The Philosopher's Pupil (57 page)

‘Well, should we just go home?' said Hector.

‘We can't go home and leave this mob here,' said Tom.

‘Some people have gone.'

‘Yes, but others have come, I saw someone coming through the gate with beer bottles just now. I have an unpleasant feeling they're all waiting for something to happen!'

They were standing on the grass just outside the Slipper House.

Valerie Cossom appeared, her white robe now smudged with green from sitting on the grass. ‘George is here, have you seen him?'

‘
George?
Oh no!'

At that moment the shutters of the Slipper House sitting-room were suddenly thrown open from within, and the bright lights of the room flooded out making a brilliant rectangle upon the lawn. There were exclamations, a little cheer, people appeared out of the dark and crowded forward.

The scene within was clearly visible. Facing the window was George. At the window, in profile to the spectators, was Hattie, who had just opened the shutters. As the jostling, giggling spectators watched, George advanced upon the girl. It was evident that he wanted to close the shutters again. But Hattie, with a gesture of defiant authority, stretched out her arm, half-bare with the cardigan sleeve tucked up, across the unshuttered window. George paused.

Tom, who was standing in front of the others, close up against the window, as he had stood earlier in the evening, thought his head would burst. Then he cried out in a loud voice, ‘George, go home - oh George, go home!' In the next second someone (it was Emma) took up Tom's cry, intoning it softly as a chant to the tune of ‘Onward Christian soldiers', better known to some as ‘Lloyd George knows my father'. This latter song (as is well known to college deans) is irresistible to drunks and can be guaranteed to charm the savage breasts of troublesome students in their cups. In a moment all the revellers assembled in front of the Slipper House were singing at the tops of their voices, ‘George go home, oh George go home, George go home, oh George …' The considerable noise of united voices, penetrating through Victoria Park, drew a number of late home-comers including myself (N, your narrator). I had been attending a learned meeting at a house nearby, was coming down Tasker Road just as the song rang out, and was able to witness some at least of its sequel. A little crowd soon collected in front of Belmont. The police arrived when it was all over.

The effect upon George was clearly visible in the utmost detail. He stepped back and a look of embarrassment and irritation, then of extreme dismay, appeared on his face. Those who do not fear disapproval may be abjectly terrified of ridicule. The combination of Hattie's outstretched arm and the loud derisive singing was too much. He turned and vanished from the room. He plunged through the hall to the back door, unlocked it and shouldered his way past Pearl who was desperately knocking on the outside. Pearl skipped in and locked the door. Hattie closed the shutters.

George ran through the garden in the direction of Belmont, then down past the garage to the road, followed by the scornful hooting of those who had spotted his escape. (This ludicrous episode was the nearest which George came at this time to being lynched.) The song continued for a while, then raggedly died away in laughter. George ran away down the road, turning in the direction of the canal. In the confusion not everyone noticed (but I did) that he was followed by two women, first Valerie Cossom, and then Diane. Following the two women padded the priest, Father Bernard, and after Father Bernard padded I.

Tom held his head, which was still bursting. The revellers, pleased with their exploit, were laughing and dancing about. Some had reached the stage of drunkenness where more drink and the continuation of the party had become absolute necessities. Rupert Chalmers, Maisie's brother, son of Vernon Chalmers whose house was close by, was heard asking for volunteers to raid his father's cellar. Hector, in despair, had started drinking again. He was gazing in a confused manner at Emma, who, with his glasses on and without his wig, had evidently forgotten that he was wearing one of Judy Osmore's cocktail dresses.

‘Good evening, Scarlett-Taylor,' said Hector, swaying slightly to and fro.

‘Emma,' said Tom, ‘how on earth are we going to get rid of this lot? Someone will call the police, and I'm scared cold that Rozanov will find out. Oh God, if only you weren't drunk — '

‘Well, I got rid of George, didn't I?'

