The Philosopher's Pupil

‘What’s that strange music?’

‘There’s a fair on the Common.’

The distant sound of fair music, distilled and sweetened in the warm evening air, faintly and intermittently drifted in the garden at Belmont. Nearer at hand a blackbird, lyrical as a nightingale, was rapturously singing. The ginkgo had on its summer plumage. Its plump drooping branches were like the rounded limbs of a great animal. The garden smelt of privet flowers. In fact the whole of Ennistone smelt sourly-sweet of privet where that valuable shrub was a popular feature.

‘Pearl, I feel frightened.’

‘What of, my darling?’

‘Let’s close the shutters.’

‘It’s too early.’

‘I wrote to Margot.’

‘That’s a good girl.’

‘What a nice paperweight my stone hand makes, look.’

Hattie had placed the limestone hand which she had found in the wild garden on top of her neat pile of letters. She had written to her Aunt Margot, to her school friend Verity Smaldon, and to Christine with whose family she had stayed in France.

‘Did you reply to that impertinent journalist?’

‘Yes, I did that yesterday. Fancy that newspaper knowing that I exist!’ The editor of the Ennistone Gazette had written to Hattie asking for an interview.

‘I hope you said no firmly.’

‘Of course.’

Hattie had had a nasty dream last night which still lingered in her head. In an empty twilit shop she had seen on an upper shelf a small semi-transparent red thing which she took to be a big horrible insect. Then the thing began to flutter and she saw it was a very small very beautiful owl. The little owl began to fly about just above her head causing her a piercing mixture of pleasure and distress. She reached up her hands to try to catch the owl, but was afraid of hurting it. A voice said, ‘Let it out of the window,’ but Hattie knew that this sort of owl always lived in rooms, and would die outside. Then she looked at another shelf and saw with horror a cat sitting there about to spring upon the owl.

‘You’re so restless today.’

‘I can’t breathe for the smell of flowers. Father Bernard said he might come.’

‘He won’t now.’

‘He might, he’s always late. You don’t like him, Pearlie.’

‘I feel he’s false somehow.’

‘That’s unfair.’

‘OK, it’s unfair.’

‘Don’t be cross with me.’

‘Do stop saying that, I’m not cross!’

‘Please don’t sew. What are you sewing?’

‘Your nightdress.’

‘You did enjoy being in London?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I wish you liked picture galleries.’

‘I do like picture galleries.’

‘You pretend to.’

‘Hattie — ’

‘I’m sorry, I’m awful. It’s such an odd light, the sun’s shining yet it’s as if it were dark. I feel so peculiar. I hope I’m not wasting my time.’

‘If you read those big books you can’t waste your time.’ By the ‘big books’ Pearl meant the major European classics which Father Bernard had indicated with a flourish of his hand that Hattie ‘might as well get on with’ pending John Robert’s views on her studies. She was now reading Tod in Venedig.

‘Pearl, my dear, now that Hattie is safely at the university I can at last reveal how deeply I care for you. You have been a great support and a great comfort and I have come to believe that I cannot do without you. May I dare to hope that you care for me a little?’ These words, uttered by John Robert, were part of a fantasy which Pearl was having as she talked to Hattie. In the end (this obscure conception had become important to Pearl of late) John Robert would turn to her, perhaps as a last resort.

These visions, which unfurled themselves automatically, co-existed with Pearl’s uneasy notion, which had lately grown stronger, that John Robert had a more intense interest in his granddaughter than he affected to have. Of course Pearl said nothing of this to Hattie.

Alex had a recurring dream in which she looked out of the window of Belmont in the early dawn and found the garden, which had become immense, with a lake and a view of distant trees, full of strange people moving about purposively. A sense of impotent outrage and fear and anguish came in the dream.

Now listening to the blackbird and gazing out from the drawing-room where she had not yet turned on the lamps, she felt a stab of this fear as she saw a motionless figure standing on the lawn. She recognized it almost at once as Ruby, but it remained sinister. What was Ruby doing, what was she thinking, standing out there alone? Earlier in the day Alex had seen the vixen lying warily, elegantly, upon the grass while four cubs played round her and climbed over her back. The sight had pleased her, but also caused her some obscure pain, as if she identified with the vixen and felt a fear which was always there in the vixen’s heart.

‘I can’t pray,’ said Diane.

‘Of course you can, silly,’ said Father Bernard looking at his watch.

Diane had come to evensong for once, but on that evening Ruby had not come. Father Bernard had asked Diane into the Clergy House afterwards and held her hand and given her a small glass of brandy, and after that it somehow happened that they went on drinking brandy together.

‘You can try to pray. If you say you can’t pray you must know what trying to pray is. And trying to pray is praying.’

‘That’s like saying if you can’t speak Chinese you must know what trying to speak Chinese is.’

‘The cases are different. God knows our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking.’

‘That depends on believing in God, but I don’t. If only he’d give up drinking.’

‘Anything counts now as believing in God, feeling depressed does, feeling violent does, committing suicide does — ’

‘Then he believes in God.’

‘Just kneel and drop the burden.’

‘That sounds like a pop song. Does he believe in God?’

‘I don’t know. But you do. Wake up. Invent something. Perform a new action. Go and visit Miss Dunbury.’

‘How is she, poor old thing.’

‘Ill. Lonely.’

‘She wouldn’t want to see me, she disapproves of me. I wish you’d see George.’

‘Devil take George. The sooner he commits some decent crime and gets put away the better.’

‘How can you say that!’

‘I think you should cut and run.’

‘Oh, you upset me so.’

‘Get out of this dump. Get a train; any train, going anywhere.’

‘Have you seen Stella?’

‘No.’

‘He can’t have killed her. Where’s she gone?’

‘To Tokyo, go to Tokyo, go anywhere, do anything.’

‘I bought a new scarf.’

‘A new scarf can be a vehicle of grace.’

‘I’m drunk.’

‘So am I.’

‘I heard someone say you don’t believe in God.’

‘There is God beyond God, and beyond that God there is God. It doesn’t matter what you call it, it doesn’t matter what you do, just relax.’

‘I think George would do anything Professor Rozanov said.’

‘I’ve got to go to the Slipper House, I’m terribly late.’

‘You can’t go now.’

‘I can and will.’

‘Are you going to see that girl, Professor Rozanov’s niece?’

‘Grand-daughter.’

‘Funny little girl, little prissy white-faced thing. Couldn’t you ask Professor Rozanov to be nice to George?’

‘No. Come on. I’m off.’

‘I’ll walk with you as far as Forum Way.’

It was nearly closing time at the Green Man. As I think I said earlier, centuries of non-conformism has left Ennistone rather short of pubs. There is the Albert Tavern in Victoria Park and a new pub called the Porpoise in Leafy Ridge. There is a rather posh establishment, the Running Dog, which is also a restaurant, in Biggins, near the Crescent, and a pub called the Silent Woman (with a sign portraying a headless female) in the High Street near Bowcocks. In Druidsdale there is the Rat Man, and in Westwold the Three Blind Mice. There are also a few tiny shabby houses of less note in the St Olaf’s area, and the ill-reputed Ferret in the ‘wasteland’ beyond the canal. The Little Wild Rose on the Enn beyond the Tweed Mill hardly counts as being in Ennistone, but makes a pleasant walk in summer. However, Ennistone is not a town for an easy drink, and a surprisingly large number of Ennistonians have never entered a pub in their lives. The resistance to serving alcohol at the Institute remains firm, though this may change in time with the altering mores of the younger generation. This younger generation in the form of the classless jeunesse dorée, who had ‘taken over’ the Indoor Pool at the Baths, had lately ‘moved in’ in a similar manner upon the Green Man, to the annoyance of Burkestown regulars like Mrs Belton.

Tonight the cast of The Triumph of Aphrodite, many of them still wearing their costumes, were gathered there, after a rehearsal in the Ennistone Hall. The over-excited cast and their camp-followers had made a noisy procession from the Hall to the pub, and were now standing in a large chattering group spread along the counter. (The pub had lately been redecorated, abolishing the old distinctions between public bar, saloon and snug.) Tom and Anthea were there, and Hector Gaines and Nesta and Valerie and Olivia, with their pet Mike Seanu, and Olivia’s brother Simon who was to sing the counter-tenor part, and Cora Clun, daughter of ‘Anne Lapwing’, and Cora’s young brother Derek, star of St Olaf’s choir, who had the charming role of Aphrodite’s page, and Maisie Chalmers and Jean Burdett, tuneful sister of the St Paul’s organist and of Miss Dunbury’s truthful doctor, and Jeremy and Andrew and Peter Blackett and Bobbie Benning and other young persons who have perhaps not yet been mentioned such as Jenny Hirsch and Mark Lauder who were both animals, and young Mrs Miriam Fox (divorced) who worked in Anne Lapwing’s Boutique and was helping Cora with the costumes. Derek and Peter were both under age but plausibly tall. The masque was in that stage of penultimate disarray when (in any production) it becomes clear to the director that it will never be fit to be seen. The cast, however, remained carefree, filled with absolute irrational faith in Hector (who was now a popular figure, his vain love for Anthea being common knowledge) and in Tom, who had some vague reassuring authority as co-author. Scarlett-Taylor, after making some valuable historical pronouncements which it was too late to do anything about, had distanced himself from the operation; he was in Ennistone that weekend, but not in the pub, having declared himself for a quiet evening of work at Travancore Avenue.

Tom and Anthea were together, with Peter Blackett who was in love with Nesta and half in love with Tom. Beside them Valerie and Nesta, both worrying about their college exams, were discussing Keynes. Valerie (Aphrodite) was still wearing the long white robe which was her under-dress. Hector came up.

‘The situation is hopeless.’

‘No, Hector, it went very well.’

Andrew Blackett said to Jeremy, ‘Is she still there?’

‘Yes. Not a word to Peter.’

‘Of course not.’

Andrew was wondering whether he should drive straight to Maryville that night and offer his life, his love, his honour and his name to Stella, whose dark beauty he had loved in total secrecy for many years. They would have to emigrate, of course. He pictured himself living with Stella in Australia, and for a second his head swam and he felt quite faint with joy.

Heads of stags and dogs and great crested birds appeared here and there among the drinkers. A shaggy bear came lumbering up to Tom, and revealed Bobbie Benning.

‘Isn’t that thing terribly hot?’

‘Yes, and I’ve got a bloody cold. It’s no joke having a cold inside a bear’s head, I can tell you. Is Scarlett-Taylor here?’

‘No, he’s working.’

Bobbie Benning, still tormented by his inability to teach engineering, and unable to bring himself to confide in Tom or Hector, had elected Emma, obviously a serious scholar, as his confidant but had not yet had a chance to unburden himself.

Hector had been upset earlier in the evening by a difference of opinion with Jonathan Treece whom Hector had, unwisely he now saw, asked to help with the music. Treece had gone back to Oxford in a huff. However, this now seemed a minor matter. Hector was beginning to feel that he would go mad, consigned to his lonely lodgings at 10 p.m. and leaving Tom and Anthea together. ‘Let’s buy some drink and go on boozing somewhere else. Come to my place.’

‘Or let’s go up to the Common,’ said Bobbie. ‘The fair will still be on, won’t it?’

‘Some people were dancing round the stones at the Ennistone Ring.’

‘Some people dancing! Who are they?’

‘I don’t know, someone said all dressed in white.’

‘Druids obviously!’

‘Let’s go up to the Common.’

‘Everyone bring a bottle!’

Tom, laughing, trying on Bobbie’s bearhead, was also in torment. He had not yet written to Rozanov, though he had tried several times to compose a letter. How could he tell that man that he was not attracted to that girl? Of course there were hundreds of ways of putting it: we’ve talked, and though we like each other awfully … we both think we’re too young … She doesn’t feel I’m quite right … we’re just not interested enough … But the awful thing was that Tom was interested, only not in the right way. He thought almost with rage, that bloody autocrat has tied me to her, I don’t want to be but now it’s so hard to undo, I’ve changed. He’s made me think about her so much. I can’t just write a letter and forget it all. It’s inside me, growing like a nasty poisonous plant. It’s degrading to be afflicted like this. She probably hates me. And she frightens me, she seems like an evil maid, a sort of magic doll, bringing ill fortune, a curse, blighting my happiness and my freedom. He’s tied me, and it’s so damnably unfair. But if I get furious with him and write him some awful letter, if I write him any letter, because any letter is bound to be wrong, I shall go mad with remorse. I care about him, I care what he’s thinking, that’s what it’s come to!

Tom was experiencing for the first time in his life (and no doubt he was lucky to have escaped it so long) that blackening and poisoning of the imagination which is one of the worst, as well as one of the commonest, forms of human misery. His world had become uncanny, full of terrible crimes and ordeals, and punishments. He felt frightened and guilty, anticipating some catastrophe which was entirely his own fault, yet also brought about by vile enemies whom he detested. It was no good appealing to reason and common sense, telling himself it was all just a dotty episode which he could put behind him and soon laugh about. Oh if only he had just said no at the start; it was right, it was easy then. Where was his happiness now, his luck, he whom everybody liked so much, and who, once, had liked everybody?

Tom had thought, and there was something childish in the thought, that the day at the sea would somehow ‘cure’ him. The old idea of the family holiday at the sea was replete with innocence and calm joy. He needed to see Hattie again in some sort of ordinary way so as to wash off, as it were, the painful unclean impression of their previous meeting when he had behaved like a cad. But the meeting in the wild garden had been, as it seemed in retrospect, equally horrid. Was it that he wanted to impress her more? He had cut a poor figure. She had held the advantage, she had been cold, superior, almost cutting. There had been no exorcism. And after that he had got into that funny exalted emotional state, which he scarcely understood later, about Christ having been in England. He had tried to write a pop song about it afterwards: Jesus was here, he was here, man, do you hear, he came as a child with his uncle the tin merchant, Joseph of Arimathea, don’t fear, man, do you hear, and did those feet, they did, man, did they those feet, those feet did walk, when he came as a child (and so on). But the spiritual exaltation was gone and he could not get the song right. Then, on that seaside day, there had been the nightmare of losing Zed and Adam’s awful crying which the rescue could not efface. And now, later on, what Tom horribly, and with a sense of degradation, remembered most clearly was what he had seen from the top of the rock and not instantly reported to his companion: Hattie undressing, her mauve stockings which matched her dress, the tops of the stockings which were a dark purple colour, and her thigh above.

‘Time, gentlemen, please.’

‘Have we got enough drink?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the Common.’

‘The fair’s still on and people are dancing at the Ring.’

‘Can I come?’

‘Wait, I’ll get another bottle too.’

‘I’ve got my transistor set.’

‘So have I.’

‘What about glasses?’

‘Pick them up at Hector’s.’

‘I’ll carry that,’ said Tom to Anthea.

‘No, I’ll carry it, you’ve got your own.’

They came out together into the warm night where there was still light in the sky. Some drunks gathered on the pavement were softly singing, I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men, I will make you fishers of men if you follow me. Tom felt immediately giddy, rather drunk. Anthea took his hand and tears came into her eyes. She passionately loved Joey Tanner who did not love her, and she dearly loved Tom McCaffrey, but as a friend, as a brother.

The road from the Green Man which led down to the level crossing and then through the railway cutting to the Common went past Hector’s digs, where Hector and Valerie and Nesta stopped to collect glasses in a basket. The chorus of animals, with whom Hector was having so much trouble, had not yet been ejected from the pub. A bright light from the signal-box shone down on the red-and-white bars of the level crossing, and Tom and Anthea approached it hand in hand, bottles swinging in their other hands.

As they reached the crossing they paused at the little narrow wicket-gate which allowed people to walk across the track. Someone was coming over the rails, and the gate was only wide enough for one. The person who emerged into the light close beside them was Rozanov.

Tom let go of Anthea’s hand and dropped his bottle, which shattered on the tarmac. He stopped instinctively as if ducking, as if hiding his face; then when he recovered himself the philosopher was gone.

‘Oh bad luck,’ said Anthea.

‘Damn, all that drink gone west.’

‘Wasn’t that Professor Rozanov?’

‘I think so.’

There was no doubt that Rozanov had seen him and had seen his hand holding Anthea’s. Tom turned and made a step as if to run after him, then stopped. Anthea was kicking the broken glass into the gutter.

Someone else came through the wicket-gate. It was Dominic Wiggins.

‘Hello, Dominic’

‘Hello Anthea, hello Tom. If you’re going to the fair I’m afraid it’s over.’

‘Someone said there was dancing at the Ring.’

‘That’s over too. There were some funny people there but they’ve gone. Still, it’s a lovely evening for seeing flying saucers.’

Hector and Nesta and Valerie were coming up the road, with the rout of actors just behind them.

Anthea said, ‘The fair’s over, and the dancing too.’

‘Back to my place then,’ said Hector.

‘I’m going to the Slipper House,’ said Tom.

‘To the Slipper House?’

‘Yes, there’s a party there. I’ve just remembered. Must be off. Cheerio.’

‘What’s that? What’s Tom saying?’

‘A party at the Slipper House.’

‘A party! Let’s all go!’

‘Come on, Tom says there’s a party at the Slipper House!’

