The Philosopher's Pupil (9 page)

This leak of her unconscious mind into her surroundings, this theft of her vitality by malicious forces, was now becoming connected for Alex with the problem of Ruby, and this upset her much more. She did not really think that Ruby deliberately hid things and found them again, but it was as if Ruby had become the human ‘front' of a revolt against Alex of her most familiar world. Alex could not imagine her life without Ruby, if Ruby were simply to go away. Herein Ruby appeared as a defence, not before recognized as such, against gathering forces. On the other hand, if what Ruby wanted was to be welcomed at last, by some revolutionary change, into an equal and quite different relationship with her employer, this Alex felt to be unthinkable, the final breakdown of sense and order. There were no ordinary gestures of affection and recognition between them which could possibly mediate such a change. It could not be done. Alex would resist it to her last breath.

Frightened by the dark shiny windows of the Slipper House through which beings could look from the outside, she went round closing the shutters, on the inside of which in a faraway time the young Ennistonian painter Ned Larkin, a discovery of Geoffrey Stillowen, had painted powdery garden scenes in pastel shades. The pictures vaguely represented the Belmont garden, the ginkgo, the fir tree, the copper beech, the birch trees, now suitably modified into pastness, with distant views of Belmont and the Slipper House. In the drawing-room, members of the family were similarly represented, in period costume, in antique poses, in a faint golden long ago light. Geoffrey Stillowen in white flannels, blond and youthful, was seated, reading a book with a tennis racket leaning against his knee. His wife Rosemary, standing behind, was opening a white parasol. There was also a picture of Alex as a pretty little girl holding some flowers. And a slim beautiful golden-haired youth, Alex's elder brother who had been killed in the war, a shadow now, a shade, scarcely ever entering Alex's thoughts except when she saw his image in this place. She turned from it. The Slipper House lived in the past, Alex's hall of meditation was a time machine; but the past for which she craved was a faintly scented atmosphere, untroubled by the staring ghosts of individual people.

Tonight, however, individual people pressed upon her, and she could not attain the detached nervous vagueness which her aloneness needed. As she walked, for she always prowled all over the house in these late secret visits, she began to think about George. She wondered if George would come to her and speak to her, as he sometimes used to. She felt every day the minute movement of something which separated him from her. Perhaps this was her sense of old age, so inconceivable yet so near. She had lost George and found him again. Would he come to her now? The woman, a prostitute, with whom George was said to be ‘involved', was some sort of connection of Ruby's. Ruby had many such connections, and Alex disliked this connecting up of things which ought to be separate; it had begun to fit in too well with her sense of an evil conspiracy. There was a bad network. Perhaps it was to escape that network that Tom had withdrawn from her. Alex loved Tom; not best, George was best. About Brian she felt little. The women were outsiders; Gabriel with her droopy hair and her paper handkerchiefs, Stella so intelligent, so hard, so bad for George. Adam was a disturbing object, kin to her yet inaccessible.

Another individual occupied Alex's restless mind this evening: John Robert Rozanov. (Alex had only pretended not to pick up his name when it was mentioned by Gabriel.) Alex had got to know John Robert slightly when he was young, already a little famous (he was older than Alex) and no longer living in Ennistone but returning from his grand university world to visit his mother who still lived in the town. His parents (his grandfather was a Russian emigre) were not well off and lived in the poorer quarter, in an area called Burkestown, remote from leafy Victoria Park. However, the Rozanovs were Methodists (John Robert's father had married a local girl) and attended the same church (in Druidsdale near the Common) as Alex's family, hence a slight acquaintance. Geoffrey Stillowen, engaged as a church-goer in various charitable enterprises, met John Robert's father. Alex vaguely remembered seeing John Robert as a boy, then as a youth. She had never felt any interest in him, partly (she was not snobbish) because she found him physically repulsive. Then when (after the publication of his first book,
Logic and Consciousness)
he turned out to be ‘brilliant' and began to be well-known as one of the ‘young philosophers', it became chic for people in Ennistone to boast about him, announcing casually that they had known him all their lives. Alex, then nineteen, indulging in this little falsehood, caught the attention of one of her friends, a girl called Linda Brent with whom she had been at boarding-school. Linda was now at the university and was thrilled to learn that Alex actually knew John Robert Rozanov. Alex, continuing to show off, asked Linda to come and stay, saying she would exhibit the prodigy. Alex's stranger mother, another alien, had died not long before, and Geoffrey Stillowen was occupying Belmont. Linda came. A little party was arranged and John Robert was invited. (‘He won't come,' said Alex's brother Desmond. ‘He will, he'll be delighted,' said Geoffrey, who had a high sense of his own importance.) He came, and Alex introduced him to Linda. Linda of course (ignoring handsome Desmond) at once fell in love with him. Alex laughed. She laughed less when she read in a newspaper a remarkably short time afterwards that fabulous young John Robert Rozanov, after whom so many clever young ladies were chasing, was about to marry Miss Linda Brent. Alex never forgave either of them. More than that, she became, as she saw it afterwards, temporarily insane. She fell madly in love with John Robert Rozanov herself. Why on earth had she introduced this wonderful person to Linda? It was sheer stupid vanity. Why had she ingeniously done herself this awful damage? Why had she not had the wit and the creative imagination to cultivate this very unusual man? Surely by rights he belonged to her.
She
ought to have married him!

