The Philosopher's Pupil

When he had sung the round through and started again Emma joined in, not using his full voice but with a high clear pure whispering sound. And by the time they turned into Travancore Avenue, although there were not positively tears in their eyes, there was a great deal of mournful yearning in their hearts.

‘My God, it is snowing!’

An awful iron grey silence had possessed the town since early morning. The sky, appearing like a dull solid dome low over the roofs, had been grey, then yellowish, then almost white. Now scarcely visible very small snowflakes were dancing up and down like midges. As Brian and Gabriel watched them (it was lunch time) they (the snowflakes) were to be seen, not as it seemed falling, but jigging about just above the pall of steam which (as the temperature fell in the direction of zero) once again covered the surface of the open-air pool.

‘Snow in April!’

‘It can snow any time in this bloody country.’

Brian and Gabriel returned to the little white cast- Iron table, covered with circular brown stains, at which they had been sitting and drinking tea out of plastic cups. The white snowy light revealed in terrible detail the pale stained flaky green walls of the Promenade and the cold, wet brasswork of the lion disgorging Ennistone water into a kind of sink. Zed, established upon one of the chairs, was with them today. Dogs were allowed, in the Promenade only, upon leads. Gabriel had brought him with her, from her shopping and his run in the Botanic Garden, and had given up her swim so as to sit with him over coffee, waiting for Brian and Adam to arrive. Adam was still out there swimming, somewhere underneath the roly-poly blanket of the steam. Gabriel banished from her mind rapid mental movies of Adam drowned, his limp body lifted from the water, et cetera. She returned to the topic of the seaside visit. Brian detested this topic and refused to help her to think about it. He sat scratching his pockmarked face with blunt, audible fingernails, and glaring unseeingly in the direction of Gavin Oare and Maisie Chalmers who were giggling at a corner table, and of Mrs Bradstreet who was drinking some of the sulphurous water and brooding over her terrible secret.

‘If we want to go to a hotel we ought to book now.’

‘One day’s enough, isn’t it?’

‘I think it would be fun to go to a hotel — ’

‘I don’t. Why go at all?’

‘Well, it’s a family tradition. Alex sets store by it.’

‘I don’t think Alex “sets store by it”, whatever that means. With Maryville gone it’s pointless anyway.’

‘We did it last year without Maryville.’

‘And what a frost it was.’

‘I don’t think so — ’

‘I know why you want it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you want George to come.’

‘Don’t be silly!’ It’s true, thought Gabriel, but not in a bad way. It was so important to let George know that they cared.

‘I’ve never seen such a dog for playing.’

‘Yes, remember when we watched him through the kitchen window playing there all by himself— ’

Zed, fluffed up on top of Gabriel’s shopping bag, had his roosting bird look. He had what Gabriel called his ‘winsome look’, his black lip a little curled to show a flash of teeth, his blue-black shot-silk eyes staring flirtatiously at his admirers. He touched the handle of the bag with one tentative white paw, stared at Gabriel, then patted it twice as if inviting co-operation in a game or ritual.

‘Zed! Where’s bailie?’

‘Don’t excite him, Gabriel.’

‘Zed, you darling, kiss hands!’

‘Soppy little blighter. There are small dogs, but this is ridiculous. A miserable sissie little object that couldn’t defend itself— ’

‘Dogs in Ennistone don’t have to fight for their lives!’ She added, ‘Oh dear.’ Such a tiny defenceless crushable animal. Oh dear.

‘He’s not a dog, he’s a cuddly toy. Adam treats him like a toy.’

‘Adam treats everything like a toy.’

‘How does such a ridiculous little animal know that it’s a dog at all? Put him down, he’s sitting on the cheese.’

Gabriel put Zed on the ground where he immediately began to frisk and dance at her feet, moving his round black and white rump voluptuously, as a preparation for attempting to jump up. She lifted him on to her knee where he settled himself, staring with intense insolent private amusement at Brian.

‘We could stay at that little hotel — ’

‘I’m not paying out money for hotels.’

‘Then if we go for the day — ’

‘What’s the use of a day? We’d spend half the time getting there and getting back.’

‘No we wouldn’t. It’s very quick now by the motorway. And a day by the sea is - so special - if we’re all together. Brian, please don’t say no. It’s our only family thing except Christmas, and you know how much I enjoy Christmas.’

‘And you know how much I hate it! Alex hates it too, remember how she wrecked the last one.’

‘Don’t be cross, I have to organize this because nobody else will, like I have to organize Christmas because nobody else will. You’re all glad enough when I’ve done it!’

‘You deceive yourself.’

‘Tom suggested we should take tents and camp.’

‘Oh did he!’

‘I’ll make the sandwiches, Ruby will help, you know how she enjoys it — ’

‘You’re always imagining that other people enjoy things, but they are not like you!’

‘Well, they’re not like you either, you don’t enjoy anything!’

‘I used to enjoy things, but they’ve all gone, the nice things, like waltzing with you at the thé dansants we used to have in this room before everything got so awful.’

Gabriel was touched by this memory. She too had enjoyed the sentimental old thé dansants with the three-piece orchestra. ‘Darling! And the tangos and the sambas and the rumbas and the slow fox-trot — ’

‘No. Only the waltzes. But they’ve gone. We shall never waltz again. Oh God, must you cry about it?’

I’m not just crying about that, thought Gabriel, though I am crying about that. Why am I always so near to tears? It annoys Brian so. Are other people’s lives like mine - always so near to the edge of something infinitely touching, awfully moving and significant and sort of deep - Can it be God? No, it is too small.

Adam had been upset this morning because Gabriel had destroyed his ‘bear’. This ‘bear’ was a smudge upon the kitchen wall which resembled a bear, which had somehow become Adam’s property. Busily cleaning, Gabriel had accidentally mopped his bear away. He’s like me, she thought, and yet with him it’s different. He loves all sorts of funny little things which are almost non-things. For him the world is full of such things. He owns the world - it’s always his blackbird that’s singing, his spider that has made a web in the corner. The thought about the lost bear reminded her somehow that last night she had dreamed about Rufus, and in the dream he was her son. She often had this dream, which she told to no one.

There was something else too, something which had just happened as she sat at the table in the Promenade waiting for Brian to join her. An Indian man, perhaps a Pakistani, a thin, youngish man with a beard, had sat down opposite to her, as she sat reading the Ennistone Gazette, and asked her one or two trivial questions. Gabriel had answered his questions briefly and gone on reading. She did not easily talk to strange men. After a short while the ‘intruder’ went away. A few minutes later, after he had disappeared, and just before Brian came, Gabriel put down her paper, penetrated by a terrible pang of conscience. The man had been lonely, perhaps he had only lately arrived in England, a new immigrant, living alone, made to feel unwanted, looked askance at, victimized. His trivial questions were an appeal, for conversation, for human contact, for a smile, for a look. Perhaps he had thought she had a kind face. And she had utterly failed, she had been curt, almost rude. And now he was gone, and that precious moment would never come to her again. This too was what made tears come into her eyes when Brian recalled the thé dansants.

Father Bernard was standing at the long window of the Promenade looking at the fascinating play of the tiny snowflakes which, in the very cold windless air, seemed unable to decide whether to go up or down. Some however must be reaching the ground since the edge of the pool was white, blotched and criss-crossed with the dark prints of bare feet. As he watched, Tom McCaffrey, stripped for swimming, passed him close upon the other side of the glass. Tom stood a moment on the edge of the pool, tense, erect, enjoying the cold beneath his feet, the chill touch of the air, the tiny feathery caresses of the snowflakes upon his warm skin. Then lifting his head and tossing back his hair, he breathed in luxuriously air and snow, flexed his body, dived into the plump rounded cloud-cover of the steam and disappeared. Father Bernard, who had been holding his breath, let out a sigh. Dans l’onde toi devenue ta jubilation nue.

The priest, who had had his swim, was feeling exceptionally full of spiritual well-being. After mass that morning he had composed a suitably pompous letter to John Robert to the effect that he had examined Miss Meynell’s capacities and found her, though immature, proficient in modern languages. He especially commended her careful attention to grammar. After that he had put on his longest tape of Scott Joplin and sat down opposite his long-eared Gandhara Buddha, whose austere calm stern visage, with pursed lips and down-cast musing eyes (the creature was thinking) seemed to him so much more spiritual than the tormented face of the crucified one. He sat in an upright chair, his spine straight, his eyelids drooping, his hands relaxed upon his knees. While his paltry mind chatters on he breathes, aware of air moving, gently pulsating airy movement which becomes slower … and slower … Darkness wherein a joy which has no owner quietly evaporates like a disintegrating rocket. Is he changed? No. Is this enlightenment? No. What is it then? A harmless semi-miraculous private diversion costing strictly nothing.

Now on his way from the window to the tea counter he paused at the table where Brian and Gabriel were sitting.

‘Good morning. Why there’s Omega. What a proof of God’s love that little animal brings us, how humble we should feel — ’

‘Why?’ said Brian.

‘What an upspring of spirit in that tiny beast, such good humour, such inexhaustible good temper, what selfless affection burns in those eyes — ’

‘Tosh,’ said Brian. ‘He’s a completely egoistic, self-centred animal.’

‘God is everywhere visible in his creation.’

‘In this tea cup also?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we don’t have to be sentimental about dogs.’

‘Isn’t the snow delightful?’

‘Bloody awful.’

‘What did you think of Miss Meynell?’ said Gabriel.

‘A childish, simple girl, but — ’

‘Simple, you mean mentally deficient?’

‘Of course he doesn’t, Brian.’

‘Simplicity is a divine attribute.’

‘Yes, just look at the world.’

‘May I ask if you have had any news from Stella?’

‘No,’ said Gabriel, ‘I’m very worried, she hasn’t written, she’s just vanished. It isn’t like her.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the priest, ‘the Institute is always filled with nonsensical rumours. People love crimes and disasters.’ He moved on to the counter.

‘What are these rumours?’ said Gabriel to Brian. ‘I haven’t heard anything.’

‘Oh fascinating, I even saw Mrs Osmore talking to Mrs Belton about it.’

‘But what?’

‘The latest idea is that George has done away with Stella, the only question being what he’s done with the body.’

Another witness of Tom McCaffrey’s elegant dive was William Eastcote. William, also stripped, was standing on the edge of the pool. He had been swimming and was now experiencing the familiar feeling of his warmed body cooling. (The water temperature was 28° Centigrade, the air temperature 2° Centigrade.) He thought instinctively, scarcely framing the thought but mixing it up with his sensations: I would have enjoyed this warm and cold feeling, the ice-cream-pudding feeling Rose used to call it. I would have enjoyed the snow and seeing Tom stand there and dive. Only now I can’t. And I am envious of Tom, I am envious because he is young and strong and will live, and I am not, and will not. It seemed so paradoxical and so awful to William that today his own lean brown near-naked body stood up as sturdily as ever and looked as solid and felt as strong, while all the time, as he now knew, it carried inside it the inevitable engine of his own imminent death. He thought, shall I tell Rozanov? The disclosure would be embarrassing to them both. John Robert did not like failure; and what greater failure could there ever be than that one?

Something touched William’s hand and he looked down to find Adam McCaffrey looking up at him. ‘Hello, Adam.’

‘Hello.’

‘Isn’t the snow nice?’

‘Yes, I heard the birds singing in the snow.’

‘Even in the snow they know it’s spring.’

‘A wren can sing a hundred and six notes in eight seconds.’

‘Can it really?’

‘Yes. Did you know?’

‘No, but I can imagine.’

‘I was up on the common with Zed. We saw a white horse all by itself.’

‘Perhaps it belongs to the gipsies.’

‘It was rolling on its back. Then when it saw Zed it jumped up. When it saw a dog near it was frightened. It went away then.’

‘A big horse frightened by a little dog!’

‘It was a pony more than a horse. I saw Uncle George coming out of the library, but he didn’t see me. Once I saw Uncle George being in two different places at the same time.’

‘He can’t have been, unless you were too.’

‘I was on top of a bus, you see.’

‘Does that make it different?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps there’s someone else who looks like him.’

‘Perhaps. I will just rescue that fly.’

William saw a bright-winged fly lying on top of the glossy restless water which was moving quietly about at their feet. Adam slid into the pool easily, noiselessly, like a water rat, not disturbing the glossy surface. He carefully floated the fly on to the back of his hand and reached up to tilt it on to the concrete near to William’s bare feet. The fly shook itself, drew its legs briskly over its wings, and flew away. Adam waved a little polite farewell wave and swam off into the crowding steam. William, who had forgotten about his death during his conversation with Adam, remembered it again. He thought, when that boy is twenty I shall have been dead for twelve years.

Soon after his dive which had aroused such strong but different feelings in the breasts of two observers, Tom McCaffrey ran into Diane Sedleigh. Before this encounter Tom had swum along, exercising his quiet effortless Ennistonian crawl, with a lot of unhappy muddled thoughts buzzing around inside his handsome head about which his wet darkened hair flopped or swirled. It was now two days since his extraordinary interview with John Robert. During this time Tom had done nothing, had, almost, hidden. He had made no plan. He had stayed at home, unable to read Paradise Lost, unable to work on his pop song, unable even to watch Greg’s colour television. He felt physically sick with anxiety and foreboding, alienated from himself as in a bad attack of ‘flu. The curious excitement he had felt just after the interview had faded, or been changed into some lurid less pleasing sense of being captive. He still felt it was impossible to ‘get out of it’; certainly he could not now (though, as Emma pointed out, in a way nothing was easier) simply write a letter to Rozanov saying that he had decided not to proceed. This letter would have to contain (he had not told Emma of John Robert’s terrible proviso) his promise never to attempt to come near Harriet Meynell. Never? At his age? How could he be in such a far-fetched predicament? He had to go on, he had to see the girl, although the prospect held no attraction except that of acting out a dream-like destiny. He felt now no ‘romantic curiosity’, no ardour for some challenging ‘quest’. What he did feel as he swam along so privately, so wretched, inside the steamy roly-poly, was a kind of restless, nasty erotic adventurism. He had been perfectly happy as he was. Now he was being forced to think about girls! All right! He thought to himself, yes, John Robert has changed my value. He has made me worse! At that moment he ran straight into Diane who was swimming equally strongly in the opposite direction. Emerging at close quarters into visibility, their outstretched arms entwined, then they heeled over knocking each other away.

‘Sorry.’

‘Diane!’ Tom had of course had his brother’s mistress pointed out to him long ago by someone, perhaps Valerie Cossom, who took such an interest in George’s activities. Tom had never learnt Diane’s surname and had, in so far as he ever thought of her, used her first name, which now instinctively came out.

Diane, with her dark little cap of short hair, looked much the same whether her head was wet or dry, which was not the case with Tom. With wet hair his face looked gaunter, fiercer, older. Diane did not know who he was.

‘It’s Tom, Tom McCaffrey. Don’t be afraid.’ Tom was not sure why he said this. He took hold of the strap of her blue bathing costume.

‘Oh - please let go — ’ Diane’s wet hand scrabbled helplessly at Tom’s hand. She gulped water. ‘Let go, you’re pushing me under.’

Tom let go, but barred her way, treading water and touching her arms with his finger tips. At close quarters her wet face looked childish, red, the make-up a little smudged.

‘How’s George?’ said Tom.

‘I haven’t seen him.’

‘May I come and talk to you, just talk, you know? I’d like that. George wouldn’t mind, would he?’

‘No.’

‘So I can come?’

‘I mean don’t come, please don’t come.’

‘I just want to talk to an older woman, I need advice.’

‘No.’

‘Be a sport, Diane. I say, is it true that George has murdered Stella? That’s what they’re all saying!’ Tom uttered these idiotic words as a sort of joke. He now saw Diane’s small face crumple into a grimacing animal’s mask, and in a second, she shot away from him as swiftly as an otter, her departing kick jabbing his leg. Tom did not try to follow. He felt degraded and rotten. He thought, I will go and see her, I don’t care!

‘Hello, Tom!’ It was Alex. They danced round each other in the warm water, touching each other like ballet dancers pretending to be boxers.

‘Shall we go home, then?’ said Pearl a bit crossly to Hattie.

Pearl and Hattie were still in happy ignorance of John Robert’s plan, since the sage had not yet managed to compose the letter which was to explain it. In fact he had now decided to overcome his nervous reluctance and to visit the Slipper House in person on the following day.

Pearl had at last persuaded Hattie to come to the Institute. Hattie had bought a sober black one-piece bathing suit with a skirt at Bowcocks. She had also visited Anne Lapwing’s Boutique with Pearl, and had bought a summer dress, which Pearl chose. Now today it was snowing.