‘Yes, yes, marvellous - but now - think of something — '

Emma stepped back with a movement like that of an athlete or dancer about to perform, with perfect confidence, a very difficult feat. He half turned, spread out his arms, and began to sing. He sang now with his full voice, with all its high weird slightly husky penetrating force, he sang as a fox might sing if foxes could sing. The sound of his voice filled the garden and made it resonate like a drum; waves of sound gathered the garden together into a great vibrating bubble of thrilling sound. And beyond the garden, Emma's voice was heard in the night in streets and houses far around, where people awoke from sleep as if touched by an electric ray, and china in distant kitchens shuddered and rang in sympathy. It was claimed later that his singing could be heard as far away as Blanch Cottages and Druidsdale, though this no doubt was an exaggeration. What he sang was,

Music for a while

Shall your cares beguile …

Come away, do not stay,

But obey, while we play,

For hell's broke up and ghosts have holiday.

The effect upon the revellers was indeed that of an enchantment. They became, of course, instantly silent. It would have been impossible to utter speech against the authority of that voice. And they stood where they were, as still as statues, some even in the attitudes in which the music had surprised them, kneeling on one knee or holding up a hand. It was as if they had all drawn a deep breath and were holding it. Their faces, dimly seen beneath the lamp-lit trees, were rapt and grave as the song continued. Tom whispered to Hector, ‘Quick, see them off, quietly.' Tom and Hector, as if they were the last men left alive, began to move among the throng, touching people on the shoulder and whispering, ‘Go now, please, it's time to go,' ‘Time to go home, please go now.' Sometimes a little push was necessary. More often the grave-faced listener, as if he were reverently leaving a ceremony in church, turned and tiptoed off. One after the other, the touch of Tom and Hector animated the petrified guests and sent them on their way. Some even bowed their heads and folded their hands as they set off, now trooping in a long line, toward the back gate. At last they were all gone, even Bobbie Benning who had been found asleep on the seat where he had sat and confided in Father Bernard. Even Hector had gone and the song had died away. Tom and Emma stood alone in the garden. They put their arms round each other and silently laughed or perhaps cried.

Did I push the car or did I just imagine that I pushed it? George had reached the canal, the place beside the iron Foot-bridge. He had already forgotten (though he would remember later) his humiliation at the Slipper House. Clouds of emotion which had hung about this place were there waiting for him; undiminished, they engulfed him in their stupefying fumes. He had been away, he had had to come back, it was all as before. What on earth happened, thought George, what did I do, what
am
I? It had been raining on that night; he remembered the rain surging to and fro on the windscreen and the way the yellow lights on the quay got mixed up with the rain. He remembered the cruel bumping of the fast-driven car upon the cobbles. He had turned the steering wheel and the car had plunged into the canal. He saw again the wet white top of the car looking so odd just above the dark disturbed waters whose waves were breaking against it. Somewhere in the sequence of events or dream events were his hands, slipping a little, spread out upon the rainy back window of the car and the slithering of his braced feet upon the stones. He seemed to recall now that he had moved his hands lower down to get a better leverage. Then he had fallen. If he fell, did that prove that he had pushed the car? He looked down at the square unevenly tilting granite cobbles and at the edge of the canal, all glittering with tiny sparks in the lamplight. He felt the cobbles springily with his feet, shifting back and forth and trying to remember.

The warm summer night was soft and quiet, and the three-quarter moon rising over the dark countryside beyond the wasteland made a private silver brilliance in the sky which seemed, as George stood under the yellow lamps, very remote from the earth. Beyond the iron bridge the fretty outline of the gas works rose in moon- Illumined silhouette. The lamplight showed a lurid green haze upon the quayside where tufts of grass were growing between the stones. Here Ennistone was asleep. There were no lights showing across the canal beyond the empty ragged rubbishy vegetation, which could not be called a field, which separated the canal from the houses. On this side, behind railings, a maze of partly derelict ‘light industry' yards and sheds and one-storey brick buildings divided the canal from the road (known as ‘the Commercial Road') which led toward Victoria Park. A dog was barking.