‘Hooray, to the Slipper House!’

‘Hooray!’

Exactly how what was later known as the ‘Slipper House riot’ began was wrapped in confusion for some time, and a lot of wild charges and counter-charges were made afterwards. That it was really quite an innocuous and accidental business, at first at any rate, and in no sense a conspiracy, is made clear by the foregoing account which I had from Tom himself much later on. Many of the more outrageous things which people said and believed were quite untrue; though it must also be added that a number of those involved had good reason to feel ashamed about what happened on that notorious night.

However that may be, shortly after the departure of the rout from Burkestown, Alex’s dream came true. She was drinking by herself. (She had taken to solitary drinking lately, and had been twice seen alone in the bar of the Ennistone Royal Hotel.) She looked out of the bow window of the drawing-room and saw the Belmont garden full of strange people and moving lights.

‘Whatever’s happening?’ said Diane to Father Bernard as they reached the back gate to the Belmont garden in Forum Way.

There was a sort of murmurous buzzing noise from within, a subdued sound of voices, occasional loud laughter, faint confused music.

The priest pushed the door open. ‘There’s some sort of fete or party or something or else they’re acting a play.’ He went in through the gate.

Diane said, ‘I can’t come, I haven’t been invited,’ but she followed him in.

The little damp path led through the shrubs and trees at the end of the garden, and as they followed it they saw the Slipper House with all its lights on throwing an illumination upon the grass. Mostly outside this patch of light, though intermittently in it, there moved or surged a number of people, some in medieval costume, some dressed as animals, some carrying lighted lanterns (these were props from the play). Transistor sets were droning, not loudly, mingling classical music with pop, and a member of the Music Consort was playing a treble recorder. A few people were practising a minuet, while others were absorbedly dancing by themselves. On the darker parts of the lawn groups had settled down and were opening bottles and sloshing beer and wine into glasses. As Diane and the priest advanced, someone with a huge stag’s head and antlers came up and put drinks into their hands. Someone else said, ‘Hello, Father, I’m not quite sure what’s happening here,’ and reeled off.

‘Who was that?’

‘Bobbie Benning.’

Meanwhile on the lighted part of the lawn Tom was having some sort of quarrel or explanation.

‘No, you can’t go into the Slipper House, there isn’t a party, I just said that, it was a joke!’

‘Well, there’s a party now.’

‘Why can’t we go in? You said there was a party.’

‘Yes, but there isn’t - I was upset. It was just an excuse — ’

‘You brought us here.’

‘I didn’t, you followed me!’

‘I want to go inside, I’ve always wanted to see inside this house.’

‘No, stop, you can’t.’

‘Let’s knock anyway.’

‘Let’s ask them out!’

‘I want to go in .’

‘What’s going on, why can’t we go in?’

‘I wish you’d all go away!’

‘But it was your idea to come here.’

‘It wasn’t, don’t make such a noise.’

‘Shall we bang on the windows?’

‘Let’s give the girls a song!’

‘Please stop, please go away from here!’

‘There’s someone in the garden,’ said Hattie. ‘There are people in the garden.’

‘Don’t worry, the doors are locked.’

‘Oh Pearl, do you think we should phone the police?’

‘Of course not, they’re probably guests of Mrs McCaffrey’s.’

‘I think they’re awful people. Pearl, let’s turn on all the lights. I feel so frightened in this house. I wish we were living in London. I hate this place. I feel someone will break in.’

‘All right.’ The girls ran all over the house turning on the lights.

‘Wait, don’t light up my bedroom, we’ll look out of the window. They’re making a noise.’

‘Perhaps it’s something to do with the fair.’

‘They can’t be having a fair here. They’re all dressed up as animals. Pearl, this is some sort of attack —’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘It is, they’re making a mock of us, it’s an insult, listen to the people laughing — ’

‘I think they’re drunk.’

‘Shall I ring up John Robert?’

‘No, for God’s sake, he’ll think we’re perfectly stupid! Anyway he isn’t on the telephone!’

‘Isn’t that Tom McCaffrey there?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Oh Pearl how awful, how horrid, he’s brought all these horrible people here to annoy us, I can’t bear it — ’

I’m sure he hasn’t, it must be a party at Belmont that’s just come out.’

‘Then why are they all down this end, and more people coming from the back gate — ’

‘Hattie, don’t panic — ’

‘I think it’s scandalous. Let’s close all the shutters.’

Alex turned away from the window, frightened and angry. A lamp was alight on the other side of the drawing-room, but much of the room was rather shadowy. Something rolled or ran across the carpet in front of her and she gave a little yelp of alarm. She made for the door and turned on all the drawing-room and landing lights. The fine wide curving staircase was revealed with its fretted banisters thickly covered with reassuring white paint. The soft tufty brown stair-carpet glowed with good-as-new fibrous cleanliness. Alex stood at the top of the stairs and called ‘Ruby! Ruby!’ There was no answer. She shouted once more, frightened by the tone of her own voice. No answer.

She went downstairs and turned on more lights. Ruby was not in the kitchen or in her own room. Alex went to the back door, which stood open, and looked down the garden. Some distance away lights and figures were moving and voices speaking. Alex did not dare to call again. She stepped out on to the pavement behind the house. Then she gasped and mouthed a cry as she saw the figure of a man standing near her.

‘Alex — ’ It was George.

‘Oh thank God! What is this awful business in the garden, what’s happening?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course, those horrible girls are giving a party, how dare they, in my garden, they never asked me, I shall go and tell them to stop, there are hundreds of people trampling everything, oh damn them, damn them — ’

‘No, don’t, there’s something odd about it all, I don’t think it’s that.’

‘What is it then?’

‘I don’t know. Devil’s work.’

‘Ruby’s gone.’

‘Go inside, Alex, and give yourself a drink and lock the door.’

‘Don’t go - you were coming to see me — ’

‘No, I heard the noise just as I was passing.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Just walking about the town, walking to the canal.’

‘To the canal? Why? To that place? Don’t go there, stay with me, please — ’

‘I’ll just go and see what all this business is.’

‘Come back, won’t you, please — ’

George had already disappeared.

The shutters of the Slipper House were now closing one by one, quenching the light which had been illuminating the patch of lawn. Outside there was a groan of disapproval followed by laughter. Tom ran forward.

Hattie, spreading out her arms to take hold of the shutters of the sitting-room, cried out when a figure appeared suddenly outside the window, like Peter Pan, close up against the glass.

Tom tapped. ‘It’s only me! Can I come in?’

Hattie stared, then violently swung one of the shutters across.

Tom, dancing outside the still unshuttered half of the window, shouted, ‘It’s not my fault! I didn’t bring them!’

Hattie swung the other half of the shutter across with a bang and fixed it with a bar. She stood looking into the painted eyes of Alex’s eternally young brother. Then she began to cry.

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

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

‘No!’

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

‘No, don’t go away!’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Are things going to turn nasty?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valerie, searching, grieving, had passed on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh shut up!’

Emma caught Tom round the waist.

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

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

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

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

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

Emma said, ‘Hello, dear.’

Pearl said, ‘Have you seen Tom McCaffrey?’

‘No, dear. Don’t go, dear.’

‘Excuse me — ’

‘Pearl — ’

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

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

‘You’re drunk.’

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

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

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

‘It’s a disgrace. Go home.’

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

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

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

George said, ‘Good evening.’

Hattie said, ‘How did you get in?’

‘I hope I don’t intrude.’

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

‘Why are you so cross with us McCaffreys?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Some people have gone.’

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

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

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

‘George? Oh no!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music for a while

Shall your cares beguile …

Come away, do not stay,

But obey, while we play,

For hell’s broke up and ghosts have holiday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father Bernard emerged and helped Diane out from behind the tree. He put his arm round her and led her away. Valerie, coming through the gate on to the quay, now saw the other two and watched them depart. Then she turned the other way and walked past my place of concealment. I saw her face as she passed. She wore a strange expression, very sad, weary, grave, even stern, and yet with a twist in the mouth which was almost like a smile, though it might have presaged tears. It struck me at the time that this expression very well expressed what, at the end, the very end, if that can be imagined, someone, perhaps God, might feel about George.

At a distance, for I knew where she lived, I followed Valerie to see her home safely. As she walked she seemed to lose a certain tragic exaltation which had possessed her. Her head drooped, she stumbled over her long besmirched white dress and picked up the skirt impatiently in one hand, drawing it upwards with a graceless movement. Now the comfortless tears would be coming. She began to hurry. I followed her until I saw her put her key into the door of her father’s house, one of the ‘better’ detached houses in Leafy Ridge, and disappear inside. The most beautiful girl in Ennistone.

‘Well, how are the old sinuses?’ said Mr Hanway.

‘All right, sir,’ said Emma.

‘I trust you have been practising as much as you should?’

‘No. Not as much. Some.’

‘Why? You can use the college music rooms? And I’ve told you you can come here.’

‘Yes, well, I do use the college music rooms and I sing in my digs when there’s no one else there, but somehow — ’

‘I sometimes feel,’ said Mr Hanway, ‘that you are ashamed of your great gift and want to keep it a secret.’

‘No, no — ’

‘Perhaps you feel that you counter-tenors have still to make your way in the world and fight to be accepted?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘You’re not troubled by foolish worries?’ Mr Hanway had a prudish delicacy which Emma greatly liked.

‘No, of course not.’

‘You seem so timid about it all.’

Emma, not used to regarding himself as ‘timid’, engaged indeed in the not less than heroic operation of sacrificing one of his gifts to the other, flushed with annoyance. ‘I’m not timid, I’m just embarrassed. One can’t always be forcing people to hear a loud resonant piercing rather unusual noise!’

‘My dear Scarlett-Taylor, what a way to describe your exceptionally beautiful voice!’

Emma thought, I ought to tell him now that I’m going to give up singing. I’m going to give up serious singing, and that is for him, and for me, the same as giving up singing. But looking into Mr Han way’s gentle diffident grey eyes it seemed impossible to utter. Also, in a yet more terrible way, even the touch of Mr Hanway’s fingers on the piano (he was an excellent pianist) struck a resonance deep in Emma’s soul which made him wonder: am I not irrevocably bound to music?

‘I think it is time for you to come out.’

‘I’m not ready.’

‘Have you heard of Joshua Bayfield?’

‘Vaguely. He plays the guitar.’

‘He plays the lute, also the guitar. He asked me if you would perform with him. The B B C are interested and there is a possibility of making a record. And there is that flautist I told you of - you know how well your voice accords with the flute — ’

‘Oh I don’t think anything like that yet - I do occasionally perform after all. I’ve been asked to sing in the college Messiah -’ Emma did not add that he had refused.

‘You sound quite panic-stricken! You mustn’t be so modest. Shall I ask Bayfield to write to you?’

‘Please, no.’

Emma, who had just arrived, was sitting beside the piano which his teacher was idly touching as an accompaniment to his admonitions. Mr Hanway, once a moderately well-known operatic tenor, was a corpulent man of over fifty, with coarse straight grey hair and grey eyes. He looked like a teacher, more like an economics don than a musical man, but without self-assertion. His face, not wrinkled, had a greyish sad used look, drooping under the eyes and chin. Something vastly poetic and romantic seemed to stray lost and grieving within him. He had been married, but his wife had left him childless and long ago, and his once promising career as a singer was over. He lived in a dark little flat high up in a red brick mansion block in Knightsbridge. Emma liked the flat which reminded him (perhaps partly because of the particular sound of the piano) of his mother’s flat in Brussels, though her flat was large and full of big Belgian furniture which Emma’s ‘I like it!’ when they first arrived there many years ago had kept unchanged.

Emma felt no retrospective satisfaction about his two musical triumphs at the Slipper House. He was ashamed at having got so drunk. He had not wanted to go out with Tom and Tom’s old friends, of whom he felt jealous. He had seriously proposed to himself an evening of study. But after Tom had gone he felt so depressed that he decided to have a shot of whisky. After that it was necessary to continue drinking. Then he had gone to look at Judy’s clothes, and had found the long-haired wig in her cupboard and tried it on. Then it seemed a shame not to try on a dress or two. The effect was so funny and so charming, the transformation so complete, that he felt bound to share the joke and, emboldened by whisky, set off for the Green Man where Tom had said he would be after the rehearsal. In Burkestown he had been told about the ‘Slipper House party’. He could not clearly remember the whole of the evening, particularly the later part which seemed to be full of black patches; but once back at Travancore Avenue he had realized that Ju’s pretty dress was torn completely apart at the shoulders and irrevocably stained with red wine.

He did remember putting his arms around Tom, and then, not at all long afterwards, around Pearl. This was the effect of drink. It was not how he usually behaved. Yet it was not false or unreal. Had he just transferred the kiss he could not give to Tom to Pearl, who looked so bisexually angelic with her hard straight profile and her thin upright grace? No, that was Pearl’s kiss, not Tom’s; and he recalled with a kind of guilty gloomy pleasure her quiet acceptance, at least tolerance, of the kiss. He recalled how positively he had noticed Pearl on the first occasion when he saw her. But how stupid and pointless it all was. Tom appeared to be half in love with Anthea Eastcote, and was in any case framed by God for women’s joy. And this ambiguous ‘maidservant’ figure, what did he know about her? He had only had one conversation with her in his life. In any case, what was this about except his capacity to get drunk? It would end, if it had not already ended, in muddle, and he hated muddle, and in rejection, and he hated and feared rejection. He was frightened too by his inability to remember the evening, and ashamed to ask Tom about it. Supposing something disgraceful and absurd had happened? Supposing he were to become an alcoholic? He had seen terrible alcoholics in Dublin. His father, a moderate drinker, had always warned him against alcohol. Had his father, for himself, feared this fate? Had Emma’s grandfather, whom Emma could scarcely remember, been an alcoholic? Was it not hereditary?

And now he had to tell Mr Hanway that he was going to give up singing and would come no more. The end of singing would be the end of Mr Hanway. They were only close in this place, in these roles, in the benign and sacred presence of music. He would never see Mr Hanway again. Could that be, was it needful? Yes. He could not divide his life, he could not divide his time. He was between two absolutes and he knew which one he loved best. His history tutor, Mr Winstock, who cared little about music, and to whom Emma had once vaguely spoken about ‘giving up the singing’, could not understand his hesitation; and when he was with Mr Winstock Emma could not understand it either. But now he was with Mr Hanway.

The sun never shone into Mr Hanway’s flat, but it sometimes slanted across the window illuminating the white window sills and reflecting on to the gauze curtains which, never drawn back, concealed Mr Hanway’s life from windows opposite. It shone so now, reminding Emma of sunrise in Brussels illuminating lace. He thought, and will I sing no more for my mother, who so loves to hear me sing? Could I get used to singing less than very well? That would be impossible.

‘It’s not that I want to tempt you with visions of fame,’ Mr Hanway went on, ‘I know I can’t and wouldn’t anyway! Fame will undoubtedly come to you, but that does not concern us now. It is time for you to move to another shelf, to face new challenges. As a teacher I have always encouraged your natural modesty. But it is time for you to realize, to acknowledge to yourself, what a remarkable instrument you possess. You must not neglect what God has been pleased to give you, the voice for which Purcell wrote. Your counter-tenor must be heard, the music must be heard that was written especially for you!’

‘There isn’t much of it,’ said Emma gloomily. He was sitting on an upright chair beside the piano. There had been no singing yet. Perhaps there would not be any.

‘Bach, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Cavalli, to say nothing of Handel and Purcell and some of the divinest songsters who ever wrote, and you say that isn’t much! In any case a little of what is perfect should suffice a purist! You have the most austerely beautiful, most purely musical of all voices, like no other sound in music, to honour which the most beautiful words were wedded to the most perfect music by a century of geniuses. Besides, you owe it to music now to let your talent speak. More composers will write for the counter-tenor voice. A contrived voice they may call it, but art itself is a contrivance. We are already witnessing a musical revolution. An old voice, a new voice, wherewith to sing unto the Lord a new song!’ (Here Mr Hanway raised his arms.) ‘You must give more time, Scarlett-Taylor, more time, time is the fuel. Of course you will soon have finished your university studies and be able to concentrate on music, but you should now be singing with a group, and having experience of working with old instruments - you must stop playing the lone wolf. Well, we will talk of these things - now let us sing. What shall we limber-up with, something playful? A folk song, a love song, some Shakespeare?’

Automatically Emma stood up. He blew his nose (an essential preliminary to singing). Mr Hanway touched the piano, suggesting several songs. He sang three of Mr Hanway’s favourites, Take, oh take those Lips Away, Woeful Heart with Grief Oppressed and Sing Willow. (‘What a gloomy unsuccessful lot they were, to be sure!’ said Mr Hanway.) After that they sang together. Mr Hanway’s famous Glee Club, flourishing when Emma first made his acquaintance, had, like many pleasant things in the teacher’s life, ceased to be, but Mr Hanway retained, together with all his musicological pedantry, a strong sense of music as fun. They sang Fie, nay, prithee John in round, then The Silver Swan with Mr Hanway producing a remarkable soprano, then Lure, Falconers, Lure, then the Agincourt Song, then The Ash Grove in improvised parts. And as soon as Emma began to sing he could not prevent himself from feeling very happy.

