The Philosopher's Pupil

Even before John Robert spoke the first words confessing that he was ‘in love’, Hattie had begun to understand what he was telling her. His trembling voice, the pleading movements of his hands, the painful ring of his ardent words, the glare of his light eyes, conveyed to her the dreadful importance of what was happening between them; and she did shudder, and she did want to run, but she felt also a most intense pity and a weird excitement, together with a shocked dismay at the spectacle of the man she had feared and revered reduced to a sort of babbling beggar in her presence.

‘Well, that’s all right,’ said Hattie nervously. She put her hand on her breast, her fingers upon the collar of her brown dress, and pushed her chair an inch or two backwards.

‘It’s not all right!’ John Robert smote the flimsy table with his hand, making several knives leap to the floor. He stood up and stumbled to the other end of the room and stood with his back to her leaning his head against the wall.

Hattie looked at him with horror. She said, in a timid breaking voice, ‘Please be more ordinary, please be calm, you frighten me. Nothing can be so awful. I’ve always respected and trusted you. Just be quiet, be as you used to be — ’

‘I can’t be as I used to be!’ The words came out in a kind of bubbling roar, and John Robert turned round, wiping his wet mouth with the back of his hand, and gazed at the girl with eyes blazing with anguish. ‘Yes, you respected me. You never loved me. Can you love me, is it possible? I need you, I crave for you. Oh God, what stupidity, what wickedness to talk to you like this — ’

‘I’m all right,’ said Hattie, ‘don’t worry for me. I just want so much that you shouldn’t be unhappy — ’ Appalled by the effect of his revelation upon John Robert himself, she could not measure the enormity of it or decide how best to calm him or to express the pity which she felt. She could hardly bear to look at him, at the cool dignified remote philosopher, the guardian of her childhood, suddenly transformed into this pathetic spitting moaning maniac. At the same time she felt his presence, his closeness to her in the room, as that of a large uncontrolled animal.

John Robert stood now against the wall, stooping a little, his hands hanging, his big head and his lips thrust forward. He said, ‘She was right to say that I shouldn’t be with you here.’

‘Who was right?’

‘Pearl. She taunted me with this, she laughed about it.’

‘Oh - no — ’

‘They’ll all know, she’ll tell them, everyone will know.’

‘No, no, no — ’

‘Don’t leave me Hattie. Just for today stay with me, let us be quietly together. I’m sorry I’ve behaved in this beastly way. But I’m glad that I love you and that I’ve told you, really. I’m in awful pain but I’m happy. Don’t go to the Slipper House, don’t leave me alone, don’t drive me mad by going - just after - all this. Just give me today, please.’

‘Was that then,’ said Hattie, ‘why you wanted me to marry Tom McCaffrey?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll stay with you,’ she said.

On Friday Tom did not know what to do with himself. It was impossible to return to London and resume his ordinary life. His visit to Diane now seemed like a dark nightmarish cavern out of which there opened an indistinguishably large number of exits into hell. He kept wondering whether, after he had gone, George had quietly strangled Diane. He imagined her little body, with the fringed skirt and the pathetic boots, lying upon the chaise tongue and George looking down on it and smiling that weird mad radiant smile. His shoulders hurt where George had gripped them. He felt as if he had been kicked downstairs. His imagination was utterly fouled up, haunted by filthy loathsome apparitions. The vision had returned of Hattie as a witch, as an evil enchantress, a temptress, a devilish enticing doll, the wanton spoiler of his innocence and freedom. He imagined her in a nurse’s uniform, smiling frightfully, armed with a syringe which she was about to plunge into his arm in order to destroy his sanity. (Perhaps he had dreamed that last night?) He shook himself, shook his head as if literally to hurl the hateful visions out, to make them come away like gobbets of wax out of the ear. He thought, I’ve got to see Hattie, I’ve got to see her, then all this will stop. At any rate something will change if I see her, something will become clear, I’ll ask her something, some question, I’m not sure what. And in this resolve he felt almost a kind of fury. But I’ll wait till dark, he said to himself. If I were to meet Rozanov or George in the street I should start to scream. He felt an urge, during the morning, to go out and buy a paper to see if Diane had been murdered, but he resisted the urge, and consigned his thoughts on this subject to the class of apparitions. He spent the day feeding on ectoplasm.

As Tom, in extreme agitation, was walking through Victoria Park at twilight, with his own mackintosh and Greg’s umbrella, he thought about Alex and how he ought to call on her, only not now of course. It only now occurred to him that he ought to say something to her about last Saturday night. He also saw at once that this was not only impossible but unnecessary. Alex, at least, was capable of swallowing things without demanding explanations. He saw her like a huge fish gulping it all down. He paused outside Belmont, seeing a light in Ruby’s room. He had intended to walk round to the gate in Forum Way, but decided to go straight through into the garden from Tasker Road. He walked down the side of the house past the garage and looking up saw that the lights were on in the drawing-room and the curtains drawn.

He walked out on to the muddy water-logged lawn and the Slipper House came into view and he paused. The idea of seeing Hattie now seemed colossally important, ambiguous, unpredictable, dangerous, as if something enormous were at stake. Was it, and if so what? He had been going to ask Hattie a question. What question? What could he say to her now which would not be some sort of awful impertinence, would not his presence, especially his unheralded presence, be an impertinence? And suppose John Robert was there? He had not considered, after the reception of his last call, telephoning. He thought, maybe I’ll give it up and see Alex instead. But his fate drew him on with a siren song of menace, and he thought, better a smash than any more abject waiting.

The Slipper House, surrounded by dripping trees (the rain was abating) looked melancholy and mysterious like a lonely secluded house in a Japanese story. The shutters were closed, but there appeared to be a light on in the sitting-room and one upstairs. Tom put down his umbrella. He could not find his handkerchief (his cold persisted), but blew his nose on the sleeve of his shirt. He felt sick with apprehension as he approached the door. Some light was coming from the hall through the stained-glass, but he could not find the bell. He tried the door. It was not locked. He opened it softly and stepped into the hall. He stood a moment in silence looking at some faded roses in a mauve vase, and taking in the self-possessed quietness of the house which for a moment struck him as being clearly empty. He slithered out of his mackintosh, laid down his umbrella on the floor, and before he went any farther automatically kicked off his shoes and put on a pair of slippers from the box in the hall. He went to the sitting-room door, which was ajar, and looked in. There was no one there. The gas fire was on. There was a book and a scarf on a chair, writing-paper and a pen on the table. Even these evidences struck Tom as signs of a place overtaken by sudden disaster and abandoned.

He moved back into the hall. The continued silence began to be frightening. He shuffled his feet; then called out, ‘Hello’. Then again, ‘Hello! It’s Tom McCaffrey.’ Silence. He opened the front door and shut it noisily, then reopened it seeing the bell in the light from the hall, rang the bell and shut the door again and waited.

There was a sound of movement, steps, and a door opening up above. Then after a short interval a figure appeared at the top of the stairs. It was a man, tucking the tail of his white shirt into the top of his black trousers. The man was Emma.

Tom was so surprised, so shocked, that he leapt backwards coming into resounding contact with the front door.

Emma, red in the face, and breathing deeply, was equally distressed. He reached the bottom of the stairs, advanced a step or two, and stood looking sternly at Tom, his eyes narrowed without his glasses. Tom moved forward and they faced each other.

‘Emma! What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Well, what are you, if it comes to that?’

‘How can you speak so? Where is Hattie? Why are you intruding?’

‘Don’t shout!’

‘Is she - is she up there?’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘I think you’ve been with her!’

‘Oh Tom, stop, think, don’t be crazy! Hattie isn’t here.’

‘Then what — ’

‘There were two women in this house, though I know you only noticed one. Your lady, the mistress, has gone away. I, as befits my position as the hero’s friend, have been in bed with the maid.’

‘You’ve been - oh Emma — ’

‘You’re shocked.’

‘I resent your being here.’

‘You have no rights in this house as far as I know.’

‘You behave as if you have! What a charade, what an affront to - to her - to Hattie Meynell.’

‘All right, it takes some explaining, but if you take on so I can’t explain.’

‘To treat this house like a — ’

‘Oh come, come, Tom.’

‘I thought you were a serious person with decent standards of behaviour.’

‘Do you mean someone who doesn’t make love to maidservants?’

‘You know I don’t mean that.’

‘What did you want, if it comes to that, creeping in unannounced at this hour?’

‘Are you suggesting —?’

‘No! I’m just asking you to calm down.’

‘You go about it in a funny way. What else have you been doing that I don’t know about? You tried to wreck things, at any rate you did wreck things — ’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You gave away what I told you about John Robert and Hattie and me. I told it to you as a secret and you gave it away, and now it’s been all over the press, you don’t know how horrible it’s been and what awful damage it’s done.’

‘I did not give it away.’

‘You must have done. You told it to Hector Gaines.’

‘I did not!’

‘You did. You bloody liar.’

Emma picked up a paperback book (his own copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War) which was lying on a table beside the faded roses and hit Tom across the face.

Then instantly they started to fight. Both were athletic and agile and for the moment very angry, but neither was much good at fighting. Tom gave a violent push against Emma’s shoulder. Emma lunged at Tom’s chest and sent him reeling back towards the door. Then they sprang at each other like two dogs, clutching and staggering round in a circle, Tom dragging at Emma’s shirt and Emma at Tom’s jacket. Emma tried to get a wrestling hold, one foot driving behind Tom’s leg. Tom punched him in the ribs. They crashed into the table, sending the vase of roses flying.

This scrimmage might have gone on longer, only it was suddenly ended by a deluge of cold water which descended on the combatants, decanted from a bedroom jug by Pearl on the landing above.

Startled, soaked and ridiculous, they drew apart.

‘Hell!’

‘Damn!’

Tom took off his jacket and shook it. Emma wrung out the end of his shirt, which had emerged again.

‘Thank heavens I wasn’t wearing my glasses.’

Tom had closed his eyes and lowered his head.

‘Are you all right, Tom?’

‘Yes, let’s go in here.’

They marched into the sitting-room and closed the door.

Tom said, ‘Is there anything to drink?’

‘No, it’s a teetotal house. There’s some Coca-Cola here.’

‘Give me some.’

Emma opened the cupboard and poured out two glasses. His hand shook.

‘That was absurd, to fight like that,’ said Tom.

Emma said nothing.

‘Emma, I’m sorry.’

‘OK.’

Tom looked anxiously at his friend, then looked away. He said, ‘What’s been happening here, how long have you been here?’

‘I arrived this evening. John Robert took Hattie away last night.’

‘Where to?’

‘Back to America. Well, I suppose first to his place here, or to London — ’

‘Oh -God - but I don’t understand. How did you know? I mean, did you come here looking for Hattie?’

‘No, you fool.’

‘But then why - how - you don’t know Pearl, you’d never exchanged a word with her, was it just accident, a sort of impulse, when you found her alone?’

‘Oh, Tom - I saw her at the Baths, and I talked to her on that picnic, can’t you remember, and again last Saturday. Last Saturday I kissed her.’

‘I see, so — ’

‘I was feeling bloody depressed. You hadn’t turned up or shown any sign of life. I thought I’d come down here, and I rang up from the station to ask Pearl to come out to a pub. She said she was alone and asked me to come round. She’s pretty depressed too.’

‘Emma, there’s been such ghastly stuff in the local press here.’

‘Yes, she told me. That brings us back to where we started.’

‘You mean - yes — ’

Emma sat down and rubbed his eyes. ‘I’ve been thinking about that, of course, I didn’t tell Hector. I didn’t tell anybody. Pearl didn’t tell anybody, and I don’t imagine Hattie did.’

‘Of course not.’

‘But do you remember, we were both pretty drunk, in the garden that night we started talking about it, about John Robert’s idea about you and Hattie, and all sorts of people were slinking about and could have been listening.’

‘My God, you’re right. What we said must have sounded pretty crazy though.’

‘Enough for somebody to pick up an idea.’

‘Yes - oh Christ, we’re bloody fools. I mean I am. Oh Emma, if you only knew what a fool I am and what a muddle I’m in and how miserable I am!’

‘And I think I’ve given you a black eye.’

Tom noticed that one of his eyes was closing. He touched it. It felt hot and tender. ‘Yes! Is there any more Coke? Thanks. But look, about Hattie and John Robert — ’

‘Do you mind if I ask Pearl to come down? This is her house in which we’ve been behaving like oafs. And she can explain, at any rate she can tell you what she knows. It’s all bloody obscure.’

While Emma went to fetch Pearl, Tom looked at himself in the cut-glass fountain mirror. His right eye was watery and narrow and surrounded by a puffy red circle. His hair was wet from the deluge, its long curls reduced to rats’ tails. His shirt was wet too and torn at the neck.

Emma found Pearl in the hall. She had picked up the strewn roses and the fragments of the mauve art déco vase, and was on her knees mopping up the water, squeezing a cloth into a pail. She got up slowly and looked sombrely at Emma.

Emma reached out and took her hand and pressed it hard. He said, ‘Come in and talk to Tom. Tell him about last night.’

Pearl said, ‘I think that water will stain the parquet.’

‘Damn the parquet. Come, girl.’

Pearl was wearing a blue summer dress and a big shaggy cardigan into whose pockets she now thrust her hands, pulling the garment down. Her legs were bare above her slippers. Her straight hair had been fiercely combed and her face had its older Mexican look. Her nose was thin and sharp. She frowned and hunched her shoulders, then followed Emma into the sitting-room.

Tom hastily put away the comb with which he had been trying to arrange his wet locks. He bowed awkwardly to Pearl, who nodded to him. Tom was now acutely conscious of Emma’s implied condemnation of him for having failed to notice Pearl because she was classified as ‘the maid’. He was now aware of her handsomeness and the strength of her presence. Emma stood looking from one to the other.

The room was suddenly full of jealousy, as palpable as a thick green gas. Tom and Pearl looked at Emma. All three stiffened as if to attention.

Pearl said, ‘Do sit down.’ She sat down wearily in one of the bamboo chairs. The two men remained standing.

Tom said, ‘I’m sorry I barged in.’ Then, ‘So John Robert took Hattie away?’

‘Yes. Last night. He arrived about ten o’clock and there was a row.’

‘A row?’

‘He was furious with us, chiefly with me, because of the business last Saturday and the stuff in the Gazette.’

‘But you’d seen him since Saturday?’

‘No. We were waiting for him every day. He only came yesterday.’

‘I had my interview on Wednesday,’ said Tom.

‘What happened?’ Emma asked him.

‘He told me to go to hell. Never to come near Hattie again. He somehow thought I was in league with George.’

‘He thought I was in league with George too,’ said Pearl.

‘He’s crazy, he’s got George on the brain.’

‘Pearl has got the boot,’ said Emma.

‘You mean he’s sacked you?’

‘Yes, it’s all at an end. He decided suddenly that I was a corrupt person and a moral danger to Hattie. He called a taxi and took Hattie away and said they would be going back to America at once.’

‘But it can’t end like that,’ Tom said.

‘That’s what I told her,’ Emma said.

Pearl, looking very tired, said slowly, ‘I thought that Hattie would come today. Last night she was terribly upset and sort of dominated by him. But I thought that this morning she would come running straight back. And I waited. But she didn’t come. That means either that he’s taken her away to London or straight to the airport, or else he’s poisoned her mind against me, persuaded her I’m some sort of - degraded schemer.’

‘He couldn’t,’ said Tom, ‘she wouldn’t believe anything like that. They must have gone away. She’ll - she’ll write, she’ll come back.’

‘It’s too late,’ said Pearl. ‘He said it was time for things to change and of course it is. Things must change. Hattie must change - and go away - altogether. And he couldn’t possibly - now - bear for me to be near her — ’

‘Why?’ said Emma.

‘Oh because - because - Anyway they’re probably in America by now. She has gone.’

There was a moment’s silence. Pearl said, ‘I’m so tired, I didn’t sleep last night, you must excuse me.’ She got up and slouched out of the room.

Tom said, ‘Hell, hell.’ Then he said, ‘Are you staying here tonight?’

‘Yes, if she’ll let me.’

‘Well - I’ll be off - I’ll leave the door open at Travancore Avenue just in case - I’ll go back to London tomorrow - I think. And you?’

‘I don’t know.’

Tom went out into the hall.

‘Damn, my jacket’s still wet.’ He pulled on his jacket and then his mackintosh. He kicked off the slippers and put on his shoes. ‘Funny, I put the slippers on without thinking. I suppose nobody bothers now.’

He picked up Greg’s umbrella. ‘Why, there’s my umbrella in the stand, I left it here - that other time — ’ He put the two umbrellas under his arm.

Emma was standing at the sitting-room door. He said, ‘Is it still raining?’

‘I think it’s stopped. Well, goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’

Tom opened the front door. He said, ‘Would you walk with me as far as the back gate?’

They walked in silence across the wet lawn and along the soft mossy path under the trees whose wet leaves still dripped. Tom opened the gate.

‘Emma.’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘All right?’

‘Yes. Goodnight.’

When Emma came back to the Slipper House he found Pearl sitting on the stairs.

‘Let’s go up, Pearl.’

‘No, I like it here.’

Emma sat down on the stairs below her. He kissed the side of her knee through her dress.

‘Perhaps sitting on the stairs suits us.’

‘It suits me anyway.’

‘You’re a funny girl.’

‘Almost as good as no girl at all.’

Their unexpected love-making had come about because both were in despair. These despairs were the occasion of an untypical recklessness. Pearl had waited all day for Hattie, first confidently, then with mounting grief and surmises. She tried to occupy herself by packing up Hattie’s clothes, but kept stopping to look out of the window, expecting to see her come running with flying hair. She had seen Hattie depart helplessly in tears, overpowered by John Robert and unable to resist. She imagined (rightly) that in the morning Hattie would be in command of herself, pugnacious, rebellious, summoning up a kind of cold fierce resolve, rarely displayed, which Pearl knew she possessed. Pearl did not imagine that Rozanov would lock her up. Whatever his general intentions, he could hardly prevent her, on that day at least, from coming back. About that Pearl felt fairly certain; and she did not believe that John Robert was likely to set off for London or the airport in the middle of the night. About other things she could only try not to be too terribly wretched. She had, she realized, made a fatal mistake, indeed two fatal mistakes, in telling John Robert that she loved him, and in letting him know that she had perceived his feeling for Hattie; and she had blurted these dreadful truths out in such a crude ungentle ugly way. (In fact Pearl’s indiscretion affected her own life and the lives of others more profoundly than she ever knew, since the shock of her unspeakable knowledge of it provided John Robert with an extra, perhaps decisive, motive for telling his love to Hattie.) Pearl knew the philosopher well, his vanity, his dignity, his prudishness, his secretiveness. Against all those she had offended and could scarcely be forgiven. At hopeful moments (early in the day), she thought that she might, for Hattie’s sake, be tolerated. At less hopeful moments she got such meagre comfort as she could from reflecting that John Robert had in any case, and without her foolish words, already decided, or feigned to himself, that Pearl was ‘corrupt’, ‘no fit person’ and so on. He had decided to get rid of me, thought Pearl, and any show of loyalty to me from Hattie would make him more determined. He has suddenly come to see me as in the way. In the way of what? Here she checked her reflections, since whatever that future might prove to be it did not seem to contain her.

