The Philosopher's Pupil

‘What day?’

‘The one you’ve been waiting for.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You wanted me to come to you in the end. When I was broken and beaten and rejected. Well, I’ve come.’

‘Oh, George — ’

‘And I am broken and beaten and rejected but it’s not like I thought at all - it’s like a triumph - it’s with trumpets and drums and - torches and fireworks and bright lights - it’s liberation day, Diane - can you hear them all cheering? They know we’ve won. Fill your glass up, darling, and we’ll drink to freedom. They wanted to break us, but they have only broken our chains. We’ll go away, shall we, like you used to say. Would you like that? I’ve got a good pension. Let’s go and live in Spain, it’s cheap there.’

‘George, do you mean it?’

‘Yes, I do. Diane, this is it. When one is compelled to do what’s right. We’ll live in Spain, we’ll live in the sun, and we’ll be free. We’ll live like kings on my pension. You’re the only person who really loves me. You’re the only person I can talk to, the only person whose company I can really tolerate. We’ll live in the south by the sea and we’ll be happy at last. Come, darling, lie beside me. Just put your arms around me. I’ve solved the riddle, it’s all come out clear. You just have to get to breaking point and break, it’s as simple as that. Oh I feel so much at peace. I want to sleep now.’ And George did at once fall peacefully asleep in Diane’s arms.

‘You mean you love me?’ said Hattie.

‘Yes,’ said John Robert.

‘You love me like - like grandfather - or like - like being in love?’

‘The latter,’ said John Robert in a low voice.

It had taken them a long time to reach this point.

When John Robert went to the Slipper House he had had no clear plan in his head. He wanted very much to see Hattie. He felt angry with the girls for their stupidities and indiscretions, whatever these might be, which had somehow contributed to his humiliation. Obsessed with George and Tom, he had not too much reflected on these ancillary follies, and felt no burning desire to find out every detail, to examine and to punish: no satisfaction, in this case, at the idea of passing on some of his pain. He felt rather a general misery and a sense of being wounded and mocked. The interrogation, for which he had certainly drawn up no list of questions, seemed more like a duty than anything else. He had of course noticed the references to Pearl in the scurrilous articles but he had not, in his earlier mood, bothered to make sense of them and had indeed (as Pearl had hoped) put them down as ‘some sort of rubbish’. Even the ‘significance’ of Pearl being Diane’s sister had not struck him at first, since he had simply had too much to do dealing with other thoughts. He had not at all foreseen the sudden drama of Thursday evening and its huge outcome. It was not until he actually started to ask questions that all these ideas ‘came together’, and familiar inquisitorial Socratic instincts prompted him to corner and to strip, further arousing his wounded mind to cruel extremes. He was excited by the sudden and absolutely new experience of castigating Hattie; and with this step closer to her there came, in a single igniting flash, suspicion and jealousy of Pearl.

The decision to remove Hattie was certainly not premeditated. John Robert’s new vision of Pearl as the villain of the piece, once fairly started, grew in self-authenticating clarity. It all made sense. Pearl had been, from the beginning, a terrible mistake. He had employed her as a watchdog, a guardian angel, a guarantor of Hattie’s seclusion, her purity, her out-of-the-worldness. But in effect Pearl had separated him decisively from Hattie and had stolen Hattie’s love which would, if he had looked after Hattie more directly, have been bestowed on him. A sudden burning jealousy of Pearl consumed the present and blackened the past. Pearl was indeed not only a tactical disaster but a positive traitor. She was resentful of Hattie who ‘had everything while she had nothing’, she had given away John Robert’s match-making plan and was in league with George and that prostitute. Any possibility of second thoughts on these matters was of course removed by Pearl’s sickening declaration of love which followed upon her unspeakably crude reference to his secret. That, if nothing else, sealed her fate.

‘Being together with Hattie in that little house in Hare Lane’ was indeed proving to be an amazing and frightening experience, though it was now only Friday morning. How extraordinary this would be he did not, even in the taxi, begin to imagine. How small the house was he realized as he lay sleepless on the rather damp divan bed in the tiny spare-room, listening to Hattie first crying, then tossing about and sighing, on his own old iron bedstead in the next room. On Friday morning John Robert rose as usual at six forty-five and went downstairs and made preparations for breakfast, a meal which, except in the form of a cup of tea, he did not usually have. He found a table-cloth, cross-stitched by his mother, in a drawer in the side-board, and put it on the little folding table in the sitting-room and laid the table with preparations for coffee and eggs and toast. As he did so he felt a curious pain which consisted in finding a new and special pleasure in laying a table for Hattie, and at the same time thinking how often he might have done so in the past, and how unpredictable now was the future, and how unclear the meaning of the little humble action.

Hattie came down at seven-thirty. John Robert peered out of the kitchen. She looked tired and pale but had put on a brown straight rather ‘grown-up’ dress which Pearl had packed for her, and had put her hair up. In reply to his questions about breakfast she said that she only wanted a cup of coffee. Then she announced that when she had had the coffee she was going straight back to the Slipper House. John Robert asked her, please, not to, but to listen instead to some things which he had to say. He did not at the moment know what exactly these things were; but the inevitability was now clear of some sort of ‘fight’ with Hattie, and though he was frightened at the prospect he was also excited by it.