‘Good, good, but don’t feel you have to stand so still, I’ve told you before, you’re a singer not a soldier, all right, some singers jig about too much, but you’re too afraid of making faces and moving your hands, don’t be so dignified, too great a sense of dignity can hinder an artist, it’s an aspect of selfishness, give yourself, relax, let it sing through you as the Japanese would say! And keep the sound well up, well up, don’t think of your vocal cords, put yourself right up in your brow, feel it as a vast area full of empty caverns where free spiralling columns of air vibrate! Vibrate! You still haven’t got that absolute high pianissimo which moves away into the distance into a thin whisper of pure sound like a thin thin tongue of faintly trembling steel. Ah, you have much to do — sometimes I think you are just coasting along.’ Mr Hanway’s exhortations, often highly metaphorical, were always accompanied with elaborate mime. ‘Now, dear boy, let us have special exercises and then on to the Bach Magnificat, I shall hear your beautiful Esurient es …’

As Emma came out into the bright sunshine after his lesson, having failed once more to ‘say anything’ to Mr Hanway, he felt that dazed giddiness again as he shielded his eyes, the vertigo of an abomination of loneliness and loss, where silent endless streaming snowflakes blinded him and obliterated all meaning. He remembered a dream where he had wandered in vast vibrating caverns, realizing with despair that they were caves of ice deep underneath a glacier where he was destined soon to fall to his knees and die.

‘Must we have all the light shut out by those bloody plants?’ said Brian.

‘I like to have a living thing near me,’ said Gabriel.

‘Aren’t I a living thing? Do you want me to squat on the window ledge while you wash up?’

‘Sorry, I’ll move them.’

‘And I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the kitchen, you smoke over the sink, it gets everywhere — ’

It was two days since the events at the Slipper House (which had occurred on Saturday, it being now Monday). Gabriel and Brian were having breakfast in the kitchen at Como. Brian was cross this morning because it was Monday and because Gabriel, reaching out in the night for the glass of water she always kept beside her, had tapped her wedding-ring upon the glass top of the dressing-table and woken him up, after which he was unable to go to sleep again.

Sitting on a chair in the corner, Adam was holding Zed on his knee and murmuring to him almost inaudibly. This ritual occurred every morning. Gabriel knew without being told that Adam was explaining that he was only going away to school and would very soon be back and that Zed was to be a good dog and not to worry. Zed listened to these comforting admonitions on each occasion with an air of alert bright-eyed interest, occasionally thrusting forward to lick Adam’s nose. This scene filled Gabriel with the old familiar mixture of intense love and intense fear, each emotion as it were jacking the other up.

Adam was dressed in his prep school uniform, the ‘togs’ which had pleased Hattie, blue jersey, brown corduroy knee-breeches, and blue socks. Last night Brian and Gabriel had been arguing again about where Adam was to go to school next. Gabriel did not want him to go away from home, but she thought the Comprehensive School was ‘too rough’. There was a small private secondary school with quite a good reputation not far away on the road to London, and could he not go as a day boy, there was a school bus which ran in and out of Ennistone. Brian said this was out of the question, it would be far too expensive, especially as he would soon be out of a job. Gabriel said, good heavens, this is the first I’ve heard. Brian said he just meant everyone would soon be out of a job. Anyway what was wrong with the Comprehensive, it was a good school, the maths were excellent under Jeremy Blackett. Gabriel said what about his French and Latin which he was doing well at, the Comprehensive didn’t start French till fourteen and had never heard of Latin. Brian said he was exhausted and was going to bed.

Looking at Adam and Zed, Gabriel thought about the awful scene at the seaside, and about her adventure with the fish. She had not talked to anybody about the fish. This connected in her mind with something weird which had happened last week. By herself in the house in the afternoon, washing some saucepans at the kitchen sink, she had heard Zed barking in the garden, and looking out between the potted plants had seen the amazing sight of a completely naked man hurrying across the lawn. She did not see him soon enough to see where he had come from, whether over the fence or down the side passage from the road. He seemed to be concerned with getting out of the garden by climbing one of the fences, either the one on the right or the one at the end, both of which he attempted in a helpless perfunctory way. Both fences were made of upright wooden slats about five feet high; the one at the bottom had two horizontal beams nailed along it, the one on the right had not, but had branchy shrubs growing against it which would afford footholds. Gabriel saw that the runner was wearing brown laced-up shoes with no socks. He had greasy longish grey hair, and a look of preoccupied anxiety on his face which she could see clearly as he tried to climb into an old rosemary bush, breaking the brittle branches with loud cracks and trampling them down. After the first moment of shock Gabriel felt no fear of the man, only pity and fear for him, for the pathetic pale soiled vulnerability of his flabby unyoung flesh, as he now struggled at the bottom of the garden, gripping the top of the fence (which Gabriel knew to be jagged and full of splinters) with two hands, and trying to lodge his awkward shoes upon the sloping transverse beams off which they kept slipping. All this time Zed was continuing to dance round the man’s heels barking fiercely. Gabriel imagined him astride upon that sharp jagged fence and covered her eyes, not knowing what to do. She wanted to run out into the garden, to soothe him (for she did not doubt that he was mad, this was no youngster’s jape), bring him inside, give him clothing and a cup of tea. But at this point she did feel frightened. Suppose he were violent? Should she not telephone Brian, telephone the police, get help somewhere? Oughtn’t she to lock the doors? She ran out into the hall, then ran back to lock the garden door, then ran back into the hall and lifted the telephone, then set it down again. She decided she ought to go out into the garden. She hurried back to the kitchen window, but now the garden was empty and Zed had stopped barking. Gabriel unlocked the door and went out. Zed trotted towards her beaming with the satisfaction of duty done. Gabriel searched around, looking over the fences and into the shed, but the man was nowhere to be seen; he had vanished like a hallucination. Gabriel went slowly back to the house. She decided not to telephone the police. The police might arrest him, be rough with him, charge him, imprison him, whereas if he were left alone he might recover and find his way home, or someone might befriend him and look after him as she might have done if only she had had more courage! Then she remembered the Indian man at the Baths, whom she had never seen again. In the evening she told the story to Brian, but making light of it, laughing a bit, then suddenly crying. Brian got the impression that she was being brave about a terrible experience. (And in a way it had been a terrible experience, an ordeal of helpless and frustrated pity.) He said that she ought to have telephoned the police, but now there was no point. (Brian was reluctant to get in touch with the police, because he hated ‘trouble’ and anything to do with publicity, which might get his name mentioned in the papers.) The next day however at the office he changed his mind and rang the police but without alerting Gabriel. Confronted by a policeman on the doorstep, Gabriel was instantly certain that either Adam or Brian was dead. When the policeman solemnly made clear the reason for his visit she was incoherent with relief. ‘Oh, I didn’t mind that at all!’ ‘Are you telling me, madam, that you don’t mind finding a naked man in your garden?’ ‘I don’t want him to be hurt!’ Tears. ‘I can see, madam, that the episode has upset you very much.’ And so on. It turned out soon after that the poor man was a patient of Ivor Sefton’s and was now in hospital. Brian, that evening, positively forbade Gabriel to go and visit him. That night she dreamed about fishes suffocating.

‘Good God!’ said Brian, who had been reading the Ennistone Gazette over breakfast.

‘What?’

‘We’re in the bloody paper!’

‘About the streaker?’

‘No, not that! I mean Tom and George, not us, but we’ll be dragged in. Good grief! whatever have they been up to, damn them? Tom wants thrashing and George ought to be put away, nothing but trouble and it’ll land on us. Look at this awful muck in their filthy gossip column!’ He handed the paper over to Gabriel.

MCCAFFREY PRACTICAL JOKE GOES TOO FAR

Extraordinary scenes took place on Saturday night at the so-called ‘Slipper House’, luxury abode in Victoria Park lately purchased from Mrs Alexandra McCaffrey by Professor John Robert Rozanov as a home for his grand-daughter Miss Harriet Meynell and her maidservant. ‘Rehearsals’ of The Mask of Aphrodite in the Ennistone Hall broke up in confusion when George and Tom McCaffrey led a drunken rabble to lay siege to the two damsels in their flossy seclusion. Drinking and shouting, the revellers, who included parish priest Reverend Bernard Jacoby, attempted to gain access to the house, and failed, proceeded to wreck the garden, fouling the lawns and damaging valuable trees and shrubs. Stones were thrown at the windows, one of which shattered a pane of antique stained-glass. Also present were a number of young men in outrageous ‘drag’ and their sponsor, our own Madame Diane. At last, with the connivance of the maidservant who opened the back door to him, George McCaffrey was enabled to enter the house, while his brother Tom howled with laughter outside. What happened next is not recorded! One fact has emerged. The so-called maid, Pearl Scotney, is no other than the sister of the afore-mentioned Madame D, who is the intimate friend of G. McCaffrey! What makes the whole episode more mysterious (or does it?) is that Tom McCaffrey, with professorial prodding and rather suggestive haste, has lately become engaged to the professorial granddaughter. Miss Meynell may or may not have found the evening amusing. Picking up the pieces should constitute an interesting problem in moral philosophy.

Gabriel read it through with little mews of distress. ‘But it can’t be true, it can’t be true!’

‘It’s true now,’ said Brian. ‘We shall never hear the end of this.’

It was never known for certain later on who was the author of this scurrilous piece. The general view was that it was the editor, Gavin Oare, who was annoyed with Hattie for her slightly haughty letter refusing an interview, and who had an old grudge against George because of a humiliation he had suffered at George’s hands some years ago (an incident at a party). It seems likely that the innocent occasion of the article was Maisie Chalmers, the Women’s Page girl, who had gone along with the others from the Green Man, without any malicious intent, and in fact left fairly early, soon after Anthea Eastcote. The next morning, laughing about it all, she gave the editor an account of junketings in the Belmont garden. Gavin Oare immediately sent out his spies (Mike Seanu was one) and pieced together a fuller and more interesting account. On the day after the Gazette’s revelations, its rival, The Swimmer, the weekly trade paper, also ran the story, taking up as usual a different ‘angle’ from that of the Gazette. According to The Swimmer, the ‘orgy’ had been arranged by Miss ‘Hattie’ Meynell herself, who had turned out to be considerably less stuffy than was at first imagined. The paper also struck a note of its own, reporting that ‘Our Sapphic Sisterhood of Women’s Libbers were also there in force, and the so-called “maid” was to be seen hugging and kissing, clasped to the bosom of another long-haired Amazon.’ The Swimmer repeated, even more suggestively, the tale that Tom and Hattie had become engaged in a hurry at the insistence of ‘our learned Professor’. George also figured prominently. One sentence read, ‘Miss Hattie, so hastily pledged to Tom, appears also to be on friendly terms with George, which goes to show that a McCaffrey will do anything for another McCaffrey.’ (The meaning of these words was much discussed.) The article was headed Prof’s grandchild launched in Ennistone.

Not long after the Brian McCaffreys’ Monday breakfast time Tom, who never read the Ennistone Gazette, was packing to return to London. He had in fact just been round to Leafy Ridge to see Gabriel and ask her to try and mend and clean Judy Osmore’s dress, but no one was there when he arrived, Brian had gone to the office, Adam to school, and Gabriel was out shopping. Tom played a while with Zed, then left the dress in the kitchen with a note. Emma had left on the previous day full of remorse and repentance. Tom, also remorseful and repentant, had tried to cheer him up. Emma had brought Tom, wordlessly, the ruined dress, and Tom had told him first that Judy Osmore was not the sort of girl to mind a thing like that, and that second, anyway he would take the dress to Gabriel who was awfully clever at mending things and removing stains. Emma had gone away uncomforted. Seeing him depart, Tom had an urge to run after him. They had of course referred to the disastrous evening but not discussed it. Tom felt both that it had upset Emma very much and that he, Tom, might have appeared (since he made a joke or two) to regard the whole thing in a frivolous light. Emma’s stern eyes seemed to charge him with frivolity. Tom felt unhappily that he was somehow, where Emma was concerned, failing to ‘keep up’, and had become lately a more ordinary, less extraordinary person for his friend. Tom was used to being loved and valued and his vanity was engaged. He admired Emma very much and regarded him as, in important respects, his superior, so that he was sad and irritated to think that Emma’s image of him might diminish. This unworthy anxiety prevented the communication which might have removed it. They were awkward with each other and Tom, failing to discover any way of expressing his affection, found himself playing the fool in front of an increasingly silent Emma.

Tom had also, throughout that rather unhappy Sunday, been thinking about George. George had never been, as the years went by, very far away from Tom’s heart and mind. At times Tom felt, as he felt now, as if he were being positively prompted to help George, perhaps willed by George himself to come to him. Yet such an impulsive warm approach, as Tom conceived it, could scarcely be imagined in detail. Reflecting on the recent drama, there did seem to be one point of hope. George had been defeated, and easily defeated, by mass ridicule. This could scarcely be a precedent since the circumstances were so unusual, but was it not a good sign? It made Tom see George as comic, and with this came notions of forgiveness and change. Maybe we take him too seriously, Tom thought. He should be laughed out of it all, persecuted by laughter. And Tom thought, I’ll go and see old George, I ought to have before, I’ll go next weekend. But next weekend was a long way off, and Tom had still to contend with the image of George inside that window with Hattie.

Hattie was hardest of all to think about and most painful. Tom kept saying to himself, I have to give it up, leave it alone, do nothing, there’s nothing I can do, I don’t understand and I’d better not try. If only George hadn’t got mixed in, it was all bad enough without that. Tom had resisted an impulse to send Hattie a long rambling letter of apology. Better to say nothing. What did Hattie think after all, how much did she know, and how much would she say to Rozanov? Tom saw Hattie as a girl capable of saying very little or nothing. She might well feel that the whole incident was best left to disappear without further comment. George, who seemed so significant to Tom, might seem considerably less so to Hattie. And surely Hattie could not really think that Tom had led that mob into the garden on purpose to annoy her. Perhaps she was already laughing about the whole thing. An apology might simply have the effect of accusing himself of crimes of which it had not occurred to her to accuse him. Tom even began to think it reasonable to hope that Rozanov would not hear of the ‘little escapade’ at all.

All the same, he thought, after he had finished his packing and was standing at the back window looking out over the garden at the view of the town, all the same, I will write to her, I will see her, but not yet, later on. And as the image of Hattie defying George, her bare arm outstretched, came back vividly to his mind, he felt that this was not the last time that he would want to brood upon it. He stood looking out over Ennistone, funny little town, where the sun was shining upon the gilded cupola of the Hall, ‘just like Leningrad’ as the Official Guide touchingly said, and he thought now about Emma and about George and about Hattie, and he felt sad and alone.

At that moment in his reflections the telephone bell rang. It was Gavin Oare, asking if he had any comment to make on today’s issue of the Gazette. When Tom said that he had not seen today’s issue, Gavin Oare chuckled and said that he had better go out and buy one. Tom ran from the house.

Pearl saw the paper on Monday morning when she went out shopping. She ran back at once and then could not bring herself to tell Hattie who was quietly reading. However, with Pearl so upset (and the more she thought the more upset she became) concealment proved impossible. The girls, in tears, agreed that now there was nothing to be done but wait. (Hattie did try to write a letter, but soon gave it up.) John Robert Rozanov did not catch up until Tuesday. On Monday morning he went early to the Institute (he had spent the night at Hare Lane where he was sorting out some papers) and swam in the Outdoor Pool before retiring to his den in the Rooms, where he worked all the morning and had a sandwich lunch brought to him. He soaked in his hot bath, then had his sleep as usual. He worked on till late in the evening and went to bed. No one, during that time, dared to approach him. When he woke on Tuesday morning he found that a copy of Monday’s Gazette and of Tuesday’s Swimmer had been thrust under his door.

George, shut up in his house in Druidsdale and oblivious of articles in newspapers, had decided to give John Robert another chance. He had phrased it in his mind as ‘a last chance’, but he could not bear those words and changed them. For no reason that he could have thought of, had he decided to reflect about it which he did not, a warm spring-like breeze of hope was blowing in his soul. It was not a desire for happiness. George had never, even as a young man, allowed himself a desire for happiness. It was something involuntary, mechanical, a primitive self-protective jerk of the psyche. It now seemed to George that he had been seeing his situation in an entirely irrational light, and that he had built up an entirely false picture of his old teacher. In a way, thought George, egoism is the trouble, I’m just being too much of a solipsist. I imagine John Robert thinking a lot about me and hating and despising me in quite an elaborate way as if this were a major activity in his life creating a vast complex barrier between us. But it isn’t like that. He doesn’t think about me all that much. After all he’s got other troubles. And what did he always think about nearly all the time anyway? His work. I’m a minor problem. So is everybody else, everybody else, it isn’t just me. So I mustn’t attach too much importance to the peevish hostile things he says when I arrive and interrupt him. Of course I’ve been very tactless, I’ve even been aggressive. John Robert is a tremendous one for his dignity. No wonder he was sharp with me. In a way it’s a sign he cares for me, he cares how I behave. Well, I’ll behave better. I’ll write him a very careful letter, I’ll write him an interesting letter. John Robert always forgives people who interest him.