Moreover, as the day went on and Hattie did not come, Pearl began to imagine how Hattie’s resistance might have been broken down, how Hattie’s mind might have been poisoned. Could Hattie be brainwashed, made to believe that Pearl had betrayed Rozanov’s plans, had plotted with George McCaffrey, had deceived Hattie and was altogether a different person from the one she seemed to be? Was such a total change of view possible? Could Hattie be thus led to think that it was time to give up a childish fancy for her old nursemaid? Hattie had never resisted Rozanov’s will. She had, it was a fact, gone away with him last night. Was not the picture of a rebellious Hattie speaking up for Pearl quite unrealistic, a wishful dream? When Pearl reflected how loyal she had been, how totally she had given over her life to those two people, she felt an anger against Rozanov which gave a little relief to her pain. But the pain was terrible. Her love for the monster raged in her heart, and the more she rehearsed his sins the more she loved him: she loved him, protectively, tenderly, forgivingly with an absolute self-breaking sweetness as if she had made him up or he were her child. She held him secretly, possessively, in her heart with such a strength of passion that at times it was hard to believe that he was a separate person with other concerns who knew and cared nothing about how she felt. The desire to tell love is a natural ingredient of love itself; love feels it is a benefit, a blessing, a gift that must be given. No doubt the desire to tell Rozanov, always present, had grown stronger in her heart, and with the shock of his attack on her, became irresistible: the desire by some sort of passionate magic to join together the captive loved image and the terrible free real reality. That was one pain. The other, perhaps even worse, pain was her love for Hattie, not a lurid secret devotion of the imagination, but a real bond, a daily bread love, a lived reality of family life such as Pearl had never known before: an absolute entwining of two lives, a connection the breaking of which had seemed inconceivable. This too, as the day went interminably on, she almost cursed. How could she have become so blindly attached to what she could so suddenly and so completely lose?

When Emma rang up, about five o’clock, Pearl was sure it must be Hattie, and this disappointment made a final degree of desperation, a final signal. She had in fact become, alone in the house so long and with such thoughts, appalled and frightened. She had not thought much about Emma, she had indeed very little conception of him, but now she found herself needing his presence. She needed help, she needed somebody, and Emma, proposing himself, was suddenly clear as the only possible person. What followed was a part of her decision to abandon hope, though this did not prevent her from almost dying of fright when she heard Tom enter and thought it was John Robert.

Emma’s despair and consequent recklessness was of dual origin. He was upset and annoyed by Tom’s failure to appear in London and his failure to write or telephone. Of course, since he had returned to London on Sunday, he knew nothing about the Gazette article and the later dramas. He did not think that Tom was ill; at any rate, if illness was its cause, Tom would surely by now have explained his absence. The silence must be hostile, it must express an alienation which was entirely unjust. Emma could have telephoned Travancore Avenue, but felt too stiff and proud to do so. Besides, a messy telephone call would leave him even more disturbed. He reflected often upon the night which they had spent together and wondered whether a retrospective disgust at that episode was what was rendering his friend absent and silent. Emma had by now firmly classified that night as, as he had put it, a hapax legomenon; nothing like that would ever happen again. And yet he could not help thinking about it and experiencing, in relation to Tom, that mysterious and terrible and well-known yearning of one human body for another, a condition which got worse as the week continued without sign or sight.

The other matter was the question of singing. Emma had not had the courage to say anything to Mr Hanway. He had decided to write to him a letter, but had not written. At last he rang up to cancel his next lesson, but still without giving any hint of the dreadful decision he was in process of taking. For it was, now he was so close up against it, a dreadful decision. He began to realize how deeply important his gift was to him, how connected with his confidence against the world. Mr Hanway was important, the guarantor of the well-being, the purity and continuity of his talent. He had sometimes thought of his voice as a burdensome secret, but it was also a valuable life-giving secret, so long as the question of giving it up, for so long vaguely present, did not seriously arise. Of course it was clear to Emma that it was his destiny to be a historian, that that admitted of no doubt was made plain by the merest flicker of the unreal hypothesis: give up history. He was to be, with all his intellect and all his nerves and his desires and all his energy and all his soul, a scholar, a polymath. He would, as a good historian must, know everything. Herein he could see and understand and emulate excellence. Such a dedicated life must preclude serious singing; and of unserious singing he had been irrevocably trained to be incapable. So … never to sing again? Never?

Emma had intended to come to Ennistone to look for Tom, to walk in upon him indignantly, but the image of Pearl, which had certainly not been absent from his mind, began, upon the railway journey, to grow stronger. It was some time since Emma had kissed a girl, and he did not view lightly the matter of having kissed Pearl on the previous Saturday evening when rather drunk. In fact the event was remarkable. On the other hand he did not know what to make of it either. As the train approached Ennistone, the whole idea of coming to look for Tom began to seem rather stupid and dangerous. At the station, on the spur of the moment, he rang the Slipper House number which he found in the book under McCaffrey.

At the Slipper House he kissed Pearl on arrival, and after her account of the recent happenings kissed her again. What happened after that surprised them both. It was less than satisfactory because of Emma’s lack of competence and Pearl’s determination not to risk pregnancy. It was momentous, however, and left them both a little dazed.

Emma, sitting below her on the stairs, said, ‘Perhaps Hattie will come tomorrow.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘They’ll have gone tomorrow.’

‘Then she’ll write.’

‘No. And even if she writes - it will already be too late.’

Pearl had of course not told Emma about her own feelings for John Robert or what she surmised of his for Hattie.

‘I can’t see why you think so. All right. John Robert said your job was at an end and said all those disobliging things, but he may change his mind after he’s calmed down and talked to Hattie. He can’t stop her from seeing you. And your relation with her is bound to change as she grows up anyway.’

‘I can’t be … related to Hattie … in any other way,’ said Pearl. This awful idea had only just occurred to her.

‘Why? I think that is nonsense. You think John Robert has really turned her against you?’

‘Even if he can’t persuade her that I’m a horrible person, he will have told her that she doesn’t need a maid any more, and that I am - just that.’

‘But she won’t think so!’

‘Oh - she - I don’t know, I don’t know.’ And Pearl began to cry. She had not cried all day. She put her head against the wall and cried into the wallpaper.

‘Oh don’t, don’t !’ said Emma. He knelt on the stairs and tried to put his arms round her, but she thrust him away. He said, ‘With Hattie - I feel sure - there isn’t any “too late”. Don’t cry. God, I wish there was something to drink in the house. Let’s go out to the Albert. Damn, it’ll be closed.’

‘You’d better go,’ said Pearl. She mopped her eyes on the hem of her dress.

‘Why can’t I stay?’

‘No.’

‘I want to be with you tomorrow. I’ll come back.’

‘Better not, whatever’s left for me - it’s in waiting alone.’

‘Yes - I see. But this, between us, is something.’

‘Oh, something. Anything is something.’

‘Well, you can’t make it nothing. I appear to have entered your life.’

‘There’s no such place. You’re just interested in this business.’

‘Well, it’s your business. I’m interested like in your green eyes.’

‘Don’t let’s have a stupid conversation. We aren’t anything to each other and can’t be.’

‘Why not, for heaven’s sake, because of class?’

‘Don’t be silly!’

‘Pearl, don’t be destructive, let’s just see.’

‘You’re in love with Tom McCaffrey.’

‘Well, maybe, but that’s just personal, subjective. I feel love for you.’

‘You don’t say you love me.’

‘I’m being curiously precise. I am grateful to you. And I do love you. And you are awfully interesting. And I want to protect you from all pains and terrors.’

Pearl, who had been staring down into the hall, turned and looked at him. He had resumed his narrow rimless glasses which enlarged his eyes. His hair, still damp and darkened, streaked away down into the disordered collar of his shirt.

‘Don’t look so mournful, girl.’

‘Was that you singing that night?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought it was. You have such a strange high voice - but beautiful.’

‘Yes. But what about us.’

‘I think I can only love my own sex. Like you. Not that anything has ever come of it.’

‘Do you love her - Hattie - like that?’

‘No. Hattie’s special. And what’s “like that” anyway? Everyone’s special.’

‘Exactly. Do you still want me to go?’

‘Yes.’

‘We won’t lose each other?’

‘I suppose not. I don’t know.’

Ten minutes later Emma had left the house. But he did not go to Travancore Avenue. He spent the night in the Ennistone Royal Hotel and returned to London early on Saturday morning.

What Brian McCaffrey later called ‘the family court-martial of George’ came about by accident.

The funeral of William Eastcote took place late on Saturday afternoon. There is a Quaker graveyard, a touching ‘dormitory’ with low uniformly patterned headstones, next to the Meeting House, but this was filled up in the last century, and the old Quaker families now bury their dead with the rest of us in the municipal graveyard adjacent to St Olaf’s Church in Burkestown. The coffin was taken there privately on Saturday morning, and shortly before the burial the Friends gathered in the little all-purpose chapel to conduct their ‘funeral meeting’ which on such occasions, according to Quaker custom, is the same in form as the ordinary Sunday meetings. The gathering was not large. All the Ennistone Friends were there, and a few others including Milton Eastcote. No one was moved to speak. Any eulogy of the deceased was felt to be unnecessary and out of place. Many people wept quietly in the silence. The coffin was then carried to the grave by Percy Bowcock, Robin Osmore, Dr Roach, Nicky Roach, Nathaniel Romage and Milton Eastcote. As the Gazette put it, ‘Bill the Lizard was mourned by everyone in Ennistone.’ Certainly the universal respect and affection in which he was held was evidenced by the arrival at the scene of nearly two thousand people who stood in the graveyard and upon the grass slopes above it (beyond which is the railway). This crowd stood in complete and impressive silence through the duration (almost half an hour) of the meeting, and only pushed forward a little during the interment. Afterwards, and quite spontaneously (it is not known who started it) this large crowd sang Jerusalem, a favourite of William’s and a song which, for some reason, everyone in Ennistone knows. On this moving and memorable occasion I (N) was present. Also present were Alex, Brian, Gabriel, Tom and Adam McCaffrey and Ruby. There was a sensation when George was seen in the crowd accompanied by Diane Sedleigh: this was the first recorded occasion of George being seen in public with his mistress. There was a rumour that Stella McCaffrey, in disguise, had also been seen, but this was false.

After the burial, and the spectacle, judged touchingly appropriate by her fellow citizens, of Anthea’s tears at the graveside, the mourners dispersed, some to go to the Institute, others to proceed to various public houses, there to reminisce about the good deeds of the deceased, and also to discuss the will, details of which had been broadcast by one of Robin Osmore’s clerks who had joined the considerable contingent who had repaired to the Green Man which was close by. William had left numerous bequests to friends and relations and to national and local charities. The Meeting House received a legacy ‘for maintaining the fabric’ large enough to dispel Nathaniel Romage’s anxiety for some time to come. Monies also went to the wasteland community centre, the Asian Centre, the Boys’ Club, the Salvation Army, and various other good causes and hard cases. However, a large slice of the cake, including the fine house in The Crescent, went to Anthea Eastcote; and for this partiality, the virtuous departed was soon being criticized by those who, while sincerely admiring him, were getting a little tired of hearing him praised.

The McCaffrey contingent, who were (except for George) standing together, were all in different ways deeply grieved at the death of one whom they had always regarded as ‘an example of goodness’ and ‘a place of healing’. Tom and Alex both privately wished that it had occurred to them to expose some of their recent troubles to William. Brian thought he ought to have consulted William about what to do should he lose his job. Gabriel felt that a silent guarantor of the reality of goodness had been taken away from her vulnerable world. She loved William very much and now wondered why she had never seemed to have time to see him. Adam regretted that because of a cricket match he had refused an invitation to tea at 34 The Crescent. In spite of their grief, the various McCaffreys shared that curious energy, almost a kind of elation, which survivors, if not too terribly bereaved, feel after a funeral. So that when Alex suggested that they should all go and swim, and then come back to Belmont and have a drink, this seemed a good idea, and it turned out that they had all, in anticipation of just this period after the solemnity, brought their swimming costumes.

When they reached the Institute they found the place in a turmoil. ‘Have you seen?’ shouted Nesta Wiggins running past them just outside. (She and her father had of course attended the funeral.) She did not say what, but they soon saw for themselves. The ‘Little Teaser’, or Lud’s Rill, had suddenly decided to change itself into a powerful geyser, sending a spout of scalding hot water up more than thirty feet into the air, ‘higher than last time’, it was gleefully reported. It was a cool sunny evening and a light wind was distributing the fallout over Diana’s Garden and the pavement which divided it from the pool. A plume of steam hung about the tall magical spout, around which, allowing for changes in the direction of the wind, Institute attendants had erected barriers on either side. The water, rushing up, made a fierce swishing sound like tearing silk which added to the uncanny frightening charm of the phenomenon.

Behind the barriers a crowd had gathered, watching the antics of the great jet which played unevenly, eliciting ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ such as are to be heard at a display of fireworks. Alarming rumours were also rife. Some people were saying that scalding water was spreading through the whole Institute system, running into the baths in the Rooms and likely to drown unwary people bathing there as had, it was alleged, happened on the previous occasion of such an outburst. A number of swimmers had hastily emerged from the Outdoor Pool, having conceived or been offered the idea that the whole pool would soon be filled with boiling water, the influx of which they of course persuaded themselves that they could now feel. Others, more sceptical, continued to swim. Various speculations were also being eagerly discussed concerning the possible cause of the amazing phenomenon. Druids and poltergeists were mentioned. Someone had a theory about earthquakes, another that it was caused by the Russians, another that it was to do with a Flying Saucer which someone (a respectable youth, newly apprenticed to Dominic Wiggins) had seen two nights ago over the Common. It was recalled (wrongly) that Lud’s Rill had behaved in exactly this way on the occasion of the previous saucer, the one which William Eastcote had seen. It was then observed with triumph that the latest saucer had appeared exactly on the night that William died. All were agreed that the portent indicated that Ennistone was going to have another of its ‘funny times’, that this time had indeed already started, initiated some said by the recent weird goings-on at the Slipper House. Meanwhile Vernon Chalmers, the Director of the Institute, was walking about among the crowds and trying to reassure everyone, explaining that the scalding fount was on a quite different water system from that which served the pools and the rooms. (Vernon was also telling himself that really the Source itself ought to be open to the public, as it used to be before the first war, so that the people could see for themselves how everything worked and how safe and well-controlled the waters were. But certain prudential considerations operated against this idea; and in any case Vernon, who felt very possessive about the Institute with which he had been connected all his life since his father had been a water engineer, felt a certain reluctance to letting the common herd tramp into that sanctum sanctorum.) The citizens listened to his reassurances and then returned ardently to the most gruesome and ridiculous hypotheses.

The McCaffreys, after watching the irregular play of the huge steamy jet, quickly attired themselves for swimming and dived into the pool where the temperature was precisely what it always was, between 26° and 28° Centigrade. Tom swam across the pool and back and then got out and rubbed his long wet hair into a frizzy mop. He dressed and went back to the crowd beside the geyser and pushed his way forward to the barrier. Here by holding out his hand he could feel, at turns of the wind, scalding drops falling on to his skin like red-hot pennies. He felt unbearably restless and miserable. He had waited up for Emma at Travancore Avenue but his friend had not come. Tom felt abandoned and jealous and confused, all his emotions and nerves lashed and raw. He was embarrassed by his black eye which, although only slightly discoloured, was able to attract attention. Brian in his blunt way had said, ‘What’s the matter with you, been fighting?’ Tom said, ‘I fell and knocked my head on a chair.’ Brian said, ‘Drunk again, I suppose.’

But what filled Tom’s soul, painfully expanding it as it were through sheer anguish to a size never attained before, was the question of Hattie, or rather the fact that there was no question any more. The thing was over. Tomorrow Tom would have to go back to London and resume his work, see his tutor, go to lectures, write essays, and go on in the old way as if nothing had happened. So much had happened which seemed like a bad dream. Yet also it was not a dream but a terrible overriding reality, the permanently changed reality of his unhappy being, tortured by yearning and remorse. They were gone, that demonic pair, and he would never set eyes on either of them again.

But how could he return to his ordinary life, to his work, to the, as they now seemed, insipid childish pleasures of his London student world? He had been bewitched. For a short time he had lived with gods or fairies. He had been summoned to a destiny, presented with an ordeal, and he had dully, casually, failed to understand, failed to respond, failed to see. Even at the beginning, when it had seemed important, he had been only grossly excited, flattered and amused. He recalled John Robert’s huge bulk in that little room and how surprised and alarmed and gratified he had been when at last he understood the strange man’s purpose. And he had taken those facile emotions to be something remarkable in his life.

The image of Hattie shimmered before him now, occupying its own space, radiating its own light. He saw her silver-white blond hair cunningly pinned up or descending in amazingly long plaits or as he had seen it at the sea spread out like silk over the back of her dress. He saw her pale white-mottled eyes, gazing sarcastically or else gentle and truthful. He saw her long legs and her stockings with darker-coloured tops. He thought, how can I have lost her, how did it happen? I behaved like an oaf, like a cad, like a bloody fool. At the same time he could clearly remember, though he could not feel or inhabit, the fact that he had actually considered Hattie, looked her over and rejected her! Dully and casually he had turned away, failing to see that the being confronting him was a princess.

But she’s a false princess, he thought. I am in a state of temporary insanity, I must be. They are demons, both of them, wonderful and beautiful and not quite real. Rozanov is a magician who took me to his palace and showed me a maiden. But she was something that he had made, invented out of magic stuff, so as to ensnare me. And they have gone away and I am still ensnared, they’ve gone and I suffer. Oh how much I want to see her now, he thought, how much I want to tell her how it all came about. Yet how did it, what did I do wrong and when did I do wrong? How happy I could be if I could only see her and explain that I wasn’t so stupid and so oafish, or wasn’t any more, and that I was sorry and … But that’s impossible, I never will see her again. She has been removed into the invisible world, and because of her I shall be sick forever after.

‘Oh Tom, I forgot, I’ve brought Judy Osmore’s dress. Look what I’ve done. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad.’ Gabriel brought out the dress and displayed it.

They had removed themselves to Belmont and were sitting in the drawing-room having drinks. Adam, who had decided to run back to Como to fetch Zed, had not yet returned.

Gabriel had done a wonderful job on the dress. The tears on the shoulders which had looked so awful to Emma were only split seams and were easily mended. The wine stain on the front was indelible. But clever Gabriel had managed to blend it in to the irregular blotchy pattern of the material by discreetly dyeing surrounding, and other, areas with different strengths of tea. The dress certainly looked a bit different, but the stain could now be accepted as part of the pattern. It might even be said to look nicer, Gabriel thought. She had taken a lot of trouble with the dress and was pleased with herself, happy to have been of service to Tom, and expectant of praise.

Tom however accepted this masterpiece with a vague ‘Oh yes - thanks — ’ He crumpled up the carefully ironed dress into a clumsy ball and stuffed it into the bag which Gabriel had provided.

Gabriel retired to the window and looked out, concealing sudden tears. She knew her ‘weepy’ tendency annoyed Alex. She was upset in any case because Adam’s birthday (last Saturday) had been spoilt because Brian refused to take her and Adam out to lunch at the Running Dog, an unprecedented treat which Adam had asked for. Brian had said that it was ridiculous to spend money on going to snobbish restaurants to have rotten food thrown at one by sneering waiters. Brian had also vetoed Adam’s request for a ‘malachite egg’. ‘What on earth put that idea into his head? At his age I hadn’t even heard of malachite. I’m not going to encourage him in expensive useless tastes!’ But Gabriel had secretly bought a (small) malachite egg, and was now in an impossible position, as she dared not confess this extravagance to Brian, and realized it would be immoral to ask Adam to keep it a secret. The guilty egg, in a cardboard box, meanwhile reposed at the back of the wardrobe.

‘What is that thing up in the ginkgo tree?’ Alex had moved to the window.

Brian followed her. ‘Some sort of plant.’

‘Plant?’

‘I mean like mistletoe.’

‘That’s not mistletoe.’

‘I said like mistletoe.’

Looking over their shoulders, Tom saw Emma’s (or rather Judy’s) blond wig hanging conspicuous and odd among the branches.

