whatever will my mother think, it'll kill her.

Peter Blackett was saying to anyone who could hear, ‘I gave him a drink, then I saw he was George McCaffrey, did I have a turn!'

Jeremy Blackett said, ‘Peter, it's time for you to go home.'

‘I think we'd all better go home,' said Olivia Newbold.

‘Are things going to turn nasty?'

Valerie Cossom, portentously beautiful in her long white robe, had heard that George was in the garden and was looking for him. Hector Gaines was looking for Anthea. The middle of the garden was dark, but lights from Belmont could be seen at one end, and the street lights in Forum Way at the other illuminated the trees.

Tom was at his wits' end. The noise and the laughter was louder than before and he had the impression that a number of complete strangers had come in through the back gate. He wanted to
explain
to Hattie, but couldn't see how to do this and couldn't bear to go away either. He had thought of something else which distressed him: Dominic Wiggins must have assumed, and would tell Nesta, that he was taking Anthea to ‘Lovers' Lane' to lie down under a hawthorn bush.

Father Bernard had lost Diane but found Bobbie Benning. He sat beside the distraught youngster with his arm around him. ‘My dear boy, tell me
all.
'

Pearl said to Hattie, ‘I'll go out and find him, don't grieve, I won't be long. I'll go the back way, you lock up, and I'll call when I'm back.'

Valerie said, ‘Hello, Nesta, have you seen George? Oh hello, Diane, have you seen George?'

‘Is he here?' said Diane, and scuttled away among the shrubs.

‘She's like a terrified little mouse,' said Nesta. ‘It makes me sick to see a woman so frightened of a man.'

Valerie, searching, grieving, had passed on.

Tom thought, I can't go and knock on the door, I'd look a complete fool there not being let in, it's all shameful, I really must go home. I'll write a letter of apology tomorrow. Oh
God.
As he began to walk unsteadily up the garden towards Belmont he became aware that he was being followed by a girl, a strange girl. Heaven knew who was in the garden by now, but there was nothing he could do about it. He felt reckless and remorseful and angry. He said, ‘Hello, what are you doing here?' He added, ‘What am I doing here, if it comes to that.'

The curtains were drawn in the Belmont drawing-room, but the big uncurtained landing window, which showed the white sweep of the stairs, gave a diffused light. Tom looked at the girl who was giggling, perhaps a bit tipsy, and throwing her longish fair hair about. She was rather tall and wearing a smart silky multi-coloured dress. Now she came on, sidling boldly up against him. Tom, recoiling, looked at her again, more closely.

‘
Emma!
You
wretch!
This is
too bloody
much!
And
you're drunk, you
reek
of whisky!'

‘Have some, I've brought it with me, let's sit down somewhere.'

‘You're horribly drunk. How did you know we were here?'

‘I met some drunks near the pub who said there was a party at the Slipper House. Where are the girls?'

‘If you mean Hattie Meynell, she's in the house with the shutters closed!'

‘I thought you'd come to serenade her, after all Rozanov is forcing you to marry her!'

‘Oh
shut
up!'

Emma caught Tom round the waist.

Pearl had been gone for some time and Hattie was very upset. She was standing in the sitting-room, but with the door ajar so that she could hear Pearl's knock and call. She was scared and affronted by the extraordinary mob outside whose noise showed no sign of abating, and deeply hurt and angered by Tom's extraordinary and spiteful treachery. Now everything had gone so wrong and so sour. She regretted having let Pearl go out to look for him, which might seem like a capitulation, as if she were pursuing him.

At that moment Hattie heard a curious sound at the back of the house as of a door opening and a footstep. It could not be Pearl, after whom she had firmly locked the back door, indeed all the doors were locked and the windows fastened. As she held her hands to her face in horror, the door of the sitting-room began to move and a man came in. It was George McCaffrey.

Hattie and Pearl had of course discussed George, casually before, and in more detail after, their meeting with him on the family picnic. Here Hattie had been as ready as the others to appreciate his heroic rescue of Zed, but had resented the insolent and, she felt, mocking way in which he had stared at her. She had also been annoyed by his misappropriation of the Rover, which had meant that she and Pearl had had to convey Alex and Ruby back to Belmont. (Alex had not concealed her dissatisfaction at this arrangement.) Hattie thought people should behave properly and was unamused by George's waywardness which the family seemed too much to condone. Pearl had said, though in vague terms since she knew little about it, that George had once been John Robert's pupil, and this information also, for some reason, displeased Hattie who began to manifest nervous irritation when his name came up. Pearl had earlier imparted to her the usual legend about George's awfulness, together with her own view that he was simply mad.

George certainly, as he entered the room, looked rather mad. His gaze had the squinting intensity of Alex's ‘cat look'. His round face was shining, as if covered with sweat, his wide-apart brown eyes were big and moist with emotion, and he was smiling inanely displaying his little square teeth. His head looked weird, like a flickering pumpkin face illuminated from within. He had entered the Slipper House through the coal house, which had an interior window into the back passage which had originally given on to the outside before the annexe was added just before the war. This window, which was covered by a curtain, was inconspicuous and had a faulty catch, promptly highlighted by George's memory as he walked down the garden. He was excited by the sudden strange night scene and by what he overheard someone say about the girls being ‘barricaded inside the house'. He began to feel that deep nervous urge which he had described to Rozanov as a ‘sense of duty'. He was constrained to, he had to go to the Slipper House and get inside and look again at the girl whose image still chiefly lived in his mind as a flying-haired thing in a white petticoat glimpsed through a window. He had had a good stare at her on the picnic, but this eyeful had on the whole defused the intensity of his interest and fortified his view of her as simply ‘taboo'. He could not afford to be fascinated by Hattie, and was relieved to find that after all he was not. But now, as if he had made a
mistake
which was being corrected by the gods, everything had switched round again, and he was being drawn towards her by the constraint of an exquisite and agonizing obligation.