She did not see Rozanov again until some time later when a slightly apologetic Linda visited Ennistone with her husband, and by then Alex was engaged to charming popular Alan McCaffrey and had recovered from her paranoiac episode. The Rozanovs went to America where Linda later died leaving a daughter with whom, rumour had it, Rozanov never got on. The daughter married an obscure American academic called Meynell; she died and he either died or vanished, leaving behind a child, the little neglected waif before mentioned, about whom, it appeared, Rozanov cared even less. Rozanov came back to England for a time and taught in London, where George McCaffrey became his pupil. Later the philosopher went back to America whither, on the occasion described by Brian as unsuccessful, George followed him. Alex did not see Rozanov during his London period. She had troubles of her own and wanted to hide her unhappiness. (Like George, she hated to ‘lose face'.) Alan had left her and was living in Ennistone with Fiona Gates. Then when Fiona became ill Alex developed her obsession about getting hold of Tom, whom she had always coveted. All this while the John Robert whom Alex, during the brief time of her insane remorse, had so intensely imagined, lay dormant within her: an imprint, a little live ghost, an abiding private double of a man who no longer concerned her. This double now stirred and grew in her imagination with the news that John Robert Rozanov was returning to Ennistone. Why was he returning? Was it possible he was returning for
her?

‘What a bloody mess,' said George. He used to chide Diane for her untidiness. Now he viewed the signs of increasing disorder with a certain satisfaction.

‘Have you seen Stella?' asked Diane.

‘No. I meant to go again. I felt I ought to go. You charmingly told me to go. I didn't go. Then it became difficult to go. Then it became impossible to go. Then it became essential not to go. It became a duty not to go, it became a sexual urge. Do you understand?'

‘No. I'm sorry about the mess, I'd have tidied it up if I'd known you were coming, I never know when you're coming, I wish I did.'

‘So do I. Like the Messiah I am eternally expected. I expect myself.'

‘I miss you. I am starved of love.'

‘If that is so then derry down derry it's evident very our tastes are one.'

‘I wonder if you'll ever marry me.'

‘If I married you I'd murder you.'

‘Better dead than unwed.'

‘You yearn for respectability.'

‘Yes, yes.'

‘Most respectable people yearn to shed their respectability but they don't know how; they cannot get out, said the starling. Think how lucky you are. You are out.'

‘You mean I have no further to fall.'

‘Change the metaphor. You are free.'

‘Is that a metaphor?'

‘Almost everything we say is a metaphor, that's why nothing is really serious.'

‘
You
are never really serious. I think it's how you try to escape being awful.'

‘It's how I escape being awful.'

‘Was I free before I met you?'

‘No, you had illusions.'

‘I'm disillusioned now all right.'

‘Unillusioned. I liberated your intelligence.'

‘I'm not free now. I'm a slave.'

‘You love it. You kiss the rod. Don't you?'

‘Don't be coarse. I do what you want.'

‘Whores are so fastidious.'

‘Please don't — '

‘A verbal point. My service is perfect freedom.'

‘I think I've never been free. Who's free anyway? Is Stella free?'

‘No.'

‘Then is Stella —;?'

‘Shut up about Stella. I don't like her name in your mouth.'

‘Her pure name in — '

‘Shut up.'

‘Who's free?'

‘I know only one person who is free.'

‘Who?'

‘In the end you'll be my nurse, that's what you're waiting for, the smash. You think you'll pick up the pieces.'

‘I don't want you smashed. I love you.'

‘It thrills you to tell me my duty. You'd be sick if I did it.'

‘So you think I have no illusions now.'

‘How can you have? I tell you the truth. I am a fount of truth in this place.'

‘I think you do tell me the truth,' said Diane, ‘and I suppose that's something.' She looked at George's calm round face, his clean white shirt sleeves neatly rolled up, his pale arms covered with sleek silky strokable black hairs. She said, ‘You're
here.
'

‘I'm here, kid. Look after me. I'm as full of rapiers as a doomed bull.'