‘It doesn’t look like a plant. It’s more like a cardboard box or an old sack. Would one of you boys climb up to see?’

‘Bags I not. I’m too old. Tom will.’

‘I’ll get it down,’ said Tom.

‘But if it is a plant, leave it.’

Tom had lost all sense of time. It already seemed a week since his fight with Emma and Pearl’s news that ‘those two’ had departed. Tom wanted to feel now that Hattie and John Robert had been gone a long time. He wanted mountains of time, mountains of experience, to divide him from those dreadful events. Tom was in process of revising his past so as to explain his suffering. So much misery must imply either a dreadful loss or a dreadful crime or both. But that was, was it not, long ago. He stood, clutching the bag with Judy’s dress, and gazing from the window at the green roof of the Slipper House. He thought, they’ve gone. I needn’t hide. But already the hiding was unintelligible and long past.

Adam slipped into the room carrying Zed (who had difficulty with the stairs). He set the little dog down, and Zed ran and hopped across the carpet, wrinkling up his nose in what Adam called his social smile and greeting everyone in turn with lowered head and white tail-wagging rump. Tom squatted and caressed the dog. Zed rolled over in ecstasy. Tom thought, how innocent I once was, and could have been made so happy simply by this.

Alex was thinking about Bill the Lizard and how much, she felt now, she had loved him and relied on his presence, and how stupidly little she had seen of him. He was to be always there, making life more significant and secure, in a way which did not need to be continually checked. Alex had a strange terrible black feeling which she understood as the realization that nothing of equal significance now separated her from her own death. There was no more stuff of life, no more ardently desired events, no more wise and beloved older persons between her and the grave. Her love for her family, always a diminishing consolation, was invaded by pain, as by the scalding water which people imagined was going to flow through all the pipes of the Institute. And this morning she had received a horrible and menacing letter from the Town Hall, it said, ‘Dear Mrs McCaffrey. We are sorry to hear that you have been seriously annoyed by a vicious and savage fox. It has come to our notice that there is a fox’s earth in your garden, and our pest control officer will attend at your convenience to deal with the matter. There will be no loss of amenity. The exits of the earth will be stopped and poison gas introduced. You will appreciate that, in view of the possibility of rabies, we have a responsibility to act promptly in such cases, and we look forward to receiving your notification of a suitable date.’ Alex had written in reply that there must be some error, she had not seen any foxes, savage or otherwise, and there was no fox’s earth in her garden. She felt frightened and hunted, as if it were she herself who was to be locked in and gassed. She felt angry too. How had they found out? Ruby must have spread the story around. Alex had wanted to cry out angrily to Ruby, but had found herself strangely and ominously unable to. She had stared at Ruby. Ruby had stared back. And then something else had happened which was senseless and ill-omened and weird. Alex began telling it to Brian.

Tom, sitting on the carpet with Zed and Adam, playing listlessly with the dog, half attended to Alex’s chatter.

Alex was saying, ‘I really don’t know what’s happening to the town these days, and with the Teaser shooting up like that, it almost makes one believe that we all have to go crazy at intervals around here, it’s probably something to do with the Druids and the Romans and those old pagan gods or something. I always felt those two girls in the Slipper House were part of it somehow, all the trouble they caused last Saturday. There was something unsavoury about those two. Thank God they’ve gone.’

‘Have they?’ said Brian. ‘When?’

‘At least I hope so. This morning early I found that the keys had been put through the letter box in an envelope. No covering letter, no “thank you”, just the keys. I went over of course to see if the place was all right, and they’d cleared all their stuff up and packed it into a trunk and suitcases labelled “to be called for”. The house looked in order except for some sort of brown mess on the parquet in the hall. So I thought I’d seen the last of them, but no, about an hour later I heard someone come running down the side passage to the garage. I looked out of the window and lo and behold it was little Missie.’

Tom, who had been listening more attentively, gasped and turned, his face flushing violently.

‘There she was with her hair all undone running across the grass like a mad thing. And it annoyed me that she came in from the front, they weren’t supposed to come in our way, but by the back gate. I thought I’d go down and tell her off and find out why they’d left so suddenly, I think they might have told me just out of courtesy, and you know they never thanked me or invited me round for as much as a cup of tea, the maid is a coarse type of course but the girl is supposed to be grown-up, they say she’s a bit retarded and I suppose that’s it, anyway I went out and there she was ringing the bell and pulling the door and calling out at the top of her voice. Then she began to run round the house looking in the windows and trying to open them and shouting, like some sort of little wild animal. She ran right round the house and then she saw me and I said, “Can I help you!” and she said, “Where’s Pearl?” just like that. That’s the maid, and I said, “She’s gone, she returned the keys and all your things are packed up,” and I was going to ask her when the stuff would be cleared out and then I saw that she was completely distraught, she’d been crying and was starting to cry again, and she just stared at me as if she’d gone crazy, and then without a word she ran away down the garden toward the back gate with her hair flying and that’s the last I saw of her. What do you make of that?’

‘She’s not mentally ill, she’s just very shy,’ said Gabriel. ‘She seemed perfectly normal when we were at the sea.’ Gabriel lit a cigarette, then put it out quickly in an ashtray.

‘I thought she was a bit slow,’ said Brian. ‘She never had a word to say for herself all that day.’

‘She’s certainly very peculiar,’ said Alex.

‘Poor child,’ said Gabriel. ‘I blame Professor Rozanov, they say he neglected her terribly, he doesn’t like children.’

‘When was this?’ said Tom. ‘This morning?’

‘Yes.’

Tom, kneeling, sat back on his heels. He began saying out aloud, ‘Wednesday, Thursday, Friday …’ If Hattie was still here … what did it mean? When had Pearl said they were gone, on which day did Rozanov take Hattie away, what happened last night? Was Alex simply mistaken, were they dealing with a ghost, what did it all mean? Above all, what ought he to do, was there anything which he should do now, immediately perhaps? Did this make no difference or all the difference? Now it seemed there had been some peace in believing it over. Well, was it not over, in spite of this awful visitation? How horrible it all was, this thing of her coming back, so senseless, so perfectly nightmarish …

At this moment George came into the room.

Although the drawing-room door was shut, George could well have heard their voices as he came up the stairs. Whether he had or not, he enacted surprise.

‘Why, a family scene, drinks too, may I have one?’

‘Hello, darling,’ said Alex, as if she had expected him (which she had not). She did not normally call George ‘darling’ in public, or in private, and the endearment rang out as a kind of proclamation or challenge. She said to Tom, ‘Get your brother a drink.’

‘Whisky, Tom dear,’ said George, taking the endearment cue from Alex and smiling.

Tom poured out the whisky and handed it to him. He said, ‘Is Rozanov still here?’

George said, ‘No, he is far off, he has departed, he is gone from us, he is no more seen, he is obliterated and blotted out, he has been removed into invisibility without thought or motion, the only thing, the necessary thing, in short he has gone.’

‘He has left Ennistone?’

‘He and the little charmer both. What a little girl that was, what an ivory head, what a milky body, what great mauve eyes and how they could flash! What breasts, what pale thighs, and how she fought and wept and kissed.’

‘What are you saying,’ said Tom.

‘He’s implying that he’s had her,’ said Brian. ‘Untrue, of course. George lives in a fantasy world. Typical.’

‘Cheers, Alex,’ said George.

‘Cheers, darling,’ said Alex.

‘Cheers, Gabriel, cheers, sweet Gabriel.’ George raised his glass.

‘Cheers — ’ said Gabriel, flushing with startled pleasure and smiling and lifting her glass.

It was suddenly evident that Ruby was in the room. She must have followed George in and had sat down, a big brown spectator, on a chair against the wall.

‘Look who’s here,’ said Alex, but she did not tell Ruby to leave.

‘I suggest George goes now,’ said Brian. ‘Go on, get out, go.’

‘It’s my house,’ said Alex. ‘If you don’t like it, you go.’

‘All right, let’s play it differently,’ said Brian. ‘I think we’ve got a right to ask George some questions.’

They had all been standing, with the exception of Ruby, and of Adam who was still sitting on the floor. George now sat down near the fireplace. His face had the plump exalted tender shining look which Tom had seen on it on Thursday evening and which had made him wonder if his brother were mad.

‘Oh, what’s the use of asking George questions,’ said Tom. ‘He’ll just tell lies and I don’t blame him!’

‘You don’t blame him?’ said Brian, turning to Tom. Brian was by now clearly very angry, but controlled.

‘Well, I do, but oh what the hell, what a muddle, you can’t mend it or clear it by asking a few questions.’

‘I don’t quite know what you mean — ’

‘Let’s question Tom,’ said George. ‘Ask him where he was on Thursday night.’

‘Well, where were you?’ said Brian.

George said, ‘I suppose you all know that Rozanov offered the little girl to Tom. Did you know that, Gabriel?’

‘No,’ said Gabriel, again red.

‘Didn’t you read about it in the newspaper?’

‘Yes, but it all sounded like nonsense, I didn’t understand it, I didn’t even try to — ’

‘You ought to try to understand things,’ said George, smiling.

Gabriel said timidly, ‘Yes.’

‘Rozanov was very angry with Tom, he wrote me a letter about it.’

‘Rozanov wrote to you about me?’ said Tom.

‘Yes, he thought you had behaved very badly. You see, that was what that riotous party was all about, which people blamed me for. Tom, with his usual discretion and good manners, decided to serenade the lady with his drunken friends.’

‘That’s not so — ’ said Tom.

‘Isn’t it?’ said Brian. ‘Where were you on Thursday night?’

‘With Diane Sedleigh.’

‘There you are,’ said George.

‘But not like that.’

‘You seemed to be on very intimate terms when I arrived,’ said George. ‘You were reeking of face powder.’

Gabriel said, ‘Oh — ’

‘Nothing happened between me and Mrs Sedleigh,’ said Tom. ‘You know that. You’re confusing everything, because you want to cover up your own beastly crimes.’

‘I don’t know what you did with Rozanov’s little girl,’ said George, ‘but it certainly looks as if you behaved like a cad and she behaved like a — ’

‘Stop,’ said Tom.

‘You can’t now claim to be a defender of her honour. Isn’t it strange? It seems that Tom can do anything and still be Sir Galahad, and any ordinary mistake of mine is labelled a crime. You heard him just now talking about my crimes.’

‘I don’t mean anything grand, just malicious lies!’

‘George brings disgrace on the family — ’ said Brian, finding himself incoherent and made angrier thereby.

‘I agree with George,’ said Alex.

‘So do I,’ said Gabriel, ‘I feel George has come back to us, ever since he rescued Zed, he is saved, he’s back, we lost him, it was our fault, we all exaggerate what he does, everyone exaggerates, we pounce on every little thing and call him wicked.’

‘Isn’t it wicked to …’ Brian began.

‘It’s like a conspiracy,’ said Gabriel, unconsciously waving her hand about.

‘Isn’t it wicked to try to kill one’s wife? Wouldn’t you think I was wicked if I tried to kill you?’

‘But he didn’t. It was an accident.’

‘Then why hasn’t Stella come back? Think that one out. Stella’s afraid. That brave strong woman is afraid.’

‘I don’t know why Stella hasn’t come back and neither do you. I don’t see why Stella should never be blamed.’

‘I know why you’re against Stella — ’

‘Oh stop, stop!’ said Tom, holding his head.

Alex, her eyes shining, murmured, ‘Go on.’

‘It was an accident,’ said Gabriel, ‘and so was the Roman glass.’

‘Oh hang the Roman glass,’ said Brian.

Gabriel went on, ‘George hasn’t really done anything bad at all, it’s we who are living in a fantasy world when we blame him so. Perhaps he just drinks a bit, that’s all. But we drink, look at us now. He’s really quite an ordinary person.’

‘I don’t think that’s quite true,’ said Alex.

‘I don’t mean it in a nasty way,’ said Gabriel.

‘I’m sure you don’t,’ said Brian. ‘There you were, down at the seaside, exposing your breasts to him.’

‘What?’

‘You were pretending to look after Zed and you undid your blouse to let George see your breasts.’

‘I didn’t.’

During the argument Adam had crawled away from the centre of the room and was sitting in a corner with Zed curled up beside him. Zed, not unaware of hearing his name mentioned at intervals, suddenly uncurled himself and trotted across the carpet straight to George. George promptly picked him up and set him on his knee. Adam then jumped up and followed Zed, posting himself on the floor near George’s feet. George laughed.

‘There!’ said Alex.

‘You - you bewitch - everyone — ’ said Brian, hardly able to speak.

‘I don’t think George wants to be an ordinary person,’ said Tom.

Gabriel said, ‘I didn’t mean it like - and I didn’t - do that - what Brian said — ’

‘George,’ said Brian, ‘let me ask you straight, and under God or whatever you believe in, whether you did or did not try to kill Stella that night. Now tell the truth for once, if you dare to, if you have any guts, if you’re a man and not just a mean vicious little rat.’

There was a moment’s silence. George suddenly lost his look of bland assurance, the ‘shining’ look which so much puzzled Tom. He said, ‘I’m … not sure … I can’t remember …’

‘Well, you’d bloody better remember, hadn’t you,’ said Brian. ‘It is important, you know. At least it’s important to me to know whether or not I have a murderer for a brother!’

‘He hasn’t killed anybody,’ said Alex to Brian, ‘he hasn’t tried to kill anybody, and he wouldn’t and couldn’t! Just stop attacking him, will you! Can’t you be charitable for once? You think you’re the righteous one, you seem to me just a pharisee, you can’t even be decently polite to your wife in public.’

Gabriel started to cry.

‘Oh go away all of you!’ said Alex. ‘Not you,’ she said to George.

George put Zed down on the floor. Adam rolled away and got up. Before she became too upset to do so, Gabriel had been observing her son and trying to decide to tell him to go out into the garden. He might be damaged by hearing the grown-ups fight so, but equally perhaps by a peremptory banishment. Adam had at first seemed bright-eyed, rather amused, suddenly resembling his grandmother. Now however, near to tears, he picked up Zed and ran to Gabriel.

Gabriel made for the door. Brian followed saying, ‘Oh hang it all!’ Tom looked at George.

George was sitting with his hands squarely on his knees, with vague unfocused eyes, his lips parted, frowning with puzzlement.

Alex said, ‘Go, Tom, go, dear, I’m not angry with you.’

Tom went out, closing the door. He went down the stairs. The front door stood open where the Brian McCaffreys, in their disordered retreat, had failed to shut it. Tom turned toward the back door. He emerged into the garden and ran across the grass to the Slipper House. Like Hattie, he rang the bell, tried the doors, peered through the windows. No one.

It was beginning to rain. Tom ran on along the slippery mossy path under the trees and out of the back gate. He closed the back gate. He stood in the street with the rain quietly soaking his long hair and running down his face like tears, and he held his head firmly between his two hands, trying to think.

As the door closed after Tom, Alex said to Ruby, who was still sitting on the chair near the door:

‘How dare you sit in my presence and how dare you come into the drawing-room and listen to our family talk! Go away at once, please.’

As Ruby rose, George said, ‘Ruby love, be a dear and bring us some sandwiches, would you? You know the ones I like, tomato and cucumber, and cress and cream cheese.’

Ruby vanished.

‘I’m frightened of her,’ said Alex. ‘She’s become different, as if there were an evil spirit in her. She’s even become larger, like a sort of big robot.’

‘She’s practically one of the family,’ said George, ‘and she’s old now. She knows all about us. It’s her one interest in life.’

‘Yes, and she tells everybody! She gossips spitefully about us at the Institute. I’m sure she told someone about your looking at that girl through the glasses. She saw from the garden. She’s everywhere.’

‘Oh never mind,’ said George. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He sneezed.

‘You’ve got a cold.’

‘Yes, I got it from Tom.’

‘I think that Gabriel is the silliest wettest human-being I’ve ever met. And she’s in love with you.’

‘Yes. That doesn’t matter either.’

‘Sit down,’ said Alex. ‘Why did you come now?’

‘Because of Bill the Lizard.’

‘I thought so.’

She sat down near to George and looked at him quietly. It was a long time since she had done that. George looked older and almost strange to her in a way she could not measure. Perhaps some general idea which she had had of his face was now suddenly seen to be out of date. His hair had grown a little longer than usual (he had not been to the barber) and showed daubs of grey at the temples. There were new discoloured wrinkles round his eyes. He was again looking worried. The charming boyish look was in abeyance. Now the older face appeared, George as he would be when he was sixty or seventy, less plump, more gaunt, more lined. The lines were already faintly sketched on the brow which had been smooth so long. Alex looked, feeling the pain of her love for him. She thought, I have somehow relied on George being invulnerable, untouchable, youthful, somehow like myself, a guarantor of myself. But now he looks just like an ordinary worried muddled mediocre shop-soiled man. She saw his shabby suit, his dirty shirt, his need of a shave.

Meanwhile George was looking at Alex and thinking, how old and stiff and sort of ailing she has become, and she stoops and her skin has become brown and loose and dry, dirty-looking, and her mouth droops into those long gloomy furrows and her eyelids are stained and puffy, and why must she still paint them so. She looks pathetic and touching, and I’ve never seen her look like that before.

George smiled and wrinkled up his short nose rather like Zed and showed his short square wide-apart teeth and looked young again.

‘Nice to see you, Alex.’

‘Nice to see you, George.’

‘Bill was somebody. I might have talked to Bill.’

‘I wish you had.’

‘It doesn’t matter, but it’s sad. His death touched old things, things before it all began.’

‘What is “it”?’ she asked, but he did not answer that.

‘You know, I feel changed. Perhaps Gabriel was right. What did she say? “Saved”, “Come back.”’

‘Changed? How?’

Ruby came in with the sandwiches then withdrew.

‘I’m peckish. You have some?’

‘No, thanks,’ said Alex.

George began to eat the sandwiches voraciously. He had not eaten since noon on the previous day. He said, ‘We’re going to Spain.’

‘We?’

‘Me and Diane Sedleigh. We’re going to live in Spain on my pension.’

‘Where in Spain?’ said Alex, watching him intently with her narrow-eyed cat-look.

‘I don’t know yet. Somewhere cheap. We’ll have to look at the map, get advice. I’ve got some money saved, and quite a decent pension. It’ll go further in Spain. We’ll live near the sea and eat cheaply, olives and fruit and fish. It’s suddenly occurred to me that I might be able to be happy at last, it’s not too late, it’s not impossible, have what I want. We’ll be different people. We’ll forget this place ever existed.’

‘Can I come too?’ said Alex.

George stopped munching. ‘Would you like to?’

‘Yes, very much. I wouldn’t be in your way. I’d live somewhere not terribly far off and invite you to lunch. We could go swimming together sometimes.’

‘And Diane?’

‘I’d like Diane, why not.’

‘Even if she wants to be Diane McCaffrey? She does, you know.’

‘Yes. I feel I’m changing too. Some revolution is accomplished.’

‘Perhaps it’s something to do with William, some bit of his soul that’s flown into us. Except that it’s been coming … I now see … for a long time…’

‘Could I come? I’ve got plenty of money. We could build two houses. I’d pay for a car.’

‘Alex,’ said George, ‘we’re inspired, we’ve become gods!’

And he looked at her with his radiant bland mad face, in which, at that moment, Alex saw the reflection of her own. They stared at each other. George said, ‘I must go.’

‘I’ll think of you with Diane, looking at that map.’

George murmured, ‘Don’t worry. There’s a place beyond.’

‘Beyond Spain?’

‘No - just beyond - beyond. It’s not like I thought, with a great heave of the will, or by great excessive things, at all - when all is permitted one doesn’t want to, you see - it’s so easy, just a matter of relaxing - and simply letting go - of all that — ’

‘All what?’