Hattie and Pearl were standing in Diana’s Garden beside the railings which surrounded the pitiful jumpings of Lud’s Rill. Pearl wore a hooded anorak and trousers, Hattie an overcoat and a woollen cap and woollen stockings. They had got as far as the changing-room when Hattie suddenly funked it.

‘What was the matter anyway?’

‘It was just like Denver.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘And it’s all so public, I don’t want all those women looking at me.’

‘But people have looked at you all over the place, and not only women!’

‘Yes, but it’s different here, it’s awful. And everyone swims so frightfully well — ’

‘So do you.’

‘No, not - I’m sorry.’

‘Well, shall we go or stay?’

Hattie had been appalled by the crowded and so public scene in the women’s changing-rooms, with so many women of all shapes and sizes with practically nothing (sometimes nothing) on, taking showers and standing about and chattering to each other. The place was so full and animated and noisy, and you couldn’t keep your cubicle, you had to carry your clothes to a locker and have a key to look after and so on. Hattie had pictured something much more dignified and discreet and private, and how, in her black costume, she would issue quietly to the water and slip noiselessly in. Pearl had said to her, ‘No one will bother you, no one will notice you, why do you think you’re so important!’

Hattie said, ‘I don’t, I just want to be quiet.’ There was little quietness in the changing-room, indeed it was difficult to find anywhere to stand without being jostled by wet fleshy women. And although she did not explain it properly to Pearl, the dérèglement of Hattie’s senses was increased by something quite unexpected which filled her with a terrible sick nostalgia before she could even make out what it was. The combination of the warmth, the smell of wet wood, and the snowy light outside brought back so intensely the atmosphere of skiing in the Rockies, at Aspen, the return from snow into the warm wooden interior with dripping skis and wet boots. Hattie had never been very happy at Denver, but this piercing reminder came with a whiff of a far-off home, a lost home, a lost childhood.

‘Let’s go back. We’ll light a fire in the kitchen like you said. Don’t be cross with me, Pearlie.’

When Tom, now dressed, approached them, Emma and Hector Gaines, having discovered each other as historians, had been talking for some time. Emma was muffled up in a long fur-collared coat and a Trinity scarf, both of which had belonged to his father. The smell of the coat had mingled disturbingly with the smell of his mother’s face powder on her letter which, just arrived, he had thrust into the coat pocket as he was leaving the house. Now, out of doors, it was too cold to smell anything. Hector had abandoned his dejeuner sur l’herbe act, and was in swimming-trunks desperately resolved to display his not inconsiderable physique to Anthea: he had been a rugger blue at Cambridge, and had a lot of red curly hair on his chest. (Anthea had not turned up, however.) He had boiled himself scarlet in the stews, but was careful not to exhibit his mediocre swimming. Now, as he glanced anxiously around, he was shivering with cold. Emma had steered him off the emotive topic, on which Emma’s accent had started him, of nineteenth-century Irish history. They had been discussing The Triumph of Aphrodite.

‘Hello you two, you’ve found each other, good.’

‘He’s told me a lot I didn’t know about the relation between Purcell and Gay,’ said Hector to Tom.

‘How’s the masque going, Hector?’

‘Terrible. We’re having trouble with the chorus of animals. And we need a counter-tenor.’

Emma’s leg kicking Tom met Tom’s leg kicking Emma.

‘Oh,’ said Tom, ‘but surely there aren’t any any more? Besides, who likes that funny noise? It’s like what Shylock said about the bagpipes.’

‘I don’t care for that weird falsetto myself,’ said Hector, ‘but the music needs it. Jonathan Treece says we can make do with a tenor.’

‘You’re freezing,’ said Emma. ‘Go and dress or go back in one of those holes.’

‘Yes, well - have you seen Anthea, Tom? No? Well, I’ll stay a bit. Good-bye. We’ll settle the Irish question another day.’ Blue, he shuddered off.

‘We bloody won’t!’

Tom said, ‘Here comes my mother.’

Alex, also dressed, came brightly up.

‘Alex, this is my friend Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor. Emma, my mother.’

‘I’m glad to meet you,’ said Alex, ‘I’ve heard such wonderful things about you, I hope you’ll come and see me, Tom will bring you. Oh hello, Gabriel. This is my daughter- In-law Gabriel. What’s the matter?’

Gabriel, distraught, her wind-chapped face rawly framed in a tight cotton scarf knotted under her chin, had found a pretext to run out to look for her Indian. It had occurred to her that she had despaired too soon. The man might not have left the Institute. He might have gone to swim. The text (a favourite of Bill the Lizard) occurred to her, ‘in so far as you do it unto the least of these you do it unto me’. The bearded Indian even looked a little like Jesus Christ. She had been tried and found wanting.

‘Yes, I know Mr Taylor, hello. I’m looking for an Indian man with a beard, have you seen one?’

No, they had not.

‘Well, I’ll run on - sorry to - well, good-bye — ’ Gabriel ran on, her medium-high heels slipping on the thin pale-greyish layer of snow on to which the small papery flakes were still uncertainly descending. She began to peer down into the stews.

‘My daughter-in-law is so quaint,’ said Alex, ‘we all love her. Well, auf Wiedersehen.’ In black boots and fur coat she strode away.

‘I wish you would tell your family that my surname is Scarlett-Taylor.’

‘What did you think of my ma?’

‘Very good-looking. What wonderful things have you told her about me?’

‘None. She seems to have taken a fancy to you.’

‘She doesn’t want you to marry,’ said Emma, whose quick suspicious mind had grasped this idea in a flash.

‘My marriage seems to be on everybody’s mind.’

‘Coo-ee, coo-ee!’

‘That’s my mother calling Ruby.’

‘You mean her servant? Why there’s that girl again.’

Hattie and Pearl, red-nosed and very much the worse for the weather, were passing by in the direction of the exit. The temperature, which had just fallen another degree, had opposite effects upon their appearance, making Pearl look about forty, and Hattie about fourteen.

‘Coo-ee, coo-ee!’

Ruby appeared, carrying Alex’s bag.

‘Hello, Ruby,’ said Tom, ‘who are those two girls who have just gone by?’

‘That’s little Miss Harriet Meynell and her lady’s maid. I must fly.’

Emma began to laugh. ‘Oh God!’ He thrust his hand into his pocket and felt his mother’s letter. He drew it forth and held its fragrance against his face while he continued to laugh.

George McCaffrey entered the Ennistone Rooms through the little octagonal ‘Baptistry’ which enclosed the big glowing bronze doors from which one descended to the source, and which also constituted the quickest direct route from the Promenade to the Rooms. The Rotunda, or ‘Baptistry’ as it was more popularly called, had two doors, one on each side, which were normally kept locked. Sometimes, however, because of maintenance work, one or the other might be found open. For George on this day (the afternoon of the day recorded above) both doors stood open so that he was able to pass from the Promenade to the Rooms without having to pass the ‘Porter’s Lodge’ or Reception at the front entrance of the Rooms. He paused in the Baptistry to inspect the big studded doors, a silvery gold in colour, from behind which steam was continually seeping. (This steam was whisked away by a fan situated above.) George felt the doors. They were hot. He turned the large brass handle and pulled. They were locked. He went on, padding quietly, into the Rooms, entering by a door marked private into the main downstairs corridor.

It was quiet in the corridor, or so it seemed to George as he stood there listening to his heart beat. In fact there was a steady background drumming sound which was the noise of the hot water eternally discharging itself into the boat-shaped baths in the bathrooms of the individual rooms. However, if the doors of the rooms were kept shut, this sound was diffused into a deep vibration which soon ceased to be consciously audible. George stood a while experiencing this vibration which seemed so much in tune with his own heart-beats and the vibration of his whole taut being.

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?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Yes. But it’s your job not to be. What are you for but to be the eternal forgiver? You are God in my life.’

‘A powerless God.’

‘God must be powerless. Christ was powerless. He didn’t save himself.’

‘You don’t believe in religion, you’re making fun of it.’

‘I believe in something, but I’ve forgotten its name. Pure cognition. What happens when you unlock the subject from the object? Then there’s no more subject. That’s when all is permitted, and why it is.’

‘Oh what nonsense - come and sit beside me and hold my hand.’

‘I can’t, I’m too restless, tiger, tiger, burning bright — ’

‘George, I do want to be with you in the sunlight one day, in the open, not secret and sort of shameful. I’m prepared to wait, I could wait and wait and be happy so long as I could really hope that one day we could be properly together …’

‘Aren’t you prepared to wait anyway?’

‘Without hope? Oh - but do say — ’

‘Say what?’

‘Oh - George - you know — ’

‘The clock struck one, the mouse ran down. It’s nearly one.’

‘George, I know I’m not supposed to - but now we’re together again - you must let me talk and say what’s in my heart — ’

‘Talk, talk, talk, it’s a free country.’

‘George, you’re not going back to Stella, are you?’

‘Have I been away? She has.’

‘George, where is she?’

‘How do I know?’

‘You haven’t done anything to her, have you, I mean you haven’t hurt her —?’

‘Why ever should I?’

‘Oh - I don’t know - because of - well, maybe because of me - or — ’

‘Hurt Stella, because of you?’ George paused, making his brown eyes round in his round face and opening his mouth in an O.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that, I just wondered about Stella, everybody’s wondering — ’

‘Fuck everybody.’

‘Do stop moving about like that, you’re manic. I mean, you might want a change, anybody might, you might want someone else.’

‘I saw that girl, Harriet Meynell, Hattie they call her.’

‘Professor’s Rozanov’s grand-daughter?’

‘I saw her in her petticoat with her hair streaming.’

‘Where, how —?’

‘I saw her through binoculars at Belmont. You know she’s at the Slipper House. She looked - oh — ’

‘What?’

‘Pale. Undamaged.’

‘Ah - not like me. You’re not falling in love with her?’

George paused beside Diane. ‘No. But I’d like to — ’

‘You leave her alone — ’

‘I have my duties.’

‘You mean to Stella?’

‘There are duties in the world. Kinds you don’t dream of.’

‘You’ve got me. I suit you. I love you. No one else does.’

‘Every woman in Ennistone loves me, I could have any woman I wanted. I could have Gabriel McCaffrey, tomorrow, this evening, I’d just have to wink, she’d come running.’

‘She wouldn’t!’

‘She would. Oh never mind, as if I cared. Sometimes I feel so tired. But it will be all right, kid.’

‘For us two?’

‘You don’t know what it’s like to think of one person, one thing, day and night.’

‘I do know! I think of you day and night.’

‘That’s just subjective. I mean something - metaphysical.’

‘Between us it’s not metaphysical, is it?’

‘You are a rest from metaphysics. But you aren’t real either.’

‘Why am I not real? Oh George, I want to be real. Is Stella real?’

‘Leave Stella. I told you.’

‘I wish you would.’

‘Shut up. Don’t talk to me like that.’

‘Don’t let me be utterly cast away and lost, I don’t want to be lost — ’

‘Lost, stolen or strayed, a girl no longer a maid, I had her and I paid, I bought her and she stayed, so goes it in the trade.’

‘Oh George, be serious, be quiet with me — ’

‘Don’t forget you’re my slave. Aren’t you, kid, dear?’ He sat down at last beside the sofa and took hold of her little brown hand.

‘Yes, George. I sometimes wonder whether you won’t kill me in the end.’

‘Just look at your hand. You’re like a Pakistani girl. When will you give up smoking?’

‘When you marry me.’

‘This place stinks, your hand stinks, your hand is stained, your hand is brown and dry, my heart is brown and dry, it’s like an old dry smelly leather bag. And yet - all will be well - I must go — ’

‘When will you come again?’

‘I don’t know. In a hundred years. Watch and pray.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the cinema.’

‘Good morning, Pearl.’

‘Good morning, Sir.’

Pearl, who had opened the Slipper House door to John Robert’s ring, curtseyed. Only for him did she curtsey. It was part of the playacting which was not play-acting which she put on for John Robert.

‘How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you. Why, you’re all wet!’

The philosopher was indeed all wet and did not need to be reminded of it. He frowned.

He had dressed with some care for his visit, putting on a clean shirt and a dark suit which he kept for best. He had shaved carefully, sliding his razor (not electric) into all the folds of his jowl and of his dry saurian neck and removing the old man’s grey stubble which had so fascinated George. He had combed his crisp frizzy hair making it stand up on end, and he had put on his overcoat. It was not until he had proceeded a little way along Ennistone High Street, and passed Bowcocks, that he perceived that it was raining, and he then deemed it too late to return to fetch his umbrella, hat and scarf. The rain was not much. However, it increased, and he arrived at Forum Way with his head and neck thoroughly soaked and, in spite of having put up his coat collar, water running down his chest and back. He felt uncomfortable and undignified and chilly. He disliked getting his hair wet.

Of course the girls, alerted by his telephone call earlier that morning, had been expecting him for some time (it was now almost noon), peering out of the window to see him come along the muddy path between the trees. Before that they had been busy, rushing about the house to put it to tiptop rights. (Pearl jealously prevented Ruby from cleaning. She did it herself with help from Hattie.) They also had to decide how to array themselves, whether Hattie should wear her new pretty summer dress and put her hair up. Hattie decided against the new dress which would look out of place on such a dismal wet morning, but she allowed Pearl to help her to stack up her hair. She wore a cinnamon-brown light woollen dress with dark brown stripes and a high collar which made her look older, and, after consultation, knotted a silk scarf round her neck in a way they thought to be sophisticated. Pearl had got herself up to look like a servant in an opera, with a navy blue dress and a rather smart striped pinafore.

When Pearl opened the door, Hattie remained standing in the sitting-room where they had turned on the gas fire. She did not run to the door to welcome her grandfather. She waited and smoothed her dress and fluffed up her scarf and patted her hair and breathed fast. Pearl had taken John Robert’s coat away to the kitchen to dry. She had omitted to indicate where Hattie was. John Robert, who had not entered the Slipper House since he kissed Linda Brent in an upper room during a Methodist fete at Belmont over fifty years ago, looked about, then peered in through the sitting-room door to see Hattie standing there. At that moment Pearl ran back holding a towel.

‘What’s this?’

‘To dry your hair.’

‘Oh.’ Standing in the doorway he vigorously rubbed his hair and face and neck, then threw the towel back to Pearl without looking at her, entered the room and closed the door behind him.

Of the three persons involved in this little arrival scene or ceremony. John Robert Rozanov was not the one least moved. His heart beat as fiercely as Hattie’s as they faced each other.

John Robert had never managed to get on with his daughter Amy. He loved his wife who had died so soon after the child’s birth. He mourned Linda, he resented Amy, he did not like children, he had wanted a son anyway. Amy was an awkward suspicious hostile child, he had made her so. She showed no spark of any intelligence which might have interested him. He engaged nurses and housekeepers, then dispatched Amy to a boarding school. Just when he was arranging for her to go to college she ran off with that fool Whit Meynell. Then there was another little girl.

John Robert was never sure later on exactly when he had begun to notice Hattie; perhaps not until she was about eight or nine, and her mother, whom she had been so drearily ‘part of, was already dead. She was a solemn child, aloof and shy, but, unlike Amy, not patently intimidated. She had Whit’s Icelandic mother’s stone-blue eyes and silver-gilt hair. But in the totality of her face and tenure she resembled Linda. John Robert’s heart had long ago been walled up and frozen; or rather his heart had become an intellectual organ and it was as such that it could beat strongly and warmly. He was at the height of his philosophical powers and in the grip of intense and continual mental turmoil. He had never deeply desired any woman except Linda. As a young widower he had been pursued, especially by powerful American women intellectuals, but any brief involvements had been much regretted by him, and even more by them. This period was short. His relations with his pupils were sometimes intense, but for John Robert these relations were strictly a function of intellectual excitement. When they ceased to be able to interest him philosophically he forgot them. He enjoyed talking with his colleagues on intellectual academic topics, where his interests and his knowledge ranged beyond the field of philosophy (he could have been a historian). But his pleasure in these encounters was concerned with ideas not with people, although there were not a few clever men and women who would dearly have liked to become his intimates. The last thing in the world that he expected was that he should suddenly find himself moved by a child.