The evening at the Slipper House had already been mercifully worked upon by the chemistry of memory, and even his defeat at the hands of the singers appeared with a difference. He retained most vividly an impression of Hattie, her breathing closeness to him, her fragile crushability, her crunchability. He recalled too with appreciation her large gesture at the window. And he remembered the running, the escaping pursued by a crowd. This image was now not displeasing. To hear the vulgar outcry and outrun it and then to be alone: that was a picture of life. The histrionics beside the canal made no sense and had dropped into oblivion. The recent past appeared as a kind of show, an interlude, unconnected with the pressing duties which now composed the significance of his life.

So it was that on Monday afternoon George sat down at the polished but dusty table in the sparsely elegant dining-room in Druidsdale, ‘he was still living downstairs, he had not gone upstairs since his excursion to find the netsuke) and wrote as follows:

My dear John Robert,

I have been thinking about you. I feel I have been ungracious and unfair and I want to apologize. I know you care little about apologies and other such ‘posturing’, a word which you used, years ago, to describe a similar demarche on my part. I know too that you understand the strategic psychological purpose of an apology, which is to put the apologizer once more upon a level with his adversary, the offended person! My aim, as it has always been, is clarification, one which you surely share. We have known each other a long time and have been more than once in the place we are in now; a consideration which makes me the more confident in addressing you. There are various ways in which our relationship might be pictured, but fundamentally it is that of teacher and pupil, a relation which, prima facie at any rate, imposes a lasting obligation upon the teacher. You must know from experience how lively and how durable such a connection can be, and it is not your ‘fault’ any more than it is mine that we are in this way eternally connected. It is because you are a great man and a great teacher that this is so. These are facts in the light of which my being ‘a nuisance’ or ‘impolite’ must show as superficial. You know that my ‘tiresomeness’ is an expression of love, and one which perhaps at a deep level you would be sorry to be without. You know also, and I need not stress it, how I crave for your kindness. This may sound servile, but I offer it as another fact, and in no spirit of servility. You know me well enough to know how little I am given over, even where you are concerned, to any form of slavery.

I have been reflecting about philosophy of late, in a somewhat ‘existential’ mood (sorry, I know you loathe that word, but it has its place), and it has occurred to me (not actually for the first time) that you and I are alike. How is that? you will ask. I will tell you. We are both free men. I remember you said once (my God, how many sayings of yours are stored up in my head!) that the idea of being ‘beyond good and evil’ was and could only be a vulgar illusion. I think we had been discussing Dostoevsky. All right. Those who claim to be ‘beyond’ this familiar dualism are lying cynics or irresponsible victims of semi-conscious will, or eccentric or perverted enthusiasts who elevate some virtue (courage, for instance) so far above the other virtues as to make these invisible. Or if one attempts to draw a more spiritual picture, is not this simply morality itself at a more intense level? The adept who ‘prefers knowledge to virtue’ is either a vulgar magician or else a kind of ‘scholar’, whose selfless application we may admire, while we deplore his neglect of simpler duties! I seem to hear the echo of your voice here! (Did you not also speak later on, I seem to recall the phrase of a possible ‘conceptual dissolution of morals’? Perhaps that is part of the secret doctrine!) But, John Robert, is there not a much less arcane sense of this ‘freedom’, closer to home, closer anyway to our home? Do we, you and I, fall into any of the categories I have enumerated? I think not! We have simply ‘cut free’, and what we have done is not really so mysterious (or so grand) after all. There are many aspects to our freedom. One is certainly an absence of vanity (I speak of course in a neutral sense, and not as claiming a merit) which expresses itself as a complete indifference to ‘what people say’. We are outside the power of censure, as I believe very few people are. Schopenhauer says somewhere that virtue is simply an amalgam of prudence, fear of punishment, fear of censure, apathy and a desire to be liked! Can we not simply proceed by eliminating these one by one? And when they are all gone, have we not reached a place which some deny exists? Not by a dramatic leap, or by the development of some narrow specialized super-virtue, but by a simple movement of escape, like an eel slipping out of a trap. We are outside, you and I, and are we not, in this unpopulated open space, to shake each other’s hands? I think you understand me.

I would like to talk to you about these and other matters. I won’t try to see you just yet. Indeed, I don’t mind whether we talk here or in California. But we will talk. I feel, I cannot express to you how I know it, sure of that. We are bound together. I have sometimes behaved to you like a vulgar fool and I am sorry for it. But I know that you know that I am not a vulgar fool. Between now and the end, I am to be reckoned with.

I want in this letter to make peace with you. The sense of our being ‘at odds’ has troubled me. Let there be peace, John Robert, for both our sakes. Don’t trouble to answer this, but receive it, think about it please, let it be in your mind. I will communicate with you again. Ever, indeed forever, your devoted pupil,

George McC

George wrote the letter rapidly, straight out, in a state of excitement as if inspired. When he sat back and read it through he felt relieved, almost happy. It was wise not to suggest a meeting, better to indicate a vague future which, being peaceful, would in its due time bring forth a meeting. George felt sure that this letter would charm the philosopher. At worst it would amuse him. But George meant every word of the letter and hoped that its seriousness would impress. The sending of it would be a magic act which would restore to its tormented writer peace, and time.

It was Wednesday morning. Tom, who had of course not returned to London, was ringing the bell at number sixteen Hare Lane. He had received by the first post a letter which read:

Dear Mr McCaffrey,

I shall expect you to call on me at Hare Lane at 10 a.m. on Wednesday.

J. R. Rozanov

John Robert opened the door and made a gesture toward the back room. Tom entered past him. The day was cloudy and overcast and the room was dark, but Tom saw a copy of the Ennistone Gazette open on the table.

Rozanov came in and shut the door. He said in a husky voice, clearing his throat, ‘Have you seen this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you explain it? There’s a report here too.’ He slapped a copy of The Swimmer down on the table with a violence which made Tom shudder.

Tom had already thought out his speech which would consist simply of telling the truth. He said, ‘It’s horrible, I felt sick when I read it. But you know what gossip columns are. It’s all lies — ’

‘Oh, is it?’

Tom was standing with his back to the window, Rozanov against the closed door. Tom realized that the philosopher was actually trembling and that there were frothy bubbles on his lips. Tom drew a deep breath. He was beginning to tremble too. He said, ‘Wait, listen, I’ll tell you exactly what happened, it was all perfectly innocent, not like that - I was at those rehearsals at the Hall, then we all went to the pub, to the Green Man, and then when it closed I went to Belmont and they all followed me, I didn’t want them to, I didn’t invite them — ’

‘Were you going to see Harriet?’ John Robert was controlling himself, Tom could hear his slow deep breathing and the expulsion of his breath between his teeth.

Tom hesitated, then said, ‘Yes - but — ’

‘So late at night? Had she invited you?’

‘No - it wasn’t all that late - I mean — ’

‘The Green Man closes at ten, ten-thirty?’

‘Well, all right, I wasn’t going to call on her like, I just wanted to - to go there — ’

‘To go there?’

‘I don’t know what I wanted, I was drunk.’

‘I see.’

‘Then all the others followed, they thought there was a party.’

‘Had you arranged a party?’

‘No— ’

‘Why did they think there was a party?’

‘Because I said so — ’

‘You said so — ’

‘Yes, but only sort of to put them off, to get away - I pretended I had to go to a party - and then - well, then there was a party - I didn’t intend it - and once they were there I couldn’t get them to leave. It wasn’t my fault. I’m very sorry indeed about it all. I’ve been writing a letter of apology to Miss Meynell — ’

‘Why are you apologizing if it wasn’t your fault?’

‘Well, I suppose it was my fault because it was offensive but not intentionally — ’ Awful unclarified feelings of guilt had been confusing Tom’s mind. He seemed somehow to have brought about, and yet how, an absolute mountain of complicated events. He had wanted to run to see Hattie but did not dare to. He had been trying to compose a letter to her but found it too difficult. He was indeed only at that very moment realizing the full enormity of the situation.

The familiar process of question and answer had made Rozanov less agitated. At first he had hardly been able to speak. He said, ‘You brought George there, you introduced him into the house.’

‘I didn’t, I swear it! I don’t know how George came into it, he must have arrived by accident.’

‘Were you in the house?’

‘No.’

‘But he was.’

‘Yes, but I don’t know how he got in - then we - we shouted at him and made him go.’

‘And were all those people there, Mrs Sedleigh and men dressed as women?’

‘Yes, well, one anyway, but it was just a lark — ’

‘A lark? Are you in your right mind?’

‘I know it’s awful but it wasn’t my fault, all that other stuff was made up by the paper.’

‘Are you suggesting that they simply invented the idea that — ’ John Robert leaned back against the door and opened his wet frothy mouth like an animal.

Tom was now almost crying with fear and distress. He said, wailing it out, ‘I did nothing wrong!’

Rozanov said with difficulty, ‘Are you suggesting that the newspapers invented the idea that I had - said that you might - that you and Harriet might - that I wanted you to be together?’

There was something pitifully awfully sad in the utterance of those words; and it was only at that moment that Tom fully realized what a terrible position he was in. He had been facing the philosopher, but now lowered his head. He mumbled, ‘I don’t know what made them say that.’

‘Don’t you? You told somebody - what I told you not to tell — ’

‘No-’

‘You told somebody.’

‘Well, yes I told one person.’

‘Who?’

‘My friend Scarlett-Taylor, but — ’

‘You said - you promised - not to tell anyone — ’

‘I’m sorry, I’m very very sorry, if you knew how sorry you would be less angry with me - I don’t know how it got around - it can’t have been him - perhaps they really did make it up — ’

‘Do you realize the terrible harm you have done to Harriet and to me, terrible irreparable harm?’

‘Surely not,’ said Tom. ‘This is some stupid impertinent rubbish in a local paper, people will laugh at it.’

‘Do you imagine that I like being laughed at? Do you think that I lightly ignore the fact that you have made a fool of me, a laughing stock? That something so very private has been made into a vulgar joke —?’

Rozanov took a step forward and Tom flinched toward the corner of the room - standing in the corner, he leaned back against the wall. He said, ‘I am very sorry, I’ve said that. What more can I say? It’s a piece of nonsense.’

‘My grand-daughter’s name dishonoured in public and you call it nonsense?’

‘I don’t see that it can harm Hattie in any way.’

‘Do not call her Hattie!’

‘Well, Harriet, Miss Meynell, whatever you like, I dare say it hurts you - your - your self-esteem - but you’ll soon recover - and it needn’t bother her, it’s all temporary — ’

John Robert lunged out one hand, picked up a small china dog from the sideboard and smashed it with tremendous force into the grate. The fragments flew about the floor. He said, ‘Have you read those two articles?’

In fact Tom had not seen the article in The Swimmer at all and had not read the Gazette article with close attention. He had read it through with horror and disgust and then torn it up in case he should be tempted to distress himself further by looking at it again. He said, ‘I sort of read that, not carefully - I haven’t seen the other one — ’

‘Well, read them now please. Sit down at the table and read them. Sit down.’

Tom sat down on a chair beside the table. He read the Gazette article. It took him some time to do so because he found that he could not see, the print was fuzzy and unclear and he had to keep blinking his eyes and reading each sentence twice over. He then read the article in The Swimmer which Rozanov had spread out beside him. When he had first read the Gazette Tom’s eye had passed over the bit about ‘professorial prompting’ and he had vaguely understood it but without taking in the accompanying innuendo. His appalled reaction had been to the account of ‘a drunken riot’ and he had winced at the connection of his own name with those of Hattie and Rozanov. But even on that he had not reflected fully. He had thought, it’s only a piece of blatantly shameless gossip in a local paper, no one will take it in or understand it, they’ll simply think it’s crazy, and I don’t imagine John Robert will even see it. His thoughts had fled at once to Hattie and what on earth he was to say to her after that horrid scene. But now … He read the other article. He put his hands up to his blazing hot face. He said, ‘I hadn’t fully taken it in. I see now. But it’s all a lot of lies and inventions. It’s such awful stuff - can’t one do anything, can’t we make them say it isn’t true —?’

While he was reading, John Robert had sat down opposite him at the table, watching him. ‘No, of course we can’t do anything. I hope you see now the extent of what your treachery has done, to her, and to me, what hurt, what distress, what irrevocable damage you have brought about.’

Tom said feebly, not looking up, ‘I do assure you nothing was given away through me. They must have invented it all. Of course it’s horrible - but no one will believe it - and later on it’ll all blow away and be forgotten - nobody cares these days about things like that anyway.’

‘You speak with a foul tongue,’ said Rozanov. ‘I should have realized that you are like your brother, a filthy-minded self-obsessed cynic and a pitiful idiot. And you appear to be his drinking companion and lieutenant.’

‘I’m not, don’t connect me with George. I mean we’re not close like that at all.’

‘The details don’t matter. It is all sufficiently bad to be fatal. You have made a fool of me, and I don’t forgive that.’

Tom looked up with his flaming face and sustained Rozanov’s glare. ‘You frighten me and I can’t think clearly. I just meant people will forget, and it’s not the end of the world.’

‘And to have your brother’s name brought into this. And to think that he went into that house. Whether you introduced him there — ’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Is immaterial. I think you tell lies and I don’t want to talk to you any more. You say nobody cares now. No, “nobody cares” about sexual honour and decency and chastity and right conduct. But I care. And I - I chose you - because I thought - you cared. I should have kept clear of your vice-tainted clan.’

Tom felt tears coming into his eyes. He said, ‘I’ve said some stupid things - I didn’t mean it like that. But surely you - I don’t understand - you don’t think that Hattie did anything wrong?’

John Robert stood up and Tom rose quickly and moved to the fireplace ready to dart for the door. John Robert said, ‘You are a foul-minded fool. But you need not be afraid of me. I only called you here really for one thing.’

‘What?’

‘You have broken one promise. I shall require of you now, after all the harm you have done us, not to break another. You are not ever again to see my grand-daughter or to communicate with her in any way.’

‘But — ’

‘You will not see her again ever. Any approach to her now would be an unforgivable offence, an outrage. I believe you live in London. Go there today and stay there. Do not dare to show your face in Ennistone. If you do I will - I will do everything I can to harm you as you have so unpardonably harmed me. Go away and stay away. I shall soon take Harriet back to America. It was an accursed mistake to bring her here. And the fault, the curse, is yours, son of a profligate father and a runaway mother, corrupted by your evil brother. And to think that I trusted you with - something so precious — ’

‘No, no don’t send me away, let me stay please, let me try again, I really am as you thought me, I’m not like George — ’

‘Go now and right away, at once.’

‘Please, please— ’

‘Go away, go away!’

The philosopher turned upon Tom a face of anguish, his eyes and brow screwed up, his wet lips opening revealing the red interior of his mouth, as for a great cry of woe. Tom escaped to the door and out of the house.

There’s a head up there in the ginkgo tree, thought Alex. A head with long golden hair perched high up in the branches. Alex looked at it with her heart beating fast. It was twilight on Wednesday evening. She thought, it’s something to do with them, those wicked ill-omened girls. It’s some kind of vile filthy ghost thing. Adolescent girls attract ghosts.

She walked back toward the house and edged round the corner of the garage beside the dustbins, seeing the top of the Rolls-Royce through the garage window, and feeling another pang of fright and pain. On the evening of the ‘riot’ Alex had secured all the doors and gone to bed drunk leaving Ruby locked outside in the garden. Ruby had spent the night in the Rolls. Alex felt disgust at the idea of Ruby’s big sweaty body curled up inside the car. She thought, I’ll sell it, it’s spoilt now.

Earlier Alex had again seen the pretty vixen reclining while four fluffy milk-chocolate brown cubs with light blue eyes and stubby tails played tig on the lawn. This sight now seemed uncanny too, an accidental slit into another world, weird, beautiful, dangerous, coming nearer. The blue-tits at her bedroom window wore demonic masks. And places where she might have run for help, George, Rozanov, were the most haunted of all.

Alex looked past the dustbins along the side of the house toward the road where the lights had not yet come on. If she screwed her eyes up a bit she could see quite clearly in the faintly fuzzy blue light. No one was there. Then a sudden movement nearer to her made her startle and step back. Something had appeared just beyond the farthest of the three dustbins. It was the dog fox, who stood looking at her with his darkly lined sorrowful fierce face. Alex instinctively raised her hand in a dismissive gesture; but the fox did not flinch. Withdrawing his attention from Alex, he began sniffing about at the base of the bin. Then he stood up on his hind legs and thrust his nose and his front paws under the top of the bin. Alex felt frightened and angry at the fox’s indifference to her presence. She said, finding it strangely difficult to speak to the fox, ‘Stop that!’ She did not shout, but spoke quite softly; and she knocked her fists, feebly and almost inaudibly, upon the lid of the bin nearest to her. The fox descended to all fours, evidently eating something, and then, without even looking at Alex, stood up again to resume his investigation. Alex drew back. Then she moved forward again and, picking up the lid upon which she had tapped, threw it in the direction of the fox where it skidded on the concrete and went bowling past him like a hoop. The fox leapt but did not run away. He ran in fact directly toward Alex, round her, and back again to the garage wall where he proceeded with a violent blow from his front paws to overturn one of the bins completely. He began scrabbling among the rubbish. Alex, suddenly mad, ran to the further bin and knocked the lid off and began pelting the fox with the contents. At the same time she cried out, loudly this time, ‘Oh, stop, stop, go away!’ The fox, his black paws deep in the mess, regarded her, and then uttered a sound. It was not exactly a bark, it was a deep resonant shrieking noise. As Alex now rushed towards him he darted across her feet (his fur brushed her dress) and in through the open door of the garage. As with almost superstitious terror she peered in through the doorway, she could dimly see the fox sitting up in the front seat of the Rolls.