‘Never mind. Dear, dear Alex. Kiss me as if we were … anybody … nobody … as of course … we are …’

They both rose, and kissed. Lips only touching, they hung together as if suspended in space. They remained so for a long moment.

‘Goodbye, Alex. Soon, soon, you know. I’ll take the rest of the sandwiches.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the cinema.’

However George did not go to the cinema. It was raining when he left Belmont, and he decided to go home to Druidsdale rather than walk to the Odeon in the High Street, which was farther away. George hated rain, he hated getting his hair wet, his feet wet, his clothes wet. He had no umbrella. He felt vaguely unwell and feverish. And he wanted to eat the rest of the sandwiches in peace. He wanted an interval in his existence, his life which had for some time been such intensely hard work. He felt, for the first time for months, that he might be able to rest, to do something which had seemed forever impossible, to lie down on his back and close his eyes and feel quiet and drowsy and unafraid and at peace. At the same time he felt excited and confused and odd. Something had snapped, had given way, and that was (was it not?) better. He did not want to examine the new state at all closely, he felt he would never want to examine anything closely again. He wanted to spend the rest of his life in peace, with people who did not examine things closely.

He reached Druidsdale and got the key into the lock. His hand trembled. He opened the door and entered the darkish hall. He stopped. There was something wrong. There was something there. Something terrible. He peered. Stella was sitting on the stairs.

‘Hello, George.’

‘Oh God.’ George sat down on one of the chairs in the hall.

‘I’m sorry to come suddenly.’

‘Why have you come at all? Why now, oh Christ, why now?’

‘Well, it had to be sometime. I’m sorry it wasn’t sooner.’

‘You cold - cold - beast.’

‘I can’t talk otherwise. You know how I talk. I can only say what’s the case. I feel very upset, very emotional, not cold.’

‘Other people have emotions. You say it’s the case that you feel emotional.’

‘I’m sorry I went away. I can’t explain my conduct. Though there is an explanation. I just mean it would take some time, if you ever wanted to hear. Nothing dramatic, nothing interesting.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘With N, with Mrs Blackett.’

‘N, that impotent voyeur, I thought so.’

‘Why?’

‘I saw his sly old face in the street, he’s always after me.’

‘Don’t be angry about that.’

‘Oh I’m not. Were you afraid to come back?’

‘Yes, I suppose so — ’

‘Afraid I’d kill you?’

‘No - just afraid of you - you’re like a dog that bites - one is afraid. I don’t like unpredictable things.’

‘Why have you come back then?’

‘I had to decide whether I wanted to go on being married to you. That was another reason why I didn’t come back. I felt it wouldn’t be fair to you.’

‘What wouldn’t be fair?’

‘To come back and leave again.’

‘And you decided —?’

‘I decided I did want to go on being married to you.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why. Because I love you. Because I think - this between us is - absolute.’

‘Absolute, what a word. You always were an absolutist. You talk of love, you who have no tenderness, no gentleness, no forgiveness.’

‘I have these things, but you just kill the expression of them, the way I would express them, you reject all my language, all my — ’

‘Always my fault.’

‘No.’

‘You have never forgiven me anything. You remember every fault. You might as well be the recording angel. You are a sort of angel, a frightful one.’

‘Let’s not talk about forgiving, I think it’s a weak idea, usually false — ’

‘You’re like Cordelia, the most overrated heroine in literature.’

‘The question is, do you want to go on being married to me?’

‘What a charmingly blunt question. No.’

‘Are you sure?’

George was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘That night - when the car went into the canal - can you remember it clearly?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened exactly?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Was it an accident, or did I deliberately make it happen?’

‘You mean you don’t remember?’

‘No.’

Stella paused. ‘It was an accident.’

‘It was an accident?’

‘Yes, of course.’ She added, ‘You like to think of yourself as a fierce violent person, but you’re harmless really. Just a bad-tempered dog.’

‘And you claim to love this animal.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘You humiliate me in order to love me. That’s not love. It’s like torturing your pet. The sort of thing that interests N.’

They sat silently in the darkish hallway, Stella on the stairs, George sitting near the door on a chair against the wall, not facing Stella but facing an old ornate Victorian hallstand which they had bought in an auction sale when they were engaged.

Stella said, ‘See, I brought the netsuke back.’

George saw on the hallstand the little array of pale ivory figures. He said, ‘Yes, I went looking for them one day.’

‘I thought you would.’

‘Isn’t it rather sentimental of you to bring them back? The sort of thing a real woman might do. Am I supposed to be touched and softened?’

Stella was silent. She began to fumble in her handbag.

George said, ‘Oh you aren’t crying are you? Can you cry now? Congratulations. You never used to.’ He added, ‘I’ve got a cold.’

‘Want an aspirin?’

‘No. To answer your earlier question, yes, I am sure I don’t want to go on being married to you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m going to go and live in Spain with Diane Sedleigh.’

Stella was silent again. She blew her nose. She said, ‘All right.’

‘What. No scene?’

‘You know me.’

‘Yes I do. Diane is a woman. I like women. I get on with her. She makes me feel happy and calm. Which you have never done.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I admired you. That was the trouble. A rotten basis for marriage.’

‘I daresay.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t have gone away, I mean if you really wanted it to go on. I had time to see the point.’

‘I wanted you to have time. And I needed a holiday from you too.’

‘Well, the holiday can continue. What will you do with it?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll travel. I’ll go to Tokyo to see my father, go to California to see Rozanov.’

‘You’ll - what?’

‘Well, I might. I’d like to see him. I only kept away because of you. Or is he still here?’

George leapt to his feet.’ You’ll talk to him about me…’

‘It might be difficult to avoid mentioning your name, but I won’t discuss you. You know how fastidious I am in such matters.’

‘Fastidious, that’s one of your words. How I loathe your vocabulary! It’s power, power, contempt, contempt, everything about you. Oh God, why did you have to come back now, you devil, just when I was feeling better, you don’t know what you’ve done, you’ve spoilt everything, you’ve destroyed it all, you did it on purpose, you heard I was with Diane at the funeral. Didn’t you, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. But that’s not the reason.’

‘It is - it’s common mean spite and jealousy - you can lie too, you foul vixen - I could kill you for spoiling things so - you want to destroy me - and you killed Rufus, you killed Rufus, you killed Rufus…’

Father Bernard was sitting in his study in the St Paul’s Clergy House meditating to the sound of Scott Joplin’s Sugar Cane. He sat as usual, four-square, relaxed, his hands on his knees. He used to kneel once, but found the posture uncomfortable and fraught with irrelevant emotion. The unlined curtains put up by his predecessor were drawn and displayed, penetrated by the lurid rainy light of Saturday evening, a design of huge chrysanthemums. The room was filled with a subdued yellowish glow. In a corner of the room a dim electric lamp illumined a calm radiant icon of the baptism of Jesus. (Father Bernard did not care for the more tormented images.) Opposite to him, Father Bernard’s Gandhara Buddha (a reproduction) meditated with drooped eyelids and delicate slightly pursed lips. His exquisitely beautiful austere face combined the calm of the East with a thoughtful Hellenic sadness. Father Bernard loved him because he was and was not a judge. He paid no attention to the priest and did not require to be addressed as ‘thou’. But Father Bernard, who did not always meditate with lowered eyelids, paid a great deal of attention to him.

Some teachers of meditation exhort us to empty our minds. Others permit the quiet circling of random thoughts, increasingly to be set at a distance and sensed as unreal. Father Bernard followed both rules, but more usually the latter which was easier because more ambiguous. He let his worldly thoughts accompany him sometimes to the extent that a detached observer of them (God, for instance) might have found little difference between the priest’s holy reverie and the unregenerate day-dreaming of one of his flock.

On this Saturday evening Father Bernard’s thoughts, somewhat tidied up for purposes of communication, might be rendered as follows. John Robert, what a monster, how attractive that frightful face is, I want so much to see him again, I’m quite in love with him, dear me. If only my life could change completely, be utterly renewed and changed. Lord, let me amend my life. If I could only reach a place beyond personal vanity, sometimes it seems so close, an inch away. Miss Dunbury said she saw Christ waiting on the other side, could she be right? Lord have mercy upon me, Christ have mercy upon me, Lord have mercy upon me. How moving simple faith is, Lord let me have a simple faith if it be thy will. Quaerens me sedisti lassus. I ought to go and see Hattie, I must see her before I see Rozanov, I was supposed to see her last Saturday, oh my God, last Saturday. Hattie, that milky-white flesh, like angel cake, no. What a nasty anonymous letter I had this morning about kissing prostitutes in church, there are spies everywhere. And on that bench with Bobbie, oh dear me. I like that bit in the music, it’s such melancholy music, mechanical and yet jaunty, like life. Tom McCaffrey, his tumbling hair. Dans l’onde toi devenue ta jubilation nue. Yes, I spend my life wanting the impossible. But I never reach out my hand for what I want. Isn’t that religion, not reaching out? O Lord Buddha, have mercy upon me, a sinner. George McCaffrey, may he be protected from evil and may he do no harm to anyone. Will he come to me? Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa. What a dreadful thing to say, how cruel Dante was and yet he was granted a vision of paradise. Pretty boring place, actually. But oh the desire for God, the desire, the desire. Agnus dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. If I had walked across the bridge when George was miming the accident he would have killed me, exciting, what nonsense. Dear little Diane squatting down behind the elder tree. I’ll have to go one day, the bishop’s letter will come, Mount Athos, I’ll live in retreat at last. John Robert said I was false, a false priest, broken my vows. I suppose so. Not that anybody cares what a priest believes these days, but I do. Have to come to it at last. At last. I wonder if Diane would come with me to Greece, she wouldn’t mind what I did, what a crazy idea. Bobbie’s coming tonight, I hope he’s got rid of that cold, thank God I don’t seem to have caught it, a pity he’s so unattractive. Have a nice talk, wine, oh blast I forgot to buy that cheap Valpolicella. I shall lie in the earth. Every year I pass the anniversary of my death. Where will I lie? In Greece? In America? Perhaps I shall follow Rozanov, I suppose he’ll go back there. An impossible man. How sad the yellow light is in this room, and a fly on the window. How beautiful he is, the Lord Buddha, so austere, so stern, so sad. George and Rozanov. Oh God, help them, help us all, help the planet. The lonely circling planet moving into night. God rest all souls. I am tense, I must relax, forgive. Not think about Rozanov, Tom, Mount Athos. Oh the desire. Oh God, if only I could be at peace. Lord, I prostrate myself, I ask for forgiveness, for guidance, for faith. My Lord and my God. Tomorrow’s Sunday, damn.

The front door bell rang. The priest sighed. He rose and turned off Scott Joplin. He bowed reverently and kissed the stern Buddha on the brow and the lips. Then with slow majestic tread, smoothing his hair, he went to the door. George McCaffrey was outside.

‘Come in,’ said Father Bernard. And after a glance at George he thought, this is it.

George followed the priest into the study. Father Bernard did not draw back the curtains. He switched on a lamp.

‘Sit down, George. There, on that sofa.’

George sat down, then got up again and walked to the bookcase, facing it but not looking at the books. There was something dreadful in the position, as if he were expecting to be shot in the back. Then he turned and leaned against the bookcase, facing the priest who was also standing. Love for George flooded Father Bernard’s heart.

‘What is it, my son?’

George was silent for a while, looking rather wildly about the room as if searching for something. Then he said, ‘Stella’s come back.’

‘Oh - good.’

‘Not good. I don’t want her. I detest her.’

‘Perhaps that means you love her.’

‘I suppose you have to say something stupid like that.’

‘I’m glad you’ve come, George. I thought you’d come, at last.’

‘Did you? I didn’t. Anyway it doesn’t mean anything, not what you think.’

‘Would you like a drink?’

‘No. Is Rozanov still here?’

‘So far as I know. I didn’t know he was going. I haven’t seen him lately.’

‘He’ll corrupt others as he corrupted me. Oh God, I’m so unhappy. Stella was the last straw.’

‘Talk to me, my dear.’

‘You love talks, I know, you grow fat on people’s troubles, you grow fat and sleek and purr.’

‘We are frail human creatures, all our good is mixed with evil. It is good none the less. If we sincerely pray to be made pure in heart there is a sense in which we do not pray in vain. I wish you well, oh so well. You must forgive me.’

‘Oh damn you. Listen.’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to ask you a question.’

‘Yes. Like “does God exist?” ’

‘No, not like that.’

‘“Is there life after death?” “Ought I to stay with Stella?” “Ought I to stop seeing Diane?”’

‘Don’t play the fool, stop making jokes.’

‘I’m not making jokes, I’m expressing something I feel for you, I feel concern for you, love for you, I’m very glad you’re here.’

‘I want to ask you - a question.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘That night … when the car fell into the canal … with Stella in it … you were there … weren’t you?’

The priest hesitated. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s why you felt sure I’d come to you?’

‘That was one reason. For any spiritual event there are always several reasons of different kinds.’

‘Hang that. You were there, you were crossing the iron bridge, I saw you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Now tell me what you saw.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What you saw, what happened.’

‘It was dark - I saw the car swerve and fall into the water.’

‘No, you didn’t see that, you liar - I, what was I doing? The car stopped on the brink and I got out of it. Did you see that, in the name of Christ? And did you see me try to push it in?’

‘No,’ said the priest, though he had had time to wonder, what is the right answer?

‘I’m trying to remember,’ said George, ‘help me.’

He came forward and took hold of Father Bernard’s arms at the elbow, glaring into his face with glittering eyes.

‘I ask you, I beg you, to tell me the truth, I must know exactly what happened, it’s important. I drove the car - the car came up to the brink and stopped and I got out - or did it stop - I got out - then what happened? I can’t see it - did I go behind the car and try to push it? Or did I imagine this? For Christ sake, tell me, I beg you for the truth, I beg you.’

Father Bernard involuntarily stepped back pulling away from the clutching hands. He said, ‘You jumped out as the car went over the edge. Of course you didn’t try to push it. It was an accident.’

‘Before God, are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

George showed no relief. A look of anguish distorted his face. He murmured something which sounded like ‘the pity of it’, then, ‘I have done something terrible.’

Father Bernard said again, ‘Please sit down,’ only George would not sit, but went to the bookcase and turned his back in the sad penitential posture, as Father Bernard with inexplicable distress saw it. He leaned against the books, rolling his forehead to and fro against them.

‘George, you haven’t hurt Stella, have you?’

George, half turning his head, said in a dull voice, ‘Stella? No.’ He turned round and put his hand in his pocket and brought out something, two small white fragments which he held in the palm of his hand. He said, ‘I broke it, I got angry, but it can be mended. See, the little Japanese thing, ivory, a man holding a fish, a fisherman with his basket, see underneath his foot and the pattern of his dress folded - his head is broken off, but it can be mended. It’s all to do, it’s to do. Oh, if you only knew how unhappy I am, how my heart hurts in my breast. It’s all so black. Oh what a burden it is— ’

Father Bernard had pictured a scene where George ‘came to him’ at last, but it had not been like this. He was upset, frightened, confused by George’s state of mind which he could not understand but about which he felt he ought instantly to be able to do something. He wished George would sit down and spill out some fairly coherent story and require to be talked to, instead of flinging himself about the room. He wanted to dominate George, to hold him and soothe him, but could not see how to do it. He asked, ‘Where is Stella now?’

‘I don’t know. At Druidsdale, I suppose. I’ve left there. I’m staying with Diane. We’re going to live in Spain.’

‘You and Diane?’

‘Yes. But it’s so terrible, so black, like a hideous dream, and I have to do it all again.’

‘Do what? What terrible thing have you done?’

‘Nothing, nothing. I saw my double carrying a hammer. How can another person steal one’s consciousness, how is it possible? Can good and evil change places? Well, well, I must go now.’

‘You are not to go, sit here.’ Father Bernard planted a firm palm on George’s chest and pushed him abruptly down on to the sofa. As soon as he touched George he felt an inrush of warm power. He knelt on the sofa, pressing his hands on to George’s shoulder to prevent him from rising. George struggled but the priest was stronger.

‘Stay. That’s right. Relax your body. Don’t look so wretched. You’re not going to cry, are you? I don’t believe you’ve ever done anything terrible or that you’re ever going to. The only person you hurt is yourself. Your mind is boiling over with anger and remorse and grief and black pain. Let it all go from you. Turn to God. Never mind what it means. Let the miracle of forgiveness and peace take place in your soul. Forgive yourself and forgive those whom you imagine to be your enemies. I want you to say the Lord’s Prayer with me.’

‘The Lord’s Prayer?’ said George and he seemed surprised and almost interested. ‘Now?’

‘Yes. You remember it, don’t you? Our Father — ’

George said, speaking quickly and looking up at the priest who, with one knee on the sofa, was still gripping him by the shoulder, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ Then he stopped. He said, ‘My God, you are a charlatan.’

‘Give us this day our daily bread.’

‘And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.’

Father Bernard stopped holding George and sat down beside him, and they sat together in a slightly dazed silence, aware of an event which had taken place in the room.

George shuddered and got up. ‘You’ve got the old magic in working order.’

Father Bernard rose too. ‘George, don’t go away, please, sit down again and be quiet with me for a little while. You needn’t talk. Let me get you some coffee, whisky, brandy, something to eat. Let the old magic work in you, let it travail in you, let it travel with you, turn towards it. Repeat the old charms. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.’

‘Turn to it! Even if it’s all false?’

‘It can’t be. It will do good to you. It has already done good to you today. If you utter sacred words with a sincere and humble and passionate desire for salvation they cannot fail. Let grace flood your heart. Remember that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.’

George stared at the priest for a moment or two as if he were thinking over what had been said. Then he said, ‘Oh,’ and turned suddenly and went from the room. The priest ran after him. The front door banged.

Father Bernard came back into his sitting-room and stood still for a while. It was getting dark outside and he turned on another lamp. Then he telephoned the Druidsdale number and heard Stella’s calm voice saying that yes, George had been there and was now gone, and yes of course she was all right.

He sat for a while thinking about George and feeling softened and exalted. He wondered to himself, did I give George the right answer? What did he want? He took up his Prayer Book, and remembered Miss Dunbury holding the torch so that she could read his lips during the power cut. He knelt down and read aloud the prayer for those troubled in conscience. ‘Oh Blessed Lord, the Father of mercies and the God of all comforts, we beseech thee look down in pity and compassion upon this thy afflicted servant. Give him a right understanding of himself and of thy threats and promises, that he may neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place it anywhere but in thee. Give him strength against all his temptations, and heal all his distempers. Break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure, but make him to hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.’

After his flight from Belmont, Tom walked slowly back to Travancore Avenue. He had to keep having to stop and gasp a little and hold his chest. He felt as if something alien and too big for him had been encased in his body and were clumsily and painfully trying to get out, as if his whole body wanted to vomit. He felt that he ought to do something difficult and awful and perhaps fatal, but he tried not to think about this. He absorbed himself in his physical feelings and the strange new pain.

When he reached Travancore Avenue he went upstairs and lay on his bed, but found this position tormenting. He sat on his bed, he sat on a chair. He said out loud in a dull echoing voice to which he listened with surprise, ‘It was here and now it’s gone, I’ve lost it, it’s gone away, I shall mourn for it and that’s all there’ll be, that’s all there’ll ever be.’