John Robert was indeed surprised to find himself, confronted with the young person, experiencing a new emotion. What was it? Interest, tenderness, affection? Whatever it was, he kept it strictly to himself. He had long ago decided upon his ‘way of life’, and his experience, especially his dismal relation with his daughter, had amply confirmed the decision, also of course confirmed by the world-consuming satisfaction which he found in philosophy. There was no room for anything else now. Yet there was something else, Hattie. She appeared to him like an awkward unnerving extra, a kind of contingent excrescence upon the perfect circle of his life, something outside. John Robert reflected deeply upon this, and found that the phenomenon persisted. He began to think about his grand-daughter with certain obscure flutters of the heart. But, to her, he exhibited no emotion whatsoever. Later on, much later on, he had times of the most bitter remorse, that biting ‘Oh if only — ’ which can gnaw its way into the very centre of the soul and there set up a pain which mixes itself with every experience. Remorse, at times, even distracted Rozanov from philosophy. If only he had, earlier on, established some direct affectionate relation, some ordinary modus vivendi with Hattie. Other grandfathers, as he could see from looking at his colleagues, were friends with their granddaughters, held their hands, hugged them, set them on their knees, kissed them. Except for occasions when he sat next to her in the car or on an aeroplane, he never touched Hattie. He did not pat her head or shake her hand. And, as he sometimes reflected, when he did (rarely) happen to sit next to her, not only did he discreetly shrink from her, she also shrank from him. How could he, he wondered as the years went by, go on and on so thoroughly doing what he did not feel? If only he had been braver and more intelligent, he could have had an ordinary affectionate relationship with Hattie ever since she was a small child. This might not have been anything wonderful but it would have been a door to open wider at need. Had he at the beginning so hardened his heart that change could not any more happen? But it was exactly his heart which was no longer hard. If only he had, years ago, seized the child in his arms. Would she have shrunk from him? Was it simply the fear of that which had made this long misunderstanding between them? There remained this thing which other people found so simple which he had never in all the years learnt how to do. And now it was too late.

When had it become too late? Had it always seemed too late? As time went on John Robert, in the restless painful working out of his remorse, kept moving the moment at which it became too late further and further onward in time toward the present, with which it never caught up. But if ‘too late’ kept moving on in this way, was it not still in his power, looking at the present from the future, to assert that, after all, now was not yet too late? The idea of just this freedom was perhaps what tormented the philosopher most. He could still ‘do something about Hattie’. Or could he? What could he, after all these years, do? What move could he make now which would not mystify, even appal her? Such speculations were being endlessly examined, metamorphosed and refined in his secret thought, while at the same time he struggled with the most crucial problems of his philosophy, his ability thus to brood and suffer matching but not diminishing his giant ability to work.

He thought often of writing Hattie a letter, explaining that he hoped that she realized how much he loved her. But, as in imagination he perused it, this letter seemed to be so stiffly conventional as to be insignificant or even embarrassing, or else to be something extremely melodramatic and startling. Other people solved such problems without even noticing them, or else lived thoughtlessly without their ever arising; he could not. Was it that he loved her? Was this love? Did he after all know so little of the world as not to have thoroughly understood this concept? Was it the same thing now as what he had felt when she was eight (or was it nine)? Perhaps the thing he felt, and thought he could identify, was always changing. Had it, in especial, changed lately, as Hattie grew - older? To say that John Robert was ‘in love’ with his grand-daughter was to employ too vague and dubious a concept. What was certain was that he was obsessed by her.

During years when John Robert thought continually about Hattie he saw her only at rare intervals. He deliberately rationed his visits to her, which had the effect of intensifying her mystery. Of course this was unwise, he later saw; he should have kept the child close to him. But would familiarity have dispelled her charm? He could not see the whole situation or see the situation whole. Certain necessary hypotheses excluded certain other necessary hypotheses, it was like some situations in philosophy. She would have interrupted his work. Would she have made him ‘happy’? Another problematic concept. Inevitably, and in spite of the changes in her life, she seemed complete without him. When he had first ‘noticed’ her, her father had been still alive; but the philosopher’s contempt for Whit Meynell effectively obliterated this figure from the picture in a way in which it had not been possible to obliterate Amy. Amy had been a blot, a thorn, a dismal even sinister growth. Whit Meynell was nothing. In the picture of Hattie which had begun to glow there was not even a shadow. Yet this nothingness, though it made Hattie more visible, did not make her more accessible. She always seemed to be ‘getting on’ in a sort of life of her own in which John Robert must figure as an otiose outsider, one whose arrival was a bit of a trial. Poor Whit, of course, could make no secret of his ardent desire for his father- In-law’s absence, and in this Hattie seemed naturally to share. Later, with Margot, it was much the same. Of course John Robert was aware how scrappy and unsatisfactory, how problematic and provisional, how very unhappy Hattie’s mode of life must be. But this awareness could not help him to any sensible decision. Sometimes vaguely he dreamed of taking Hattie right away with him, capturing her, keeping her with him in some Spanish-style palazzo in some isolated part of southern California and overwhelming her with luxuries and treats. But what would that really be like? Might she not be embarrassed, annoyed, irritated, bored, frustrated, longing to get away? The mere idea of finding her so caused him such anguish as to make the experiment impossible. Was it not better simply to stand by and take such satisfaction as he could in simply watching her grow? His present aloof relation to her at least precluded problems, situations, consequences. Had he not his work to do and must he not protect himself? But … watching her grow … As Hattie became fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, John Robert began to feel his ‘too late’ with an added intensity. If the disclosure of his ‘love’, or whatever it was, was likely to ‘appal’ Hattie, was this not because the ‘love’ was, or was becoming, something ‘appalling’? John Robert, who was not accustomed to stop himself from thinking, here endeavoured to stop.

It is in the context of this secret life of Rozanov that his extraordinary proposal to Tom McCaffrey may become intelligible. But before Tom there was Pearl. John Robert had never liked or trusted Margot Meynell, but for a time he could think of no alternative policy. Pearl was a sudden inspiration, and with amazing luck when he reached out his hand blindly he immediately took hold of exactly the right person. He needed an absolutely reliable watchdog, someone (when she was not imprisoned in her school) who would be with Hattie all the time; for control of Hattie’s time had gradually become a part of John Robert’s obsession. He needed positively to seclude her innocence, he wanted to be able to know where she was and what she was doing, to have, in fact, an effective spy in her life; and this role Pearl, without fully realizing it, performed very adequately. John Robert was aware of Pearl as a strong and able person; he respected strong and able people. (His awareness of her, however, had not revealed her much more intense awareness of him.) Lately, however, he had found himself beginning to feel jealous of Pearl, and resenting her existence as a barrier between him and Hattie; that was how the thing, poisonously, was growing and how mad it had all become.

The notion of Tom was in a sense a notion of the same sort, though also of course completely different. John Robert had for some time been well aware that the period of her life during which he could keep Hattie in a cage was coming to an end. Hitherto, even if he could not imprison her in a Californian palazzo with himself as a gaoler, he had been able to supervise the limitations of her life elsewhere. Pearl was good, the strict old-fashioned boarding school was good, the ‘families’ were very carefully chosen. John Robert did not want Hattie to live free with bands of disorderly young people; this idea sickened him. He was beginning to realize, with another turn of the screw, how crazy his secret possessiveness was destined to become now that Hattie was seventeen.

Was he now to be the helpless spectator of Hattie becoming a woman? Only yesterday she had been a little slim thing with pigtails and a doll and pale solemn eyes, the child who lived in his mind, as she might have lived in his house. He had established his picture of her as an innocent child. He had prepared no picture of her as a young woman. There would be lovers, affairs, scrapes, pregnancies, abortions, all the coarse horror of the world of indiscriminate sex, the degraded sex-mad modern world from which John Robert shrank away with profound moral revulsion. Then there would be no Pearl any more, Hattie would escape from her watchdog and dance about free. Could he bear it, and if not what could he do? Sometimes, walking at night in half-nightmares, it seemed to him that the only solution was to kill her.

John Robert could recall, in permanently available cinematograph, many of the occasions, not immensely large in total number, when he had been with Hattie. He saw her in the senseless baked garden of Whit Meynell’s bungalow in Texas, a little child, not as tall as the flowers. Could he not have made friends with her then, when she reached up her hand and expected him to take it (which he did not), when she had not yet fenced him away with her nervous thoughts? How he perceived it later, that fence: not that he imagined she thought immensely about him, but she had a view of him, a view which paralysed them both at terrible little tea parties at terrible motels. Later in Denver they had gone on some short expeditions to see lakes and waterfalls, to look at a ghost town (Hattie liked ghost towns), to drive to a high place from which, surrounded by scores of other motor cars, they could look at immense empty flanks of snow mountains behind snow mountains into white distances where the eyes failed. (John Robert hated cars but, being a Californian by adoption, had to drive one.) Margot, later Pearl, had come on these jaunts. Occasionally he was alone with Hattie. Of course, it was possible that he felt as he did about the pure child because she was only available as a set of pictures and not as a continuous active imperfect person. But what difference did such speculations make now? He recalled her too, faintly, perceptibly adolescent, in California beside the ocean, walking on the lawns of campuses in the east, in the west, in a desert somewhere standing with Pearl beside his car and drawing cats in the dust upon it with her finger. Had they not, on those occasions, had ‘ordinary talk’, ‘got to know each other’? No. The occasions had been too rare, and they had both, too early, set up their formal self-protective attitudes. These ‘impressions’, these ‘stills’ from her childhood came to him with a piercing sense of her particular odd dim whitish charm and her secluded innocence, her blessed loneliness and awkwardness in anything which showed any danger of being a ‘sophisticated’ or ‘merry’ scene. Of course John Robert had always endeavoured to steer her clear of ‘merry scenes’. He had done his best to preserve her from any touch or even knowledge of the abysses which surrounded her. He could not, short of total captivity, keep her out of the world. Often it seemed that it could not touch her, she was not only too well-protected, she was too naturally fastidious and, perhaps, profoundly naive. At least it could not touch her yet. Still, still, she was preserved from the abominable vulgarity of growing up.

The idea of Hattie simply walking away into a secret world of sexual adventure increasingly tortured the philosopher. It was as if he felt, with a crazed passion: she must not sin. This torment, visiting earlier with premonitory pains, now, as if by destiny, raged in full possession exactly at the time when John Robert began to feel, or imagine, that his philosophical powers were waning. That was one way to put it. It was, too, like a loss of religious faith. He began to mistrust not only what he was doing now, and everything he had ever done, but everything they had ever done, his philosophers, the great immortal ones, in fact to doubt the whole goddamned enterprise. His pen weakened in his hand, his hand which would soon in any case be stiff and monstrous with arthritis. (He had never learnt to use a typewriter, a machine which he found totally inimical to thought.) He felt world-weary, as if the journey was done, his era was over, John Robert Rozanov was finished. There only and so terribly remained alive the future, which was Hattie.

In this desolation the characteristically dotty idea of marrying Hattie off quickly came to him as a salve. Why should he not at least attempt to arrange her marriage, to meddle thus far in her life and her future? It had been one of his most secret and peculiar miseries, one which he continually revived for his discomfort, that he would never be able to know when and with whom Hattie lost her virginity, and moved definitely out of the magic circle in which he had installed her. He would have to wait and guess and never be certain, and could he bear that? Hence there arose the idea of hastening the event and controlling it himself. It remained to find a bridegroom. Again, as in the case of Pearl and, as he hoped, with equal luck, he had at once hit upon a candidate. It might have been expected that the world of possibilities would at once have seemed so giddily large as to defeat reflection. Tom McCaffrey’s amazement at the choice lighting upon him is easily understood. But in fact the area of selection, once essential requirements were met, turned out to be reasonably small; and here Rozanov’s calculations were a strange mixture of extreme self-protective worldly wisdom, and a naivety as great as Hattie’s.

John Robert did not want an American. Americans knew too much. He considered, not seriously but as a clear instance of an impossibility, one of his cleverest younger pupils, Steve Glatz. Steve was a noble youth, but he was already hand- In-glove with life; he lacked that certain awkwardness which characterizes English boys and which, somehow or other, was upon John Robert’s list of requirements. Besides, Steve was too old, being now at least twenty-five. Men of other races were out of the question. (Jews were, of course, not excluded, but the only Jews known to John Robert were American ones.) The chosen one must be English and must not be a philosopher, that too was clear. Philosophical chat with his grandson- In-law was not part of John Robert’s picture of the future. Indeed any chat with this person was rather hard to imagine. The boy must be educated, a university student or graduate. Hattie herself, he supposed, would be proceeding to the university. She would need an educated person, able to earn his living (perhaps as a school teacher) but not too brilliantly clever (nothing like Glatz). Very clever people tended to be, in John Robert’s experience, neurotic, unstable and obsessively ambitious. The chosen one must be English, and must, in practical terms, be an Ennistonian. John Robert still, in that large part of himself which remained untouched by sophistication, regarded Ennistone as the centre of the world. Besides, there was nowhere else in England where he knew so many people. He had quickly passed his academic London friends in review, scrutinizing their families in vain. As soon as it was Ennistone, the light shone upon Tom McCaffrey.

In the wilds of California and Massachusetts and Illinois John Robert had regularly received and studied the Ennistone Gazette. This gossipy sheet mentioned Tom on a few occasions as having acted in a review, been a runner-up in the tennis tournament, played well in the cricket team, obtained a university place: modest achievements, but McCaffreys were news. (The Gazette had also featured Tom’s only publication so far, an extremely bad poem, but this fortunately John Robert had not seen.) McCaffreys were news, and not only to ordinary home-keeping Ennistone, but also to John Robert himself in exile. In an odd way John Robert, bereft of home ties and relations, felt himself connected with the McCaffreys and the Stillowens, the old Victoria Park people, as if they were his family. This connectedness, which did not need to include any real friendship or even acquaintance, passed of course through Linda who had been, at the crucial time, so much at home with these folk. Perhaps indeed something even more primitive had been touched within the philosopher’s soul. George had, without for a second believing it, hazarded, to insult his teacher, the idea that John Robert, when he was young, had resented not being invited to ‘the grand houses’. In fact this was true. John Robert, at a time when he was already well known and admired, was annoyed to find himself ignored, or patronized, by people like Geoffrey Stillowen and Gerald McCaffrey. From this too he retained a deep and mixed feeling about these self-appointed ‘grandees’. From this source came his whim to establish Hattie in the Slipper House, an edifice which amid much social fuss and éclat, he could remember being built, and which had figured in his youth as a symbol of affluence and social power. Perhaps even the very idea of ‘choosing’ Tom arose from some scarcely formulated desire to see his grandchild stoop to marry a McCaffrey. John Robert did not purposefully intend to dominate and trap Tom, yet this he instinctively did and with a perceptible satisfaction.

There was, of course, a sufficiency of simpler motives. The philosopher had been well aware of Tom’s developing existence not only through ancestral memories and regular perusal of the Gazette, but also through his very occasional ‘secret’ visits to Ennistone, when he stayed briefly at the Royal Hotel to arrange the letting or repair of 16 Hare Lane. People talked about Tom, he was popular, he was happy. John Robert had already made his great decision when he had been struck by Father Bernard’s remarks that Tom McCaffrey was ‘innocent and happy, happy because innocent, innocent because happy’. Could such a condition perhaps last? And was not this exactly what he wanted for Hattie?

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.’

Promptly banishing the inconvenient ghost of Whit, John Robert thought how important it was that they had talked about America as if they had between them placed and disposed of that great continent, thereby clearing the decks. Then he thought, if Hattie married Tom they could live right here in the Slipper House.

Pearl was standing in the hall holding his overcoat which was now warm and dry after its proximity to the central heating boiler. Pearl clicked her heels and helped him on with the coat; at any rate standing on tiptoe she held it up while he fought with it, blindly waving his arms behind him and staring at Hattie. Pearl opened the front door, but John Robert suddenly made for the sitting-room again. Hattie, who had followed him, hopped out of the way. He emerged carrying the gin and vermouth bottles. He said, ‘I don’t want you girls to drink. Please don’t keep any liquor in the house. Good-bye then — ’ He blundered out into the rain.

With a sudden energy of exasperation Pearl spoke after him. ‘I hope we will see you again soon, Professor Rozanov.’ Pearl could have a strong penetrating voice when she chose to put it on.

John Robert stopped, amazed, but did not turn round. He said, ‘Yes, yes,’ but went on, not talcing the path to the back gate into Forum Way, but going across the wet grass in the direction of Belmont. Pearl shut the door sharply.

Hattie said, ‘Ouf!’ Then, ‘I liked talking to him. It wasn’t as difficult as usual.’

‘That’s because you were both tipsy!’ said Pearl.

‘He was nice.’ Hattie thought, I held my own, I had a real conversation with him!

Pearl had other thoughts. She had seen, in the sharp cameo of her keyhole, John Robert staring at Hattie, and she had not liked what she saw.

They separated, Hattie returning into the sitting-room where she wanted to be alone for a few moments and think about John Robert. Pearl stood in the hall with her hand still upon the door. Then, without a hat or coat, she ran out into the rain. She ran among the trees of the copse where foxie lived, and laid her head against the smooth trunk of a young beech tree.