The fight began with Hattie saying that she would listen to what he had to say and would then go back to the Slipper House.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll ask Pearl to move out, and I’ll come with you to the Slipper House.’

‘I don’t care about the Slipper House! It’s Pearl I want to go back to. You wouldn’t listen to what I said yesterday — ’

‘Don’t you think it’s time for you to leave off Pearl? You’re grown-up now. How nicely you’ve done your hair.’

‘You say “leave off Pearl” as if she were some sort of bad habit!’

‘Well, in a way she is. You’ve grown out of her.’

‘She’s not a teddy bear!’

Hattie had taken her coffee into the sitting-room and had sat down at the table which John Robert had laid and moved into the window. John Robert sat down opposite to her, unconsciously moving the plates and cutlery and setting them in a neat pile. The weather had changed, and outside it was softly gloomily raining upon the little garden enclosed by its low and partly broken fences.

‘I have told Pearl that we no longer need her.’

‘We no longer need her? You mean you’ve sacked her?’

‘She quite understands.’

‘Well, I don’t. I told you, she is my friend, she is my sister, you wanted us to do everything together — ’

‘You mustn’t be so dependent on another person, you must give up this old sentimental attachment to someone you’ve just got used to.’

‘Used to! And it’s not dependence it’s love! I don’t want her as a nursemaid! I want her as a friend and a relation! You don’t realize how alone I am, I have no family — ’

‘You have me.’

‘Well, yes, of course but - I’ve seen so little of you - you couldn’t have a child in your life - of course you haven’t had time. I don’t know you — ’

‘Do you think, Hattie - do you think that you could call me “John Robert”?’

‘I don’t know you, John Robert.’

‘That is my fault.’

‘Of course I’d like to know you better, that would be nice. But Pearl is essential, she’s part of me, I won’t give her up — ’

‘When you marry you will have to — ’

‘Of course I won’t have to, what are you talking about? And as for when I marry, you seemed very anxious to get rid of me when you tried to - to offer me to Tom McCaffrey - and he didn’t want me — ’

‘He didn’t want you?’

‘No, why should he, I don’t blame him, it was a mad idea.’

‘I meant well. One day perhaps you’ll understand. Do you forgive me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, John Robert.’

‘Yes, John Robert. Now I’m going.’

‘No. Don’t go. I forbid you.’

‘I don’t think you can.’

‘Pearl isn’t what you think. She’s not been faithful. I see now she’s an unfit person — ’

‘What on earth do you mean? Pearl has been perfect. She’s done everything. She’s taken all the trouble off you — ’

‘She was well paid for it — ’

‘What a mean thing to say!’

‘She’s envious of you, she’s jealous, she said so, she said to me “she’s got everything and I’ve got nothing”.’

‘Did she really? She must know that everything I have she has.’

‘That’s not so, Hattie. You must be realistic, you must be properly grown-up — ’

‘Being grown-up seems to mean being cynical and ungrateful and stingy!’

‘You and she have different fates, you must see that.’

‘Do you mean we have different stations in society?’

‘You have taken her for granted as a part of your life in a way which is no more possible. This is the natural parting of the ways.’

‘Of course our relationship has to change, it has always been changing, it is changing, but when two people love each other — ’

‘You seem not to realize how much that horrible scandal — ’

‘I don’t care about the scandal — ’

‘Well, you ought to and I do. It has done you a lot of damage — ’

‘Damage to me, what a rotten little journalist says in a rotten little town?’

‘You’ll see later, you’ll suffer for it later — ’

‘You seem quite glad to think so!’

‘You seem not to realize how much that scandal was Pearl’s doing. She told the press about you and Tom McCaffrey, she let that other man in — ’

‘She didn’t tell, she didn’t let him.’

‘She must have done. She’s an irresponsible mischief-maker. You heard her admit that she was outside kissing some man when you thought she was looking for Tom.’

‘Well, why shouldn’t she kiss a man, she’s lived without men all these years for my sake and for your convenience — ’

‘So no doubt it’s time she broke out and dropped the mask — ’

‘There is no mask, she’s a very truthful person, she’s one of the best people I’ve ever met!’

‘I think you don’t know how coarse she is and the things she can say - you are a child and you have met very few people and you think too well of everyone - people who seem nice can be thoroughly wicked.’

‘What’s wicked is that article that you’re so obsessed with, you got all that stuff out of the article, it’s all just spiteful lies, you haven’t any proof. Well, have you?’

‘Strong probabilities amount to proof.’

‘Perhaps they do in philosophy, but I prefer to believe what I see clearly.’