At last he did attempt to think. Today, this very afternoon, Hattie had been still in Ennistone. What did that mean? Did it mean anything that made any real difference to him, or did it only matter because it made him so terribly sick? Had he not finished with it all? It had never really been anything anyway. It was totally artificial, a maniac’s fantasy. He had rejected her, she had rejected him. Even this was too portentous. They had, to satisfy the old fool, politely said hello and good-bye, they had passed with a casual wave. It had been all over before John Robert’s anger. He must keep that clear in his head, he must keep John Robert out of it. Though how could that make sense, since it was all his idea and only his idea? Tom’s sense of time was all mixed up, he could not remember what had happened on what day, and what had happened after which. He could not recall why he had felt it so necessary to go to the Slipper House on the day of the ‘riot’. He must have wanted to go to see Hattie again. And then she was gone, she and John Robert had returned to America, and he was rid of the whole nightmare, he was set free. Had he felt relieved? That was the end of the story and he could rest at last. But what was he resting from, and into what awful renewed sense of possibility and demand and power was he now awakening? Now he was free? Was it that he felt that he still might, if he would, have it, gain it, win it, after all? But what was it, of which he had been speaking just now, this thing which evidently he desired so? Was it to do with John Robert, John Robert’s esteem or approval or even affection? Or was it his own esteem, some image of himself as a hero, which was missing? Well, it was missing, but he could have noticed that loss and regarded it as temporary. What was it about Alex’s story of Hattie running down the garden and trying to get into the Slipper House which had driven him so absolutely mad? It was not even Hattie really that he was thinking about now: that image of the running girl seemed to have usurped her real being in his bewitched mind.

The shock was partly to do with time. He had settled into thinking they were gone, into a state of protected impossibility. He felt now that he had even recovered a little as a result of William’s funeral and the phenomenon at the Baths. These had been events, barriers between him and that terrible pair. There had been, it now seemed to him, a little touch of elegiac sadness in the pain he had felt as he watched the jet d’eau, a curative energy in his thought of Hattie as removed from him absolutely, gone into the invisible world. Even remorse was a challenge to be met. Now he had been suddenly jolted back into a previous era with all his tasks undone, with it all to do again. But what were these tasks and this hideous freedom and this it with which some new sense of possibility tormented him so? The thought that she was still in Ennistone was somehow unbearable. Oh God, if only she were far away! But then perhaps she was, she could have been here in the morning and be gone now. And if so he would be back where he was, and wasn’t that where he wanted to be? All he had to do was to allow the time to pass. He looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty.

Tom now lay down again on the bed and tried to let his thoughts wander. He must not concentrate. If he did … he might be led … to decide something … John Robert had appointed Tom to be Hattie’s protector, her knight. But what was he supposed to protect Hattie from? Tom was far from guessing that the answer was, from John Robert himself. Yet intuitively he wandered round the idea at a distance. He thought, he knows he can’t look after her himself, it’s like living with a monster, a big rough animal, she might come to harm accidentally. Oh, let her not come to harm. But not to think like that, remember William dead and the water flying up and the way it had burnt his hand, he could still feel the bum. What Tom was all the time trying to keep out of his mind by the wandering of his thoughts was the terrible idea that there was nothing in the world to stop him going round to Hare Lane now and finding out whether Hattie was still in Ennistone. But, no, he thought, there is nothing I can do for them or with them now. I must simply stay quiet until it is all too late, and oh let that be soon. But how can I know, it may already be too late, they may already have gone, and I am suffering simply from not knowing. He thought, I could go round to the Ennistone Rooms and ask someone, they might know, John Robert had a room there, so someone said … And as he was thinking this he fell asleep.

‘Tom, Tom, wake up, Tom dear, wake up.’

Tom rolled over and sat up. A bright light was on in the room and a woman was standing beside the bed. Tom stared at her, not recognizing her. Then he knew her. It was Judy Osmore.

‘Greg, come here, here’s Tom, he was fast asleep. Tom, we’ve come back, did you get our letter?’

‘No,’ said Tom. He put his feet down and stood up, felt giddy and sat down again on the edge of the bed.

‘Well, we only sent it last - I forget - we did everything in such a hurry - we’ve had the most wonderful time.’

Gregory Osmore came in. He was looking tired and not best pleased to find Tom there.

‘Hello, Tom, still here?’

‘Of course he’s still here!’ said Judy.

‘Hello, Ju, hello Greg, great to see you,’ said Tom. ‘Have you just got back?’

‘Yes, we feel terribly funny, don’t we, Greg, jet lag you know, we flew all the way from Dallas, we saw the place where Kennedy was shot, we flew non-stop and we’ve been drinking all the way, I just can’t think what time it is here, what time is it?’

Tom looked at his watch. ‘Ten-thirty.’

‘My watch says - oh I started changing it about, it’s crazy now. Whatever have you done to your eye?’

‘I suppose there’s something to eat in the house?’ said Greg.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Tom. ‘I don’t remember.’ He suddenly realized that he was very hungry.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ said Greg to Judy.

‘We can go out to the Running Dog.’

‘It’ll be shut.’

‘Not the restaurant. Anyway let’s have a drink, I bet there’s some, where there’s a McCaffrey there’s drink.’

‘There’s drink,’ said Tom.

‘Come on downstairs, I feel so over-excited, I must have something.’

They went down to the sitting-room and Greg found whisky and glasses while Judy pranced restlessly about, touching things, touching Tom, laughing.

‘Oh it’s so marvellous, we’ve had such a time, we went to New Orleans, the South is fantastic, have we got southern accents, I quite feel I have.’

Tom saw on the sofa the plastic bag containing Judy’s dress which he had evidently brought back from Belmont without noticing it. He said, ‘Oh Ju, I’m so sorry, someone spilt wine on your dress, look, but Gabriel fixed it.’

‘Who was wearing it?’ said Greg.

‘Oh well - a friend of mine - I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Let me see,’ said Judy.

‘Gabriel dyed it with tea.’

‘With tea?’

‘Was Gabriel wearing it?’

‘No, Greg, a girl, a - I’m terribly sorry.’

‘Well, it’s not quite its old self,’ said Judy, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Tom dear, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, we’re so glad to see you! Aren’t we, darling?’

‘What else have you done?’ said Greg, looking round.

‘Oh nothing else - the place is fine - if I’d known you were coming I’d have cleaned up, changed the sheets.’

‘And how is Ennistone, and how is everybody? Isn’t it funny to think that you’ve all been leading your quiet little lives here while we’ve been having the most amazing time, we must tell you all about it.’

‘William Eastcote died,’ said Tom.

‘Oh - I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Greg putting down his glass. ‘I am sorry - such a dear good man - an old friend of my father’s. When?’

‘Oh recently,’ said Tom. He felt he could not give details, count days, describe the funeral.

‘How sad, a dear man,’ said Judy.

‘I’m going to telephone the Running Dog,’ said Greg. He left the room.

‘We haven’t slept for ages, we couldn’t sleep on the plane,’ said Judy, ‘we were travelling first class, there was a staircase and a bar, it was super, I enjoyed every second, even the silly film, and - oh Tom, it’s so good to see your old familiar face, only you look so pale! See how brown we are! We got quite tired of the sun. Look.’ She rolled up the sleeves of her dress and displayed a sunburnt arm.

‘I must go,’ said Tom.

‘Of course not - you must stay tonight - mustn’t he, Greg - Tom says he’s going — ’

‘Shut up,’ said Greg from the hall. ‘A table for two if we come at once?’

‘For three,’ called Judy.

‘I must go,’ said Tom. ‘I’ve got to catch the train to London, I was just packing up when you came.’

‘Nonsense, you were fast asleep when we came. Anyway you’ve missed the ten forty-five.’

‘We can have dinner if we go now,’ said Greg.

‘I must go,’ said Tom.

‘Certainly not, don’t go!’

‘Let him go if he wants to,’ said Greg. ‘God, I feel terrible.’

‘I’ll just pack my bag,’ said Tom. He ran upstairs into his bedroom and closed the door. He saw the room, so bleak now, with his stuff strewn around, his suitcase which he had so cheerfully unpacked, the room with the view over the town which he had chosen when he had moved in such a long time ago, in a previous era, when he had been young and happy and innocent and free. He pushed his things roughly into the case and then he couldn’t close it. He wanted to wail with vexation. He thrust the case, with its lid almost closed, into a corner, and began to tidy up the messy unmade bed. He began to pull the sheets off, then left them as they were. He went downstairs.

‘Judy, do you mind if I leave my suitcase here? I’ve tidied my stuff away. I’ll come and fetch it later - I’ll ring up - I must just get off to London. Thank you so much for letting me have the house, I’ve loved it here.’

‘Thank you for looking after it,’ said Gregory, who felt he had been churlish. ‘You must come and stay,’ said Judy, ‘any time you like — ’

‘I must run — ’

‘And we’ll tell you all about it.’

When Tom got as far as the Institute he hurried along the front of the building making for the entrance to the Ennistone Rooms where there was always a porter on duty. However, when he got as far as the big main door, which was usually closed at this time, he saw that it was very slightly ajar and there was a light inside. He went to the door, pushed it cautiously, and peered in. A light was on at the far end of the Promenade. There was no one about.

It occurred to Tom that if he were able to get through to the Rooms by the back way through the Baptistry he could find out what he wanted to know (whether Rozanov was still in Ennistone) by looking to see if his name was on the board in the corridor. If he went by the Lodge he would have to speak to the porter, and while a porter who knew him would no doubt be chattily informative, a porter who did not might ask him who he was and what he wanted; and in his present guilty frightened state Tom felt that any unsympathetic questioning might simply elicit a flood of tears. Tom could also picture Rozanov suddenly appearing, seeing him in the brightly lit Lodge, and cornering him, glaring at him through the glass partition, his huge face distorted by rage and hate. Tom was in the state of restless obsessive nervous energy which drives people to meddle when they are too stupid to think clearly and too frightened to act decisively. What he needed was some sort of symbolic or magical act which concerned or touched his situation without running any danger of changing it. He wanted, as it were, to light a candle or recite a formula, he needed to busy himself about his state of mind.

The Promenade was empty, silent, half dark. The tables had been pushed to one side and the chairs stacked. The counter was covered with white cloths. Tom took a few careful noiseless steps, conscious of his shadow behind him. A flood of excited physical fear took possession of the lower part of his body, a painful vertiginous thrilling urgent pressuring feeling, like sexual desire. Then Tom thought, it’s not like sexual desire, it is sexual desire. He moved quickly now, his mouth open, his eyes wide. He padded on his toes toward the source of light, which was the partly open door of the Baptistry, which housed the descent to the source, and led also to the long downstairs corridor of the Rooms. Tom paused, listening, then slipped through the door.

He had for a moment been aware of a warm steamy smell and a kind of vapour in the air. Now he stood still, amazed. The Baptistry was full of steam. The big bronze nail-studded doors under their stone pediment stood wide open. There was a low throbbing humming sound. Tom moved toward the opening. He touched one of the open doors and quickly withdrew his hand. The door was scalding hot. He stepped through the doorway, blinking, his eyelashes already wet with steam.

Before him and below him a great many extremely bright lights were on. He stood on a sort of railed- In shelf or gallery from which metal stairways led steeply down to left and right. A great mass of gleaming pipes, some very small, some enormous, filled the space below. The pipes were a light silver gilt in colour, a very very pale gold, and covered with tiny droplets of moisture which glittered here and there like diamonds. The design made by the pipes, obscured by areas of steam, seemed geometric yet made an unintelligible jumbled impression. They went on down and down for a long way without any floor or bottom being visible. Tom was aware of a warm breeze blowing and could see, looking down, that the steam which seemed to pervade the chasm was in irregular motion. There were evidently hidden fans, air currents which were intended to keep the space clear of steam, perhaps now unable to do so.

Tom did not like high places. He felt a genuine vertigo, like to, perhaps continuing, the sexual thrill he had experienced in the Promenade. He had never seen the ‘workings’ of the Institute since the source had never been open to the public in his lifetime. He had vaguely imagined a deep cleft or grotto and a steamy surging spring, not all these terrible glittering pipes. But, he thought, there must be a spring, there must be rocks, right down at the bottom water must be flowing out, rising up. If I go down a bit I shall see. Passing a red notice saying Danger he stepped on to the nearest stairway. It swayed slightly. Tom stopped, sick, then holding on to the smooth round banister, ran on down toward a steadier-looking platform below. The stairways, of which he could now see more, were made of some kind of light faintly flexible metal, presumably steel, but some kind of exquisite steel, Tom thought, since they were so elegant and spidery, almost insubstantial, with their narrow treads and eye-defeating lines of thin vertical rails supporting slanting banisters, more like suspended trapezes than stairs. They were silvery grey in colour, contrasting with the maze of pipes among which they hung, and were wet with steam and rather slippery. Tom’s hair and face were already wet, his clothes damp, his shoes covered with beads of water. The temperature was high, and as he descended, higher. The humming throbbing sound was louder. The platform on which he stood swayed too. He went down another flight of spidery steps. He could still see nothing below except yet more pipes beyond the ones he had seen at first. He had noticed no sidewalls and could see none now as the steam was a little thicker. The whole contraption, with him upon it, seemed to be hanging in space.

Tom thought, the place is open because the engineers have been trying to control the spring, something has happened to it. All that boiling water came shooting up at Lud’s Rill. It could run through the whole place, it could run through all the pipes, it could burst out everywhere in a flood. They must be very alarmed, otherwise they would have remembered to close the door. Then he thought, but where are they? There seems to be no one here but me. And they - are they dead, all those engineers, all lying down there at the bottom, drowned in scalding water or suffocated by steam, was there no one to give the alarm? Can steam suffocate? It surely could. Tom’s mouth was open as he inhaled, almost eating the thick hot steamy air which was beginning to feel devoid of oxygen. He realized he was still wearing his mackintosh. He took it off and dropped it on the little landing where he stood, then took his jacket off too. The same frightful thrilling nervous anxiety was making him go on, go down rather than up. He thought, I must see the source, I must see it, it’s my only chance, then I’ll run up again. There hasn’t been any awful accident, there’s just no one here. He went down another longer flight of trembling stairs which seemed to be suspended on nothing in the middle of the space, passing through a thick cloud of steam.

A piece of concrete wall, wet and grey, appeared on his left. At least it seemed a wall, then turned out to be a vast pillar, beyond which the view was closed by two huge vertical pipes from whose bolted joints, level now with Tom’s head, steam was escaping with a hissing noise. This hissing, joined with the humming noise which was louder and more vibrant, became suddenly urgent and menacing. The presence of so much compressed steam, so much sheer awful force, seemed to animate the sweating pipes as if they were all quivering with life. Might not the whole thing be about to explode, and was not this imminent danger the reason why the place was empty? Everyone had run away except him. The pipes seemed to pant, and in the steamy air to be shuddering and bending. Tom retreated a few steps. The air, almost too hot to breathe, was oppressing his lungs. Then as the long section of stairway swayed, he ran on down to a large substantial platform. He looked below him: more pipes overlaying each other, mixed now with monstrous horizontal tubes, another glimpse of wet concrete. The thrilling hum seemed to have entered his body, making him vibrate with an ecstatic urgent anguish.

Tom thought, why am I here? There must be a reason. I have got to do something, I have an aim, a task, I must go on down, I’ve come so far I can’t give up now. Several stairways now led downward, less steeply. He took one at random, running down, leaping down it, sliding his hand along the warm highly polished rail. He thought, I must get to the end, I must find the source, I must get there, it’s dangerous, yes, at any moment I may hear something terrible, some loud roar as of some huge thing breaking, it’s all out of control. But I can get there first and get back, I’ve got to find the place, I’ve got to see it, the real source, there’s rocks and water and earth down there and a cleft in the ground, somewhere down below, I must get there and … and touch it …

The steam was becoming thicker, the air hotter and harder to breathe, Tom was panting. He thought, in a minute I’ll faint, I must keep my mind alert, I must keep my consciousness. He swung round at a landing, bounded down another few steps, and came violently up against a concrete wall with a door in it. Automatically he tried the door, which was locked, then ran up back to the landing. He could see another stairway, just visible in the steam, below him, but could not see its connection with where he was. He grasped the rail, put one leg over, raised the other leg, began to slip, then, unable to balance or keep a hold on the damp smooth metal, fell rather than jumped on to the lower level where he collapsed on to his knees. He limped down some more treads and jolted abruptly on to a level concrete floor.

Tom looked about him, ran forward, then back. He was on a wide level space where immense silver golden pipes like pillars entered smoothly, sleekly, into the perfectly fitting concrete. The pipes gave out an immense heat and he avoided touching them. He ran about, expecting to find some gallery, something like a bridge or an arch, where he could look down, perhaps climb down, on to the rocks, see water rising and glistening in the gloom below. He went one way as far as a sheer concrete wall, then returned the other way to be confronted by another wall like a cliff. A half-circle of concrete in front of him showed no way onward, no way down, no magic door promising further mysteries, and behind him a row of pipes soared up like a huge organ, with no gap between them into which could be inserted as much as a match-stick. There was nowhere below. He was at the bottom.

It took Tom some time to establish this with certainty. The steam and the heat confused him and he found it difficult to see and understand the space he was in, how large it was and what shape it was. He noticed now with a kind of surprise, as his motions became less rapid, how exceedingly bright the scene was, how brilliantly the lights, which seemed to be concealed, were shining upon the silver-gold organ pipes and upon the glittering web of hanging stairways, now suspended above him. As soon as he was sure that there was no dark archway, no steamy grotto with a scalding fount, and no way out except by the stairway down which he had come, he started to mount the steps; then he came back, stood a minute as if in prayer, and touched the wet concrete floor like a child touching ‘base’. He said aloud, ‘I did my best,’ then hurried back to the stairs.

He was, very soon, checked. He went up, passing the place on to which he had jumped or fallen, crossed a landing and found that the stairway ended at another locked door (he tried the handle). When he retreated he realized that the set of stairs on which he now stood did not connect with those which he could see above him, by which he had descended. He had in fact chosen to make his leap at the point where the two systems came closest. To jump down had been easy. To climb back, balancing himself on a slippery rounded banister and clinging with outstretched arms to wet and rather hot vertical rails and steel treads above him, and then hauling himself up - was impossible; and would in any case have been an unattractive enterprise with a drop of twenty-five feet on to the concrete below in case of a slip. Tom stood there panting. He felt he had been inside this weird humming brilliantly lighted shaft for a long time. The damp tropical heat now, as he breathed, came to him in waves of burning hot air, which his seared lungs rejected, and he gasped. Feeling a weak helpless lassitude, he forced himself to breathe slowly. He thought to himself, of course the engineers must wear heat-proof protective clothing and masks when they come down here … He walked slowly back up the stairway to the door and tried it again, and leaned against it and kicked it. It was firm, made of metal, and, like everything else about him, extremely hot to touch. He could now feel the hot stairs beginning to vex his feet. Up till now he had felt like a secret tiptoeing intruder. Now he felt suddenly like a prisoner. He banged on the door and called out several times, ‘Hello, there.’ His voice echoed thinly in the clammy steaming air of the whole huge cylinder which was starting to hiss and tremble like a rocket about to go off. He looked downward half-expecting to see that something had changed, but all was as before in the intolerably bright light. Was he imagining it, or was the temperature rising?

He looked up at the nearest part of the level above, a joint in the stairs, a tiny twist or landing balanced in mid-air. It was not directly over him but hanging, at about two feet of distance, about five feet higher than his head. What he needed was an intermediate foothold, but there was none except the knob of the door which was lower than the banister rail of the level place where he stood. Even to get one foot firmly on to the banister seemed scarcely possible. Tom thought, if only I had something with me, anything to stand on; though really there’s no point. I could never balance and stand upright on that rail so as to catch hold of the stairs above, and even if I did I couldn’t draw myself up, I’d just swing and fall into the gap between. But if I don’t get out of here soon I shall suffocate. And I think something’s going to explode. He shouted again but his voice seemed soundless. He began automatically to search his pockets and his hand gripped a knife, the strong long two-bladed Swiss knife which Emma had given him for Christmas. He drew it forth and opened the longest blade and looked at the door. It occurred to him that if he could drive the blade into the slit at the top of the door, the protruding handle might not only assist him to rise, with the help of the door knob, up on to the banister and balance there long enough to get a good grip on the vertical rails of the stair above, but might also provide him with an intermediate step on which to climb upward, provided he did not rest his weight on it for too long.