George closed his eyes and tried to breathe slowly and deeply. That awful giddiness was coming upon him, that physically announced loss of identity, a most intense sense of his body, of its bulky heavy solidity and of his various views of it, combined with the absolute disappearance of its inhabitant. This suddenly painful body-presence produced a kind of seasickness and a heavy metaphysical ache. He thought, hold on, it will pass. Then somewhere inside the sick weight where he no longer was came the thought, where is Stella, where is she? He thought, I know, but I've forgotten. She isn't dead, that's certain. Surely I know where she is? But she's there in the form of a black hole, like not finding a word. I can't remember anything about her, what happened to her after
this,
where she was, where she went. Fancy not knowing. I must find out, I must ask somebody. Perhaps it's drink, I'm drinking more than I used to.

Did
I push the car, he wondered as the giddiness receded. If I could only start up some sort of memory. He began weaving about on the cobbles, moving his hands, moving his feet, miming turning the car, stopping the car (did he stop it?), getting out of the car, coming round behind the car and pushing it with his hands spread out like stars. If he now imagined them ‘like stars', did that mean that he had actually seen them like that as they slipped and strained upon the window? Or had he in a
fantasy
seen them ‘like stars'? Could he not hang on to something here as a
clue?
But the clue slipped away and returned him to a futile empty helpless feeling of blankness. If only someone else could tell him. If only there had been a witness. But surely there had been a witness, and he had even recognized the witness? But this idea too dissolved in his mind and disappeared.

He thought, I'm in a bad way, I must ask people, seek for help. I'll go to John Robert. He
must
receive me
in the end.
This formulation gave comfort. He thought, I'll write him a letter, I'll explain everything. That's what I'll do, a letter will explain it all. He can't really be so cruel, he hasn't understood, it's a
mistake.
I'll write him a
good
letter, a clear honest letter, he'll respect that. Then he'll see me and be kind to me and oh how my heart will be relieved. Hope came back to George like a genial light of an opening door, quietly dispelling the dark and giving him back himself. Now there was a future. He felt gentle, intelligible, whole. He breathed calmly. He thought, that is how it will be. It will be all right. And I will be all right, I will be better. I'll go home now and sleep. He began to walk along the quay in the direction of Druidsdale.

Stationed in different hiding-places, four persons were watching George. Valerie had gone through a gate into a factory yard and was watching him through the railings. Diane was on the quay behind a big elder bush which was growing between the stones. Father Bernard was a little way behind Diane, relying on a curve in the quay for shelter, and peeping and peering so as to keep both Diane and beyond her George in view. I had made a circuit, since I knew what George's objective was, by the Commercial Road and had come out on the quay beyond the iron bridge, where I had mounted on top of a pile of household junk which someone had illicitly dumped. From here I could see George clearly and also command a view of my fellow watchers.

The evening had no dramatic climax, it faded away rather into a kind of melancholy elegiac peace. From my vantage point, lying concealed behind a crest of old mattresses, I could see, for she was close to me, Valerie Cossom's grave beautiful face, looking with such sadness and such anxiety toward George as he performed on the quayside what must have seemed to her mad unintelligible antics. (I had of course realized at once that George was re-enacting his drama.) And I thought how fortunate George was to be loved by this beautiful intelligent girl, and how little his ‘fortune' was worth to him. More distantly I could discern poor Diane uncomfortably crouched between her bushy tree and the railings and beyond the dark shape of Father Bernard, his long skirt swinging as he bobbed to and fro, looking, then hiding. There was something ridiculous in the scene, and yet something moving too. We had all presumably come to ‘look after' George, though Father Bernard had also doubtless come to protect Diane. The idea that George might suddenly hurl himself into the canal, simply as a crazy act of violence, was certainly in my mind. I did not see him as about to commit suicide. (In any case no Ennistonian would choose to attempt death by drowning.) I was relieved when George turned away from the fatal place and began to tramp off home. The crisis appeared to be over. (I may say that I discussed this scene much later with two of the participants.) As George passed her, Diane crouched down into a little dark ball behind her tree. It is just possible that George saw her and ignored her. Father Bernard, in absurd haste, squeezed himself back through a gap in the railings. Valerie, safe where she was, did not move. I could not help wanting to laugh as I saw the scene dissolve.