‘That’s in philosophy too. But what you see clearly can be false. Dear Hattie, believe me, I want the best for you, I want you, for your own sake and for my sake, bravely and sensibly, to let this relationship go, to let it disappear naturally into the past. As time goes by we often have to shed relationships which no longer suit us, such shedding is a natural function. There is no need to make a drama of this. You are at a stage in your life where you have to face many changes and challenges, many new things. We have to think about your university career. I want to talk to you at length about that. I am inclined to think now that an American university may suit you better than an English one. I am going to arrange for us to return to California in a matter of days. I’ll buy a house for us near the ocean, you’ll like that, not like the little one at Malibu, a real big house. I’ll aim to keep you with me very much more from now on — ’

‘That is very kind of you, John Robert,’ said Hattie. She had put her hands palm down on the cross-stitch cloth and was leaning foward, gazing at him earnestly with her pale marble-blue eyes. ‘That is very kind of you, and I realize that all sorts of things will change and must change in my life in the next years. I have always done what you wanted. When you wanted to see me I came, when you were tired of me I went away, I never questioned the schools which you chose for me, the journeys which you ordained. I will continue to do what you want, probably. I just tell you now that I will not give up my friendship with Pearl, I cannot, it is part of me. You would surely not respect someone who abandoned her friend.’

‘You speak of abandoning. But she abandons you. You said how much she had given up to be your maid. Can’t you now imagine that she wants to be free of you? She’ll be relieved, glad to go! That’s what I understood her to say when we talked frankly last night when you were in the taxi.’

Hattie, breathing deeply, continued to stare. Then, removing her hands from the table, she leaned back. She said impatiently, ‘This is a silly argument. Of course I must see her, I’ll go to her, she’ll be expecting me. If she feels as you say, which I don’t at all believe, I shall know and naturally I will accept it. Coming away suddenly like that yesterday was horrible, it shouldn’t have happened. You kept bullying us and accusing us of things. You didn’t understand. You don’t know Pearl. I won’t believe anything against her.’ Hattie then stood up.

‘Sit down, please, please, Hattie, sit down a minute, wait.’

Hattie sat down again. She felt hungry. She had eaten nothing last night, being anxious only to get to bed and into the death of oblivion for which she had so much longed at school. She was surprised at herself, at the way she had just been speaking to John Robert, at the firm almost rude tone she had adopted. But she felt perfectly clear-headed about the whole matter, and desperately longing to get back to Pearl.

John Robert then approached the revelation of his secret. He intended only to come near to it, not to tell it. He knew that even this was a mistake and probably morally wrong, but he could not, looking now at Hattie across the table, and after the peculiar exciting awful tension of their fight, resist moving that step closer to her. It was, answering to his wish, an occasion, an opportunity. Perhaps she’s somehow vaguely guessed already, he thought; besides what does it mean? It isn’t anything definite anyway. I’ll just say something now, I must. If she sees Pearl, God knows what horrible thing Pearl might say. That’s another reason for just, at least, telling her in an ordinary way how much I care for her. The fact that Pearl knew it is a reason for speaking out, it’s not even a secret any more. It’s necessary to do so, and now’s the time. Hattie had, once too often, casually expressed her taken-for-granted view that her grandfather did not care for her and regarded her simply as a burden. John Robert felt now he at last could and therefore must comment on that assumption.

‘Hattie - dear Hattie - I’ve acted for the best, I mean I’ve tried to act well, to do right, it hasn’t been easy.’ A curious almost whining tone of self-pity here invaded John Robert’s voice.

Hattie at once realized that something had changed, that some emotional statement was about to come out. She said more gently. ‘I’m sure you have always meant well, I mean wished me well.’

‘Oh Hattie, if you only knew — ’

‘Knew what?’

‘How I’ve yearned over you and wanted you. You think I don’t care about you, but that isn’t true, it’s the opposite of true.’

Hattie stared at the huge face of the philosopher which seemed suddenly like a relief model of something else, a whole country perhaps. She stared at the flat head, the lined bumpy fleshy brow and the very short electric frizzy hair, the big birdlike nose framed by furrows in which grey stubble grew, the pouting prehensile mouth with its red wet lips and the froth of bubbly saliva at the corners, the fiercely shining rectangular light brown eyes which seemed to be trying so hard to send her a signal. The soft plump wrinkles of the brow, pitted with porous spots, so close to her across the table, gave her especially the sense of something so sad, so old. She felt frightened and full of pity. She said, just in order to say something soothing, ‘Oh don’t worry, don’t worry, please — ’

‘I’ve deprived myself of your company simply because I cared so much. I think now I was wrong. Was I wrong, is it too late? I thought you might just find me appalling, a monster. I found myself so. I was afraid, yes. And yet I should have had more courage, more faith and trust, I should have got to know you, kept you with me, tended you — ’

‘But you have been very kind,’ said Hattie. ‘You mustn’t reproach yourself, you are always so busy, you wouldn’t have time for a child, it isn’t as if you were my father.’

‘I deprived myself of you. I could have had time, I wanted time, what better could I have done with my time. If I had felt less, had felt differently, I might have - but I wanted to keep you as something precious and I didn’t dare to be too close to you.’

‘I’m sure I would have bored you very much!’ said Hattie in what was intended to be a light tone.

‘You haven’t understood, better so, better so — ’

‘Please tell me what you mean — ’

‘Even if it makes you shudder, even if it makes you run? I love you, Hattie, I’ve loved you for years. For God’s sake, don’t leave me now that I’ve found you, don’t go away — ’