Tom slid the knife into the top of the door. It fitted snugly. leaving three inches of handle sticking out. He put one hand on to the round banister rail. It was wet and hot and terrifyingly slippery, and as he looked at it he could see the drop below. He felt in his pocket and brought out a large and, amid all the dampness, amazingly dry handkerchief. With this he mopped the metal rail. Then quickly, without waiting to inspect the elements of the scene any further, he reached up his right hand and took hold of the knife, lifted his right leg and placed his foot on the door knob, pressed his left hand springily down on the banister and took off, rising to a standing position on the dried portion of the rail, and as he did so stretching his left hand upward to take hold of a tread of the upper stairway, then quickly moving both hands to the vertical bars just above. From here, if he could for a moment rest his right foot on the knife, he would be enabled to rise again so as to insert his left knee between the bars and on to one of the treads of the higher stair.

As he estimated the distance involved and braced his body for it he heard from far above a loud echoing clang which he immediately understood. The bronze doors at the top had been slammed shut. A second later all the lights went out.

Emma turned on the lamps in the room where for some time he and his mother had been sitting by the light of a flickering fire.

It was Saturday evening, the end of a long day. Emma had returned to London that morning from Ennistone by an early train. He had got into the Underground to proceed to King’s Cross and so to his digs. But the idea of being alone in his room seemed so appalling, he suddenly decided to go to Heathrow instead and fly to Brussels. His mother’s joy at his unexpected arrival cheered him up a little.

The room in which they were sitting had existed for a long time, ever since just after his father’s death. It was a Belgian not an English room. Not that his mother had especially willed it so. She had taken over some articles of furniture with the flat, and inherited others from her sister (now dead) who had been married to the Belgian architect. Perhaps too, in deciding to ‘live abroad’ she had adopted a kind of old-fashioned bourgeois style suited to that part of Brussels, a modification of old vanished rooms in Belfast which continued to exist only in her imagination. The (extremely handsome) lace curtains on the tall windows were yellow, the velvet curtains which enclosed them were stained and discreetly moth-eaten and had torn linings. The Turkey carpet was worn with tracks of feet. The embroidered shawl on the grand piano, always replaced in the same position, was faded on top where the sunlight reached it. The silver frame of the photo of soft-faced soft-eyed sixteen-year-old Emma, also upon the piano, looked always from the same place at the same angle. Emma’s father was present too. A portrait of him upon the wall (painted by a fellow student at Trinity) showed him boyish, twinkling-eyed and jaunty, wearing a green tie. Emma did not like this picture. The photograph in his mother’s room showed his father older, sadder, shy and diffident, with soft drooping moustaches and a look of gentle intelligent puzzlement. Both his parents looked ‘dated’. His father looked like a subaltern in the first war. His mother looked like an early star of the silent screen, with her short pale fluffy waved hair, and her little straight nose and small mouth and beautiful eyes. She still did not manage to look middle-aged, but looked fadedly youthful, preferring to sit on the floor or on a low stool or hassock, displaying her excellent silky legs and slim ankles and glossy high-heeled shoes. There was always a wistful not unpleasant sort of tension between Mary (nee Gordon) Scarlett-Taylor and her son, she nervously anxious not to annoy him by her love, he irritated, remorseful, aware of his prudent miserly concealment of his great love for her, at which, perhaps, she could only guess. In this way, he knew, he deliberately deprived her of a happiness to which she had, perhaps, a right. Her voice, soft and almost but not quite without an Ulster accent, reminded him that he was Irish. Sometimes they were like young lovers together.

‘I like this room.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘It’s so dusty and stuffy and quiet and nowhere in the world.’

‘Shall I open a window?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I wish you were in it oftener.’

‘It’s like visiting the past, I like the past. I hate the present.’

‘Tell me about the present.’

‘I read books, I write essays, I stuff my head.’

‘And your heart?’

‘Empty. Hollow. Cracked like a broken drum.’

‘I don’t believe it at all. And you sing.’

‘I’m going to stop singing.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Forever.’

‘You’re blathering. I wish you’d bring your friends here.’

‘I have no friends.’

‘Don’t be so morose.’

‘Morose. I like morose.’

‘Tom McCaffrey.’

‘You wouldn’t like him.’

‘I would.’

‘I wouldn’t like that either.’

‘Get away with you!’

‘He’s bouncy and self-confident and beautiful, not a bit like me.’

‘No girls?’

‘Yes, a maidservant with a London accent who looks like an old dry wooden carving.’

‘Be serious. I wish you’d marry.’

‘You do not.’

‘I do so! I wish you’d bring your real life here.’

‘It is here. I visit it occasionally. The rest’s a fiction.’

‘You work too hard at those books. You ought to sing more. You’re happy when you sing.’

‘I hate happiness and hereby forswear it.’

‘Oh darling, you upset me so — ’

‘Sorry.’

‘Shall we play the Mozart duet?’

‘I’ll do the piano.’

Emma removed the embroidered shawl and a lamp and the photograph of his young undefiled self and opened the piano. He had telephoned the Slipper House from Heathrow, again from Brussels airport, and twice from the flat. No answer.

He drew up the second piano stool and sat down beside his mother. They smiled at each other and then suddenly, holding hands, began to laugh.

Brian McCaffrey rang the bell at George’s house in Druidsdale. Stella opened the door. It was late Saturday evening.

‘Stella!’

‘Hello.’

‘Is George there?’

‘No.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes.’

Stella led the way into the dining-room where she had evidently been sitting at the table writing a letter. One lamp was on. There was a book on the table, at which Brian peered. La Chartreuse de Parme. The surviving netsuke were also there in a jumbled bunch. George had taken away the one he had stamped on.

The dining-room looked dead, like a pretentious office. It had a naked artificial unused look with its self-conscious ornaments all in (Stella’s) good taste: Japanese prints, engraved glass, plates perched on stands. Everything was dusty, including the unoccupied end of the table.

‘You’re back.’

‘Yes.’

‘And George?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But is he all right?’

‘So far as I know.’

‘You’ve seen him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he likely to turn up?’

‘He says he’s living with Diane Sedleigh and they’re going to emigrate to Spain.’

‘But that’s splendid! Isn’t that good?’

‘I don’t know. It may not be true. Whisky? I’ll get some.’

Brian looked quickly at the letters on the table, a long one written in a tiny precise hand, one just started written in an italic hand. He had never, he thought, seen Stella’s writing. He guessed the long one was from her father.

‘What did you want with George?’ said Stella coming back with the whisky and one glass.

‘Won’t you drink?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Gabriel wanted me to come.’

Brian and Gabriel had been talking and arguing ever since the scene with George earlier in the afternoon. Gabriel had been very upset, and then to Brian’s surprise very angry, about Brian’s suggestion that she had deliberately displayed her breasts to George at the seaside. Brian had withdrawn the suggestion, then, when Gabriel had continued to reproach him, had become angry too. They went over the whole usual fruitless argument about George, in the course of which Gabriel remembered that she had had a nightmare last night in which she had seen George floating somewhere, drowned. She then became persuaded that something terrible had happened to him.

‘He was in such a terrible state of mind.’

‘He seemed to me rather pleased with himself.’

‘He’s in despair, I know, please let’s at least ring up.’

Brian rang George’s number but there was no answer. Gabriel then begged him to go round and see whether George had not taken an overdose of sleeping pills and were lying semi-animate on the sofa at Druidsdale. She was so upset by her dream, and likely, if Brian did not go, to go herself, that he had set off.

‘I’m not answering the telephone,’ said Stella, who had listened in silence to a curtailed and improved version of this account.

Brian looked at his handsome sister- In-law of whom he was a little in awe. Stella looked older, her face thinner. Two light hairlike lines rose up between her brows giving to her face a greater concentration. Her dark immaculate hair rose in a stiff springy dome above her brow, like to a crown or ceremonial helmet. Her clever mouth, with its indelible ironic shape, was calm. Her dark eyes gleamed with a light which Brian had but rarely seen in them before, not a quiet communicative luminosity, but a fanatical light, a light of will. She was to him an alien, a phenomenon, a kind of being whom he absolutely could not understand. The whisky emboldened him, however.

‘Where were you?’

‘With N at Bath Lodge. Then with May Blackett at Maryville.’

‘Ruby knew you were there. She finds lost things. She went and stared at the house. Why didn’t you come back sooner? We were worried.’

‘N wanted me to, but — ’

‘You mean you didn’t do what N wanted? Most people do.’

‘I wanted to see what would happen.’

‘To George?’

‘To me. To George too.’

‘So George is getting off scot free, off to Spain with that woman! Fancy old George gone at last, we’ll have nothing to talk about! Aren’t you relieved he’s clearing off? It solves a lot of problems, doesn’t it? You can find someone else, get out of this rotten little town. Go to Tokyo and find a nice man, someone clever, an English diplomat, or a French one. I can see you married to a Frenchman. Forget about us. Why not? God, you can’t love that swine, can you?’

‘Do you mean George?’

‘Sorry, excuse my vocabulary.’

‘You don’t think it possible.’

‘Oh it’s possible, half the women in this town are in love with George or imagine that they are, even Gabriel is. But you, you’re a cut above - I mean you’re special, like royalty - you know, I’ve always admired you so much, though I’ve never had a chance to say so, I hoped you knew - we’ve hardly ever had a real talk together, I wish we could - I feel now, now that you’re going — ’

Stella was frowning and narrowing her eyes, deepening the two new lines on her brow. She straightened her shoulders and leaned back.

Brian thought, whatever possessed me to spill all that, I must be drunk, and I’ve been disloyal to Gabriel, Stella will despise me utterly.

Stella said, ‘But I’m not going.’

‘Why not, if he is?’

‘We’ll wait and see.’

‘God, do you want revenge on George? You can’t forgive him, is that it? Are you still waiting … for something to happen …?’ Stella, who had been writing something down, pushed a slip of paper towards Brian.

‘What’s that?’

‘Mrs Sedleigh’s address. But perhaps you know it?’

‘God, I’m not going there.’

‘Then you’d better go home, Gabriel will be anxious.’

Brian walked home cursing. He felt drunk. He thought, she’s a witch. She made me say all those incredibly stupid things and then threw me out. She’s worse than George. I do believe she’s capable of murder. What is she waiting for?

It was Saturday night, late, dark. Alex had just come out of the drawing-room to find Ruby standing at the top of the stairs. The house was silent. Alex felt frightened.

‘What are you doing? Why are you standing there?’

Ruby said nothing. She stared at Alex with a frown, biting her lip. Her face expressed anguish.

‘Is anything the matter?’

Ruby shook her head.

‘Have you locked all the doors?’

Ruby nodded.

When George had gone away Alex had finished the bottle of whisky and fallen asleep. Then she had eaten some of the supper which Ruby had set out as usual for her in the dining-room. Then she had come upstairs again and drunk some more and fallen asleep again. Now she felt giddy, dislocated in time and space. She had, at some stage, she could not remember when, taken off her dress and put on her dressing-gown. So she would live in a Spanish village with George and Diane? Would that be?

Ruby kept on staring. Alex thought, does she want me to do something? To ask her into the drawing-room and pet her? Does she want me to … to kiss her …? These were such odd things to think that Alex felt that Ruby must have actually put them into her mind. Nothing stopped her from taking Ruby’s hand and saying, Ruby, dear, we’ve been together a long time, ever since we were children really, and now we are old. Come in and sit with me. Do not be afraid. Are you afraid? I will care for you, I will look after you. Then Alex wondered, does she know I’m going away? She has second sight or something. Perhaps she knows? Nothing stopped Alex from speaking those comforting words to Ruby and questioning her gently, except that all the years which should have made it possible had made it impossible, and Alex felt so sick and so frightened and so confused and so tired.

She said impatiently, ‘Don’t stand there. Go to bed. It’s past your bedtime. Go on.’

Ruby did not move. She stood like a heavy large wooden figure, larger than life, at the top of the stairs.

Alex said, ‘You talked about us. You gave away things about us at the Baths. You did it on purpose. Didn’t you talk?’

Ruby’s face changed, expressing distress. She said, ‘I told the boy. I only told the boy.’

‘What boy?’

The boy in question was Mike Seanu, the ‘little scamp’ of a reporter on the Gazette. What had happened was this. When John Robert had made his first visit to the Slipper House to apprise Hattie of his ‘plan’, Ruby had followed him down the garden, primed with jealousy and curiosity, and had eventually posted herself close enough to the sitting-room window to overhear some of what was said. From this she gathered that Rozanov had arranged for Hattie to marry Tom. She carried this interesting information away but, being more given to silence on family matters than Alex gave her credit for, did nothing with it. Young Seanu had not been present at the ‘riot’. He was ‘covering’ the masque for the Gazette and had come on as far as the Green Man, but had been too shy to stay long and returned to his local, the Ferret, on the wasteland where he lived. (A pub where drugs used to change hands, now an innocent enough little hole where Sikhs and gipsies amicably rub shoulders.) He was filled with chagrin on the next day to hear that he had missed so much newsworthy fun, but consoled by being given some immediate detective work to do. Someone (it was never clear who) had indeed (as they surmised) overheard some of Tom and Emma’s drunken conversation about John Robert and Hattie. This titbit, as it reached the ears of Gavin Oare, did not however amount to more than amused and unserious guesswork. Gavin promptly (on Sunday) sent Mike Seanu out to discover more, suggesting in particular that he should visit Ruby. The ‘young scamp’ was a gipsy and in fact (as Oare knew) related to Ruby, and the old servant, who would not have talked to anyone else, talked to this boy, of whom she was fond. Seanu, coached by his editor, put his question in terms of ‘so it is true, is it, what everyone says that’ (and so on), to which in good faith Ruby replied yes, she believed that John Robert had arranged for Tom to marry Hattie. This was enough for Gavin Oare. The further speculations were his work. (I am told that Mike Seanu was very upset and disgusted by the resultant article and considered resigning, but sensibly did not.) This was the way in which the rumour, which had so many consequences, gained currency in Ennistone.

However, Alex never received an answer to her question, not because Ruby was ashamed to give it (though the matter did trouble her) but because at that moment Ruby’s poor head was entirely filled up with something else.

She moved back a step, away from the stairhead, and said to Alex, ‘The foxes — ’

‘What about the foxes?’

‘They are evil, evil things, bad spirits. They bring bad luck. They make bad things to happen.’

‘Don’t be silly. That’s stupid superstitious gipsy nonsense. Don’t talk like that to me. Go away, go to bed.’

‘They are dead.’

‘What?’

‘The foxes - they are dead. The men came and killed them - here in the garden - I showed them where.’

Alex screamed out, her lips wet with a foam of rage - ‘You what, you let them do it? You showed them? You devil - without telling me - you let them kill the foxes - oh I could kill you for this - how could you do it - let them kill my foxes - why didn’t you tell me—?’

‘You were asleep, you were drunk, the man came with the gas, all the foxes are dead.’

‘You hateful vile wicked thing, get out of this house forever, I never want to see you again!’ Alex moved fiercely, raising her hand as if to strike Ruby. Ruby pushed her away.

In a moment Alex was tumbling headlong down the stairs. She rolled to the landing, then all the way down to the hall where she lay curled and motionless.

Wailing, Ruby ran down after her. She pulled at her mistress, trying to lift her head, weeping. Then withdrawing her hands Ruby began to howl like a dog. Alex lay still.

‘You can’t say it’s over when it’s just beginning.’

‘It’s over, it’s ended, better so.’

‘But why, and what’s over? It can’t all be spoilt, it’s you that are spoiling it! I don’t even understand.’

‘It’s not necessary for you to understand.’

‘Well, of course, I do understand, but — ’

‘Let’s stop talking.’

‘You know that’s impossible.’

‘We shall have to stop soon. We ought to stop.’

‘You started talking.’

‘I know.’

‘If only you hadn’t - you didn’t have to say anything - you didn’t have to say what you said — ’

‘I know, I know, I know — ’

‘You could have drawn us gradually together, it would have been so easy — ’

‘Please, Hattie.’

‘You’re supposed to be so terribly clever, why didn’t you think how to do it?’

‘I’ve thought too much.’

‘Why didn’t you keep quiet and just let me learn.’

‘Don’t torment me with that.’

‘I’m grown up now, I could have learnt, without your making it into a sort of tragedy!’

‘Don’t torment me!’

‘You torment me! You’ve broken everything up into horrible jagged pieces, you’ve disturbed and changed my heart, and now you talk of ending and parting.’

‘It must be so.’

‘But I love you — ’

‘You are mistaken.’

‘I do, we can manage this, we can manage.’

‘You might, I cannot.’

‘What about my wishes?’

‘Your wishes are unimportant, they are ephemeral, you are young, your interest is not deep, your pain will be brief. Better not a step further. For me this is - not a tragedy - life is not tragic - It is a catastrophe - perhaps it is a merciful one.’

‘You’re only interested in your catastrophe.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I do love you, I want to help you, to save you.’

‘Young girls always see themselves as saviours, but it is the one role which they cannot play.’

‘Don’t generalize. I can. Why not let me try?’

‘Because I don’t want to be hurt by you any more.’

‘Oh, that’s so cruel, so awful.’

‘And so unfair, as you said before.’

‘I can love you and look after you and make you happy, and we can be friends now, like you said you always really wanted.’

‘No. You refuse to see how impossibly painful, for a hundred reasons, I would find that situation.’

‘Yes, I do refuse! Oh, we keep going in circles.’

‘Let us stop talking. It is dawn. The birds are singing. We have talked all night.’

‘It’s nearly midsummer, there is no night, we haven’t talked for long, I can’t stop talking, I can’t sleep. You were afraid I would run away. Now I am afraid you will run away.’

It was early on Sunday morning, though as Hattie said, morning was early. A blackbird was singing in the apple tree at number sixteen Hare Lane. John Robert rose stiffly and pulled one of the curtains back a little, letting a deadly breath of blank clear dawn light into the lamp-lit room. Hattie shuddered and moaned. She said, ‘I was so happy at the Slipper House with Pearl. You’ve taken Pearl away from me. And now you’re taking everything else away.’

Hattie had given John Robert ‘the day’ he had asked for, Friday. But on that morning, after his outburst, they had not really talked. Both were terrified and anxious to draw back. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and she, ‘It’s all right.’

John Robert’s mumbling ‘explanation’, his ‘apology’ turned into a long review of their meetings and their memories in which they both took refuge. During these reminiscences, which to a listener might have sounded like the talk of friends, they eyed each other like antagonists waiting to fight, while both were ferociously thinking. Their two intent faces even showed, during this time, a marked resemblance as they inwardly concentrated upon what had happened, and what was going to happen. They assessed, they reflected, they planned. In the afternoon (after they had distractedly played with some bread and cheese for lunch) Hattie said she was tired and had a headache and wanted to lie down, and they parted with relief. She lay on her bed stiff and alert. Now it was he who moved and sighed and she who listened. In the evening they reminisced again, less randomly, more carefully, it was as if they had to go through all those memories, like a kind of litany, before they could, cautiously approaching themselves to the present moment, engage. They discussed and argued warily, even sparring a little, declaring they would go to bed early (which they did), postponing the glimpsed frightfulness of a further clarification. Hattie asked questions about her mother, about her mother’s childhood, and talked a little about her father. They discussed Margot, talking almost pointlessly at last to tire themselves out. That night, on going to bed, Hattie very silently bolted her bedroom door.