‘What is it?’ said Ruby, coming round the corner from the house.

‘Nothing.’

‘What’s this stuff here?’

‘Nothing. Leave it .’

Leaving the garage door open, Alex followed Ruby back into the house. The strange head up in the tree seemed to be glowing in the intense twilight.

George had been sincere in attributing to John Robert a lack of vanity and a lofty indifference to ‘what people say’. His view was however incorrect. Tom had been nearer the mark, and dangerously so, in what he had blurted out about ‘self-esteem’. John Robert was an arrogant independent eccentric, careless of convention and devoid of mean worldly aims. He blundered uncalculatingly through life ready, in pursuit of his own goals and principles, to face men’s indifference, incomprehension and dislike. He said what he thought and cared nothing for society. In a totalitarian state he might well have been in prison. He was nevertheless vulnerable to ridicule, and to the mockery of spiteful misunderstanding. Moreover in this case he was helpless. He could not rush forth to confound his lying tormentors. Any such sortie would merely attract more publicity and more malicious laughter. His dignity was a part of his self-respect, and he felt wounded in his strength. He was not only tortured by the articles in the Ennistone papers, he was for a time defeated by them, made confused, almost ashamed. He wanted to ‘hide’, and indeed for two days he did not leave the house. He was well aware that his misfortunes must be a prime topic of gleeful conversation in the town. By the Thursday after the ‘riot’ the national papers had taken note of the matter, understanding it for some reason as a student protest against some aspect of Rozanov’s philosophy. Two reporters actually rang his bell and a photographer took a picture of the front door. A German newspaper (Rozanov was well-known in Germany) printed a light-hearted version of the tale, based on the Ennistone accounts, and a scurrilous German periodical pursued various inferences some entirely new, and published a picture of Hattie which they had somehow procured. (A ‘well wisher’ sent this magazine to John Robert together with a letter deploring the publication of such disgraceful stuff.) It was fortunate for the philosopher that, in his unworldliness he failed, for all his anguish, to imagine how inventively malicious the stories were which were circulating in Ennistone. Not that anybody harboured any deep resentment against him. They regarded him rather in an affectionate light as a mascot. But ‘how are the mighty fallen’ is always a theme for rejoicing, the McCaffreys were always news, and Hattie, regarded as ‘a little snob’, was fair game.

One of the more universal aspects of human wickedness is the willingness of almost everyone to indulge in spiteful gossip. Even the ‘nicest people’, such as Miss Dunbury, and Mrs Osmore, and Dominic Wiggins, and May Blackett were in general prepared to smile at nastiness and even sometimes to repeat it. Someone who was never idly gossiped to because of his virtuous austerity was William Eastcote; but in this respect as in others he was exceptional. Ennistone gossip was fairly certain about some matters, deliciously uncertain about others, and in general far from consistent. It was agreed that the old man wanted to ‘get rid of’ his grandchild and had offered her ‘like a pet calf’ to Tom McCaffrey. Whether this was also a ‘a shot-gun situation’ remained unclear, but as people smilingly observed, ‘time would show’. (This scandal spread a lot of happiness around in Ennistone, and on a utilitarian argument could thus be justified.) Some held that Tom had passed Hattie on to George, others that George, out of spite against Tom, had ‘carried her off’. Hattie was agreed to be ‘fearfully stuck up’, but had her defenders who regarded her as ‘a helpless victim of scheming men’, and her critics who were prepared to go to almost any lengths in regarding her as, according to their own moral tastes, ‘emancipated’ or ‘corrupt’. In some versions Diane and even Mrs Belton played prime roles and the Slipper House was represented (on view already traditional in Ennistone) as an abode of sin. The notion that George had made Hattie pregnant and Tom, in the goodness of his heart, was to marry her was a further sophistication of the tale which hardly anyone believed but almost everyone repeated.

For all of Wednesday and most of Thursday John Robert remained barricaded in his house, not answering the door-bell. He sat and struggled with his colossal hurt pride and with his anger, anger against Tom, against George, and against fate, which somehow included the two girls. He grieved over his Ennistone, his childhood home, his sacred place in which he had had faith, now spoilt and blackened and made forever uninhabitable. And over there, at the Slipper House which he had been so childishly pleased to give to Hattie, all was suspect, besmirched, irrevocably ruined; so much so as even to make him reluctant to find out ‘what had really happened’. He had not questioned Tom carefully, partly because he was so extremely angry and partly because he had made up his mind early on that Tom would tell any lie to protect himself. His rage against Tom was intensified by the knowledge that his own perfectly asinine policies had introduced the boy into the scene in the first place. His anger against George, and his conviction that George was the real villain, was from an older and deeper source. John Robert had received George’s long letter at the Institute on Tuesday morning and had already tossed it unopened into the waste-paper basket before he looked at the Gazette. After he had seen the articles he retrieved the letter and tore it up unread into small pieces. All this time, as he remembered and reflected, the philosopher sat quiet, motionless, in the upstairs room where he had been conceived and born, upon the iron bedstead, moved from the next-door room, upon which he had slept as a child. He did not dare to sit downstairs for fear someone might look at him through the window. Throughout Wednesday, after Tom’s departure, and for most of Thursday he sat and digested and regurgitated his rage. He knew the girls would do nothing till he came. It did not occur to him that it was cruel to keep them waiting.

Hurt vanity automatically brings with it the resentment that demands revenge: to reassert one’s value by passing on the hurt. ‘I am not to be trifled with. Someone will suffer for this.’ Certainly John Robert wanted to run to the Ennistone Gazette office, drag the editor into the street and kick his ribs in; this was abstract compared with what he felt about the two McCaffreys. Wild ideas of punishing Tom (thrashing him or ruining his university career, or ‘dragging him through the law courts’) soon faded, however. There was nothing he could do to Tom. Equally, and indeed all the more so as it appeared on reflection, there was nothing he could do to George. Of course he could go round to Drudsdale and smash his fist into George’s face. But if he were to run at George like a mad dog and savage him and break up his house, would this not be doing exactly what George wanted? George had been attempting for years to attract John Robert’s attention, to provoke a ‘happening’ which would establish a ‘bond’ between them. George had wanted to occupy John Robert’s mind; he had been, as the philosopher was vaguely aware, hurt and maddened by John Robert’s calm coldness, by the evident fact that John Robert not only did not care about him, but did not think about him. This policy, which was effected without effort, was not totally uncoloured by malice. The tiny corner of John Robert’s mind which was aware of George had experienced a fleeting satisfaction as he had thrown away George’s unopened letter and completely forgotten George in the next moment: a serene oblivion which had unfortunately not lasted long. But now - it appeared that George had won. John Robert was now as obsessed with George as George was with John Robert. The fatal connection, now running through Hattie, had tied them together at last.

John Robert did not, when he was able to think, doubt that the loathsome unread letter had contained impertinences about the girl. (Herein he displayed his lack of understanding of George’s character.) He pictured the bland round face, the boyish short-square-toothed smile. He conceived of writing to George. But could any words that existed express what he wanted to say? Now at last, when he had made out just what a victory his enemy had won, he felt that nothing would serve, nothing would do except to kill George. Nothing else at all ever would make the world right again.

While John Robert Rozanov was sitting on his bed at 16 Hare Lane, Tom McCaffrey was sitting on his at Travancore Avenue. Like John Robert, Tom was imprisoned, tortured and paralysed. He could not leave Ennistone, that was impossible. He wrote a letter to his tutor saying that he was ill. He was in fact ill, he had a feverish cold. (He thought, that’s Bobbie Benning’s cold. I shouldn’t have put on his bear’s head. I could feel it was all damp and noisome inside.) He was also, he felt, well on the way to becoming mentally ill. It was Tom’s first experience of demons. Demons, like viruses, live in every human organism, but in some happy lives never become active. Tom was now aware of the demons and that they were his demons. He stayed on in Ennistone because he could not leave behind the problems which could only be solved here, even though it was also impossible to solve them. He stayed secretly because he took John Robert’s threats seriously. Tom could not imagine how John Robert could ‘do him harm’ but he was taking no chances. He had never before been at the receiving end of vindictive hatred, and he was very shaken by it. He did not doubt John Robert’s strong active ill-will. So, although he stayed in Ennistone, he did not, for the rest of Wednesday and most of Thursday, set foot outside, and when darkness fell he pulled the heavily lined curtains carefully and turned on, at the back of the house, one well-shaded lamp. On Wednesday night he went to bed early and dreamt about Fiona Gates. (He had been hurt by John Robert’s sneer at his mother.) In the dream Fiona appeared as a ghost with long trailing hair, wearing a white shift or petticoat. She seemed to be unable to speak, but held out her hands to him in a piteous gesture as if begging him for help. He thought, she’s so young, so young. He woke in distress just after midnight and lay upon his bed tossing and turning in paroxysms of misery and remorse and resentment and fear.

The resentment, almost amounting to rage, was the most demonic constituent of Tom’s spiritual illness. It was so unusual, so unnatural, for him to feel even ‘cross’ with anybody. Now he felt angry with John Robert, with Hattie, with George, with Emma, with himself. He puzzled and puzzled over how on earth John Robert’s ‘plan’ for him and Hattie could have become general knowledge. It was inconceivable that Hattie had talked about it. He was himself to blame for having told Emma. But he had told no one else. Emma, although he denied it, must have told somebody. Perhaps he had told Hector with whom he had become (Tom felt jealous about this) rather friendly. A letter to Tom from Hector had arrived at Travancore Avenue on Tuesday morning asking him, when he was back in Ennistone, to get in touch with Hector at once. Tom ignored the letter, but later wondered if that were the reason for it. Emma had told Hector and Hector had talked. Hector was acquainted with the Ennistone Gazette man, Gavin Oare, and had given him an interview about the play … Tom wondered if he should go and see Hector, but the idea of clarification was in itself appalling; and the idea that Emma had lied to him and betrayed him was sickeningly painful.

The chief traitor was of course himself. He ought never to have agreed to John Robert’s crazy idea. He did so, not even for a lark, but because he was profoundly flattered. Having agreed, he ought to have kept his mouth shut. And having almost at once realized that it was ‘no go’, he ought to have written to John Robert to say so and have got himself out of the whole awful mess. He ought to have stayed in London and got on with his work (how attractive the decent idea of getting on with his work seemed to him now) instead of hanging around Ennistone having ambiguous adventures. In these thoughts, Tom vacillated to and fro, between seeing himself as guilty of the most disgraceful treachery, and seeing himself as the helpless victim of a monster. Who could deal with a man like Rozanov? Rozanov had trapped him into this ghastly and ridiculous business, and was now blaming him unjustly without even listening to an explanation. The scene at the Slipper House had not been Tom’s fault, only Rozanov had been determined to see it as some sort of conspiracy. And Rozanov had dared to threaten Tom, to revile him and hate him. How could that be?

Upon the figure of Hattie an even more ambiguous and intense light was falling. What exactly had happened that night? At first, and under his guilty hat, Tom had assumed that Hattie was simply an innocent girl, affronted by what must have seemed to her (though it was really an accident) a thoughtless and cruel jape, and then by George’s intolerable intrusion. In this mood Tom felt very painful remorse: why on earth had he ever invented that ‘party at the Slipper House’, why had he actually led all those drunken people thither? It really seemed like a contrivance of the devil: a fateful devil lurking in the unconscious darkness of his own mind. And he wanted very much to run to Hattie and explain and apologize and be forgiven. Then, as resentment filled up the scale again on the other side, he began to wonder: why had George suddenly turned up like that? Was Diane Sedleigh involved? He had seen her in the garden. Why was she there? He recalled now having heard that Pearl was related to Ruby who was related to Diane. Was Ruby involved? And Pearl? And … Hattie …? Was Hattie an innocent maiden affronted by vulgar jesters? Had Diane brought George to Hattie? Had Hattie herself invited George? Had she for some time known George, and was this the reason why she had been so offensively cold to Tom? With this hellish brew bubbling in his mind Tom tried to go to sleep again on Wednesday night. On Thursday morning he telephoned the Slipper House. Someone, he thought it was Pearl, said ‘Yes?’, and after he had said ‘It’s Tom,’ put the phone down.

Tom had not seriously thought of attempting to see Hattie on Wednesday because in another part of his crazed mind he felt that he had indeed promised John Robert not to; and in any case he was afraid of John Robert finding out, he was afraid of John Robert’s reprisals. On Thursday he was a good deal less sure that he had promised anything and a little less afraid. After the telephone call he wanted very much to run round to the Slipper House, but he did not dare to. Suppose he were to meet John Robert there? But he went on wanting to go. He wanted more and more, more than anything in the world, to see Hattie, to explain that he was innocent, and to know by looking at her clear pale face that she was.

Thursday afternoon went slowly, slowly by, and Tom continued to hide. The telephone rang but he was afraid to answer it. His days had already lost their sense, he could not read, he could not sit, the concept of ‘having a meal’ no longer existed. He drank a little whisky and tore bits off a stale loaf. He considered going to London, but he could not leave Ennistone without somehow removing these agonizing hooks and thorns from his heart. He had to ease the misery, though since he scarcely knew what it was he could not think clearly what to do about it. At last he suddenly thought, I’ll go and see William Eastcote, I’ll tell him everything and ask him what I ought to do. After all, Bill the Lizard is John Robert’s friend, he’s the only person in Ennistone that John Robert can tolerate! He might even explain to John Robert, intercede for me. Why ever didn’t I think of this before? It was evening, not yet quite dark. Tom selected one of Greg’s overcoats and one of Greg’s tweedy hats and slunk out into Travancore Avenue.

At Eastcote’s house, number 34 The Crescent, there seemed to be something happening. A number of lights were on and the door was open. A car was parked outside. Tom thought, oh hell, he’s got visitors. I must go back. Feeling intensely disappointed, he stood uncertainly at the bottom of the stone steps which led up to the door. Then he saw Anthea passing across the hall. At the same time he realized that he was standing in the light from the door and might be recognized by someone passing by. He went up the steps and into the house, closing the door behind him.

The hall was empty, full of the coloured beautiful things familiar to Tom since his childhood, when he had felt that these rugs and these tapestries and these huge bowls which Rose Eastcote used to fill with flowers existed somehow of necessity, composing an exotic place where very gentle tigers lived. The scene reassured him with a whiff from a safe authoritative world. But he felt at once that something was wrong. There was an odd silence, then lowered voices and padding. Anthea Eastcote came out of her uncle’s study. She was crying.

She saw him and said, ‘Oh Tom, how wonderful of you to come.’ She came up to him and put her arms round him, pressing her face into Greg’s coat.

Tom put his arms round her shoulders, pressing her against him, and moving his chin about in the mass of sweet-smelling brown-golden hair. He stared over her shoulder, feeling her heart beat and his own.

Dr Roach came out into the hall. He said, ‘Oh Tom, dear chap, you’re here, that’s good, that’s good.’

Dr Roach came forward and detached Anthea, who was now quietly sobbing, and propelled her into the drawing-room. She sat down on the sofa covering her face. He said to her, ‘Sit quiet with Tom. I’ll bring you a draught.’ He said to Tom, ‘He went off peacefully about an hour ago. He didn’t suffer at the end. He knew us. He said, “Pray always, pray to God.” Those were his last words. A saint if ever there was one.’ There were tears in the doctor’s eyes. He went out of the room.

Tom sat down beside Anthea. He knew now that William Eastcote was dead. He hugged Anthea, murmuring, ‘Oh darling, darling, don’t grieve so, I love you so much — ’

The doctor came back and gave Anthea a whitish drink in a glass. She stopped sobbing and moved a little away from Tom and drank the white stuff down slowly. Dr Roach, with a hand on Tom’s shoulder, said, ‘I’m glad you got to know so soon. I made several telephone calls - the news must be flying around. What a wonderful life, that’s what we must say to ourselves, mustn’t we. How terribly we shall all miss him. But what a wonderful life, what a wonderful man, not just a comforter but a living evidence of a religious truth. Anthea dear, hadn’t you better lie down upstairs for a while?’

Anthea, raising her face all reddened and swollen by weeping and brushing back her hair which was wet with tears, said, ‘You must go now, you must go to Miss Dunbury, I would be so glad if you would go to her. I’ll be all right now Tom has come.’

‘How good of you to remember Miss Dunbury. Well, I will go. Tom will look after you. And I’ve asked Dorothy to come in.’ (Dorothy was Mrs Robin Osmore.) ‘I’ll come back later this evening.’