John Robert meanwhile had walked past the garage and along the path beside the house and into the front porch of Belmont. The porch was a large structure rather like a little chapel with Victorian stained-glass windows. There was a seat in the porch which he remembered and on this he put down the two bottles which he intended to leave there. As the rain just then came on in a fiercer flurry he sat for a moment beside the bottles. Dressed in a mackintosh and head scarf, Alex came out.

‘Oh - John Robert — ’

‘Mrs McCaffrey - I’m sorry - I brought these bottles — ’

‘How very kind! Won’t you come in and drink them now? And please call me Alex.’ Her blue eyes narrowed as she breathed her shock, standing in the shadow of the big man who had leapt up. She could smell the warm cooked smell, not yet banished in the rain, of John Robert’s overcoat. ‘Come in, come in, please.’ She retreated to the door, pushing it open.

At that moment Ruby appeared from round the corner of the house and stood there, wide herself as a door, and stared at the philosopher.

John Robert, saying ‘I must go, sorry,’ shot out of the porch and down the path to the road. He thought to himself, I’m drunk! and made his way back to Hare Lane as quickly as he could.

Alex said to Ruby, ‘Why did you have to come and stand there like that, like a great toad. Where have you been anyway? You’ve got the evil eye. Take these bottles in.’ She went out into the front garden holding on to her secateurs in her pocket. Two warm tears mingled with the cold rain.

The next day there was a power cut (the electricians’ strike was on again) and the shoplifters joyously made their way to Bowcocks. (It was in the evening but it was Thursday and Bowcocks was open till nine.) Diane, who was inside the shop this time as she had been last time, hurried out for fear someone should accuse her of stealing. After George’s visit her heart was all scratched and scarred and vibrating all over with a mixture of joy and pain and fear.

Valerie Cossom and Nesta Wiggins, who had been writing a Women’s Lib manifesto, shouted down the stairs for lights, for it was already darkish outside, having been another yellow overcast rainy day. Dominic Wiggins, leaving his work, which he could not now continue, came up to the girls bearing a pair of candles. He adored his daughter, but wished she would marry a nice Catholic boy and have six children. He liked Valerie. He lingered, and after a while they all went downstairs and made tea on a primus stove.

Father Bernard was with Miss Dunbury. Miss Dunbury had had a heart attack, and had been told by Dr Burdett, Dr Roach’s junior partner (and brother of the St Paul’s Church organist) who believed in being absolutely truthful, that another such attack might possibly carry her right off. Miss Dunbury was afraid. Father Bernard was doing the best he could. He had prayed over her a solemn prayer. ‘O Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of just men made perfect, after they are delivered from their earthly prisons, we humbly commend the soul of this our sister into thy hands, most humbly beseeching thee that it may be precious in thy sight. Wash it, we pray thee, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb that was slain to take away the sins of the world …’ After this prayer had ended with ardent hopes of life everlasting and a loud ‘Amen’ from Miss Dunbury, the lights went out. At this point Father Bernard made a discovery about his parishioner: Miss Dunbury was almost entirely deaf and relied upon lip-reading, at which she had become extremely adept. Miss Dunbury was ashamed of her deafness and had kept it a secret, but now the revelation was unavoidable. Candles were somewhere, but where? Miss Dunbury produced an electric torch and shone it upon the priest’s face. They could then proceed. Father Bernard had an extraordinary deep touched unnerved unworthy feeling as he moved his illuminated lips to go on lying to the sick woman. Her fears, the solemn words, the glimpse of finality, disturbed him with a sense of his own ending.

‘God is there, isn’t He? He is a person, isn’t He? People sometimes say now He isn’t a person.’

‘Of course God is a person, we are persons, that is the highest mode of being that we know, how can God be less than a person?’

‘But there is eternal life like we pray for? And will I really go on living and see my loved ones?’

‘We cannot understand how this can be, but this is what in our faith we firmly believe.’

‘But will I go on being me? I wouldn’t want to live on as somebody else, would I?’

‘Eternal life would have no meaning for us if the individual does not survive. God would not cheat us with a different kind of survival.’

‘I don’t know. He can do anything.’

‘Not cheat.’

‘And you’re sure I won’t go to hell?’

‘I think you can be confident of that, my dear. I doubt if anybody goes to hell.’

‘Not even Hitler? I’d like to think he was there.’

‘Come now, you must put away such revengeful thoughts!’

‘Will you pray for me?’

‘Of course.’

At number 34 The Crescent, William Eastcote, who had been sitting at his desk and looking at his will, was suddenly plunged into a twilit darkness. He had made a careful rational will, leaving a large part of his property to Anthea, and dividing the rest among various good causes: the Meeting House, famine relief, cancer research, Amnesty, St Olaf’s alms houses, the Asian Centre in Burkestown, the community centre in the wasteland, the Boys’ Club, the Salvation Army Hostel, the National Art Collections Fund (this was for Rose who had cared about pictures). Now as he sat motionless in the increasing dark he felt a strong irrational impulse to leave the lot to Anthea. Why? Was this a last confused desire for some kind of survival? (William did not share Miss Dunbury’s hopes.) There was a lot of money, the fine house in the Crescent, some valuable building land beyond the Tweed Mill. William realized now how much his wealth had fattened him, made him feel solid and real. How thin and wraith-like he was beginning to feel now.

A little earlier, Tom McCaffrey had been making his way through the livid rainy evening in the direction of the Slipper House, holding an umbrella carefully up over his head and a bunch of yellow tulips which he was carrying. He felt singularly ridiculous and quite venomously angry with himself. He had yesterday sent a picture postcard (representing the Botanic Garden) to Miss Harriet Meynell which read as follows:

I shall be at Belmont tomorrow evening and I wonder if I could drop in for a moment to introduce myself? I believe you know my stepmother, and your grandfather wants us to be acquainted since you are a newcomer to Ennistone. I will telephone later to see if a time shortly before nine would be suitable. With best wishes,

Tom McCaffrey

A telephone call in the morning (Pearl answered) had established that that hour would be convenient. Now he was going along, as he put it to himself, to get the thing over with. He had decided against inviting Hattie to Travancore Avenue because of Emma, and also because of the awful possibility that the young lady, once there, would not soon depart. Besides, how could he ‘entertain’ her? It was only natural in a way for him (pretending to visit Belmont) to ‘pass by’ the Slipper House, where, after making a token appearance, he could inform Rozanov that he had tried and given up. The glimpse of Hattie at the Baths which had set Emma laughing had been enough for Tom also. He had seen a bedraggled red-nosed rat-child, a child about whom, with the best will in the world, no romantic fantasy could weave.

When the lights went out, Tom had entered the garden by the back gate from Forum Way. One moment he could see the street lights revealing the young green branches of trees, the lights of the Slipper House, and beyond the lights of Belmont. The next moment all was dark against the dim rainy twilight of the sky. In the sudden obscurity Tom laid his open umbrella down on the grass and tried to work out the outline of the Slipper House roof. As he peered and blinked, the wind took the umbrella hopping lightly away across the lawn. He dropped the flowers and pursued the umbrella, then could not find the flowers and stepped on them. Suddenly a light flared in the murk ahead. He stood and watched as dim flickering lights appeared in several windows of the house where the girls had not yet closed the shutters. Figures moved carrying candles. He waited a while, watching the pale rectangles of the windows emerging; and as he watched he revived in his heart an old fantasy, that he had been conceived in the Slipper House, when Fiona and Alan lay together on that first night. Then he went forward and knocked.

Pearl opened the door. She had not put on her maidservant rig for Tom. She was dressed in jeans and an old jersey. This evening her part was to look shaggy, sluttish and of uncertain age. She did not regard Tom, bearer of John Robert’s bright idea, as a happy portent. If John Robert wanted to marry Hattie off so soon, what was to become of Pearl? Also, Pearl had imbibed, perhaps from Ruby, on her odd visits to Ennistone, the notion of Tom as a little local star, and she felt a very private kind of annoyance at seeing this special young man being offered to Hattie on a plate. Of course Hattie, who declined to regard the introduction as a serious matter, would not take him. But Pearl had divined, as Hattie had not, John Robert’s weird seriousness: a curious, in respect to Hattie, intensity which Pearl now felt she was not observing for the first time and which troubled her much. She felt alarmed and apprehensive and jealous. And now there were to be handsome young men to whom she would open the door and for whom she would be invisible and old. That was why she dressed, on that evening, invisible and old. In America she had never felt like a servant.

‘Let me take your umbrella. Miss Meynell is in the sitting-room.’

Tom, who had no overcoat, handed over his dripping umbrella. A candle on the window ledge showed half their faces and cast their swaying shadows as Pearl closed the front door.

Tom went into the sitting-room carrying the tulips. Pearl, outside, said, ‘I’ll bring more light.’ Two candles, one on the mantelpiece and one on the glass-topped bamboo table, made a soft dim dome of illumination in the room.

Hattie had aggressively refused to put her hair up. She wore it strained back from her face and hanging in a single thick heavy pigtail down her back. She was wearing a scrappy tee shirt and tight jeans which showed how long and skinny her legs were. Her skin looked little-girlish, not youthful. Her collar-bones but not her breasts were prominent under the shirt. She looked almost as childish to Tom as in his first glimpse of her, though less bedraggled.

‘I’ve brought you some flowers,’ said Tom. He held them out and Hattie took them. ‘Oh dear, they’re all muddy!’ The yellow tulips were dabbled with mud. ‘I’m afraid I dropped them.’

Pearl came in with two more candles. ‘Where shall I put these?’

‘Oh anywhere. Could you wash the flowers?’ said Hattie. (These were the first words Tom heard her utter.) She gave the tulips to Pearl who had put the candles down on the window seat. ‘Would you like a drink? Is Coke OK?’

‘Lovely,’ said Tom, who hated Coke. Tom drew his fingers back through his long, now rather damp, curly hair, combing it. Pearl returned with the drinks and with the scrubbed and now rather battered tulips in a mauve vase.

‘How beautiful candlelight is,’ said Tom.

‘We said we’d have the fire,’ said Hattie to Pearl, ‘and could you close the shutters?’

Hattie and Tom watched Pearl light the gas fire, and close the shutters, revealing Ned Larkin’s picture.

Hattie handed Tom a glass of Coca-Cola, taking one herself, and said, ‘Oh please sit down.’ They sat down on slightly swaying bamboo chairs with fitted cushions.

‘Have you any oil-lamps?’ said Tom. ‘They’re useful for these occasions.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Hattie, and then, after a pause, ‘I think you know my grandfather?’

‘Yes, I met him once.’

‘Once?’

‘Well, yes — ’

‘I supposed that he knew you quite well.’

‘I hadn’t met him before last week, when he asked me to come and see him.’

‘Oh,’ said Hattie. ‘What about?’

‘About you.’

‘About me?’

‘Yes, but - he must have told you — ’

‘Told me what?’

‘His idea.’

‘What idea?’

‘About us.’

‘Us?’

‘You and me. Sorry, I’m not putting it very well — ’

‘So it was his idea that you should come and see me?’ said Hattie.

‘In a way, yes. I mean, yes.’

‘But why?’

‘He wants us to know each other.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, why not!’ said Tom. He was aware of having made a number of blunders already and was acutely conscious of the perfectly horrid falsity of his position, but he was exasperated too by Hattie’s hard aggressive tone, as if it was all his fault. He thought, has she no sense of humour, no sense of fun? Why is she so cross with me? ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘you’re a newcomer here — ’

‘And so —?’

‘I could show you round and introduce you and - that’s strictly all, I - there’s no need to think — ’

‘Oh I don’t!’ said Hattie. She seemed to be stiff with anger.

‘I wasn’t suggesting — ’

‘Naturally not,’ said Hattie with extreme coldness. ‘We haven’t met anywhere, have we, that I can recall?’

‘No, I saw you for about three seconds at the Baths on that awfully cold day when it snowed. Two seconds actually. I can’t say that I — ’

‘No indeed. I see. Well, I’m sorry you’ve been put to this trouble.’

‘No trouble, I assure you - I do hope — ’

‘My maid knows Ennistone well and will be perfectly able to show me round, so there is no need for you to be inconvenienced.’

‘But — ’

‘Anyway, I am going home soon.’

‘Home —?’

‘Back to Colorado where I live.’

The American name entered the conversation with a kind of fierce chopping movement, and Tom felt brought up short as if he had been suddenly confronted by an icy cliff of Rockies. ‘Oh well - in that case — ’ he murmured.

There was a silence, during which Hattie picked up her glass from the floor and reached out to replace it with a click upon the glass-topped bamboo table. Then she stood up.

Tom began to say, ‘I’m afraid I — ’ Then he stood up too.

Pearl, who had of course been listening outside, smartly opened the sitting-room door. Tom (this had now somehow become inevitable) marched out into the hall. He turned and faced the two girls, the thin pale young one, the sturdy brown older one, their faces knit up into expressions of extreme hostile anxiety. He thought, this is absurd, it is all a mistake, I can explain. But he could not explain. He said, ‘I’m awfully sorry - I’m sorry I bothered you - I’m afraid I didn’t manage to say — ’

‘Not at all,’ said Hattie.

Pearl opened the front door.

Tom went out into the rain and began to blunder his way through the now totally dark garden in the direction of the back gate. The rain, soaking his hair and running down his neck, reminded him that he had left his umbrella behind. He turned back and was approaching the house again when the front door flew open. Something was hurled violently out and scattered on the lawn. It was his ill-fated bunch of tulips. As the door slammed shut he stood still, shocked, for a moment, looking at the candle in the hall window wavering wildly in the sudden draught. Then he turned and ran away down the garden.

‘But what is it?’ said Pearl, as Hattie’s tears ran through her fingers.

‘Didn’t you hear?’

‘Yes, but — ’

‘He isn’t an admirer, he’s a liar - and he brought those horrible lying flowers — ’

‘It wasn’t the poor flowers’ fault! And why is he a liar?’

‘He just came because he was told to.’

‘All right then, but he thought you’d understand.’

‘Understand what? Something horrible —’

‘But you’re complaining because he’s not an admirer.’

‘I’m not complaining!’

‘You said you didn’t want one!’

‘I don’t. I just want to be left alone. And then this horrible spoiling thing happens. Oh why did he have to come? He’s a horrible person. so rude - and it’s all spoilt now - oh Pearlie, Pearlie, I want to go home. I want to go home!’

Oh dear, thought Pearl, as she took Hattie in her arms, what a mess, whatever is it all about - and what a handsome boy he is too - well, I suppose that’s part of the trouble. Awful things are just starting. And soon poor Pearl was finding tears of her own to shed.

‘Are you going for your usual walk?’ said Gabriel to Brian.

The notorious McCaffrey summer expedition to the seaside was in full swing. The sun was shining, the east wind was blowing, it was now May. The jaunt had, after discussion, settled down to being for one day only, which was generally agreed to offer the worst of all worlds. Brian usually demonstrated his dislike of this intensive family gathering by turning his back on the famous element and walking inland, thus avoiding any participation in junketings on the beach.

‘No,’ said Brian.

‘Why? Are you too tired?’

‘No. I’m not in the least tired. Why should I be?’

‘Will you sit here then? Or would you like to go on the rocks?’

‘Why do you want to make it all out into a programme? Just don’t bother me!’

Gabriel gave a little (maddening to Brian) frown at being hurt, and went on silently unpacking the various ritual objects which always made up the Brian McCaffreys’ home base on the beach.

Brian asked himself, why don’t I want to go for a walk like I usually do? The answer was terrible. He was afraid that Gabriel might find herself alone with George. She might actually attempt to be alone with George. Am I going mad? Brian wondered. Why did George come anyway? It was shameless of him to come to the seaside just as if he were an ordinary person.

Of course there were other expeditions to the sea but this was the one which was supposed to assemble all the clan, and which Gabriel had (not felicitously for her husband) compared to Christmas. It continued a tradition of annual family summer gatherings at Maryville and could be seen as a kind of remembrance of, or mourning for, that house which was less than a mile distant from where the clan was now encamped. This was an aspect of it which Brian particularly detested. He had never liked the McCaffrey seaside house, since he so much preferred his own. He had however resented (as they all did) Alex’s disgraceful act of selling it without consultation. Now he felt the whole thing was better forgotten. Gabriel always came back in tears, lamenting for the lost house. And if the visit was supposed to show the usurping Blacketts that the McCaffreys didn’t care it was clearly misconceived. Of course, that particular bit of coastline, as well as being the nearest unspoilt sea to Ennistone, was exceptionally delightful; but it would have showed more spirit to abandon the place altogether. In a more general sense of course the pilgrimage survived because it had somehow become a family custom, animated and maintained by the sentimentality of the women (that is Gabriel, Alex and Ruby) and the expectations of the children (that is Adam and Zed). Alex pretended indifference, but in fact valued the event as an exhibition of her matriarchal power.