She awoke next morning from hideous dreams to intense urgent miserable fear and guilt about Pearl. After promising John Robert faithfully that she would come back, she ran to the Slipper House and found that Pearl had gone. She returned in tears. John Robert looked at her silently with his terrible eyes. By now existence in the little house, eating and drinking and moving and going to the lavatory, going up and down the stairs, standing up and sitting down, had become a sort of nightmarish pattern as for people in a prison. Sometimes, to relieve Hattie of his presence, John Robert went out into the garden and stood there under the apple tree like a big stricken animal, while Hattie, like an image in a doll’s house, looked at him out of different windows. Neither of them could suggest going anywhere or doing anything, nor could they, though they tried, resume the conversation of yesterday. At last, out of his silence and her recurrent tears, the real talk, the awful talk, began to arise, and everything that had most terrified Hattie in her intense thinking and her stiff alert lying began to come about.

She stared at the terrible dawn light and felt it turning her face to stone.

‘I don’t want to stop until we’ve got somewhere, made some sense of it, established something, reached a point from which we can start again.’

‘We shall never start again. When we stop this conversation we must not start it again ever.’

‘Please, please don’t say things like that. Why do you have to make such a tragedy of it all? Treat it as a problem. Problems have solutions.’

‘A great philosopher said that if the answer can’t be put into words neither can the question.’

‘But the answer can be.’

‘It’s not a problem.’

‘You have a duty to me. Isn’t that what’s most important, what cuts through everything else?’

‘I had a duty. I failed. Duty is over.’

‘Duty is never over. Because you said what you said you now have a duty not to make me terribly unhappy about it. Please make it all easier, make it less awful, think of me. You felt like that when I was younger because we couldn’t communicate. You think it’s worse now I’ve grown up, but it isn’t, it’s better because we can talk about it, we can be friends.’

‘We can never be friends.’

‘Oh stop it, don’t say that! Is it your book, you feel in despair about your book so you want to destroy everything here too, pull it all to pieces, is that it?’

‘Don’t be foolish, you know nothing about my book.’

‘Can’t you be reasonable, can’t you be ordinary, can’t we get back to - well, not to where we were before, we can never be there, but— ’

‘If I had behaved properly, naturally, to you as a child I would not have built up this — ’

‘We’ve said all that - but isn’t it now just as if you had - haven’t you just - by this sudden - thing - made it as it would have been - haven’t you changed the past?’

‘That’s impossible, that’s sacrilege, one dies for that.’

‘No. You’ve done it, you’ve leapt the gap, oh let me persuade you, don’t you see, we’re together, as loving relations, as loving friends, as family - you’ve made us come close.’

‘It’s not like that, Hattie, and cannot be. I ought to stop this conversation but I cannot bear to, I wish it could go on forever, it’s agony but what will come after will be worse. It’s wicked to talk to you like this because it’s an image of things which are unspeakable and impossible, and that is why I want to prolong it - oh the pain — ’

‘Don’t suffer so, I can’t bear it, try not to — ’

‘I appal you. I revolt you physically.’

‘No.’

‘I did yesterday, or whenever it was, I’ve lost track of time.’

‘Yesterday was a long time ago. I don’t feel like that about you at all. I feel quite differently - I’ve - I’ve discovered you.’

‘You mean it’s an exciting situation, an exciting talk.’

‘No!’

‘Oh wicked, wicked, the pain of it.’

‘You gave me a shock, a surprise, but that’s over now. I’ve lived - it’s as if I’ve lived all these years, lived them in peace, lived them with you, and - oh - happily - that was what was happening when you were talking about the past.’

‘You are making up false fantasies. You are using your intelligence. But your intelligence is not enough. Your being so intelligent is another - twist - but all that is past now, it is over. This is a conversation between two ghosts.’

‘I’m not a ghost.’

‘You are for me. You had not yet come - but I always knew that if you ever did come you would pass me in a sort of atomic flash.’

‘I am not passing you. I refuse to. Perhaps there was a flash. But isn’t that good? Just be still and look round quietly and you will see you are in a new country.’

‘Yes. It is a country in which we can never be together.’

‘Why can’t we be?’

‘What we have done by this talking is to make it impossibly dangerous to go on - anywhere.’

‘Why do you want to define everything? Philosophers define things. But don’t they sometimes give up definitions?’

‘Don’t argue with me.’

‘I am fighting for my life.’

‘Don’t lie, Hattie, don’t exaggerate.’

‘I’m sorry, I just feel like that, I’ve found you, we can communicate, we understand each other, we’re so close, I mustn’t lose you, I mustn’t - oh it’s so awful - look, I can’t bear this sort of light, please pull back the curtains and put the lamp out.’

He rose and did so.

‘See, John Robert, dear, the sun has risen, it’s shining, the sky is blue, the blackbird is singing, we must try to be happy, why can’t we, since we’re both so intelligent! There, do smile at me.’

‘Oh, Hattie, Hattie — ’ He pulled violently at his short crinkly grey hair as if he wanted to drag it down to cover his eyes. He sat down heavily in the armchair. Hattie was sitting upright beside the table which still bore the remnants of a meal they had tried to eat many hours ago.

‘Hattie, don’t tempt me, you’re like a demon, a devil, the way you go on.’

‘How can you say that? Oh you upset me so! You’re so determined to see it all in that horrible way, you destroy everything, every possibility, out of spite, I think you enjoy hurting me - oh why did you tell me, it’s all your fault!’

‘Yes, yes, I know.’

‘You say we can’t be friends, then let us choose to be something else. You love me. I love you. So why can’t we just be together like that?’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Not like - I mean just like loving people are.’

‘That could only be if the past were different, and I’ve told you we can’t remake the past - it would be a fake, an abomination, we are absolutely and utterly not as we would have been if …’

‘I don’t mean that, I mean just being together and loving each other, there is a way to be together.’

‘There isn’t and you know there isn’t, don’t lie to me, Hattie.’

‘A way to be together, caring for each other, telling each other everything, talking.’

‘You mean like ex-lovers?’

‘Don’t speak in that horrible hard way. I don’t mean like anything except just us.’

‘Angels could do it. Humans not. Our minds lack that degree of particularity. Anyway you don’t love me. Oh you think you do now, but that’s just excitement, because of this unspeakably wicked argument for which I am entirely responsible, because of what you call the drama, and because you’re flattered!’

‘Flattered!’

‘Young girls are flattered by attentions from older men, especially if the older men are famous.’

‘Don’t you lie, that’s a sort of false lying vile speech!’

‘Yes. All right. But I’m probably the first man who has - made advances - and if I’m not - don’t tell me - oh God.’

‘How can you use such language to me!’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean - it’s just - I’m so unhappy.’

‘Oh how can I show you what it’s really like! If you had been my teacher I would have loved you.’

‘If I had been your teacher everything would have been entirely different.’

‘Well, can’t you be my teacher now, somehow —?’

‘No.’

‘Why can’t we make our home together, like you said, you actually talked about it, have you forgotten, about going to California and buying a house for us near the ocean, you said I’d like that, you said you’d keep me with you very much more.’

‘I was mad, I knew it couldn’t be, it couldn’t ever be.’

‘Well, you said it, anyway.’

‘Yes, but that was before I - broke the barrier, leapt the gap - we can’t go back to that.’

‘Why not? Why can’t you try? You’re a free man, not a helpless victim.’

‘I am a helpless victim - I’m pinned down and screaming - can’t you understand, can’t you feel the difference between us now? You’re talking, you’re thinking, you’re being clever, you’re trying this and trying that to make me stop upsetting you. But I’m in a different world, I’m in pain, I’m in the presence of death.’

‘Death.’

‘I don’t mean I’m ill or going to kill myself or anything, it’s just death-pain, parting-pain, bereavement.’

‘No, no, no, it doesn’t have to be. Why can’t we live together in that house? I could be so happy in that house, if we could only live together, you and me and Pearl.’

‘And Pearl - exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Oh if only you’d kept silent, we might have gone there.’

‘If I’d kept silent and gone on pretending - I thought I loved you then - but I feel - so much more now - speaking of it brings that about - and so - brings it all to an end.’

‘But why?’

‘You speak of Pearl - could I bear now, after what we’ve both become, to witness even your friendship with Pearl?’

‘But you wanted me to marry Tom McCaffrey.’

‘That was before, before we changed, it was to avoid this.’

‘Can’t we just be ourselves, surely we can live beyond all these things, we, surely we, can do as we please.’

‘Hattie, don’t tempt me, don’t end as a devil in my life, I’ve got to live afterwards with a memory of you.’

‘Why can’t you try to imagine a way?’

‘No, no, not there, we will not go there — ’

‘Where?’

‘There where everything switches and starts to run the other way. No, I will not imagine. You don’t know what you have been to me, what an image of purity and innocence. Of course you don’t know what you’re saying, but just please don’t talk any more. You are innocent now, later you’ll be like the rest. I almost feel I’d like to kill you, simply to keep you as you are now.’

He pushed the chair back violently, but did not rise.

Hattie was sitting very still, her two hands flat upon the table, as she had sat before, just before he revealed his secret. Her face was hotly flushed and her eyes were shining, whether with excitement or tears John Robert could not see. They were both silent for a moment.

Hattie relaxed, rubbing her eyes and falling into a dejected stoop. She said in a dull almost whining voice, ‘Then you won’t want to think of me - as I shall be later on.’

‘No. I won’t want to know - anything about you - later on.’

‘And you call that love. You have no common sense - no decent feeling - at all.’

The words were flat and terrible after their lofty wrangle.

John Robert felt their deadly flatness, he felt with dread the ending of their talk. He said, ‘You have been excited, and stirred, for you this has been an experience, and now you are disappointed. But for me - oh Hattie - I cannot tell you the hell I am in.’

She refused to express pity. She was thinking of herself, of her feelings. ‘You have forced me to feel love for you - that is what has happened - and now you instantly kill it all. You’ve made me feel - so much. Would it surprise you - how much I feel - what I feel - now?’

‘You are close to me. I mean we are both here breathing and sweating in this small room. I am a big animal. You find me powerful and frightening and interesting. It is a momentary impression.’

‘It is your atomic flash. I feel now - almost - in love with you.’

‘Don’t be silly, Hattie. Keep your sense, keep your senses.’

‘I’ve never felt just this before.’

‘I’m not interested.’

‘Oh you - you - I don’t understand you!’

‘It’s all to do with the past, Hattie. When I told you what I ought never to have told you - you are quite right - a sort of guillotine came down. I didn’t realize it at once. But time was cut off. I have no more time - I mean, for you. It is as if I have killed you. You will always be the same now, but dead.’

‘How can you say such hateful cruel things? Why not let me try to make you happy somehow? Don’t say it’s impossible. Think about it. Not now, but later, we’ve done enough now, we’ve said enough and we’re beginning to talk nonsense. Only don’t cut it all off, don’t consign me to being dead.’

‘Oh you will be alive enough, somewhere else. I hope you will be very happy, I really hope it.’

‘You don’t. You are trying to curse me, to destroy my happiness forever. You won’t share my life so you want to blacken it.’

‘Please don’t think that.’

‘You’re so sorry for yourself, you’re so stupid. I do care for you, I do love you, you’re lucky to be loved by me, why throw it all away, why do we have to think what it means, let’s see what it means. All right, this has been a crazy stupid conversation, you made it so. Why not let’s just go away now, to the railway station, to the airport, to America.’

‘Hattie, don’t do this to me.’

‘Let’s go away together.’

‘Hattie, stop, listen. I want you to leave this house at once and return to the Slipper House. You can have Pearl back if you want, I don’t care now so long as I don’t see you again.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘I will send you money, arrangements about your English college, all that. You can do what you like, I’ll be in America, but now go, will you, it’s still early, no one will see you, just go.’

‘I will not go, why should I? I hate all this tormenting repetitive talk just tearing at our nerves. I can’t bear being so close to you, feeling so close, and feeling - and not — ’

‘Go away, now, please.’

Hattie sprang up. She was flushed and her face was dirtied like a child’s with traces of tears. She had not plaited her hair or even combed it and now it had been tangled by her anxious clutching tugging fingers. Her dress was buttoned awry. Her lips, her jaw were trembling, her hands shaking, she breathed with audible shudderings. Her pale milky-blue eyes shone with tears and anger. John Robert who was sunk deep in the sagging armchair, like a huge half-hidden toad, struggled to rise, scrabbling his feet on the torn carpet, cracking the sides of the chair with his braced arms, but failed to get up. He murmured, ‘Don’t come near — ’

For a moment it looked as if Hattie were going to hurl herself upon him, leaping on to his lap like a kitten. Then she fell on her knees beside the chair, grasping one of his hands and covering it with tears and kisses. ‘Forgive me, don’t leave me, you are my dear grandfather, I love you, I have nobody but you, look after me, love me, don’t leave me alone.’

‘Stop it, Hattie,’ said John Robert.

At that moment, and suddenly, there was a loud noise in the house. Hattie sat back on her heels. The loud noise was repeated, a violent echoing banging sound. Somebody was knocking, was hammering, on the front door. They looked at each other. John Robert said, ‘It must be the police.’ That was his immediate thought.

‘Don’t go,’ said Hattie, on her feet now. ‘No one knows we’re here.’

A prolonged ring on the bell was followed by more and louder banging, a fist applied to the panels.

John Robert got himself on to one knee, and then to his feet. He mumbled, ‘I must go, I must.’ He blundered stiffly out into the hall followed by Hattie, and after fiddling with the door in the semi-darkness, opened it. The bright cold light from the street came dazzling in.

Tom McCaffrey was standing outside. He stared at them with dazed exhausted wild eyes. His hair was bedraggled, his shirt was unbuttoned and he was barefoot. He said in a low clear voice, ‘I’ve come for Hattie.’

John Robert did not hesitate for a second. He turned, and pushed and bundled Hattie somehow past him, between his great bulk and the wall, and out into the street. Tom later remembered seeing John Robert’s hands clutching the material of her dress as she stumbled out through the door.

Hattie cried, ‘No!’

Tom received her as she fell against him, touched by her, by her warm neck, her cool hair. A moment later he had taken her damp hand firmly in his. He said, ‘Come on!’ and pulled.

The door of number sixteen Hare Lane slammed shut.

Tom began to run, pulling Hattie after him. At first she resisted, then ran with him, holding his hand.

Who, drawing back his curtain in the early morning saw, in that clear sunny light, through empty streets, Tom McCaffrey running away with Hattie Meynell? I did.

After a while, somewhere in Travancore Avenue, they stopped running and walked on panting. Tom let go of Hattie’s hand. She was crying quietly, clearing her eyes with her knuckles from time to time. Tom kept glancing shyly at her.

‘Hattie, don’t cry, darling, what’s the matter? It’s only me.’

She shook her head and did not reply. Her face was red, her eyes bloodshot, her mouth wet. Her tears were abating, but she gave panting sobbing breaths, like little cries. She drew her tangled hair down about her face like a veil.

They passed Greg and Ju’s house. The curtains were drawn. All was silent, no one was about in Ennistone. Tom’s feet were aching, his knees were hurting. He had kicked off his shoes and removed his socks somewhere in the course of the night’s adventure, which now seemed long ago.

When the lights had gone out Tom had decided in a second to execute his plan nevertheless. His body, trained by his careful looking, remembered what to do. His right foot touched the projecting knife lightly, then rested weight on it for a moment as Tom flew upward, his hands climbing the vertical bars of the upper stairway, his left knee fumbling in the dark for a place to rest. The knife gave way and fell with a clatter on to the concrete floor below. Tom’s knee blundered against the bars, finding the space it was making for too narrow. For a moment, his arms taking most of the strain, Tom hung with his knee jammed against the bars, painfully supported by the inch or two of tread which projected on the near side, his right leg now hanging in mid-air. The weight on his arms increased as his hands began to slide slowly down the wet slippery bars. Then somehow his right knee had risen up, finding a similar auxiliary lodgement on a higher tread, leaving him hanging, crouched spider-like against the side of the structure. Instinctively Tom jerked his left knee free and, dabbing sideways, lodged his left foot securely between the bars on a lower step. The strain on his arms decreased and he rested for a moment, his body sloping sideways. Then he cautiously removed his left hand to a lower bar, nearer to his left foot, and pulled hard, working himself into a more upright position, his right hand now able to grasp the banister at the top of the vertical bars, while his right foot also found a place upon the treads. After another rest he was able to throw one leg over the banister and slide himself over so as to collapse on to the stairs. Here for some time he sat, massaging his painful knees, wondering if they were damaged. It was probably at this point that he took his shoes and socks off and mislaid them in the dark. He was sorry to have lost the knife.

After that a period of time passed during which Tom climbed up and down flights of stairs in the dark, swallowing the steamy atmosphere and scorching his feet and failing to find any continuous way up. Stairs which he ascended ended in locked doors or else unaccountably started to go down again. He called out at intervals but was appalled to hear his puny cries echoing so vainly. He went up, then down, then up until he had lost all sense of which way was up and which down. He sat down at last while all around him the hot darkness quietly seethed and boiled. Sitting still, he concentrated on breathing and on overcoming his fear of suffocation. He breathed the dark and it filled him to the brim. Later still, waking up from what had surely not been sleep, he tried calling out again, and uttered one extremely loud cry which resonated in the huge enclosed space and set the whole network of invisible metal tingling and ringing with a tiny very high noise. After this the lights went on and an angry man opened the door at the top and came running down the stairways.

The man was less angry when he discovered who the intruder was. Tom was forgiven, quite unjustly, as no doubt he will be forgiven by God if God exists. He told the now gently chiding and amused employee that he had lost his shoes and his socks and his mackintosh and his jacket and his knife somewhere down below. He tried to describe his feat of levitation but found himself unable to picture what had happened. His rescuer, telling him to ‘bugger off home!’, left him in the corridor of the Ennistone Rooms. Tom began to walk toward the swing doors at the end; but before he reached them he saw, through the open door of one of the empty rooms, a divine sight, a bed with plump pillows and white sheets. He entered, drew back the sheets and climbed in. The most refreshing slumber he had ever had came to him instantly, and wisdom and clear vision dripped quietly upon him as he slept. He awoke knowing exactly what to do, and set off at once for Hare Lane.

Tom pushed open the back gate of the Belmont garden and Hattie went through. He followed her. She said, ‘I haven’t got the keys.’

Tom said, ‘Don’t worry. I can get in.’

The garden was airily green, a little misty, a little hazy, and innumerable birds were making a great network of sweet noise. They walked along the path under the trees, covered with moss and old leaves and little shapely bits of wooden debris which hurt Tom’s feet, then they walked across the grass. Tom told Hattie to wait at the front door while he ran round the back, into the coal shed and through the window into the back passage by the route taken by George. He ran to let Hattie in. She had profited by the interval to smooth her hair down and comb it with her fingers. She looked calmer.

She came in, passed Tom and began to go up the stairs. Now, for the first time since his visionary slumber, Tom began to be uncertain of his role: not that he had actually thought out any role, he had acted instinctively at each moment as he felt he must. But now the dream-like unfolding of destined action seemed to have come to an end, the magic was switched off, and he was returned to the clumsy perilous muddle of ordinary life.

Hattie went into her bedroom and threw herself on the bed, lying on her back. Her feet fumbled, one rubbing against the other as she tried to push her shoes off. Tom took the shoes from her feet and put them under the bed. Then he stood looking down at her.

Hattie lay upon her spread hair, and her desolated face had become calm and quietly weary. As Tom stared down humbly, apologetically, questioningly, she smiled at him and reached out her hand. He took it, then sat down on the edge of the bed. He could see now that her body, to which her dress clung closely, was soaked with sweat. He kissed her hand. It tasted salt.