When the doctor had gone Anthea said, gabbling as if there were something she had to explain or apologize for. ‘You see, I went back to York on Sunday and I didn’t know how ill he was, I mean, I knew he was very ill, but I didn’t expect this, and then the doctor rang up, and thank God I arrived in time to - to say goodbye.’ Tears overwhelmed her again and she leaned against Tom’s shoulder.

Dorothy Osmore came in. Even at this moment she could not see Anthea without thinking with exasperation of Greg’s failure. She was an upright good-natured woman but she could not help also, with a quick flicker of her thought, reflecting that Anthea must now be very rich.

Dorothy said to Tom (the sight of whom with Anthea displeased her), ‘There now, I’ll look after her.’

Tom stood up. Anthea rose with him and took hold of the lapels of the overcoat. She said, ‘Tom, I shall never forget that you came to me this evening. Oh Tom, may all be well. I’ll pray like he said, and you pray too. Let’s meet again soon. Good night.’

Anthea had returned to York full of the problem of Joey Tanner whom she vainly loved. She had not expected her uncle’s death. She had missed all the scandal about the Slipper House party and knew nothing of it. She spent much of Monday composing a letter to Joey saying that she knew he would never love her, and she would not see him again. On Tuesday she sent the letter off. On Wednesday she received the doctor’s call. Now she knew that her feelings about Joey, and indeed about everything else, were as nothing compared with the everything of William Eastcote, his goodness and the mystery of his death. She felt an intense wailing grief for which the only salve was that vanished goodness which she would now press forever to her heart.

Mrs Osmore, showing Tom out, recognized Gregory’s coat and hat. Outside in the dark street where the yellow lamps had been put on, Tom thought, Oh God, why did I not come to William Eastcote sooner, why did I not visit him and talk to him and ask him to guide me? Just telling all that stuff to him would have brought out the truth of it. Then he thought to himself, I too will never forget that I was with Anthea on this evening. Then he remembered his awful dark messy misery. He thought, I ought to see Hattie, but that’s impossible. I feel so mad, so bad, so crazy, so cast out. I won’t go to the Slipper House. I’ll go and see Diane. I’ll ask her about George, about that night.

At about the time when Tom, having braved the streets in disguise, had got so far as The Crescent, John Robert had at last made up his mind to go to the Slipper House.

Late on Wednesday he had, after all, in spite of the inadequacies of language, written an intemperate letter to George, the purpose of which was to ensure that John Robert would never have to see or hear of George again. This letter contained wild phrases such as ‘I would like to kill you’, and vituperation in the style of ‘fake fantasy villain, mean weak impotent rat, incapable of evil but spewing out the sickening black bile of your petty spite’, and ‘faux mauvais, the execrable taste of your contemptible schoolboy pranks merely expressive of your own realization of your mediocrity’ (and so on). Coldness and inattention had failed to get rid of George. The intemperate letter was to signal unambiguously that this policy had now ended. The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future. After completing his violent exorcism, John Robert dodged out to a nearby pillar-box and posted it. He needed to feel that he had thereby finally finished with George and could forget him.

On Thursday evening Tom and Rozanov actually passed each other in The Crescent, Rozanov bound for the Slipper House, and Tom for Diane’s flat, but both were so completely blinded by their thoughts that they failed to notice.

Nesta, who was sickened by the sight of women afraid of men, would have had a seizure had she been able to overhear the conversations which took place on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between Pearl and Hattie.

In fact in this interim, during which neither of them left the house, a number of different theories were mooted by the beleaguered girls as mood succeeded mood. Hattie was often the more sanguine of the two. One reason for this was that whereas Pearl had studied the Ennistone Gazette article minutely, Hattie had glanced at it and thrown it away in disgust, and the horrible exact wording of it was not imprinted on her mind. Pearl had destroyed it promptly after it flew across the room, and Hattie’s remarks later showed that her understanding of what had been said and implied was mercifully vague. Another reason why Hattie was less perturbed was that she knew John Robert a good deal less well than Pearl did, and was inclined at more cheerful moments to think that he would ‘just find it funny’. His non-appearance (they expected him hourly) was then attributed to the fact that ‘he had forgotten about it all’. It was also of course possible that he had not seen the Gazette article, but the girls agreed that it was probable that some malicious busybody would make sure that the philosopher was informed.

Although Hattie kept saying that it would ‘blow over’, she was very anxious that Pearl should not leave her alone in the house. There was plenty of food in store and no need for Pearl to go away. As the conversations went on, Hattie was inevitably infected by Pearl’s anxiety, even though Pearl did her best not to communicate it. Then for a while she would keep asking Pearl for reassurance. ‘He can’t blame us, can he?’ ‘Of course not.’ ‘No one suggested it was our fault, did they?’ ‘No.’ Then Hattie would say, ‘He’s never coming. Let’s go to London. Come on, I want to go to the theatre.’ ‘The theatre?’ ‘Let’s go to London, and stay in a hotel.’ ‘Hattie, we can’t!’ ‘Why ever not? We’re free, aren’t we?’ The girls would then look at each other and laugh, or wail. They also discussed and dismissed the idea of writing an ‘explanatory letter’. The thing, thought of in that way, was inexplicable. Besides, there was always the small blessed possibility that he was unaware of the whole thing. The notion of walking round to Hare Lane was never seriously considered.

Pearl did not, or most of the time did not, think that John Robert could possibly believe all the awful things said in the Gazelle article. (Hattie and Pearl had not seen The Swimmer which was published on Tuesday.) But the need to be relieved of the fear that he might, took form as a most intense longing, a lover’s longing, for his presence and for the simple assurance that he still trusted her. She needed, and received, so little, but how precarious. There was of course no doubt that Rozanov would be very upset and hurt and angry. Pearl did not share, any more than Tom did, George’s illusion that the philosopher was indifferent to what people thought; he might be indifferent to hostility but not to ridicule. Her loving gaze had ‘estimated’ and ‘embraced’ the quality of Rozanov’s special dignity, his solemnity, his shyness, his particular awkward pomposity, his naïve unworldly egoism, his complete lack of ordinary social reactions, his lack of common sense, his distaste for mockery, and his inability to deal with it. All this made one. She had not often seen Rozanov in company, but had seen how, on such occasions (when talking to Margot and Albert, for instance) he imposed a seriousness which made gossip or even mildly malicious jokes impossible. Neither Pearl nor Hattie had ever teased him or seen him teased. Pearl also knew something of Rozanov’s view of George, and could measure his furious irritation at George’s intrusion into the picture. Pearl and Hattie had, as it happened, arrived to visit John Robert in California just after George’s ill-fated excursion to see his master, and Pearl had overheard John Robert say something to Steve Glatz, who was then a student. It was on that occasion too that Pearl noticed the jealous manner in which John Robert kept Hattie well away from his pupils, and his colleagues; so much so that Pearl vaguely framed the hypothesis, lately so vividly revived, that John Robert, so far from being indifferent to his grandchild, was obsessed with her.

Pearl was of course aware of John Robert’s match-making plan, since she had listened ardently at the door while it was being divulged. She had also witnessed Hattie’s outburst of distress and annoyance, and seen Tom McCaffrey’s yellow tulips fly out on to the lawn. But although the matter was no secret between them and could be referred to, they had not discussed it. Hattie retreated into the fastidious reserve and chaste mode of discourse which was so essential a part of their relation. They did not chat in a gossipy or malicious way about Tom, any more than they ever did about John Robert. This was not just an aspect of what Pearl sometimes wryly thought of as her ‘station’. It was to do with Hattie, with Hattie’s primness and still childish simplicity and dignity, and with Pearl, her particular love for Hattie and the preciousness of her trust. Pearl sometimes felt that she had been made, or remade, by that odd trust, and could not imagine what, without it, would have become of her.

So it was that, during this interim, while they waited ‘with hatches battened down’, as Hattie said, although they speculated about when John Robert would appear and whether he would be ‘awfully cross’, they did not discuss what he, or they, might or might not feel now about Tom and ‘the plan’. (Pearl mentioned to Hattie that Tom had rung up.) They did occasionally wonder ‘how the idea got around’; but Pearl steered Hattie off these topics, of whose enormity Hattie seemed not fully aware. Pearl dreaded most of all, with a dread which gradually crippled her mind, that John Robert might actually believe that she was somehow in league with George and it was she who had betrayed the secret. This dread made the days of waiting so painful that she began to want nothing more than to run straight to John Robert and babble out her explanations, and her love which she could not help feeling gave her rights, and even powers.

‘Perhaps he doesn’t know.’

‘Some kind person will have told him. If no one else, that impertinent editor will.’

‘He wasn’t impertinent. He just wrote to ask if I’d give an interview.’

‘I didn’t like his tone. Neither did you.’

‘I wish John Robert was on the telephone.’

‘You know he hates telephone calls. Anyway, what could we say just like that?’

‘It’s nothing really, it’s a fuss about nothing, we’ve made a melodrama out of it.’

‘It was a melodrama.’

‘People will forget it, they’ve probably forgotten it already.’

‘You don’t know Ennistone.’

‘Anyway it wasn’t our fault, was it, Pearlie?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘No, I know it wasn’t our fault, but I can’t help sometimes feeling that it was. Can you understand that?’

‘Yes!’

‘You don’t think John Robert could think we invited George in?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I’m surprised John Robert hasn’t come, just to see if we’re all right.’

‘Well, perhaps he doesn’t know.’

‘You’re saying it now!’

‘After all, he may have been away.’

‘I suppose I ought to go and see Mrs McCaffrey and say — ’

‘Say what? Better say nothing.’

‘You thought we ought to see John Robert first and then see her.’

‘I thought John Robert would come at once.’

‘So did I. There’s that stained-glass window that the stone cracked. Oughtn’t we to do something about it?’

‘It was a beer can, not a stone, I heard it fall. The window’s quite safe.’

‘Yes, but it’s cracked, we ought to tell someone. Do you think John Robert’s brooding over it?’

‘No, he’s probably gone back to his philosophy book and forgotten all about us.’

‘I sometimes wonder how often he remembers that we exist.’

‘Don’t worry so, Hat dear.’

‘I wish he’d come and get it over. Why do we have to wait here? Are we slaves or something?’

‘He may have gone to London to give a lecture.’

‘Let’s go to London. We were going to go. We’ve waited here long enough.’

‘We’ve waited so long we may as well wait a little longer. You know we couldn’t enjoy London without having seen him.’

‘We’re building it all up so, we’re making mountains out of molehills.’

‘The trouble is with him that all ordinary sense of size just vanishes!’

‘I know what you mean. How I hate Ennistone. I wish we were living in London. Let’s say we want to. We could have a flat, couldn’t we? You say, you tell him.’

‘All right.’

‘You won’t, you’ll chicken out. Oh, why on earth did he bring us here?’

‘It’s his home.’

‘California is his home. I wish we were back in America. What a crazy life we lead. Don’t you sometimes think we lead a crazy life?’ Yes.’

‘How long will it go on?’

‘Who knows.’

‘Pearlie, sometimes I feel so sad - when I go to bed - I feel like at school - just so relieved to become unconscious - it’s like wanting to be dead — ’

‘Oh don’t be silly, you’re young, you’ve got everything, when I was your age — ’

‘Yes, yes, yes, forgive me. Do you forgive me?’

‘Hattie, I shall throw something at you!’

‘I wonder who let out that story about Tom.’

‘Tom, I should think!’

‘No! Do you think so? Anyway, he can’t believe we did.’

‘No.’

‘And he can’t think you let George in, that’s absurd! Did the article say that? I can’t remember.’

‘Sort of.’

‘It’s ridiculous. He can’t blame us for anything, can he?’

‘No.’

‘Oh how I wish he’d come!’

‘Here he is,’ said Pearl.

It was late on Thursday evening and she had just observed from an upper window, by the light of the street lamps in Forum Way, the unmistakable bulk of John Robert coming along the path from the back gate.

Although the girls had been expecting him and were hourly ‘ready’ for him, his actual appearance produced surprise and shock. Their ‘readiness’ had consisted in the cleanness and tidiness of the house, the availability of suitable things to eat and drink, and the adoption of appropriate clothes and (in Hattie’s case) hair-style. Pearl had wavered between donning her operatic maid’s uniform and boldly wearing a flowery summer dress which would not distinguish her sartorially from her mistress. Hattie wore her more soberly youthful garments, one of her school ‘Sunday’ dresses, pretty not smart, and kept her hair in plaits. In fact when Pearl spotted John Robert she had just taken off her flowery dress, about to take a bath, imagining it was too late for the philosopher to come that day. In panic, rumpling her dark straight neat hair, she dragged the dress on again and hurried down the stairs, buttoning it up as she ran. Hattie, who was reading I Promessi Sposi in the sitting-room with her slippers off and one plait undone, leapt up and began to adjust her hair while trying to lodge one bare foot inside a slipper, the other slipper having disappeared.

Pearl opened the door as John Robert approached it, and he entered, passing her with a slight frown, and went at once into the sitting-room where Hattie was stooping to rescue her second slipper from under a chair. She hopped, pulling it on, then stood, holding one plait in her hand.

John Robert stared at her as if she were an amazing apparition, then said, ‘Don’t look so frightened.’ Pearl closed the sitting-room door and glued herself to the outside of it.

John Robert had intended to delay his visit to the Slipper House until his agitation had subsided and his mind had cleared. However, when his agitation did not subside and his mind did not clear, he decided he must see Hattie. As soon as he decided this he became conscious of an unprecedentedly strong desire to be with her. He felt angry with the girls for having somehow ‘let it all happen’, but, obsessed with George, he had not reflected on exactly what they were supposed to have done, nor had he planned how to question them. The idea of simply being with Hattie had seemed far more important than ‘demanding explanations’ or ‘taking steps’. And now he was more disturbed even than he had expected by the sight of the girl who, although she had tried semi-consciously to look younger, could not help looking radiantly older.

‘I’m not frightened,’ said Hattie, and she threw her plait back over one shoulder and then her semi-plaited hair back over the other. She was frightened of course, but she felt, confronted so abruptly by her grandfather, a quick surge of annoyed independence which made her little cry not entirely specious.

John Robert sat down on one of the sturdier chairs, avoiding the bamboo armchair. Hattie did not sit, but leaned against the mantelpiece, holding her skirt away from the gas fire which she had put on since the late evening was chilly.

John Robert said, ‘Be careful, you’ll burn your dress. Anyway you don’t need the fire, do you, at this time of year?’ As he said this he heard the voice of his father speaking.

Hattie leaned down and turned the fire off with a jerk and resumed her pose.

John Robert felt suddenly tired and even closed his eyes.

Hattie said, ‘Would you like something to eat, or some lemonade or coffee or something?’

‘No thank you. Hattie — ’

‘Yes?’

There was a moment, a micro-second, in which they both felt that something impossible might happen, such as Hattie running into his arms, crying out and weeping, and his stroking her hair and babbling with tenderness; but of course it was impossible.

John Robert collected himself and said, ‘Look, what happened here the other night? There was a very disagreeable notice in the Gazette. I hope you didn’t see it.’

‘We did,’ said Hattie.

‘And what did you do about it?’

‘Nothing. What did you expect us to do? We’ve been waiting for days to see you!’

John Robert had not meant ‘what did you do?’ and could not think why he had said it. His need to ‘interrogate’ the girls had slightly diminished even within the last hours as he began a little to feel that he had ‘done with’ George and Tom, as if he had killed them both; and he had arrived with no clear idea of ‘instituting an inquiry’, only now of course he saw that he must do so, and the old unappeased anger began to come back.

He said, ‘I mean - what you read in the paper - was it true?’

‘No, of course not! It was horrible spiteful journalism - it upset us very much!’

‘So George McCaffrey was not in this house?’

‘Well, he was, but — ’

‘So it was true, anyway some of it was true?’

‘Yes, but — ’

‘Did you see the other article, the one in The Swimmer?’

‘No.’

‘Did you invite George and Tom McCaffrey to this house?’

‘No!’

‘Then how was George here?’

‘I don’t know — ’

‘Did Pearl let him in?’

‘No - Pearl had gone out but locked the door, all the doors were locked.’

‘Pearl had gone out, leaving you alone?’

‘No, I mean yes, I asked her to go out — ’

‘Why?’

‘To look for Tom McCaffrey.’

‘You sent Pearl to look for Tom McCaffrey? So you did invite him here?’

‘No, not like that - I mean - I wanted - I didn’t believe he had done it all to - to make a mock of us — ’

‘He had done it all to make a mock of you?’

‘No, I say he hadn’t —’

‘So Pearl did let George in and then went to find Tom too?’

‘No, no - I don’t know how George got in, the door was locked — ’

‘It can’t have been. When George was here - were you alone with him?’

‘Yes, but only — ’

‘Did - did anything - happen?’

Hattie flushed crimson. ‘No! Nothing happened! He came in and I opened the shutters at once so that the others could see — ’

‘The others? Your friends outside? Tom McCaffrey?’

‘Well, anybody - I thought — ’

‘You opened the shutters to display yourself with George?’

‘No, not - display - I thought he’d go away then - and he did - and Tom was looking in and - then they all started singing — ’

‘Hattie,’ said John Robert, ‘were you drunk?’