‘If only Stella were here,’ said Gabriel, as she spread out a large tartan rug, ‘it would be — ’ she was going to say ‘perfect’, only honesty compelled her to realize that no such picture with Brian in it could be perfect - ‘so nice.’

Stella, who had not reappeared, was now said, in terms of a rumour which probably had no sounder foundation than the one that pronounced her dead, to be staying with friends in London.

‘Stella hated this jamboree as much as I do,’ said Brian, kicking a stone. ‘And if we must come I fail to see why we have to have those bloody outsiders.’

The persons gathered, now scattered, upon the windy sunny beach were as follows: Brian, Gabriel, Adam and Zed, Alex and Ruby, George, Tom and Emma, and Hattie and Pearl. Alex had prompted Tom to bring Emma. Tom, who loved the occasion, would have come anyway, and the two ‘idle louts’ as Brian called them, had evidently found no difficulty in escaping from their university work in London. Gabriel had also, to Brian’s disgust, invited Hattie and Pearl, encountering them one day at the Baths. She did this partly out of benevolence to one generally agreed to be a waif, partly out of a sort of motherly possessiveness which she had enouraged herself to develop about Hattie and which had so far found no other expression, and partly out of an obsessive irritated envy and curiosity which she felt about the fortunate tenant of the coveted Slipper House. Anyway, there they all were.

The Brian McCaffreys had driven themselves, together with Tom and Emma, in Brian’s old Austin. Pearl had driven Hattie in a hired Volkswagen. (The girls had never been allowed to have a car of their own, but Pearl had learnt to drive in America where they were occasionally permitted to hire a car.) Alex had driven George and Ruby in William Eastcote’s Rover, which William always pressed her to borrow whenever she needed it. (It had never for some reason been ‘the thing’ to invite the Eastcotes, William, Anthea, and when she was alive, Rose, to join this family occasion.) The cars were parked on a track at the upper end of the long sheep-dotted yellow field of wiry wind-combed grass down which they had walked to the sea. The grass ended in a wire fence through which one crawled on to the dark rocks, easy to descend, which fringed the beach all along. The beach itself was gritty, the coarse sand mingling with small pebbles, and the dark raggedy rocks began again seawards, covered with golden brown seaweed and extensively visible at low tide.

Various ‘camps’ had been established and sheltered spots for undressing ‘bagged’. Gabriel had undone her corded bales well out in the middle of the sand, as she never bothered about hiding to undress. Alex and Ruby occupied a little cave-like recess in the landward rocks which was traditionally theirs. Hattie and Pearl had walked away shyly along the beach and evidently found a similar retreat, since they were no longer to be seen. Tom and Emma had carried their kit to a summit of the landward rocks where the serrated tops surrounding a hollow composed a citadel. Adam and Zed had of course run down to the sea whose distant wavelets they were approaching by slithering over the seaweedy rocks, with many pauses to inspect the exciting pools. George, isolated upon a low rock which reared itself some distance away in the midst of the sand, was sitting and gazing at the sea. Further away along the coast, one topmost corner of Maryville could just be seen above the rocks which rose at that point almost to the dignity of cliffs.

A prompt start had been made and it was still early in the day. The usual procedure (‘usual procedures’ are sacred upon such family occasions) was that there should first be swimming, organized from the separate camps, then sunbathing, should that be feasible, and strolling about, then drinks (a ceremony especially sacred to Gabriel and Alex) with the company gathered together to form a ‘party’, then lunch, also taken more or less together as far as was convenient in terms of using rocks for seats and tables, then more strolling and wandering including sometimes a special short walk (not Brian’s walk) inland to a ruined manor house with a wild garden, then a second bathe for those who felt strong enough, then tea, then more drinks, then time to go home. It made a long day. Ruby and Gabriel ‘did’ all the food (Gabriel loved doing this) and Gabriel and Alex provided all the drinks. On this occasion Gabriel had packed the extra rations for the visitors (outsiders), Emma, Hattie and Pearl.

Since a little time has passed, some explanation is necessary concerning the present state of the parties. The university term had started and Tom and Emma had officially removed themselves to their digs in King’s Cross. However, the young Osmores were prolonging their stay in America, and Tom McCaffrey was to be seen at Travancore Avenue oftener, it was said, than was consistent with strict attention to his studies. Of course many Ennistonians now, with the improved rail link, commuted daily to work in London, but it was agreed to be a tiring and time-consuming journey. However that might be, Tom, and sometimes Emma, tended to appear at weekends. Tom had a reason for these sojourns in his native town since he had become involved in the production of The Triumph of Aphrodite which was to be performed in June, with assistance from the Arts Council. Tom now, in fact, figured as coauthor with Gideon Parke, having learnt to imitate the style of the eighteenth-century poet, providing yards of handy additional stuff which was rumoured to be ‘better than the original’. This included a charming extra song for the boy (Olivia Newbold’s younger brother Simon) who was, on the advice of Jonathan Treece (formerly choir master at St Paul’s, now organist at an Oxford College), to sing the jester’s part designed for the undiscoverable countertenor. During rehearsals Tom inevitably saw a good deal of Anthea Eastcote and was to be seen walking with her about the town, thereby reviving old speculations and driving Hector Gaines more often than before to the contemplation of suicide.

Of course Tom had, even in the company of the agreeable Anthea, very odd secret thoughts in his head. In fact he was worrying and annoying himself into a frenzy. He thought he could actually see lines appearing on his forehead. The ridiculous misbegotten interview with Hattie had left a painful throbbing scar upon Tom’s soul. Tom was accustomed to an unscarred soul; an aspect of his cheerful temperament was indeed a calm modest sunny little self-satisfaction of which he allowed himself to be aware as harmless. He had had a poem accepted by a periodical, a real literary magazine, not a senseless rag like the Ennislone Gazette; but he noticed with horror that this success gave him less than the expected amount of pleasure. His pleasure was being stolen. He felt that he had done badly, he even suspected that he had behaved like a cad, a role in which he had never dreamt to see himself. At the same time the whole thing was hideously obscure and he couldn’t clearly make out how he had done what he ought not to have done, and even what it was that he had done. When he had discussed the matter with Emma, he had hung his head at his friend’s strictures without however receiving any enlightenment from him. Yes, perhaps he ought not to have agreed to Rozanov’s dotty idea, which he had seen in the light of an innocent lark. It had then seemed reasonable to go and see the girl, so as to satisfy the philosopher if for nothing else. The trouble (was that it?) was that the philosopher had not properly warned the girl, had perhaps even misled her, which was certainly not Tom’s fault. And she had been so cold and hostile from the start that he had been unable to get any grasp upon the situation. (‘You’re annoyed because you failed to charm her,’ said Emma.) Now there was a blot upon the world which Tom heartily wished to remove but could not; indeed it paralysed him. He considered writing a letter of apology to Hattie, but any letter he envisaged could be seen as a continuation of some unpardonable rudeness. He told himself that he ought to write to Rozanov and tell him that he had failed. But he hated the idea of writing this letter too. Would he really then have to affirm that he would never speak to the girl again? And now here she was, invited by tactless Gabriel to spoil the family picnic.

‘How soon can we go home?’ said Scarlett-Taylor, sitting beside Tom on their citadel rock.

‘Don’t be silly, you’ve got to enjoy yourself first.’

‘Swimming in this wind, in that choppy dark-green sea?’

‘It’ll make you feel wonderful. Look, there’s Maryville. You can just see the top window and the edge of the roof. I suppose you’ll say, no wonder Alex sold the place.’

‘No, I think this is all marvellous.’

‘Well then — ’

‘I just don’t want to swim. But I love this sort of coast. I love the rocks and the seaweed and that black-and-white-striped lighthouse and the gulls crying like that. It reminds me of Donegal. Only,’ he added, ‘Donegal is far far more beautiful.’ And Emma thought to himself how terribly sad it was that he could not love his native land or return to it with pleasure any more. And he thought how sad it was that he loved Tom, and yet that love could not go out and reach its object. It seemed to vaporize, to dissolve as at some invisible barrier. And he thought about his mother, to whom he had paid a guilty, scrappy two-day visit just before term began. And he thought about his singing teacher, Mr Hanway, and how he had not yet managed to tell him that he had decided to give up singing. And shall I really never sing again? he thought.

‘Look at old George sitting there and brooding. Whatever is he thinking, I wonder!’

‘Why has he come?’

‘To act lonely and misunderstood. Look at that pose.’

‘I want to talk to George,’ said Emma. ‘I want to have a long talk with him.’

‘You want to help him, everyone does, isn’t he lucky!’

‘Don’t you want to help him, don’t you love him?’

‘Oh, I suppose so, but what can love do if it can’t get in, wander round wailing?’

What indeed. ‘How I wish I hadn’t missed seeing Stella that day at Brian’s place.’

‘Yes, you just missed her. Stella’s strong, she’s stronger than any of us. And so beautiful - she’s like an Egyptian queen.’

‘But where is she?’

‘In London. Or gone back to her father in Tokyo is my guess.’

‘Isn’t it odd?’

‘Yes, but George and Stella have always been odd.’

‘Why, there’s Miss Meynell and Miss Scotney.’

‘How do you know the maid’s name?’

‘I heard it at the Baths.’

‘Good heavens, they’re starting to undress, they don’t know we’re up here and can see them, quick!’

Tom and Emma slithered down the side of the rock and ran away across the beach towards the water.

The drinks before lunch had been as follows: Gabriel had brought a gin and fresh orange juice mixture all cold in thermos flasks. Alex had brought two bottles of whisky and two soda syphons. Pearl had brought Coca-Cola. Yugoslav Riesling had been served with lunch. The food at lunch had been as follows: Gabriel’s ‘spread’ consisted of pate with oatmeal biscuits, Danish salami, slices of tongue, lettuce salad, tomato salad, watercress, new potatoes, rye bread with caraway seeds, cottage cheese, summer pudding and grapes. While Ruby provided ham sandwiches, egg sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches, sausages, veal-and-ham pie, water biscuits, Cheddar cheese, Double Gloucester cheese, custard tarts and bananas. As Ruby and Gabriel never consulted each other about how much to bring, both made sure of feeding everybody, so there was plenty to eat. Emma achieved his ambition of having a conversation with George. He made a point of sitting near him and questioned him about the Ennistone Ring and the Museum. There was a general embarrassment (enjoyed by George) when Emma (who did not know of George’s exploit) expressed regret that the Museum’s unique collection of Roman glass, about which he had read, was not on display. Coughing by Brian and a kick from Tom then terminated the brief conversation. However, it had been a conversation and there had been a little perhaps absurd surprise at the spectacle of George behaving in a perfectly ordinary way. (Yet how did they expect him to behave?) George displayed no eccentricity except that, while answering Emma’s questions, he stared fixedly at Hattie. He had taken off his jacket and waistcoat, displaying a new plumpness. His round face looked pleased and calm, and his stare was benevolent though intense. Hattie, aware of it, averted her head. Before lunch Tom had politely asked Hattie if she did not find the sea cold, and she had politely answered that it was no colder than Maine. At lunch he had endeavoured to sit next to Hattie, but had been prevented, intentionally or not, by Pearl who, in the awkwardness of their sitting down on rocks and rugs, took the vacant place. Alex, looking slim and youthful in trousers and a brilliant blue beach shirt, her bushy peppery-salty hair gleaming in the sun, made herself agreeable to the girls, while being acutely conscious of George. Gabriel, also acutely conscious of George, could not help looking at him with a little smile which expressed, look how good he’s being. She even turned to Brian, indicating George’s splendidly normal behaviour with an approving nod. This annoyed both Brian and Tom.

‘Where have you been?’ said Alex to Ruby. ‘I’ve had to do all the clearing-up myself, everyone’s gone away.’

‘I went for a walk.’

‘A walk ? You don’t walk.’

‘I went to look at the house.’

‘Maryville? We don’t want them to think we’re spying! Please finish all this now. I’ve done most of it anyway.’

Alex walked away. She was quite suddenly feeling the most intense regret about having sold Maryville. She thought, I could have invited him there, a sort of house party, it would have made sense, he would have come. She had been so near to getting him in through the door of Belmont that time when he appeared with the bottles. What did they mean? She felt lonely and resentful on the empty beach and the sound of the sea made her think about death. She wanted to find George, but he had gone; everyone had gone. Looking to see the time, she found that her watch was no longer on her wrist; she must have dropped it somewhere. Moaning with vexation, she began to search the sand.

‘Where’s George?’ said Brian to Tom.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did Gabriel come with you?’

‘No, I haven’t seen her.’

Brian had walked along beside the rocks, the lighthouse way, not the Maryville way, with Adam and Zed. He thought Gabriel had set off that way, but she was not to be seen. He hurried back, leaving Adam and Zed on the beach near their camp, ‘Don’t swim until I come back,’ and then ran all the way to the ruined manor house. There was laughter in the garden, Tom, Hattie, Pearl and Emma, but no Gabriel. Brian thought, she’s somewhere with George. Puffing, he began to run back to the beach.

‘I want to sort of apologize,’ said Tom to Hattie. They were for a moment alone together in the wild garden, where the box hedges had grown into ragged monsters twelve feet high. Fragments of old paving, of statues and urns and balustrades, lay about half-buried under grass and moss, and great prickly arches of roses run wild. A distant cuckoo chanted. Invisible larks were singing high above in the blinding blue air.

‘Why, there’s a hand!’ said Hattie. She detached a life-size stone hand from a tangle of brambles.

‘How beautiful, how strange.’

‘Would you like it?’

‘No, it’s yours.’

‘Is it marble?’

‘Limestone, I think.’

‘Why sort of?’

‘What?’

‘Why just “sort of” apologize?’

‘Why indeed. I want to apologize.’

‘Go on then.’

‘I don’t know how to do it — ’

‘Don’t then.’

‘I mean - I thought your grandfather had told you — ’

‘Told me what?’

‘That he wanted - well, that he wanted us to get married.’

Hattie was silent for a moment looking at the hand. Her hair, fuzzy from immersion in the sea, held at the back of her neck by a ribbon, swarmed down her back. She put the hand in the pocket of her dress (she was wearing her new summer dress from Anne Lapwing’s Boutique), but the hand was too heavy and the dress sagged. She took it out again.

‘All right. I regard you as having apologized.’

‘But — ’

‘It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.’

‘It sounds crazy, doesn’t it — ’

‘What does?’

‘What he wanted.’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean - he is a bit eccentric - things don’t happen like that, do they — ’

‘No.’

‘Will you tell him?’

‘Tell him what?’

‘That I visited you - that I - that I tried — ’

‘No. It’s nothing to do with me. It’s nothing whatever to do with me.’

‘Oh - all right — ’ said Tom unhappily. ‘I’ll write to him.’ He had hoped that his ‘apology’ would free him from guilt and the feeling, which Tom hated, that someone thought ill of him. But now it all seemed even worse. What a muddle.

‘I’ve wanted to talk to you for some time,’ said Emma. He and Pearl were alone together in another part of the garden where there was an overgrown lily-pond at the bottom of a broken flight of steps. The lilies had covered almost all the surface of the water. Just here and there, in dark-green windows, there was the quick golden flash of a huge orfe.

‘How can that be?’ said Pearl. ‘We’ve only met today.’ Pearl was wearing a summer dress too, not a flowy flowery one like Hattie’s, but a straight yellow shift, like a sort of science fiction uniform, roped in at the waist to an increased narrowness. Her head too, with her straight profile, looked narrow as if it were trying to be two-dimensional. The sun had made her dark complexion a shade darker, raising a reddish-brown glow in her cheeks, and finding reddish lights in her dark hair, which she had had expertly cut much shorter.

‘I saw you several times at the Baths, at the Institute as they call it.’

‘Oh —?’ Pearl found Emma very odd. He was perspiring in his coat and waistcoat, and his pale face was burnt to an uncomfortable shiny pink. He peered at her sternly through his narrow oval glasses.

‘Yes. You interest me.’

‘It’s kind of you to be interested! You know I’m Miss Meynell’s maid?’

‘Yes, that’s picturesque but not important. It’s quaint for anybody to be anybody’s maid these days.’

‘You’re Irish, aren’t you?’

‘That too is picturesque but not important.’

‘Well, what is important?’

‘You are.’ Emma threw a stone into the pool but it did not sink, it rested upon a thick water-lily leaf. He threw another to hit the first but missed.