‘You ought to ring up, I might have been out.'

‘Out? You mean you go
out?
'

‘I go as far as the Baths and the Church. I go to the Food Hall at Bowcocks.'

‘One day I'll immure you.'

‘We are two people in despair.'

‘You flatter yourself.'

‘You mean you aren't in despair?'

‘I mean
you
are not. Women are incapable of despair.'

‘How can you say that!'

‘Oh they can cry, that's different. God, this room smells of cigarette smoke.'

‘I never smoke when you're here.'

‘You'd better not.'

‘If you were here more I'd smoke less. Shall I open the window?'

‘No, stay put, Miss Nightwork. I like the cosy stench of face powder and cigarette smoke and alcohol. Only I wish you wouldn't put those potted plants in the bath. Potted plants in the bath are an image of hell. Chaos and Old Night. Not like your corset on the floor, which I rather like.'

‘It's not a corset.'

‘Whatever it is. Chaos and Old Night.'

‘Would you like another drink?'

‘Hey nonny nonny - no. You have one, dear daughter of the game. I'll walk about.' George rose and began to walk, across the room, out into the hall, into the kitchen, back again to the window. He often did this. Reclining on the sofa with her shoes off, Diane watched him.

Diane Sedleigh was the most genteel prostitute in Ennistone. (The man she had imprudently married once upon a time was called Sedley, but Diane thought that Sedleigh was more elegant.) She was a small slim woman with almost black straight hair which was cut short and clung to her small head, sweeping in a little neat pointed curve round her face on either side. Her dark brown eyes were not large but were ardent and eager, not unlike the eyes of Zed, Adam McCaffrey's dog. She liked to hint that she had gipsy blood. No one believed this romantic hint but it was none the less true. She was a cousin, possibly a half-sister, of Ruby Doyle. (She had been christened, at St Olaf's, her mother being Church of England, ‘Diamond', but early decided that she had enough troubles without owning such a bizarre name. The familiar ‘Di' easily became the elegant ‘Diane'.) There was a third girl too, sister or cousin. The gipsy father or fathers were legendary beings from another era and there had never been any family life. Diane had very small feet and small nicotine-stained hands. She sometimes wore black silky dresses, very short, with black stockings, and thought of herself as a ‘flapper'. She was dressed like that today, with a barbarous metal necklace which George had given her. His only gifts, apart from money, were cheap exotic jewellery. Sometimes when she wore trousers she posed differently, legs wide apart and shirt coming loose, showing her small breasts, a tiny defiant female pirate. Of course she pronounced her name Dee-ahn, not Die-ann.

Diane had been beautiful when she was young, and had experienced the claims upon the world which beautiful women feel, especially if they are poor. She was now nearly forty. She came from a poor home in the Burkestown area of Ennistone. Her father left her mother, her mother went away with another man. Diane lived unhappily with a series of vague ‘aunties', whose relationship to her and to each other remained conjectural. When she left school she worked as a waitress, then as a shop assistant in Bowcocks, then as a clerk in a betting office. One day she let her boss take some photographs of her in the nude. Was that the beginning of it all, was it fated, could it have been otherwise? It was a long story, the old story, Diane preferred not to remember how it went. She became pregnant twice, each time abandoned, and had to look after her expensive secret abortion herself. She was briefly married to that Sedley somewhere along the way. Men were beasts. She took to prostitution as a temporary, she thought, expedient in a moment of misery, not really for the money but as a kind of suicide because she didn't care. A Mrs Belton whom she met at the Baths told her there was a ‘vacancy' in a ‘nice house'. She offered it as a kind of privilege. Diane did not stay long in the house, but already she felt it impossible to ‘go back'. What was there to go back to? She was by now not indifferent to earning money easily. She saved herself from real suicide by acquiring a more positive image of her trade. She picked up and treasured the word ‘courtesan'. Some of her clients told her tales of whores in other lands, exotic women in cages in Calcutta, motherly women knitting in lighted windows in Amsterdam. She set herself up in a flat and affected to be ‘merry'. She decorated her flat ‘tastefully' and became more ‘exclusive'. Respectable men arrived and endowed her with a kind of odd derived respectability. Older men came and discussed their wives, not always unkindly. Young men and adolescents came for initiations and to talk about ‘life'. Diane began to feel that she was a wise woman performing an important public service. Her earliest clients had been rough fellows. Then men with fast cars took her out to road houses. Later these were joined by professional men. She had a fantasy about a rich bachelor, no longer young, and despairing of finding a woman to understand him, who would suddenly carry her away into a secure and cherished married life. For a time she even kept a suitcase packed for the advent of this impetuous admirer. But then Diane's respectability had taken a new and strange turn.