Tom had been called away by Hector Gaines, who was asking him how they could end the awful carnival and persuade everybody to go. Anthea Eastcote had gone home disgusted with it all, so someone told Hector who was now chastened and miserable. A crashing among the magnolias suggested that the garden was suffering damage. Emma was waltzing by himself under the ginkgo tree when he encountered Pearl. He recognized her at once although, for her sortie, Pearl had disguised herself. She had on a long dark coat and a scarf round her head.

Emma said, ‘Hello, dear.'

Pearl said, ‘Have you seen Tom McCaffrey?'

‘No, dear. Don't go, dear.'

‘Excuse me — '

‘Pearl — '

Pearl recognized him. ‘Oh - Mr Scarlett-Taylor — '

‘Don't be silly, my name is - let me see, what is my name — '

‘You're drunk.'

‘I've got a whisky bottle here, have some.'

‘It's horrible, dressing up like that, it's vulgar, you look awful, it's all awful, all those people coming and shouting outside our windows, it's hateful, I can't understand it. We're going to call the police. Take off that wig!'

Emma took off the wig. He had found it in Judy's cupboard as he rooted about when Tom was away and it had given him the idea. He had enjoyed deciding which of Ju's various garments to put on. He threw the wig up into the branches of the ginkgo tree. ‘Someone said there was a party here.'

‘It's a disgrace. Go home.'

‘Pearl, do you mind, I'm going to kiss you.'

Emma was only a little taller than Pearl. He dropped his whisky bottle on the ground and put his two arms carefully round her waist, gathering in the black coat and drawing her to him. He raised one hand to thrust back the scarf from her face, then returned the hand to her waist, locking her firmly. Breathing deeply he felt about, feeling her face with his face, seeking her lips with his lips. He found her lips and gently but resolutely pressed his own dry mouth against them. It was a dry kiss between sealed lips. He stood maintaining the pressure, shifting slightly to keep his balance, and closing his eyes. Pearl's hands, which had been against his shoulders, to push him away, relaxed and then moved a little to hold him. They stood perfectly still together.

George stared at Hattie. Hattie had her hair in two plaits which were drawn forward over her shoulders. She had on the mauve dress from Anne Lapwing's, for it had been a warm day, and over it for the cool evening a long loose grey cardigan with its sleeves pushed up. She wore short white socks inside her embroidered slippers. She looked like a thin frail schoolgirl, and yet she had a dignified startled embattled look, her head thrown back, her face, milky brown from the sun but still pale, pouting in a kind of intensity which answered the challenge of George's squinting cat stare. Her lips were thrust forward in an expression of anger, suddenly like that of her grandfather.

George said, ‘Good evening.'

Hattie said, ‘How did you get in?'

‘I hope I don't intrude.'

‘You do intrude, you simply walked in, I didn't invite you, this isn't your house, just because you're one of those McCaffreys you seem to think — '

‘Why are you so cross with us McCaffreys?'

‘You and your brother have organized this monstrous impertinence. This is what it's for, that you should come like this, I see now what it's all about — '

‘Well, I don't,' said George. ‘Don't be so excited.'

‘I'm not excited, I'm furiously angry — '

‘All right, you're furiously angry, but don't be angry with me, I didn't do this, I'm blameless — '

‘You're - you're horrible -just like people said - go away - you frighten me — '

This was an unwise thing for Hattie to say. George's emotions as he had climbed in through the coal house window and tiptoed to the sitting-room had been confused, not excluding fear: a piercing exciting amalgam of apprehension and weird joy and a special old urgent feeling of guilt which was indistinguishable from his special feeling of obligation. The sudden shock of Hattie's presence, and her defiant stance, sobered him a little and stirred him to think. Thought, evidently, had been absent. He had made beforehand no plan or picture of this encounter. So, there was to be a conversation, perhaps an argument, a battle of wits? This prospect changed the tempo, prompting reflection, intellectual strategy. But Hattie's words, ‘You frighten me', were a signal which set off a new stream of emotion, now more clearly defined, a sudden desire not to embrace the girl but to crush her as a large animal crushes a small animal, to feel her fragile bones crack between his teeth.

Hattie saw his inane smile and his lighted eyes and she picked up the limestone hand from the table.

‘What do you think you're doing?' said Ruby to Diane.

Ruby had been wandering about among the revellers, sometimes standing with arms folded and looking. The scene seemed to afford her satisfaction. Prowling like a dog, sniffing for the hated foxes, round the perimeter of the stone wall which enclosed the Belmont garden she had come across Diane, crouched, balanced awkwardly against the low branch of a yew tree, half-hidden in the thick blackish foliage.

‘Are you hiding?' said Ruby. ‘What are you hiding for?'

With a little ‘Ach!' of misery and irritation, Diane pulled herself up out of the yew. She had come to church without a coat and was now feeling extremely cold. Her dress had become clammy from damp earth and dew as she scuttled like a trapped mouse round the edges of the garden in the dark spongy mossy ‘corridor' between the trees and shrubs and the wall, trying to catch a glimpse of George from whose rumoured proximity she could not bring herself to depart.

Upstairs in the warm brightly lit space of the Belmont drawing-room, behind drawn curtains, Alex opened another bottle of whisky. She was no longer frightened, she no longer cared about what was happening in the garden or who invaded it. She rather hoped there might be some catastrophe, a murder, or the Slipper House catching fire. As she returned across the room she caught sight of herself in the gilt arch of the big mirror over the mantelpiece. Her face was flushed and puffy, her eyes framed by discoloured wrinkles, her hair hanging down in dull witchy strings. She thought, can it really and truly be that I am no longer beautiful? Tears came into her eyes.