‘What can I do for you?’ said Pearl, rather curtly.

‘Ah, I don’t know that yet,’ said Emma. ‘Possibly nothing.’ He added, ‘I wanted to meet you before I knew who you were.’

‘But why did you want to meet me? I’m sorry, this is becoming a rather silly conversation.’

‘I don’t think so. A little laboured, but we make progress. Again, I don’t know. Why is one impressed by some people and not by others? That’s not a matter of logic.’

‘I think we should go back — ’

‘I don’t usually talk to girls like this. I don’t usually talk to girls at all.’

‘It may be better not to talk. You’ll find me very dull.’

‘Why do you think that?’

‘I know nothing.’

‘That’s all right, I know everything. If you want to know anything, I can tell you.’

‘You’re a historian —?’

‘Yes. Of course all I know is facts and a few tattered ideas I find adhering to them.’

‘We’d better go and join Miss Meynell and Mr McCaffrey.’

‘My friend is called Tom, your friend is called Hattie. Can’t you drop the Misses and Misters?’

‘No.’

‘As you please. I’ve thought of a reason why I wanted to meet you.’

‘Why?’

‘You look dry.’

‘Dry?’

‘Yes. Girls are seldom dry.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Dry as in hard and dry. The opposite to soft and mushy.’

‘I thought men liked softness. Perhaps you think I’m like a boy.’

‘Tell me something about yourself.’

‘What?’

‘Anything.’

‘My mother was a prostitute.’

‘Am I supposed to be impressed?’

Meanwhile Gabriel was having a terrible experience. She had set off walking along the beach (as Brian had seen her do) but had soon climbed up on to the rocks on the landward side and begun to clamber along them. Was she looking for George? No. The idea of being alone with George in this intense wild region filled her with fear. Did she enjoy the fear? She went on and came at last to a place she knew, not far from the lighthouse, where the rocks became steep and the strip of sand between the seaward rocks and the landward rocks disappeared, and the rocks fell sheer into deep water. Here, lifting her head from a difficult scramble, she suddenly saw a man ahead of her, outlined against the sky. For a second she thought it was George. Then she saw that in fact it was not a man, but a tall teenage boy. As she advanced, she saw another boy. They were standing looking down into a shallow pool in the rocks where, above the high-tide mark, the winter storms had tossed some flying water. Gabriel knew the pool. As she came forward the boys saw her. ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ Gabriel paused beside the pool and looked down too. Then she felt an instant spasm of pain and premonitory fear. There was a fish swimming to and fro in the pool, a large fish about eighteen inches long. Gabriel thought, that fish has no business in that pool, he must have been put there by the boys. Her identification with the fish was instantaneous. She thought, he will very soon suffocate if he is left here. The pool is foul anyway, the sea never reaches it at this time of year.

She said, ‘What a lovely fish. Did you catch him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you going to put him back in the sea?’

‘No. Not likely!’

‘You can’t leave him here — ’

‘Why not?’

‘He’ll suffocate in that small pool.’

‘We’re going to take him home,’ said the other boy. ‘We’ve got a bucket.’

‘To eat?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe just to keep.’

‘You wouldn’t be able to keep that fish alive.’

‘Why not?’

‘Won’t you please put him back in the sea? We could catch him and just drop him over the edge here into the deep water, and see him swim away. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to do?’

The taller boy laughed. ‘I’m not going to put it back. It’s my fish!’

The boys were about fifteen, dressed in black leather jackets and jeans, their hair cut close to their heads. The spectacle of Gabriel’s distress clearly amused them.

‘Please,’ said Gabriel, ‘please.’ She squatted down beside the pool.

‘Hey, leave it alone!’

‘He’s so lovely, he’s so alive, and he may die — ’

‘I bet you eat fish and chips!’ said the other boy.

Gabriel said, with a sudden inspiration, ‘I’ll buy it from you!’

They laughed again. ‘Would you, how much?’

‘I’ll give you a pound.’

‘Two pounds.’

‘All right, two pounds.’

‘Ten pounds, twenty pounds, a hundred pounds.’

‘I’ll give you two pounds for the fish.’

‘Let’s see the two pounds.’

‘Oh dear — ’ Gabriel had no money with her. Her handbag was lying on the sand under a rug with the remains of lunch. ‘I haven’t got it here. I’ll get it from the beach. But can we let the fish go first, please let’s, and I promise I’ll give you the two pounds. You can come with me — ’

‘No,’ said the taller boy. ‘You bring the two pounds and we might, I just say might, let you have the fish.’

Tears came into Gabriel’s eyes. She stood up. ‘You will stay here, you won’t take the fish away?’

‘We won’t stay forever!’

Gabriel turned and began to scramble back across the rocks. She slipped and tore her stocking and grazed her leg and scarcely noticed and bundled on.

‘Oh there you are!’ It was Brian who had returned to the beach.

‘Oh Brian, darling!’ Gabriel slithered down to the sand, wrenching her skirt. ‘Could you give me two pounds, quick, please — ’

‘Two pounds?’ said Brian, whose relief had instantly evaporated as soon as it appeared. He was exhausted with running to and fro, and annoyed with Gabriel for vanishing. ‘What for?’

‘Some boys have got a fish, a live fish, I want to buy it to save it— ’

‘Two pounds, for a fish?’

‘I want to put it back in the sea.’

‘Oh don’t be silly.’ said Brian. ‘We’re not made of money. Certainly not.’

Gabriel turned from him and ran on laboriously, her feet sinking in the sand, her face red with tears.

‘And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?’

The four young people were together again in the wild garden. Tom, after his second defeat, as he felt it to be, at the hands of Hattie, had hastened, with her, to seek for Emma and Pearl. Then they had walked on together and climbed into the ruined shell of the manor house which was filled with grass and buttercups and daisies and white-flowering nettles. Inside the irregular remains of the walls, which contained two fine Elizabethan windows, it felt odd and ghostly, as if, in spite of the bright sun, the place were twilit. In the grassy space which had been the great hall there was a curious echo, and Tom had persuaded Emma to sing, and Emma had sung Blake’s beautiful anthem. Emma had drunk as much whisky and Riesling as he could lay hands on at lunch, and this explained his readiness to sing, as well as the temerity of his conversation with Pearl. The sheer sudden force of the singing and the high sweet slightly rough piercing quality of the sound amazed and fascinated the two girls as Tom had intended. Looking at their rapt faces, he felt a sharp pang of envy. He was not always able to feel his friend’s gifts as his own.

‘I don’t understand the poem,’ said Hattie, after they had congratulated Emma. ‘Why is he asking “did those feet”?’

‘It’s a poem,’ said Tom. ‘It doesn’t have to mean anything exact. It’s a sort of rhetorical question. He’s just imagining Christ here.’

‘But perhaps he was here,’ said Emma. ‘Miss Meynell is right to notice the question. After all there is that legend — ’

‘What legend?’ said Tom.

‘That Christ was here.’

‘Where?’

‘Yes, in England, as a child. He came here as a child with his Uncle Joseph of Arimathea who was a tin merchant.’

‘Did he? Christ? Here?’

‘It’s a legend. Haven’t you ever heard it?’

‘No. But it’s wonderful!’ said Tom, suddenly transported. ‘And it could be true. Fancy Christ here, walking on our fields. It’s so - oh it’s so beautiful - and it’s great! He came with his Uncle Joseph of Arimathea as a child. Oh that makes me so happy!’

Emma laughed at him. ‘You’re easily excited by what every schoolboy knows!’

‘I didn’t know it,’ said Hattie.

‘I must go - I must run — ’

‘What for?’

‘I must tell somebody else, I must pass the news on! Oh I’m so pleased! I must run and run!’ With these words Tom vaulted over one of the low parts of the wall and ran across the ruined terrace littered with broken stone, leapt to the grass, and began to run away as fast as he could towards the sea down a long avenue of vast ragged yew trees which had once been yew hedges.

Left above with the girls, Emma felt annoyed, annoyed with Tom for deserting him, annoyed with himself for singing, annoyed with Pearl for having been the occasion of that silly conversation, and annoyed with Hattie for being, as he had got it into his head, a touchy stuck-up little miss. He said rather curtly, ‘We’d better get back now.’ They set off after Tom, walking in silence.

Tom ran fast, then becoming breathless ran more slowly. He ran along a footpath bordered by misty white cow-parsley which was just coming into flower. The footpath ended at a little tarmac road, and across the road was the field and the descending track where they had parked the cars, and the vast semi-circular rim of the sea framed on one side by the old black-and-white lighthouse, and on the other by the promontory and the house set upon it, Maryville, which was fully visible from the top of the field. A man was walking along the road, it was George.

Tom ran up and seized his brother’s arm, ‘Oh George, George, did you know? Christ was here. Oh, it’s a legend but it could be true. He was here in England like in Blake’s poem. I never understood it before. He came as a child with his Uncle Joseph of Arimathea who was a tin merchant! It could be true, couldn’t it? Fancy Christ here in England! Did you know?’

‘I knew of the legend,’ said George, detaching Tom’s arm, but gently.

‘Everybody knew but me. But now I know and it’s - like a revelation - it changes things. Oh George, I do want you to be all right, I’d do anything for you, I’ll pray for you, I do pray for you when I pray, I sort of pray, I suppose that’s what it is, I care for you so much. Stella will come home, everything will be all right again. I think I see that now. I hate to think of you wandering about alone and thinking. Don’t be alone and think terrible thoughts, will you, please. Something good will happen to you, something very good will come to you, I feel sure, I feel so sure — ’

‘Do you really pray for me?’ said George, smiling with his little blunt teeth. ‘I think that’s rather impertinent.’

‘Oh come and swim, come and swim with me now, like we used to. You know that would be good.’

‘We go different ways. Go on. And as for your friend, he was never here, you may be certain of that. Go on, go on.’

Adam had gone along the beach with Zed and discovered a place where a sort of river or gully of sand ran between the rocks right to the sea itself. Adam and Zed ran down to where the small waves were breaking. Adam took off his shoes and paddled. He knew that he was not supposed to go swimming by himself but it was so nice to be able to walk into the sea on gently shelving sand, instead of hobbling over stones and rocks. He was wearing his bathing trunks, and when the water was deep enough he sat down, then turned over and swam a stroke or two. The water was very cold, but Adam was used to that. He loved the taste of the salt. Zed stood on the sand well back from the foam. He disliked and feared the sea and did not want to get his fur splashed. He wished that Adam would come back. To cheer himself up he pawed a pebble, pushing it a little, but his heart was not in the game. Adam came back and picked Zed up. He thought Zed might like a little swim, he swam so well, and Adam was always strangely and deeply excited to see him swim. He took the dog out beyond the surf and let him down gently into the water, watching the dry white fur become wet and clinging, feeling the warm dog in the cold sea. He let Zed go and watched with joy as the little dog paddled along keeping his fastidious nose and high forehead well above the water. Zed could have let Adam know how much he hated it, but he felt he had to be brave because that is a dog’s duty, and had to pretend in order to please his master. Adam swam on a little bit and Zed followed, paddling with his strong little white paws, through the smooth glossy water which so quietly rose and fell. Adam played with Zed, encouraging him to ride on his shoulder. The sea felt warm now, and the blue sky blazed radiantly at them over the close horizon of the rhythmic waves.

Tom ran down on to the beach. Brian and Alex were searching for Alex’s watch. He ran up to them. ‘Did you know that Christ was in England?’

‘What?’ said Alex.

‘Christ was in England. It’s a legend. He came as a child with his Uncle Joseph of Arimathea who was a tin merchant.’

‘I’ve lost my watch,’ said Alex. ‘It dropped off somewhere here. Or was it here? We’ve moved.’

‘You search over there near that rock,’ said Brian. He was upset because he had been nasty to Gabriel, he had not tried to take in what she was saying, and when he followed her to the beach Alex had collared him and Gabriel had disappeared.

‘But did you know about Christ?’ said Tom. ‘It seems to me so extraordinary and so moving. Like in Blake’s poem. “And did those feet in ancient time …” I never understood it before.’

‘It’s impossible,’ said Brian.

‘But had you heard?’

‘The legend, yes, but it’s impossible, as your historical chum will tell you. Does he always drink so much? He reeled off positively sozzled.’

‘Please help us to look!’ said Alex, red-faced and stooping in an awkward position as she used to when she cried ‘Damn, damn, damn!’ with the dustpan and brush.

‘We ought to get Zed. You remember he found that pack of sandwiches once.’

‘Alex’s watch doesn’t smell,’ said Brian.

‘For a dog, anything smells.’

‘Ruby’s gone off again, blast her,’ said Alex. ‘She went to stare at Maryville. Sometimes I think she’s mental.’

‘Ruby will find it,’ said Tom. ‘She’s got second sight. It’s the gipsy blood.’

‘Just search over there, will you? We haven’t done that bit. I’ve got to go and find Gabriel. Have you seen Adam?’

‘No. All right, all right!’ Tom went over to the rock and looked about vaguely, thrusting at the coarse gritty sand with his foot. Then he sat on the rock and looked at the sea which was dark blue with a glittering crusty look like broken enamel. The tops of the waves were white with crisp creamy foam whipped up by the wind which had become stronger and colder. The sunny sky, where a few white puffy gilded clouds now sailed, was gleaming with a cold northern blue which Tom loved. He felt so happy all of a sudden. He thought, I’ll write a pop song about that. ‘Jesus was here, he was here, he was here, didn’t you know, oh, didn’t you know.’ The combination of the child Christ in England, the familiar poem, Emma’s beautiful strange high voice, and the blue-enamel sea made a huge complete perfect present moment.

It had been a wearisome run for Gabriel on the loose sand to reach her handbag and she had been sweating and panting. She took out the two pounds and threw off her cardigan. She ignored Alex who called to her, and ran back, climbing up again on to the higher rocks. The boys were still there. Then it proved very difficult to catch the fish, and Gabriel kept crying ‘Let me, let me!’ because she was afraid the boys would hurt its fins or pick it up roughly and drop it on the hard rock. At last one of them got hold of the slippery darting fish and somehow (Gabriel closed her eyes) stepped to the rock edge and dropped the fish into the deep water. Gabriel saw it enter the water and swim away and a great burden slipped from her heart. The boys laughed and said, ‘If we catch another, will you buy it?’ Gabriel began to walk back, happy, but feeling cold without her cardigan.

Adam was swimming round and round in circles and calling and calling. He had lost Zed. In the end he had swum out quite a long way from the shore, it was such fun playing with the dog in the water, he had never done this before, watching him swim, then carrying him on his shoulder, then swimming ahead and calling to him. Zed swam so well, it was a joy to watch him. The waves were becoming a little higher and more rough and developing sharp ridgy crests. They showed darker against the sky, a cloud was crossing the sun, the wind was blowing a stinging white spray off the crests of the waves, Adam swallowed a lot of water; then suddenly Zed was nowhere to be seen. Adam cried out, screamed with fear, called and called, swam and swam. The little dog was nowhere. A moment ago he had been swimming near. Now he was gone. The waves rose now like high hills, cutting off any view. Adam could only try, as he swam over the crests, to survey the empty hollows beyond, hideous and dark and without dog, while the spray blinded his eyes. Exhaustion gripped him in the form of misery, remorse, terror, agony of longing for the precious lost being. Hope deceived him with white curly patches of foam between the waves. He began to scream hysterically. He thought, I must get help, I must get them to come, and he began with hideous hideous slowness to swim back toward the distant shore.

Emma let the girls go on ahead. Without Tom, their company embarrassed him and his clearly embarrassed them. As if let out of school, they ran on ahead laughing, probably at him. He wished he hadn’t come. The place didn’t really remind him of Donegal, the sea here was a dull navy blue, the land a pallid yellow and grey, Donegal was full of all sorts of colours. But he would never see Donegal again. He had noticed Brian noticing how much he drank. He thought, I scarcely drink at all for ages, then suddenly I drink like mad. Perhaps it’s being Irish. Curse it, why do I have to think about being Irish, as if I hadn’t enough troubles. And what possessed me to talk to that girl in that familiar way. I don’t know anything about her; she must have thought me a complete oaf. And among all those McCaffreys did he not cut, thought Emma, an absurd figure; even worse, a pathetic one? No doubt he figured in their eyes, as he did for the moment in his own, as a lonely man, with no connections, no relations, no friends, who had attached himself forlornly to a family group. It was true that the whole group, with all their bonds and problems, interested him, not only as an extension of Tom. He had never before seen a family at close quarters, and their oddities and quarrels and misunderstandings and loves and hates and imperfect sympathies and impossible yet inevitable togetherness fascinated him very much. George fascinated him. But it was all a sort of hoax. He couldn’t ever belong to the McCaffreys. He wouldn’t ever, even if his friendship with Tom were to endure. He recalled how Tom had said ‘I love you.’ That scene seemed like play-acting now. How weak love is; it cannot push aside the big ordinary structures of life which divide different private individuals from each other. Then he thought of his mother, and how disappointed she had been because he had only stayed two days. However, as Emma began to walk down the yellow Meld he realized that something was very wrong on the beach. Someone was shouting, they were all running. He began to run too.