‘No!’ Hattie stamped her foot. She turned away, turned around, helpless, then stood behind a chair staring at the philosopher with her face burning, near to tears.

John Robert looked at Hattie with a frowning intensity. He said, ‘How did those newspapers come to find out - that I wanted you to get to know Tom McCaffrey?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘You must have told somebody.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I didn’t say it was a secret, but I have always trusted your ability to distinguish between public and private, and I did not expect you to gossip — ’

‘ I didn’t!’

‘Did you tell Pearl?’

‘Well, yes but — ’

‘Then you told somebody.’

‘Yes, but that was different, and she knew anyway, and — ’

‘How did she know anyway? Unless she was listening at the door.’ John Robert got up and opened the sitting-room door abruptly. Pearl was discovered standing an inch away. He said, ‘You’d better come in.’

Pearl came in, turning her face away from Hattie. She went and stood by the shuttered window, keeping her head high and smoothing down her hair and gazing unseeingly across the room.

John Robert, standing now in the centre and addressing Pearl, said, ‘Do you realize how much damage you’ve done? You have both contrived to make me ridiculous in this town, this place which I love and to which I trustfully brought you. And you have damaged Hattie’s reputation probably beyond repair. Were you drunk?’

Pearl said, ‘No,’ flickering her eyes at John Robert for a second and then resuming her grim gaze.

Hattie said, ‘Of course she wasn’t! It wasn’t her fault!’

‘It was yours then?’

‘No! You keep saying things and it’s all wrong and you won’t listen.’

‘And I read in the paper,’ said John Robert to Pearl, ‘that you were seen out in the garden passionately hugging and kissing another girl.’

Pearl said nothing.

John Robert said to Hattie, ‘Were you the other girl?’

‘No,’ said Hattie. ‘I didn’t go out. Of course Pearl wasn’t hugging and kissing girls! She was out looking for Tom like I said — ’

‘So that didn’t happen?’ said John Robert to Pearl.

Pearl spent a second wondering whether to lie, then said, ‘It did, only it wasn’t a girl, it was a man dressed as a girl.’

‘I see,’ said John Robert. ‘You admit shamelessly - not that it matters now — ’ He said to Hattie, ‘Your - your maid - is outside in the arms of vicious girls or vicious men dressed as girls, and you tell me she didn’t let George McCaffrey in.’

Hattie said to Pearl, ‘You can’t have been - I don’t understand — ’

‘Perhaps you know Miss Scotney less well than you think, Harriet. I learn only now that she is the sister of that prostitute, that corrupt and degraded woman who is - who is also connected with George - I suppose that is true?’

‘She’s not my sister, she’s my cousin,’ said Pearl in a dull hard voice.

‘Well, your close associate.’

‘No, not— ’

‘If I had known of this connection,’ John Robert went on, ‘I would never have engaged you. I asked you if there was anything in your history which I ought to know about and you said no - you lied.’

‘I have no connection with her. It was not in any way relevant.’

‘Stop being rude to Pearl,’ said Hattie. ‘I love her, and she’s my sister, and she did nothing wrong I know, let me just tell you what happened, we heard all this noise and we closed the shutters and I asked Pearl to find Tom because I wanted to tell him, I mean I wanted him to tell me, I knew it wasn’t a thing against us and I didn’t want to think that he had - and so I wanted him to say - oh I can’t explain exactly, but it wasn’t anyone’s fault — ’

‘I see you can’t explain! But I tell you one thing. You won’t see that young man again. I’ve told him not to show his face in Ennistone.’

‘You told him not to —? But I want to see him!’ Hattie was suddenly panting with emotion, unconsciously unravelling her other plait and unbuttoning the neck of her dress, looking from John Robert’s big face, all wrinkled up with anger and distress, to Pearl’s frozen unresponsive glare. Pearl refused to look at her.

‘You are a child,’ said John Robert, ‘and you do not seem to realize the harm which this boy and his brother have done to you. You cannot want to see him. In any case I forbid it.’

‘It was your idea!’ said Hattie. ‘You wanted me to know him! Now I want to see him again! And I will! I want him to explain - It was your idea.’

‘I have changed my mind.’ He turned to Pearl. ‘Would you please go and pack a suitcase for Harriet.’

‘What do you mean? Stop! Pearl, don’t go!’

But Pearl had already passed her without a glance and left the room and closed the door.

‘Please,’ said Hattie, and at this moment she found it strange and awful that she had no name by which to call him. ‘Please, what is happening, where are we going?’

‘We are going to Hare Lane,’ said John Robert. ‘I cannot leave you unprotected in this corrupt house. I am going to order a taxi.’ He lifted the telephone.

‘But Pearl will come too — ’

‘No, of course not.’ John Robert ordered the taxi, Pearl opened the door to say that the suitcase was ready. Hattie sat down in the bamboo armchair. She did not cry. She breathed, almost gasping, pulling at the collar of her dress with both hands.

After he had put the telephone down, John Robert looked at her gloomily, biting his knuckles. Then he said to her in a hoarse whisper, ‘You are, aren’t you, still a virgin?’

Hattie stared at him; she rose and then she screamed. Alex in Belmont heard the scream. Pearl came and threw open the door. Hattie ran out into the hall and stood at the foot of the stairs, her face covered with a net of tears like a veil.

Five minutes later Hattie was sitting crying in the taxi. Pearl had shoved her suitcase in beside her without a word and was returning to the house. John Robert was standing on the lawn in the light from the open front door. Pearl marched past him. Then she turned in the doorway and said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’

John Robert moved to the door, still biting his knuckles, and Pearl stood aside and they stood together in the hall with the door open.

Pearl’s sallow face was hard, her thin nose as sharp as a knife.

John Robert said, ‘You may stay here for the present, and of course pack up the rest of Harriet’s things and see that everything is ready to be moved out.’

‘Where are we going?’ said Pearl. Her voice was steady but she could not stop herself from trembling.

‘We are not going anywhere,’ said John Robert. ‘Harriet and I will be returning to America. You may go where you please.’

‘You mean,’ said Pearl, ‘that my employment is at an end.’

‘I told you at the start that it was to cease when Harriet was grown up.’

‘Did you?’

‘I will give you six months’ wages and a generous honorarium.’ John Robert spoke softly now in a low voice, and his face looked quiet and puzzled and tired as if he had done some hard work and was now resting and reflecting in a rather abstract way about other matters.

‘She isn’t grown up,’ said Pearl. ‘Besides, she needs me, she loves me, she has no one else — ’

John Robert said in his cruel abstracted soft voice, ‘She has been made too precious, she has lived too much out of the world, you have encouraged her in habits of dependence — ’

‘I only did what you wanted.’

‘She has become too dependent, too easily led, too weak, and it is time — ’

‘She isn’t easily led or weak! Anyway it isn’t my fault, you always insisted — ’

‘It doesn’t matter now whose fault it is. It is time to make a brisk change. I have formed the view, on I think sufficient evidence, that you are not a fit person — ’

‘Because you thought I was kissing a girl?’

‘You have unfortunate connections. I no longer trust you. I’m sorry.’

‘But I haven’t done anything, you don’t understand, you wouldn’t let us explain, it was just unlucky — ’

‘I am tired of being told lies, and I don’t want unlucky people in my employ.’

‘You can’t do this suddenly after so many years — ’

‘Better suddenly, better for Harriet.’

‘No, it’s unfair — ’

‘I can imagine that you are sorry to lose a well-paid job. But you can hardly complain that you have not had enough money out of us! And when I think what my money has bought — ’

‘It isn’t to do with money,’ said Pearl. ‘You made me, you invented me, you and, you can’t just say it’s at an end — ’

‘I don’t see why not. It is in the nature of such a post to end. Your family feelings are unilateral, they are your affair.’

‘Hattie loves me. Doesn’t that matter to you?’

‘I don’t believe it. Childish habits are soon lost. She will have worthier objects of interest.’

‘I have nothing, nothing, and she — ’

‘No doubt that is what your family feelings amount to. You have always envied Harriet and wanted to pull her down.’

‘No, no, I just mean that she has been my world.’

‘You will find other worlds, you already seem to be at home in some rather unsavoury ones. Could we end this conversation? You will receive your money by post.’

‘When can I see Harriet again?’

‘Never. You are not to come near her. You are not to see her again. That is final.’

‘But where are you taking her, are you going to be together in that little house in Hare Lane?’

‘Yes, why not?’

‘You know why not.’

John Robert lost his quiet tired look and stared keenly at Pearl for a moment. He said, but in the same soft tone, ‘You are a corrupt person. I only hope you have not corrupted Harriet.’

‘I haven’t told her that!’

‘You brought that man to Harriet.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I have no more to say to you.’

‘And you asked her if she was still a virgin!’

‘Enough. Do not bring your foul person near to us. We are going to America. You will not see her or me again.’ He moved to the door.

‘Wait, John Robert, wait, I beg you,’ said Pearl.

The utterance of the name startled them both, and for a second they stood absolutely still staring at each other. Then Pearl took hold of the sleeve of John Robert’s overcoat. ‘Please think, please understand. Hattie does need me. But I wanted to say something else. You are a miracle in my life. You saw me and knew me and chose me and you were right. You trusted me and you were right to trust me. I am not a corrupt person, forgive what I said just now, it was nonsense, it’s just that I care so much for you and Hattie, and I’ve watched you both so carefully, I’ve watched over you as if you were holy things - and I’m so upset and frightened now - I have done everything that you wanted and I have served you and Hattie in absolute loyalty and truth. And so much more than that. Oh can’t you see!, I love Hattie and I love you, I love you, like family, like a person in love, I am a person in love. You and Hattie are my life, you are my life, my occupation and my aim - my love has worked so long, it has waited so long, can’t it speak, can’t it be seen at last? Can’t I tell the truth at last to you, who care so much about truth? Don’t you know what love is like and how it longs to speak, it has to speak? I’ve been so quiet and so patient and so invisible, and I’ve been happy being patient and just serving you and doing exactly what you said and doing it well. Just wait, don’t be hasty, don’t send me away. I have value. Let me still be with you and Hattie, let me work for you still, I can be so useful, I can do so many things, I can learn to be whatever you want, don’t throw my love and service away - I am empty, I am poured out, all I have is you, all I am is you, don’t abandon me, don’t leave me, John Robert, let me still be in your life, oh believe me, believe in my love, look on me with kindness, with just a little kindness, please, I haven’t done anything wrong, I swear — ’

Rozanov stared at her with a gathering frown and his big soft mouth puckered up into an ugly pout of loathing. He said, almost in a whisper ‘You disgust me.’ He wrenched his sleeve away and went out of the door.

Pearl followed him across the grass to where the path between the trees began. She heard the back gate slam and the taxi start. She stood still a while. Then she returned to the house. When she looked in through the doorway and saw the hall all pretty and tidy and bright she uttered the second scream which Alex heard that evening; only it was not a scream, it was more like an animal’s long howl. She went into the house and shut the door with such violence that a piece of the cracked glass in the landing window fell out on to the lawn. She felt a pain which ran all the way down the front of her body as if she had been ripped open with a knife. She went upstairs to her bedroom and fell like a dead thing face downwards on the bed.

Tom rang the bell at Diane’s address. There was only one bell. (He had discovered her address in an old telephone directory. Later directories did not list her.)

Diane, on the entry phone, said, ‘Who is it?’

Tom, on the spur of the moment, said, ‘George’.

Diane knew it was not George, who always entered with his own key, but she pressed the entry button all the same; she had been doing some solitary drinking and for once didn’t care who it was.

Westwold is a quiet little suburb, agreed to be ‘dull’ (even the Three Blind Mice is usually empty after 9 p.m.) and Tom met very few people on his walk. As he huddled into the narrow doorway beside the Irish Linen shop he looked quickly up and down the street, but there was no one in sight.

He opened the door and, as he went up the dark stairs immediately inside, a light went on above. He arrived on a landing face to face with Diane, who was standing at the door of her flat.

She peered. When she recognized Tom she moved quickly back into the flat. Tom promptly put his foot in the closing door.

‘Please, Diane, let me talk to you just a moment, it’s important, it’s about George.’

Tom now introduced his body after his foot into the aperture and began to push the door open against Diane’s pressure. He felt suddenly excited, not happily, rather unpleasantly.

Diane gave way, let him enter, quickly closed the door behind him, and said, ‘You mustn’t stay, you mustn’t be here. I shouldn’t have let you in.’ She moved back out of the tiny hall into the little lighted room beyond, where a radio was playing pop music. There was a strong stuffy smell of cigarettes and wine.

Diane was now quickly darting about, stooping and picking up what appeared to be underwear from the floor. She opened another door and hurled a pale frilly armful through and then shut it again. She turned the radio off. She emptied an overflowing ashtray into a vase, and kicked a jangling suspender-belt in under a chair. There was now also a sweaty smell of unwashed clothes. Tom, blinking, took in the room which seemed to him so full of things that he and Diane would have to stand there with their hands stiffly at their sides. He could not at first see a chair or discern the chaise tongue, which was also covered with clothes and with a Paisley shawl which had crumpled itself up into mounds and hummocks. A wine bottle and a whisky bottle and two glasses stood on a dirty little ebony table. The velour curtains were drawn and two fringed lamps gave a dim pink light and a tiny narrow gas fire glowed pinkly. Tom, moving slightly, found his leg stoutly impeded by a leather hippopotamus and, stepping back, crunched his foot into a basket full of magazines.

Diane, in the soft sweetish light of her crammed little room, looked quite different from the shy trim person Tom had been used to seeing at the Institute. She looked, here, older, more painted, more animal. Her hair, which looked as though it had been lacquered, was sleeked down over her little dark head and came forward in two pointed curves over her cheeks. Her face looked yellowish and seemed without make-up except for the moistly scarlet lips. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed, both her small hands were brown with nicotine. She was wearing one of the black dresses which George liked, an old-fashioned cocktail dress which she had bought in a second-hand shop with a V-neck and black shiny beads sewn on to the bodice, and a long fringed hem beneath which were visible shiny black high-heeled boots with pointed toes. Her feet were also very small. Around her thin neck she wore a circlet of polished steel teeth which, not fitting well, poked her flesh, making red marks. She looked to Tom, as he gazed down on her, so little and so touching. He had often seen her in a bathing costume, but with her ‘daring’ black attire and awkward collar she seemed far more undressed. For a moment he forgot why he had come.

‘You mustn’t stay,’ she repeated, ‘you mustn’t be here.’

‘Are you expecting George?’

‘No, but he always might.’

‘May I stay a minute, please?’

Diane sat down rather unsteadily on the chaise tongue and poured herself out another glass of wine. ‘Would you like some whisky?’

Diane poured a little wine into the second glass, spilling some. Tom took off Greg’s coat and hat and picked up the wine. He found a chair with a plant on it, put the plant on the floor and sat down. He felt suddenly at home in Diane’s room, and his natural habitual cheerfulness was about to assert itself when he remembered all the horrors of recent days. He said to Diane, ‘William Eastcote has died, did you know? Well, you couldn’t know, he’s only just died.’

‘Lucky man, wish I had,’ said Diane. She took a gin bottle from under the table and poured some into her wine.

‘Diane, I wanted to ask you something, do you mind, that evening at the Slipper House, last Saturday — ’

‘Was it only last Saturday? I lose count of time. What’s today?’

‘Thursday.’

Diane had not seen George since the Slipper House evening, when, from her hiding-place behind the shrubs, she had heard the singing and seen George run away through the garden and had followed him. She knew nothing of the incident with Hattie until she read the Ennistone Gazette article. She read The Swimmer article next day. These effusions had been troubling and confusing her mind ever since. She had not forgotten George’s jokes about Hattie. Now she did not know what to believe. She ate little, drank a lot, checked on the bottle where she kept enough sleeping-pills to finish it all, and waited. The only thing which cheered her up a little was that the article had referred to her as ‘our own Madame Diane’. George had once given her a humorous lecture about ‘whores in literature’ and she remembered there had been a Madame Diane. She and George sometimes referred to these literary ladies in private jokes, and this helped Diane to feel that she had identity in George’s mind. The scurrilous and untrue way in which the Gazette spoke of her did not trouble Diane at all, indeed it pleased her slightly.

‘Did you read that horrible article in the Gazette?’

‘Yes.’

‘Forgive me - I must know - did you bring George there, and did you - bring him and - Miss Meynell together?’

‘Miss Meynell?’ said Diane. ‘Oh yes, of course, I must be drunk.’

When she said no more, Tom said, ‘Did you bring George to the Slipper House?’

‘No, he brought himself. As for what Miss Meynell did, don’t you know?’ She was becoming rather dazed with drink, but her senses seemed to have become more vivid. She had lost her urgent terror at the idea of George finding Tom with her. She was looking at Tom and thinking, how tall he is, and what beautiful long curly hair he has, and his long legs in his grey trousers, and his blue eyes like his mother’s, he’s so young. And Diane thought, oh if only life was ordinary for me and I could look at people and be with them, and a tear came into each eye.

Tom said, in answer to her question, ‘No, I don’t!’ He discerned the tears and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Aren’t you going to marry Miss Meynell?’