‘Hattie, may I lie down beside you?’

‘Yes. But just that.’

He lay down on his side, stretching himself out, measuring her body with his body, not trying to draw her to him, but touching her shoulder with one hand. He felt her very slight shrinking resistance.

‘Hattie.’

‘Yes, Tom.’

‘Will you marry me?’

She was silent.

‘Hattie — ’

It took Tom a moment longer to discover that she had fallen fast asleep. He lay still, protecting her while she slept, filled with the most pure intense happiness which went coursing through his body in a dazzling quiet stream.

Later on, while Hattie was still sleeping, he went downstairs. A neat parcel had been placed inside the front door which he had left open. Inside the parcel he found his shoes and socks and mackintosh and jacket and the knife which Emma had given him.

George McCaffrey pushed open the swing doors at the entrance to the Ennistone Rooms. The porter in his glass box was reading the Ennistone Gazette, and did not notice George’s arrival. If he had seen George, he might have been amazed by the beatific expression on his face. How could one describe that expression? George was not ‘wreathed in smiles’, but his face looked plumped out with deep satisfaction, or perhaps with inner peace. This could have been the face of a man who had inherited a million, or of one who had, after long asceticism, achieved enlightenment. This was the look which had so much alarmed Tom McCaffrey on the occasion of the ‘court martial’ and on the evening at Diane’s Hat when George had so quietly, almost absently, thrust him out of the door.

George walked along the corridor with a sort of affected step, as if he were being watched (which he was not), picking up his feet carefully from the carpet, like a dainty high-stepping horse. He walked slowly, as if reflectively. He was breathing deeply, however. His eye, roving like that of a carefree man, had elicited from the notice board the information that Professor John Robert Rozanov was ‘in’.

On the door of John Robert’s room hung a card provided by the management saying Do not disturb. George smiled at the card. Then he stood at the door and, still smiling, listened. He heard within the sound, which he expected, of the quiet snoring of the sleeping sage. It was the afternoon time when it was John Robert’s habit to be asleep. It was the afternoon of Monday. George had visited the Rooms at the same time on the previous day, only then John Robert had been ‘out’. (He had been still at Hare Lane sorting papers and writing letters.) George now pressed the door. It opened, letting the roaring sound of the water out into the corridor. George entered quickly and closed the door behind him. The scene was much as he had observed it on his former visit. The frosted-glass windows cast a clear pearly light. The sun was shining outside. John Robert was lying on the bed. but on this occasion clothed in a great blue sail-like Ennistone Rooms nightshirt which amply covered his domed bulk. He was lying on his back, one arm across his chest, the other depending from the bed. The table was covered with books and notebooks, the notebooks now being neatly stacked up.

George was still smiling. The smile intensified the beatific glow of his expression so that he now looked like a man inspired at some great moment of his life, as when, perhaps, in a battle he seizes a flag and rushes forward against the enemy with a loud joyous cry, possessed by a divine frenzy or the sacred impulse of supreme duty. Yet at the same time he was quiet and deliberate in his movements; as well he might be since he was executing a routine which he had rehearsed many times in his imagination. Indeed as he moved now in the room he might still have been within the secret unresisting chamber of his mind. He moved as if treading on air. The double doors of the bathroom behind which the waters roared were ajar, and a pillar of steam hung behind them, rapidly dissipating itself in the cooler air. George, after casting a glance at the quiet figure on the bed, slowly opened the two doors wide. From the big brass taps the waters plunged into the white abyss of the sunken bath, hiding it in their cloud. George stepped into the bathroom and peered to see whether the outlet pipe was closed. It was open. maintaining a foot or so of water at the bottom of the bath. He leaned over and turned the brass handle to close the outlet. Already, as he retreated, the steam had covered him with moisture. Turning to gaze at John Robert, he began to take off his jacket. His smile had now become a grin which might have been an expression of extreme pain. He rolled up his shirt-sleeves.

The philosopher was snoring more quietly now with a faint bubbling sound. This time he had left his teeth in, and his mouth and chin had not collapsed, but his sleeping face looked to George huge and senseless, a pile of flabby layers of soft folded skin, pitted and porous, old, like the remains of something which had failed to be cooked, or a collapsed heap of blanched dead plants deprived of light. The eyes had vanished into hooded wrinkled holes. It was not like a face but a chaotic mess of flesh spread out where a face might have been. The skin was coarse and patchily discoloured, dirtied by a grey growth of beard. George moved his gaze to where the open neck of the starchily clean shirt revealed a rising slice of pink hairless chest. The genitals were covered, the knobbly knees visible, red and smooth and curiously touching as if they had not aged and were still the knees of a boy. Beneath them the legs were a livid white, with prominent blue veins, and sparsely covered with extremely long black hairs. The philosopher’s feet were covered by a towel. George returned to the bathroom. The bath was now full and discharging itself evenly into the overflow pipe.

George pressed his hand hard to his breast, regulating his breathing. He unbuttoned the neck of his shirt. One of the bathroom doors had half closed. He propped it wide open with a chair. He looked at the problem he had set himself and through the solution of which he had so often run in his mind. The bed, one of the original beds of the Rooms, was of tubular steel, designed to move easily on casters over the sleek carpet, and standing against the pale oak headboard which was fixed to the wall. George put his hand on the foot of the bed and pulled slightly. The bed moved silently as if of its own accord. George caught his breath in a sort of swallowed sigh or sob. Now that he was at last so close to it he felt a need to pause. He began looking about the room, moving his eyes in an odd mechanical way as if seeing were a new and special activity. He looked at the carving on the oak panel of a faun among spear-shaped leaves. He looked at one of the orange-and-white plates imported from Sweden which had been placed on a chair near the door. He looked at the books on the table and saw that some of them were dusty. John Robert must have told the maids not to touch his work. George looked at the window catches, also steel originals, eloquent of their date. He felt an impulse to go and touch them, or to draw his finger across the nearest book. He looked at John Robert again and his heart was seared as if with a radiantly hot iron. From here the face made sense for a moment, the lips protruding as George had so often seen them do when his teacher was listening to an argument. There was something so alert and wakeful about this gesture of the lips that George had to peer closely, for John Robert had ceased to snore, to be sure that the eyes were not awake and glaring.

George began to push the foot of the bed round. He did this simply by leaning his thigh against it, and again the bed silently and obligingly moved. The head of the bed was now swinging in the direction of the bathroom. George was overcome by a kind of faintness which was also a fever of haste. His breath came in a little audible stream of ‘oh, oh, oh.’ He no longer seemed to care whether John Robert woke up or not. The mechanics of the operation, the absolute necessity of the task, absorbed him completely. His legs felt weak, his knees dissolving as with sexual desire. He propelled the bed head first through the double doors of the bathroom.

In his imagination of this scene George had pushed the bed quietly and cautiously and had paused to be sure that the head of it was directly above the brimming bath before he completed his task. But now this sickening fearful haste had taken hold of his body, and as soon as the end of the bed entered the bathroom he pushed so violently that the front legs ran quickly over the tiles and would have jolted down into the water had they not been checked by the raised rim of the bath. George, now in the doorway, stopped pushing, took a deep breath, and bending down seized the two back legs near to the floor and began to lift. John Robert’s weight was mainly at the top end of the bed and it was not very difficult to raise the foot. George saw the round steel legs of the bed rising up, his hands clawed round them, his knuckles white with strain. His feet apart, his body braced, he stared at what was closest. Then suddenly there was a great lumpish crashing sound and the bed was relieved of its weight and leapt out of George’s grasp, swinging sideways, into one of the louvred doors. George gave a little yelping cry, and now scrabbled in desperate haste to get himself past the obstructing bed. Already he could see he had botched it all. John Robert had not fallen head first into the water. He lay in a great whale-like bulk poised upon the very edge of the bath. George thought, he’s stunned, he has hurt himself in the fall, he can’t get up. Moaning, he ran forward and with his foot propelled the philosopher over the edge into the noisy steamy cauldron of very hot bubbling water.

George stood for a moment, dazed by the sudden disappearance. Water splashed up over his feet and steam blinded his eyes. Then he saw below him, in the long wide cavity of the bath, something blue and dark floating and agitating upon the surface. It was the blue nightshirt. George thought, I ought to have taken that off. But of course I couldn’t have done earlier. He knelt beside the bath and pressed down upon the blue shirt, feeling the fat humpy shoulders of his victim. He pressed and pressed, using both hands, pressing hard down on anything which rose above the surface. He went on doing this for many minutes, with the movements of someone washing clothes. And as he held the great head down below the water and wondered how much longer he needed to do it he had the strange feeling that he had performed this ritual before, perhaps many times. He thought, it’s just like the dead babies. Well, the babies weren’t dead, it was just that he had wanted to make them dead like this, and like this, and like this.

At last he felt that it was not necessary to continue. There was something huge and bulky, with rounded wet surfaces, floating there, bobbing, moving, in the disturbed water. George thought, I ought to take the shirt off. No clothes. I worked that out before. I can’t remember why. He pulled a little at the dark blue material. But it was too difficult now to get it off and too awful. He rose on one knee, then slowly to his feet, and walked back into the bedroom, squeezing past the bed. He stood for a moment looking at the room which looked so odd and different with the bed gone from the centre. He moved to the window and looked at the window catches and now reached out to touch one of them. How strange, that the last time he had looked at that catch the entire universe had been different. The radiant searing burn touched his heart again, this time with the touch of the most terrible fear he had ever felt, fear for his future, fear at his continued existence. He picked up one of the notebooks from the table. He thought, I’ll drown the book too. He went back, squeezing past the bed, and saw with a kind of surprise the big hippopotamus floating in the bath. He dropped the notebook into the water at the far end of the bath. He saw John Robert’s writing upon the pages. Then he thought, I’d better go, get away. He went back into the bedroom and made for the door. Glancing behind him he realized that he had left the bed jammed into the bathroom doorway. He returned and pulled it out and propelled it to its original position. The head of the bed was splashed with water and the pillow was gone. Feebly and automatically George mopped the legs of the bed and the bedclothes with the towel which had covered John Robert’s feet and which had not accompanied him in his fall. He looked for the pillow and found it lying very wet on the edge of the bath. He tried to wring it out, then left it on the floor near the bed. There was a lot of water on the carpet which he made out to be his own footprints. He took a clean towel from the bathroom rail and dried his arms and dabbed at his shoes. Then tried to obliterate the wet marks. He saw his jacket lying in the corner and put it on. He went and carefully closed the doors into the bathroom. He looked about the room. It was more silent now, and looked much as usual except that it was vastly cosmically empty. George stood for a moment breathing deeply and then let himself out of the door into the corridor. He closed the bedroom door, and the sound of the waters subsided to a distant hum. He began to walk away along the empty corridor.

Do not disturb.

As George had almost reached the swing doors they began to rotate. Father Bernard came in, turned to free his cassock, and came face to face with George. The priest began to say something, then swallowed it on seeing George’s face. George passed by and out into the sunlight.

Father Bernard had had a lot of worries of his own lately, private worries such as belong to the inner life. It had been coming into his heart and his spirit that he could not for very much longer go on wearing a dog collar and a cassock. He would have to move on. This conclusion caused real pain, not the sort which can be played with. He decided, after some hesitations and reluctances, that he should discuss the matter with Rozanov, whose candour on the subject had perhaps brought on, had certainly accelerated this distressing spiritual crisis. He went first to Hare Lane where there was no answer to the bell and nothing to be observed except an upset milk bottle outside the door (knocked over in the course of Tom’s abduction of Hattie). He then went to the Ennistone Rooms.

After seeing George’s face, the priest ran along the corridor alert with fear. He knocked perfunctorily on the door of John Robert’s room, entered and was relieved to find it empty. The bed was undone, the bathroom doors closed, and the table covered with signs of study. Father Bernard recovered his breath. He assumed that John Robert was briefly away somewhere, perhaps with a doctor. He waited, then with his usual curiosity (but with a cautious eye on the door) began to look at the table. He picked up one of the notebooks and deciphered a page or two of John Robert’s spidery writing, feeling the layman’s amused gratification of not being able to understand a word. Then he saw, half-concealed under the books, a white sheet of paper laid out, a letter. At the top was written For the attention of William Eastcote Esq. (John Robert was unaware that his friend was dead.) Father Bernard leaned over and read as follows.

My dear Bill,

I hope you will forgive me for having taken my life. I know you will disapprove. Only think it, if you can, a happier life for having terminated now. You have always seen me as a stoic, and will perhaps understand. Please look after Hattie. I have named you and Robin Osmore as executors of my will. Goodbye, Bill. You may imagine with what sentiments of cordiality and esteem I sign myself for the last time,

Yours,

John Robert

I have taken a quick and effective mixture concocted for me by an American chemist. Attempts to resuscitate me will be vain.

Father Bernard uttered a wild cry of woe. He looked desperately round, then ran to the bathroom doors and swung them open. At first in the steam he could see nothing. Then he saw the strange huge half-submerged contents of the bath. He knelt down on the slippery wet verge and pulled in helpless revulsion and misery and terror at the slippery bobbing surfaces. At last he found the head and raised it, pulling by the hair. It was plain that John Robert was gone, he was no longer there, there was only something else which slipped from the priest’s horrified hands. However, he managed, by some desperate pulling and dragging, to prop the bulky form up at the shallow seated end of the bath away from the taps so that the head lolled back upon the tiled edge. Then he rose and made for the door.

The letter was lying on the carpet where he had dropped it. Instinctively he picked it up and put it in his pocket. He ran out into the corridor shouting for help. As white-coated attendants appeared and hurried into the room Father Bernard ran away down the corridor and out through the swing doors. He began to run, panting and whimpering, in the direction of Diane’s flat in Westwold.

When George left the Institute he began to walk fairly fast in the direction of the High Street, but turned into the Botanical Garden. He paused and looked at a tree, a ginkgo, which he had long ago ‘adopted’ because he associated it with his childhood at Belmont. He crossed the garden, avoiding the Museum, and began to walk toward the Roman bridge. On the other side of the Enn he found himself turning toward Burkestown with some vague intention of going to 16 Hare Lane, as if he might find there a second and utterly different John Robert. He felt it important to have a goal. He began to walk fast. By the time he reached Burkestown, however, he had decided to make for the Common, by way of the level crossing, and the old railway cutting. He passed the Green Man, which was just opening its doors. Several people saw George pass by on that evening, but his grin of pain did not seem to them an unusual expression. No one approached him.

As George walked along the grassy bottom of the cutting he noticed the flowers growing upon the banks, foxgloves, white comfrey, campion, rambling purple vetch with its tiny stripes. He thought, this is the first day, the first hour, of the new world in which everything will be entirely different. I have undergone a cosmic change, every atom, every particle is changed, I am switched over into a completely new mode of being. And he thought, it had to be, it had to be, it had to be. I have done what I had to do, I have had the courage, the devotion, to do it. And he thought, how odd, I never did find out how Schlick’s pupil killed him. It doesn’t matter now. The cutting ended and he began to climb up on to the Common. From here the stones of the Ennistone Ring can be seen upon the horizon, as they are so often represented upon picture postcards. George began to make for the Ring. Behind the stones the brilliant radiant summer evening sky was vibrating with the tingling cloudless blue of a pure happiness. George gave a sob. He felt the pain beginning; it was starting to spread inside him, the crippling awful pain of absolute remorse; and he prayed oh forgive me, oh let me die now, let me die, let me die.

As he came up on to the top level of the Common there were a few people about, but not near him. He began to walk through the long grass in the direction of the Ring. The electrical vibration of the blue zenith beyond the stones was hurting his eyes, and he turned his head away toward where the sun, descending in the sky, was hazed by a little cloud against a gentler less vivid blue. Only the sun, blazing through the misty light, had changed or was changing. It was no longer round but was becoming shaped like a star with long jagged mobile points which kept flowing in and out, and each time they flowed they became of a dazzling burning intensity. The star was very near, too near. It went on flaming and burning, a vast catastrophic conflagration in the evening sky, emitting its long jets of flame. And as it burnt with dazzling pointed rays a dark circle began to grow in its centre, making the star look like a sunflower. George thought, I’ll look at the dark part, then I shall be all right. As he watched, the dark part was growing so that now it almost covered the central orb of the sun, leaving only the long burning petals of flame which were darting out on every side. The dark part was black, black, and the petals were a painful shimmering electric gold. The thing shone and shuddered and seemed to be getting closer, while at the same time it gave less and less light and the sky was darkening. It’s killing me, thought George, it is a death thing, this is my death that I prayed for. Oh God, if I can only look away, or my eyes will be destroyed in my head. He turned, wrenching his head round. He caught a glimpse of the Ennistone Ring, quite close and bathed in an odd vivid crepuscular light. Then from beyond the Ring and coming toward him, there appeared a brilliant silver saucer-shaped space-ship, flying low down over the Common. It came toward George flying quite slowly, and as it came it emitted a ray which entered into his eyes, and a black utter darkness came upon him and he fell to his knees and lay stretched out senseless in the long grass.

And here some time later Father Bernard found him. The priest had first visited Diane, and had found her spreading out upon the bed all the frilly flowery summer clothes she had bought for going to Spain. He managed to conceal his agitation from Diane, and went on to Druidsdale where he found Stella. Stella realized at once that something was very wrong, but the priest told her nothing except that he urgently wanted to see George. It had already occurred to Father Bernard that George might have run up on to the Common and if he did so would be likely to go toward the Ring. Here Father Bernard stumbled about in vain in the long grasses, almost weeping with tiredness and distress, falling over courting couples whom the grass, uncut, was long enough to conceal, beginning to mistrust his intuition and increasingly to fear that, wherever George was, he would not be discovered alive. When at last he glimpsed, in the green sea into which the sun was now laying down long shadows, the familiar colour of George’s grey jacket, and saw his dark hair, he fell down beside him with a cry of thankfulness.

George was lying on his face and seemed at first to be unconscious or asleep, as the priest laid his arm across the humped shoulders.

‘George, George, it’s me, Father Bernard, I’ve come to find you, wake up.’

George stirred, rolled on his side, opened his eyes, blinked a little, then closed them again.

‘George - don’t worry - it’s me - I’ll help you.’

George reached out and found a piece of the cassock and held it. He said, ‘I killed John Robert. I drowned him. He’s dead.’

‘I know,’ said the priest. He had read this, or something like it, in George’s face as they met in the corridor. ‘Only you didn’t kill him, you didn’t.’

‘You mean he’s still alive?’

‘No, no, but you didn’t kill him. Look, I’ll show you.’

‘He’s still alive, thank God, it’s a miracle - oh thank God.’

‘George, George,’ he cried, ‘he is dead, but not by your hand, he took his own life - look at this — ’

But George, hiding his face in the grass, just went on saying, ‘Oh thank God - oh forgive me - oh thank God.’

‘Look at this, look at this, look at his letter.’

George, turning on his side again, said, ‘I can’t see anything. I have become blind. I open my eyes and there is nothing, it is all dark, black. Was there an eclipse of the sun?’

‘No.’

‘I remember now. It was the flying saucer. It sent out a beam at me. It took my sight away.’

‘George, my dear, get up, can you, I’ll take you home. I’ll explain - John Robert’s dead - but you didn’t kill him, you’re not a murderer, you’re not.’

Very slowly with the priest’s help George rose to his feet. It was evident that he could not see. He swayed, holding out his hands. Together they stumbled as far as the path. It was late evening now, darkening to a clear greenish sunset sky.

As they began to walk slowly arm in arm along the path together Father Bernard asked, ‘Where shall I take you to?’

‘Take me home to Druidsdale. Stella is there.’