‘What is it?’

Tom passed Emma running along the sand and tearing his jacket off as he ran. ‘Zed’s lost. Adam took him out into the sea and lost him.’

Pearl and Hattie ran hitching up their skirts, Alex ran bare foot, stumbling, Brian and Adam were ahead, Ruby, who had turned up, ran too. Emma ran after Tom. When they reached the long sandy gully which led down to where Adam had entered the sea they all began tearing off their clothes.

‘Won’t Zed swim to the shore?’ said Emma.

‘He wouldn’t see the shore. Anyway look at those waves and those rocks. He’d never get in.’

Emma had not gone swimming with the others in the morning. He felt no wish to enter that cold sea. But he began to undress, putting his coat and his waistcoat and his watch and his trousers on to a ledge of rocks. No one bothered with bathing costumes which were all left somewhere behind at the base camps. Tom was rushing into the sea in his underpants. Emma followed him. The two girls, showing no hesitation, pulled off their dresses and kicked off their shoes and ran into the sea in their petticoats. Ruby, who could not swim, watched monumental with folded arms. Adam stood near where the waves were breaking and wept with an absolute abandonment of wailing and gushing tears, his mouth open, his hands raised up.

‘What’s happened?’ shouted Gabriel running over the sand. And when she saw Adam crying so terribly, she began to wail herself.

‘Zed’s lost in the sea,’ Alex cried. She had jumped out of her slacks and was unbuttoning her blue shirt. ‘Stay with Adam.’ She scuttled down the sandy shore and into the breaking waves. Weeping Gabriel ran to Adam and fell on her knees and clasped him in her arms, but he resisted her, flailing his arms and screaming with terrible woe.

Time passed, and they came back one by one. Alex returned first. She was used to long swims in the warm pool, but only to a brief dip in the sea. Clouds now covered the sun and the wind was sharper. Ruby had sensibly fetched the rugs, clothes, towels and other gear from the various camps. Alex, her teeth chattering, pulled off her wet underwear, dried and put on her slacks and shirt and woollen sweater belonging to Brian and wrapped herself in a rug. She had left her warmer clothes in the car. She did not approach the weeping pair. Hattie and Pearl came in next and seized their bundles and dressed fast. Emma felt it his duty to swim and search for a long time. He was very upset about Zed and so much wanted to be the one to find him and kept seeing little white phantom dogs in the sides of the sullen green waves. At last he gave up. Brian came in next and Tom last. There was no longed-for cry of ‘There he is!’ Ignoring each other and shivering with cold, the would-be rescuers searched for dry towels and dry clothes. Brian looked for his big jersey and took some time to realize that Alex had it. He put on Gabriel’s mackintosh. Ruby had started to distribute mugs of hot tea out of the picnic thermos flasks, and everyone stood or sat about in silence. Hattie was crying quietly. Gabriel was weary of crying and sat with her wet mouth open and her face disfigured, staring out to sea. She refused her mug of tea. Beside her Adam sat hunched up, his face invisible, as if he had become himself a little diminished animal. Someone had to think of something to say. Tom thought of a number of possible things but rejected them.

Alex said at last, ‘There’s that current that goes round the point.’

Tom said, ‘Maybe we should have looked on the other side.’

‘It’s impossible to get into the sea there.’

‘I suppose it’s no use going up to Maryville and borrowing some glasses?’

‘No.’

‘Have they got a boat?’

‘If it’s at the house we couldn’t launch it here, if it’s in the sea it’ll be down the coast.’

‘It’s too late anyway,’ said Brian.

There was a little silence.

Brian went on, ‘He’ll have got cold and tired and just drowned quietly. He won’t have known what was happening to him.’

‘No, he won’t have known,’ said Tom, ‘like going to sleep.’

‘Well, let’s get ourselves home,’ said Brian. ‘Come on. It isn’t as if one of us had drowned. We’ve got something to be thankful for.’

After lunch George had kept clear of the party. He walked along the little tarmac road, first away from Maryville, where the road turned inland into a wood (this was ‘Brian’s walk’) and then back again toward Maryville (when he met Tom), passing the house and the promontory on his right, and descending toward the cliff where it was ‘impossible to get into the sea’.

George felt so blackly unhappy that he wondered how anyone so unhappy could go on living. Could one not die of resentment and remorse and hate? How too could a man feel so stupid and dull, when his soul was so full of frightful fantasies? How would it all end, how could it all end? George thought to himself, I’m like a rabid dog which has rushed growling into a dark cupboard. The best thing that can happen is that my owner will have the nerve to pull me out by the collar and shoot me. Who is my owner? The answer was obvious. But that could not happen, nor did George yet seriously consider killing himself. His misery was present to him as an occupation, as a part of the weird ‘duty’ which increasingly and horribly presented itself. Gentler influences, in so far as they touched him, seemed like frivolity, a waste of time. He had lain as gentle as a lamb in Diane’s arms. He had joined the family picnic. He came of course ‘to annoy’ and because he was expected not to, and to prove who he was through the exercise of old irritations and pains. Seeing Adam always reminded him of Rufus, and this particular grief was even not unwelcome, since it absolutely licensed him to hate the world. Yet he was fond of Alex and he was fond of Tom, and he wanted to see the sea, which had always ‘done something’ for him, a curative influence which Tom indeed had indicated when he had cried out to him that they should swim together. He would never have got himself to the sea alone. There was a kind of compulsory sanity in being with people he had known so long. Even the curious and interesting distress and excitement, upon which he looked forward to reflecting later, at finding Hattie Meynell of the party, was mingled with his resentment of her as an alien. Beyond, lay insanity. That morning he had looked at his body, at his hands and feet and what he could see of his trunk, and felt his grasp of his being waver. What was this pallid crawling object? He had stared at his face in the mirror and felt mad, as if he might have to rush whimpering and slobbering into the street and ask to be arrested and looked after. The pigeons in the early morning softly said Rozanov, Rozanov.

He had dreamt of Stella, he saw her handsome royal Egyptian head in his dreams. He was touched by Diane and she gave him a little peace, but he despised her. He admired Stella but he could not get on with her, she was an enemy. He felt a vague relief that she was somewhere else and no anxiety or curiosity about where she was. Wherever she was she was strong and sane and eating up the reality all round her to increase her own. He reflected, even in an odd way valued, that terrible strength which also made her so dangerous, so hateful. He kept on recalling the incident with the car. He remembered the huge sickening sound of the car entering the water, and the extraordinary way in which Stella came out of the door like a fish. But he could not clearly see what had happened just before. Had he actually pushed the car, could he have done that? Was he simply imagining that he had put his hands on the back window and braced his feet on the cobbled quay and made the car move forward? Surely that was a fantasy, he had so many violent fantasies and dreams. He was a weak crawling creature and his violence was purely fantastic. He thought, I can’t go on like this. I must finish my relation with Rozanov. I’ll see him again. If he would only say one kind word to me, just one, it would change the world. After one kind word I could go away in peace. How can he be so cruel as not to speak that word? And how can I be so abject as to need it?

George had reached the cliff and the other view over the sea which he knew so well. Here the yellowish grass ended abruptly at a steep edge. The dark blackish-brown rocks with red streaks in them did not descend neatly to the water but went down in a jagged graceless mess of cracks and slides and overhanging ledges. In the sea, not very far below but seemingly inaccessible, a mass of brown herring gulls were crowding and crying over some trophy. George looked at the birds’ soft spotty backs and their fierce eyes and they gave him some satisfaction. They reminded him, through old sea memories, of holidays and of his father, blessedly so dead. George had disliked his father and early turned him not into a monster but prophetically into a ghost. Twice ghosted, some association with the herring gulls passed like a harmless chill. It seemed impossible to get down to the water; but George had explored the favourite area thoroughly on visits as a child, before Alex bought Maryville, when the coveted house still belonged to a Colonel Atheling who was famous for objecting to the McCaffrey children (big George and little Brian) crossing his land. There was a way down (which George had never revealed to his brothers) where one descended through an elder tree into a round hole in the rock through which one could slither, holding on to a branch, on to a shelf from which one could jump to some ‘steps’, and so to the water. He undressed on the cliff top, he was out of sight of the house, removing all his clothes and folding them as if for a ritual. He stepped down into the tree and, bracing himself against the rock, felt with his foot for the hole which was invisible from above. He could now only just get through the hole, and the rock chafed his naked body. On the shelf he sat down to lever himself to a flat rock below, then went cautiously down the ‘steps’. He thought, I’m getting old. He dived into the deep lifting and falling water and gasped at the coldness.

George was a good swimmer and made his way otter-like out to sea. He thought, as the water laved his head and shoulders, that’s good, that’s good. At the same time the cold sea was menacing; one could soon drown in such a sea, one could die of exposure. He thought, I would like to die like that. If I just swim on and on and on I shall die and then I shall really have finished with Rozanov. Well, in that case he will have won. But does that matter? He went on, cutting through the tops of the frothy crests, on and on toward realms of sea where land was never seen or heard of. Suddenly, in the green swinging hollow of a wave, he saw below him and nearby something which he took at first for a plastic bag floating. Then he took it for a dead fish, then when it seemed to move for a strange crab or big jelly fish. He turned, halting his course, to look at it. It seemed to be some horrid kind of thing. Then he saw that it was a little four-legged mammal, a dog. It was Zed.

George cried out with surprise and distress. He saw clearly now the little white muzzle held high, the eyes staring, the paws weakly moving. The next moment the dog was gone, lifted with swift force over the crest of the wave. George followed quickly, his eyes desperately fearfully straining to see the little helpless thing. He was suddenly distracted, aware of the huge sky above, the huge ocean round about, full of fast-moving heights and hollows and dazzling flashes of foam. He perceived Zed again and caught him up, then treading water lifted him. The bedraggled creature hung limply in his hands, but Zed’s blue-black eyes gazed with conscious intelligence, at close quarters, into George’s eyes. George thought, I can’t climb the cliff carrying Zed. Besides they must be in a fair state by now. However did the poor little beggar get here? I’ll swim on round the point; if I get in close to the rocks I’ll be out of the current. It was not easy, cold and now tired, in a strong-running sea, to swim with one hand while holding Zed clear of the sea with the other. But as George paused to rest and tread water, Zed slid as if on purpose on to his shoulder and clung on against his neck (as Adam had just this day taught him to do). George understood, and now holding one strand of the dog’s coat and keeping one arm against his chest he could more vigorously make way. Tom was the first who, when George had reached the rocks on the other side and felt shingle beneath his feet and lifted his head up, heard the triumphant shout.

The unhappy group had struggled away slowly over the sand. Alex had looked once more perfunctorily for her watch but had not mentioned it to anyone. Gabriel packed the last few scattered things, Adam’s socks, Zed’s lead, dropping her tears over them, into a bag. Brian, who was leading, had just reached the inland rocks that led up to the field when Tom cried, ‘There’s George.’ They had forgotten George. At first Tom did not understand George’s signals. Then he heard him shouting, ‘I’ve got him! He’s all right!’

Tom shouted too. They all turned round and began running back. ‘What is it?’ shouted Brian, also running.

Tom reached George and took the dog from him. ‘Oh George, you hero! But he’s cold, quick, find a towel, poor Zed!’ For a terrible moment holding the dog Tom thought the little thing was dead, so limp and cold and motionless it felt. Then a pink tongue licked the back of his hand.

Gabriel ran up and seized Zed and wrapped him in a dry towel and sat on the sand and rubbed him. Adam, transfigured, leaned against her shoulder wailing with joy. Brian stood behind them holding out his hands in an incoherent gesture and thankful helpfulness. (Tom said later they looked like the Holy Family with John the Baptist.)

‘I’m bloody cold too,’ said George.

George, rather plump, stark naked and pink with cold, stood there like some weird manatee. They all ran at him armed with towels, rugs, garments. George sat on a rock, his back hunched, like a big wet sea animal, and they surrounded him and stroked him and patted him as if he were indeed a beneficent monster. Tom tore off his shirt and hopped out of his trousers. Alex handed over Brian’s jersey. Brian found an extra pair of socks in Gabriel’s bag; Gabriel always packed extra socks. Ruby handed over a mug of whisky. George told the story of the rescue among many exclamations of amazement and praise. Then everyone had hot tea and whisky and felt extremely hungry and ate up all the remaining sandwiches and cheese and veal-and-ham pie. Tom ran in record time in his underclothes all the way to fetch George’s clothes, which he put on himself to run back in, looking very comical. It was some time, however, before poor Zed was quite himself again, and Brian felt an anxiety which he did not impart. The little dog, though he wagged his tail, continued to shiver and tremble, though Gabriel opened her blouse and held him against her warm breasts. At last when he seemed to be warm and dry and lively she gave him into Adam’s arms. Then Gabriel went to George and kissed him, and Alex kissed him and Tom kissed him too, and Emma and Brian clapped him on the back, and Hattie and Pearl, who had been standing a little in the background of the family scene, waved him a very special wave. Then Tom and George exchanged clothes and they all decided to go home.

The last act was less edifying. As they went along, Alex paused again (in vain) to look for her watch. George and Ruby led the way up the field. Brian ascended more slowly carrying Zed and holding Adam by the hand. He squeezed Adam’s hand at intervals, but Adam would not look up at him. Gabriel followed. She suddenly felt mortally tired as if she might fall on her face, and kept stumbling on the slippery yellow grass. Hattie and Pearl, who had somehow become very separate and alien, climbed by a different route, often pausing to look back at the sea and point things out to each other. Tom and Emma came last, having waited for Alex who was complaining that no one would help her to find her watch.

As Brian neared the top of the field he heard a car start. The others were catching up. Ruby stood waiting, surrounded by bags. Bill the Lizard’s big Rover began to bump up the track, reached the tarmac, roared round the corner and disappeared. George had disappeared too.

‘My God, the Rover’s gone. Where’s George?’

Ruby pointed toward the now empty road.

‘Alex, George has taken the Rover!’

Gabriel said, ‘I can understand his not wanting to go back with us after all that.’

‘Oh you can, can you! Alex, did you leave the key in the car?’

‘I always leave keys in cars.’

‘Typical you, typical George!’

Pearl drove Ruby and Alex with Hattie in the Volkswagen. As soon as the car started. Ruby handed Alex her watch. In the Austin, Gabriel sat in the front beside Brian, holding both Adam and Zed in her arms. She and Adam cried quietly all the way home. Brian kept gritting his teeth and murmuring, ‘Typical George!’ In the back, Emma fell asleep with his head on Tom’s shoulder.

‘Have they all gone?’ said Stella.

‘Yes.’ said May Blackett. ‘I watched the cars go.’

‘When is N arriving?’

‘He should be here in half an hour or so.’

Stella had moved downstairs to the big first-floor drawing-room at Maryville, with its wide bow windows overlooking the sea. One casement was open and a white curtain blew in and out. The sea was pale grey now, sheened over by a dimming pearly light. From the upstairs corner room, which was her bedroom, Stella had at intervals watched through long-distance glasses the various antics of the McCaffreys on the beach. Hidden, she had seen Ruby come and stand like a totem portent gazing at the house. And she had watched George coming walking along the road and pass by. After George disappeared she stopped looking out and came downstairs. May Blackett checked at intervals to see if the cars were still there.

‘He can’t have known?’

‘George? No.’

‘Ruby stared so at the house.’

‘Just curiosity.’

‘She has second sight.’

I should explain that I, N, the narrator, am about to intrude (though not for long) into the narrative, not to exhibit myself, but simply to offer an unavoidable explanation. People in Ennistone had been wondering whither Stella had fled, where she had so mysteriously gone to. Well, she had gone to me.