‘No.’

‘It’s off - because of that?’

‘No! It was never on!’

‘Oh well, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know anything. I’m just sitting here drinking myself to death.’

Tom thought, I’m crazy, I can’t discuss Hattie like this, it’s awful, how foul my mind is, I oughtn’t to be here at all. And how tiny she is, almost a dwarf, and so unhappy. He said, ‘May I have some whisky after all?’ Inspired by her example he tilted it into his wine and swallowed a little and began to feel rather strange. He said, ‘How did all this happen to you?’

‘You mean on Saturday?’

‘No, I mean, all this, how did it start — ’

‘My being a prostitute?’

‘Look,’ said Tom, ‘I’d better go, I’m very upset about a lot of things, please excuse me — ’

‘Don’t go,’ said Diane, ‘I haven’t talked to anybody for a week. I became a prostitute to get my revenge on men.’

‘No - really? I can’t imagine — ’

‘No, that’s something I read in a magazine. I don’t know why, I don’t know why anything happened in my life, it’s all muddle and accident and the horribleness of the world. Oh what does it matter. I was forced to pose in the nude. Then when I got pregnant they left me. I wish I’d had the courage to have a child. All I’ve got is George and he’s mad, he ought to be in an asylum chained to a wall, he’ll kill me one day. He said he saw the Meynell girl undressing.’

‘What? How, where?’

‘I don’t know, George is a terrible liar. I don’t know what happened last Saturday. George may have seduced the little girl, I’m sure he wanted to.’

Tom remembered all his griefs, the terrible scene with John Robert, the nightmarish hiding at Travancore Avenue, the loss of Hattie, these crazy tormenting doubts - what was he thinking? The loss of Hattie? He had never had her to lose, he had rejected her. Had he forgotten that? And he had seen her proud eyes reject him. He thought, I must see her, I must. He stood up and put his glass, pushing aside various ornaments, on top of the piano. Then he picked it up again and poured some more whisky into it.

Diane held out her glass and Tom filled it. Tom sneezed. Diane said, ‘You’ve got a cold.’

‘Sorry, yes.’

‘Well, don’t give it to me, for God’s sake. George won’t see me when I’ve got a cold, he hates me. Well, I suppose he hates me all the time, the cold just brings it out. Do you play the piano?’

‘No— ’

‘Funny, none of my gentlemen ever played the piano.’

‘I must go.’

‘Where’s Stella, isn’t it time she came back to join in all the fun we’re having?’

‘I don’t know where she is. I like Stella.’

‘She’s afraid of George.’

‘So am I!’

‘I wish I could go to the south, to the Mediterranean, Italy, Greece, anywhere. I’ve never left England, been to London a few times, big deal. I used to keep a suitcase packed in case some marvellous man came, some prince, I used to dream about him, a rich man, gentle and sweet, and I’d love him like he’d never been loved before, a sad man and I’d make him happy.’

‘Why don’t you chuck George, you’ll never get any good out of him, go away somewhere and — ’

‘Start a new life! You grew up rich and easy, you think people can go away, for you there are other places, anywhere you go you’re somebody, you’re visible, you exist, you can make friends and be with people in a real way. If I left here I’d die in a corner, I’d dry up and shrivel up and die like an insect, no one would care, no one would even know.’

‘Don’t say that - things could change - I wish I could help you — ’

‘Well, you can’t. Don’t say empty untrue things. I’m - like that - finished — ’

‘I wish you could talk to William Eastcote, only he’s dead. He was a good man.’

‘If I’d been that rich I’d have been good too.’

‘But you are good - I mean — ’

‘Don’t talk nonsense. You mean well. You always looked at me kindly, your eyes sent me messages.’

‘Are you really Pearl Scotney’s sister?’

‘Cousin. And Ruby’s. But they don’t want to know. Madame Diane. The Ruby and the Pearl and the Diamond. All fakes. Our fathers were gipsies.’

‘Do you really think that George and that little girl —?’

‘Oh damn her. Damn you. I don’t know.’

‘Diane, I must go.’

‘I won’t say come again. George said he’d kill me if I had anything to do with you and the other brother. Oh God, if I could only talk to people, if I could only have a little bit of happiness, if things could be ordinary — ’ Tears came quietly out of her small doglike eyes. She closed her eyelids slowly, pressing more tears out.

Diane suddenly opened her eyes and the tears seemed to disappear as if abruptly withdrawn into their source. She leapt up, tangling one black heel into the Paisley shawl. Tom leapt up too.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s George. He’s trying to put his key in the door. Quick, quick.’

Diane pulled Tom, gripping his wrist, round which her short fingers could not join, out on to the landing where she slid back the door of a large built- In cupboard. She pushed a number of dresses along on a rail, making a space into which Tom stumbled. Diane whispered, ‘He always goes to the toilet when he comes, I’ll put the radio on, I’ll come out on to the landing and cough, then you go — ’ She slid the cupboard door back again and was gone.

Tom instinctively adjusted the dresses, pulling them in front of him and pressing himself against the back of the big cupboard. His feet, below the dresses, felt huge. He reached out and moved the sliding door slightly. He felt very unpleasantly frightened and ashamed.

The radio was playing again, quite loudly. He heard the downstairs door open and George mounting the stairs and Diane saying something to him. George went into the sitting-room. A minute or two passed and he showed no sign of going to the lavatory.

Diane’s clothes were not like Judy Osmore’s. Diane’s clothes were musty and in need of washing and cleaning, and smelt of stale tobacco and old cosmetics, cosmetics, which went out of fashion long ago, old powder, old lipstick, old face cream, old magic. Tom began to want to sneeze. Then the radio was switched off.

Tom thought, he knows. But now he could hear George and Diane talking in quiet voices. If he had concentrated he could have heard what they were saying. He thought, I must get out of this cupboard; if George were to find me standing here among these dresses I couldn’t bear it, it would ruin my whole life! He slid the door and stepped very quietly out of the cupboard. The sitting-room door was shut, the voices continued, Tom moved step by silent step toward the flat door which Diane had left open. Already he could imagine himself creeping down the stairs, leaning heavily on the banisters, putting his feet down with slow care, then the street door and freedom. At that moment Tom remembered that he had left his hat and coat lying on the floor in the sitting-room.

He checked the impulse to run. He could not now run. Diane might see and hide the awful evidence, but she might very well not. He thought, it’ll be worse for her if he sees them when I’ve gone, I can’t go now, I’ve got to see George, I’ve got to face him and try to explain, oh God why did I come here! I’m doing nothing but harm to everybody —

Tom took a deep breath and opened the sitting-room door. He stood in the doorway.

George and Diane were standing near the sofa holding hands. They had an odd formal dated look, like an old photograph or an old film. They turned toward him. Diane’s face expressed open-mouthed, open-eyed terror. George’s face expressed, for a moment, pure surprise. He let go of Diane’s hand. Then almost artificially, as if he were acting, he transformed his face into a wrinkled mask of indignation and fury.

Tom raised his hand with the palm open. He said, ‘George, I’m sorry. I came here to see Diane to ask her something about Miss Meynell. I’ve never been here before. I’ve never talked to Diane before, well, except once we talked a few sentences at the Baths.’ (Tom felt it essential to be truthful in case the encounter had been witnessed.) ‘I’ve only been here about ten minutes and I was just going to go. Nothing is Diane’s fault. She didn’t want to let me in and when I pushed my way in she begged me to go away. It’s all my fault. I just intruded. It’s nothing to do with her.’

George stepped away from Diane and stared at her as if expecting her to speak, but she was speechless with fear. She stood stiffly, her head turned away from both the men. George frowned, drawing his eyebrows right down over his eyes. He lowered his head. Then he caught sight of Greg Osmore’s coat and hat lying on the floor. He snatched them up and glared at them. Then bundling them up he moved toward the door. Tom dodged promptly out of his way. George went out on to the landing, hurling the bundle in front of him, and kicked it out of the flat and down the stairs. He came back into the room and advanced on Diane, ignoring Tom. He said, ‘Sit down. Sit down there.’ He pointed to a chair against the wall beside the piano. Diane obeyed, putting her hands to her throat. She took off the metal necklace and laid it on the piano.

Tom began, ‘George, listen — ’

‘Who is Miss Meynell?’ said George, still frowning.

‘Hattie Meynell, you know, John Robert’s — ’

‘Oh her. If you refer to her as Miss Meynell you should refer to Diane as Mrs Sedleigh. Don’t you think? What did you want to know about Hattie Meynell?’

‘Oh George - I’m in such an awful mess - and I’ve been such a fool - don’t be angry with me - I just wondered whether you and Hattie were - whether you knew each other at all — ’

‘No,’ said George, ‘I don’t know her. I met her at that picnic, and last Saturday for approximately one minute before she opened the shutters and you started singing. Your ten minutes with Mrs Sedleigh was much longer and I daresay more interesting than my total converse with Miss Meynell. OK?’

‘Mrs Sedleigh said you saw her undressing, I suppose that was at the sea — ’

‘Mrs Sedleigh should keep her bloody mouth shut. I observed her once in her petticoat by field glasses from Belmont. All right now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you believe me?’

‘Yes, George.’

‘Why are you interested in that little minx? Is she your mistress?’

‘No. And she’s not a little minx.’

‘Your questions to Mrs Sedleigh displayed little faith in the young lady. She may not be a minx now, but she will certainly become one soon, so you’d better hurry.’

‘She’s an innocent girl — ’

‘You think so? Well, perhaps she is. I’m not against her. Because of her … I’ve had a wonderful letter … from John Robert …’ He gave an odd little laugh like a sigh. ‘Did you know that Bill the Lizard has just died?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘It’s round all the pubs. Funny how everybody cares - because that man has died - perhaps it’s a sign — ’

‘I was just going to talk to him,’ said Tom, ‘and then he was dead. Oh George — ’

‘What?’

‘Don’t hurt anybody. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt Mrs Sedleigh. Don’t hurt yourself.’

‘You said you were going, why don’t you go? Do you want to be thrown down the stairs after your coat?’

‘I’m glad you had a good letter from John Robert.’

George advanced toward Tom. Tom moved quickly back into the doorway. George stopped in front of his brother and put his hands one on each shoulder. He looked up, he was shorter than Tom, into his brother’s eyes. Tom looked with amazement at George’s round boyish face, which now wore a radiant quizzical amused expression. George looked like someone who was emotionally exalted, ready to cry with happiness as the result of some wonderful news, some great achievement or discovery.

Tom wanted to say something suitable, something affectionate, for he felt all his affection for his brother suddenly and ardently enlivened by the strange radiance of that look. At the same time he wondered whether George had not at last perhaps, and finally, gone mad. ‘Dear George — ’

‘Clear off, Tom. Go on. Beat it.’

In a moment, although the clear light of the look did not waver, George’s fingers dug fiercely into Tom’s shoulders. Tom turned and leapt across the hall and out of the door which George had left open, he flew down the stairs and tumbled over Greg’s coat and hat which were lying at the bottom. He scooped them up and got himself out into the road and slammed the door.

Then in the sudden silence of the empty lamp-lit street he paused. He stood for a while, dreading to hear a terrible scream. But the silence continued.

‘Come on, kid, you can come out from behind the piano.’

Diane got up and took a step forward. George sat down on the sofa and drew a letter from his pocket and began perusing it. He said, ‘Give me a drink, will you.’ Diane poured some whisky into her own empty glass and thrust it toward him. She continued to stand stiffly, looking at him. George took a sip of the whisky, still reading the letter. Then he looked up. ‘What’s the matter? Oh Tom. Sit down beside me. Why are you so frightened of me? Don’t be. Come, sit down.’

Diane sat beside him and he put an arm round her shoulder. She put her face down on to the sleeve of his coat. ‘I thought you’d blame me about Tom.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, was it? Was it?’

‘No. Like he said.’

‘Well, then. Forget Tom. Give me a kiss.’

George was only slightly drunk. His inability to get the key quickly into the lock was not caused by intoxication but by the ordinary fact that the door was in a dark recess. However, George was certainly in a strange frame of mind.

He had received Rozanov’s violent letter that morning (Thursday). George had not seen either of the local newspapers and was unaware of the public ‘scandal’ concerning himself and Hattie. He gathered something of the matter from Rozanov’s incoherent thunderings, and assumed that Hattie had complained to her grandfather about George’s intrusion and had somehow linked it to the riotous goings-on outside. He also gathered that the Gazette had said that Rozanov wanted Tom to marry Hattie (which seemed so crazy that he did not even think about it). The cause of the letter did not concern George too much. What was important was the letter itself, an entirely new development, a vast new phenomenon in the long history of his relations with his teacher.

When George saw John Robert’s writing on the envelope he had at the first moment hoped that the letter would contain something, he knew not what, to match his wishes, some gesture of gentleness, some gesture of humour or sweetness, almost anything, even reproaches, might, he felt, feed and warm his heart, even perhaps (whatever that might mean) heal him. The brutality of the missive which his trembling fingers drew forth shocked him profoundly. George’s ingenuity at interpreting any word of John Robert’s as a communication or an encouragement was almost limitless, but could not deal with this letter. He was used to the philosopher’s coldness, his sarcasm and irritation. This almost incoherent torrent of rage and hate left George for a while utterly prostrated and defeated, as if he could not survive in a world where John Robert’s ferocious mind existed so to curse him. For the first time a feeling of death touched him. His relation with Rozanov had always been unhappy right from the start, poisoned by jealousy and humiliation and fear and unfulfilled desire, but it had gone on and been, as such unhappy things can be, a source of life, a focus of dreams, a goad, a thorn, not a dagger in the heart. George intuited in that ferocious letter John Robert’s determination to end George absolutely, to exclude him totally, as if indeed he had carried out his expressed wish to kill him. Every previous reaction of his teacher had been something which George could take over and with which he could do something. But with this outburst he could do nothing.

On Thursday morning George considered suicide. He imagined various ways of actually dying in John Robert’s presence, or even arranging for John Robert to be accused of murdering him. These fantasies were not consoling since they too contained the real idea of death; and from this George shuddered away and hid his face. He shed tears. Then for a long time he sat quietly on the sofa in the sitting-room at Druidsdale. He crumpled up John Robert’s letter and tossed it away. Then he picked it up and looked at it again. It was true that he had got past John Robert’s guard; he had, for one moment at least, occupied John Robert’s mind to the exclusion of all else. This was surely a significant climax. It was of course an absurd letter, one which John Robert would regret having written. Suppose George were to reply, harping on that chord? ‘My dear John Robert, I feel sure that by now you regret …’ But that would not do. The letter, absurd as it was, remained an act, there was something irrevocable signalled by that smell of death. George believed in signs. The letter was a sign. Love and death were interchangeable. The letter signalled that his relation with John Robert had reached a final orgasm.

‘It ends so,’ he said out loud. ‘It ends … so …’ And this, such an ending, was in a sense, not an ending. And again for a long time he sat still.

Then it began to be as if his mind, like a boat which has crashed upon rocks, and flown over rapids, had come out in a serene light on to a calm golden lake. He felt his taut and twisted face relax and become smooth. He breathed quietly and deeply. He thought, it is as if I have died only I haven’t died. I live in a life after life where all is changed. Can it be that I have actually finished with John Robert Rozanov, that this has come upon me as a change of being, as a mystery of which I scarcely know the meaning? He stood up. He went out to the kitchen and ate some soup. It was evening. He went out into the warm calm fuzzy twilight air. He walked to the nearest pub, the Rat Man, and here he learnt the news of William Eastcote’s death. And it seemed to him that this too was a sign, that Bill the Lizard had offered himself up as an innocent substitute for George’s death. Love had reached its climax and died in peace. He walked and breathed and felt rising within him the warm inner radiance which Tom McCaffrey had been so astonished to see upon his face.

‘What’s the letter?’ said Diane. She too saw the radiance and was worried by it.

‘It’s from John Robert.’

‘Is it a nice letter, kind?’

‘It’s - let’s say - merciful. Ah, mercy - yes - what’s that? Look, I’m going to burn it.’ George knelt and lighted a corner of the letter at the gas fire and watched it burn on the tiles of the grate.

Diane watched him in amazement.

George returned and sat on the sofa and Diane slipped down on the floor beside him as she often did and put her hands on his knees.

‘Do you love me, kid?’

‘You know I do.’

‘When a man that “Turnips” cries, cries not when his father dies, does that mean that he would rather have a turnip than his father?’

‘You’re in your silly mood today. Are you thinking about your father? You’ve got a funny look.’

‘Funny, yes. I feel I’ve been broken and remade in a moment, well, in half an hour. Something - it’s like a haemorrhage - has broken - inside — ’

‘You don’t mean really?’

‘No, no, it’s like that, only it’s in the mind. Something’s all washed away - washed away in blood — ’

‘Like Jesus Christ.’

‘Yes. Yes. Nothing less would do. I said the world was full of signs today. And Bill the Lizard dead. God rest his soul. So I look strange?’

‘Yes. Your face is different - more beautiful.’

‘It feels like that. Give me another drink, kid. Ding dong bell, Debussy’s in the well. We’ll live yet and beat them all, we’ll outlive them all. Do you know what day this is?’