On the day, so much lamented by Gabriel, when Stella disappeared from Leafy Ridge, she had not set off for London or for Tokyo. She had taken one of Gabriel’s umbrellas (it was raining on that day), and thus concealing her conspicuous dark head ‘like that of an Egyptian queen’, had walked the distance, not great, to my house, not far from the Crescent, and there, one might say, gave herself up. When I use this phrase I simply mean that she came as one at the end of her tether and (let me emphasize) with no special thought in her head except to get safely away from the McCaffreys. I have had, and have, no ‘sentimental’ association with Stella, nothing of that sort is involved. I am considerably her senior. I am, as I said at the beginning, an Ennistonian, and I have known the McCaffreys, though not intimately, all my life, and Stella since her marriage. I think I may say that we are friends, and I do not use the word lightly. And we are both Jewish. Stella came to me as to the nearest ‘safe house’, a place ‘out of the world’, out of the pressure of time, where she could rest and think and decide. She fled from the kindness of Gabriel, and the smallness of her bedroom at ‘Como’, and from Adam, who made her think of Rufus, and from a place where George could find her. She came to me, not seeking for advice, or support in some ‘policy’, but just because she trusted me and knew I would hide her. (She is not the first person I have hidden.) Whether this particular flight was a good idea was something upon which doubt could be cast, and we did, in later discussions, cast it. At any rate, once the door of my house had closed upon Stella, a course of action was set and had to be followed. As Stella put it once, she was ‘in blood so stepped, returning were as tedious as go o’er’.

Stella’s removal from my house, Bath Lodge, to Maryville was my idea. I removed her simply because we had, for the moment, talked enough. Of course I gave her advice; it was impossible in conversations of such intensity not to. She did not take it; but indeed any view which I could form of the matter was tentative. And Stella was no sickly waif, she was a strong rational self-assertive woman who had, as she realized as time went on, put herself in an impossible position. She was paralysed between different courses of action and, with her pride at stake, unable to decide to move; and the longer the silence and the secrecy went on, the harder it was to see how it could be ended. Stella seemed to me in danger of settling down into an idea of being trapped, which the minute discussions she enjoyed with me tended to reinforce. I suggested an abrupt change of scene, and she agreed to go to Maryville, consigned to the care of a much longer-established friend of mine, May Blacken, the mother of Jeremy and Andrew. Stella was fond of May and respected her. The situation as it then was may best be clarified, at any rate exhibited, by a transcription of the conversation which took place that evening after dinner between Stella and me.

‘I see you’ve set out the netsuke, my old friends.’

‘Yes — ’

‘I especially like that demon hatching out of his egg.’

‘You would. You were the only person who really looked at them. I’m glad I rescued them from George, he would have enjoyed smashing them. The idea was certain to occur to him some time.’

‘Have you written to your father?’

‘Not like you said. I just sent a note to say I’d be away in France for a while.’

‘It must have been odd to see the McCaffreys at play.’

‘A shock, yes. It made me feel such a traitor to them all.’

‘Because you’ve taken refuge with the enemy.’

‘Yes. Well, for George everyone is the enemy. But where have I been all this time, what on earth can I ever tell them?’

‘Lies. I’ll think of some.’

‘Don’t be facetious. How loathsome it all is. And I’ve involved you.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I’m stormproof.’

‘I’ve put myself in the wrong, and that paralyses my willpower. I feel I’m in a steel box or something.’

‘People get out of boxes, it’s often easier than they think.’

‘I can’t see how to get out of this one. Have you any new idea? God, as if you hadn’t other things to think of.’

‘What did you instantly feel when you saw George pass by this afternoon?’

‘So close, so close. Frightful fear, like an electric shock. Then when I saw he wasn’t coming here, an intense desire to run out after him and that was like fear too. He looked so lonely.’

‘You don’t feel you could just go back to Druidsdale, just turn up?’

‘No.’

‘Or write to him simply to say you’re OK?’

‘No. I’m not OK. And he doesn’t care.’

‘Just to have written the letter would be a step. Move one piece and you alter the board.’

‘Yes, yes, like you said.’

‘Any act might change the scene in ways you can’t now foresee, and I don’t see that this one would do harm. I’d post the letter in London. It would make for a kind of vagueness, less intensity, more space.’

‘I know what you mean. But anything I do would commit me and I’m terrified of making a mistake. I can’t do anything until I’ve cleared my mind. That makes sense, doesn’t it?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘At least now I’m free — ’

‘I thought you were in a steel box.’

‘I mean I can think about it. I feel I’m poised - like a rocket that might go off different ways. Better to wait.’

‘You regard George as a problem to be solved. Maybe you should relax and give up.’

‘You mean go bobbing back to him like a piece of flotsam, like an ordinary person? All right, laugh!’

‘Why not go to Tokyo?’

‘And tell my father he was right?’

‘Or invite him here. You know how much I’ve always wanted to meet him.’

‘Oh, you two would get on terrifyingly well. Invite him into this shambles? No.’

‘You want to get everything right all at once. Why not fiddle around with the bits? What does May think now?’

‘She thinks I ought to plan carefully how to be happy for the rest of my life! You know, sometimes the thought of happiness torments me. This house reeks of happiness, it drives me mad. Sometimes I’m happy in my dreams. Then it’s as if George was blotted out, as if he’s never been.’

‘Well, why not blot George out?’

‘You said go on a journey, only the journey must be a pilgrimage. There isn’t any holy place for me to go to.’

‘Jerusalem?’

‘Don’t be silly. That means something to you. It means nothing to me. I used to think that if I went to Delphi I’d receive some sort of illumination, but I know now that Delphi is empty too. My holy place is George. And it is an abomination.’

‘I meant to blot him out effectively, write saying you want a divorce, and imagine how he’d curse, and then he’d smile and then he’d cheer. Conceive that he might be better off without you. That would be one way of taking the weight off yourself!’

‘All right, I am self-obsessed. But I couldn’t divorce George. It’s not possible. All that unfinished business.’

‘You want power over him. You want to save him your way. One can’t always finish business, put that picture out of your head. If you can’t decide to leave him, then go back, without waiting for the right time, without knowing what it’s all about and without the intention of fixing or finishing or clarifying anything. You can talk to George, that remains — ’

‘Yes, in a way, but — ’

‘He envies you, he fears you, give up your power.’

‘As if that was easy. You should know.’

‘You’re the particular principle of order he rejects. That’s as important as the particular religion one doesn’t believe in.’

‘You flatter me. That sounds like a rational link. There are links, but they are deep and awful.’

‘Yes, I know. Do you mind if we go over one or two things again?’

‘No. All right, you ask the questions.’

‘And you forgive me?’

‘One has to forgive the executioner. Not to would be fearfully bad form. You told me to keep off tranquillizers and endure it all, I am enduring it all, it hasn’t made me wise.’

‘About Rufus — ’

‘It isn’t Rufus, it isn’t Alan or Alex or Fiona or Tom - not those old theories - not really - it’s something aboriginal.’

‘I’m talking about you, not George.’

‘Oh, I know you’ve got a theory there too. All right. Rufus’s death was my fault, it happened in a second, due to my carelessness and stupidity - and then I couldn’t get in touch with George, he wasn’t at the Museum, I had to wait until he came home to tell him, I sometimes think I died during that wait and everything since has been a dream of life. Of course I feel the loss of Rufus every second, that death is the air I breathe, I relive that accident … But that it has got mixed up with … George and … that’s extra …’

‘Yes.’

‘It was impossible to talk about it afterwards, we didn’t talk about it to each other or to anyone else. George never asked for the details and I never told them, except for saying it was my fault and saying, oh - very vaguely - what happened. He never said anything. I’ve never looked, even glanced, into the depths of how George felt, how he blamed me in his heart — ’

‘Perhaps less than you imagine.’

‘How he accused me, what a process he set up - these words don’t fit - it’s ineffable. And then later on people began to say it was his fault, they even hinted it was deliberate, they believed terrible things - and I didn’t say a word. And now if I shouted “I did it” they would still think it was him. How can I leave him after that?’

‘Because he took the blame.’

‘No, no, those words are too feeble, I tell you it’s ineffable, it’s absolute, it’s like being damned together, tied together and thrown into the flames.’

‘Isn’t this what must be undone?’

‘Theories, theories, you keep looking for a key, even this isn’t fundamental. Yes, he “took the blame”. It has made him worse.’

‘I think it has made you worse.’

‘You think I should forgive myself.’

‘And him in the same movement. Guilt and resentment often get mixed up together. You deeply resent - whatever it was he did - to protect himself - from that terrible thing. You said the other day that he “lapped it up like a cat lapping cream”. I remember that curious phrase.’

‘Did I say that? Of course that doesn’t describe it. His heart was utterly smashed - Rufus was - well, you know - for both of us — ’

‘Yes.’

‘What I meant was that at once George began to make it all into something else, something awful, against me - oh, to protect himself, as you just said. But to mix up that awful pain with vile spite and malice and absolute misrepresentation and lies - that sort of deep determination to change what really is into a horrible machine to hurt somebody else - that’s the activity of the devil - it corrupts everything, everything.’

‘But you see it both ways round.’

‘Exactly. It was my fault and I kept silent about it - I kept silent first because it was too terrible to speak of, and later because - because it wasn’t anybody else’s business and I couldn’t — ’

‘You couldn’t stoop to counter the vile things people were casually saying about George — ’

‘Yes. It would simply have made them talk more, they would have said I was shielding him, they would have loved it. But because of - the thing itself - and the silence - I am to blame. So in a way George is right and can tell himself so. But the way he has made it into a weapon against me - sort of silently, malevolently - is so awful - it’s a caricature of any real condemnation, it’s the opposite, it’s the exact opposite of the response which love and pity would have made.’

‘So objectively you are guilty and George is right, only as he works it he’s absolutely wrong.’

‘Yes. And what you call seeing it both ways round is part of the torment. It’s warfare, it’s hell, hell is this sort of warfare.’

‘You spoke of George’s “determination”, but what about yours? You see him as acting silently and malevolently. This is the picture which you have worked upon. No doubt George moves instinctively, as we all do, to save himself. So he makes something of the matter. But so do you. He can’t afford love and pity. But it seems you can’t either.’

Stella was silent for a moment, reflecting. ‘If I believed that such springs could flow - but all my strength goes into not being destroyed. I don’t want to become a machine of misery and hate. I want to stay rational. Just trying to think clearly about George is the best I can do by way of love and pity and such. You don’t think he’s likely to kill himself?’

‘No.’

‘Suicide has always seemed to me so abstract. No one could wholeheartedly do it.’

‘We are abstract beings and rarely wholehearted.’

‘I know you respect suicide because of Masada.’

‘Oh don’t speak of that. Suicides are often acts of revenge, or proofs of omnipotence.’

‘That sounds like George. But no, I don’t see him as a suicide either. A lynch mob might kill him one day. Yet inner violence is a power, like magic, people fear it.’

‘He’d be protected, hedged!’

‘Yes. Like a king.’

‘Like a king, which he has to be since you’re a queen. You once said you felt like a princess who had married a commoner. “It tells in the end”, you said.’

‘Did I? The things I say, and you remember them all!’

‘Don’t be too busy with those pictures. It is good to declare a blankness now and then. We are not anything very much, not even machines. You imagine that your thoughts are rays of power. Simple actions may be a better way to just views.’

‘Simple actions — ’

‘Undertaken in a light shed from outside, some ordinary faith or hope, nothing clever.’

‘You are preaching humility again! Like going home. If I could see that as a duty - but I can’t. I can’t walk into the dark. I’ve got to have a picture, I’ve got to have a plan. You still don’t think Diane Sedleigh is important?’

‘A toy, a divertissement. You aren’t worried about her?’

‘Yes. But I understand what I feel about her, it’s plain and wholesome compared with the rest. I used to think he might kill her. I believe he was with her when Rufus died. You don’t think George is simply mad?’

‘No.’

‘Or epileptic?’

‘No.’

‘Electric shocks, all that?’

‘No.’

‘But you think it’s dangerous, this waiting, this letting time pass? I’ve become obsessed with “letting time pass”, I can’t arrest it, I can’t use it. I used to classify it all as “an unhappy marriage”, but it isn’t, it’s vast. Of course his having no job makes it worse, he can sit and have fantasies. He imagines awful things. He used to tell me, centuries ago.’

‘Were you together in that?’

‘You mean, was I fascinated? Yes, before I started to — ’

‘Fear him.’

‘Hate him, or whatever it is.’

‘And you are still fascinated.’

‘It’s closer than fascination. I am George. Suppose I went back, would I be safe?’

‘He is fully occupied with John Robert Rozanov.’

‘So he mightn’t notice me? I hope it’s a harmless occupation. Does that mean I can wait or that I needn’t wait?’

‘You don’t think George ever realized how friendly you were with Rozanov when you were a student?’

‘I wasn’t friendly with him. He just thought I was good at philosophy. And I — ’

‘And you —?’

‘Well, you know John Robert, or you did.’

‘You think you aren’t part of the Rozanov problem?’

‘I hope not. When I saw how besotted George was, I gave Rozanov up.’

‘And you gave up philosophy, in case George realized you could do it and he couldn’t!’

‘Don’t! That was ages ago, before we were married. I was studying George even then.’

‘I recall your saying once that George interested you more than anything in the world.’

‘Anyway I don’t want to be involved with George while he’s involved with John Robert, that would be one Chinese box too many. There is something, if I could only work it out, while I’m waiting. You can’t explain George by the old theories. You might just as well say he’s possessed by a devil. It’s more something to pity, like an illness, or an urge, like sex, like a nervous obsessive guilty angry craving. He knows now he’ll never do anything with his life. He’s a pathetic figure really. If George was in a novel he would be a comic character.’

‘We would all be comic characters if we were in novels. I wish you had gone on studying, philosophy or economics, not George.’

‘Yes. It’s part of that dream.’

‘Of happiness?’

‘I dream I’m back at the university. And don’t say “why not”, don’t say “you’re still young”, don’t say — ’

‘All right. Nothing ever came of those plays George was writing?’

‘Of course not. Didn’t he show you one?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry I lost George. I hate to lose anybody.’

‘If you could have kept him - but it’s impossible. If you had kept George he would have begun to detest you as he detests Rozanov. I think he tore up all the plays. He tore up my novel anyway.’

‘I didn’t know you’d written a novel.’

‘I might have let you see it. You’re lucky.’

‘I hope you’ll write another?’

‘It’s not being able to do anything, to impress anybody - I know you see George as a sort of “hero of our time”.’

‘The powerless man who becomes apathetic and then nasty.’

‘George as a nasty man. That sounds quite soothing. You know George lives in a sort of odd time scheme, as if he were a criminal who had already been punished and set free, although his crimes still lie ahead. He has already paid, and this sanctions his resentment.’

‘The justified sinner going on sinning. You said George felt like a Nazi war criminal at the end of a long sentence, purged by suffering, yet unrepentant!’

‘Yes. He was fascinated by those people. He read a lot of books about them. He’ll never achieve anything now, like studying or writing or anything, but he might achieve some awful act. I’m sure he dreams about it - all his little outrages — ’

‘Like trying to kill you?’

‘Well - he tried in a sense - but — ’

‘He pushed the car.’

‘Yes. I can still see so clearly his hands pressed on the back window, all pale like - like some animal’s — ’

‘And he kicked you after he’d got you out.’

‘I think I resent that more. I did provoke him. I taunted him about Rozanov. If he ever did kill me it would be accidental.’

‘Never mind. Go on. All his little outrages, or “pranks” as his admirers call them — ’

‘Are like - imagery, symbols - like a rehearsal for something he’ll do one day that will satisfy him at last - and then he’ll stop - he’ll be satisfied, or perhaps he’ll be disgusted, he’ll have destroyed something in himself, he’ll be exhausted, weak and pale like a grub in an apple, and the craving will go away.’

‘What stage in this process are we at now?’

‘That’s what I want to work out. The Rozanov thing is an interruption. It’s serious, but in a way that could be divertissement too. It’s fortuitous and can pass. Rozanov will go back to America and George will recover. Then we’ll know.’

‘Whether the thing he’s waiting for - the act that will cure him - has already happened?’

‘Yes. I thought the Roman glass was it.’

‘Yes?’

‘Then I thought that murdering me was it.’

‘Except that you’re still alive.’

‘Yes, but it could be good enough.’

‘And if it isn’t?’

‘He might feel he had to finish me off so as to finish it off. He might see it as a fiasco, as a loss of face, as something that went wrong.’

‘Is that why you wait?’

‘No, it isn’t, that doesn’t make any difference, if I go back to George I take the risk. I just don’t want to go back in a muddle, in an undignified scramble, without a clear head and a policy.’

‘A policy —!’

‘And now I’ve delayed so long I may as well wait until Rozanov has gone back to America.’

‘And if George were cured, “exhausted” as you said, if he were weak and pale like a grub in an apple, docile, would he still interest you? Don’t you rather like the waiting?’

‘Sometimes I feel as if George were a fish I’d hooked … on a long long line … and I let him run … and run … and run … What a terrible image.’