The Philosopher's Pupil

PRELUDE

i An Accident

A few minutes before his brainstorm, or whatever it was, took place, George McCaffrey was having a quarrel with his wife. It was eleven o’clock on a rainy March evening. They had been visiting George’s mother. Now George was driving along the quayside, taking the short-cut along the canal past the iron foot-bridge. It was raining hard. The malignant rain rattled on the car like shot. Propelled in oblique flurries, it assaulted the windscreen, obliterating in a second the frenetic strivings of the windscreen wipers. Little demonic faces composed of racing raindrops appeared and vanished. The intermittent yellow light of the street lamps, illuminating the grey atoms of the storm, fractured in sudden stars upon the rain-swarmed glass. Bumping on cobbles the car hummed and drummed.

Stella was usually silent when George had one of his rages. On this occasion she spoke up.

‘George, let me drive.’

‘No.’

‘Let me drive.’

‘I said no!’

‘Don’t drive so fast.’

‘Don’t touch me, damn you, leave me alone!’

‘I am leaving you alone.’

‘You never do, never, never.’

‘Change gear, you’re straining the engine.’

‘It’s my car, I can do what I bloody like with it.’

‘Don’t drive so fast, you can’t see.’

‘I can see with my own eyes. You can’t see with my eyes, can you? So shut up.’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘Fancy that!’

‘You make your mother drink too much.’

‘Why come then? You like to see us degrade each other, is that it?’

‘She shouldn’t drink so.’

‘I hope she dies of it, the fiend. Oh if only she could get on with dying!’

‘She sets you off, she always does.’

‘You set me off. She hates you.’

‘All right, I know.’

‘You seem quite pleased.’

‘No.’

‘You’re jealous of her.’

‘No.’

‘You think you’re better than all of us.’

‘Only in some respects.’

‘Only in some respects! Oh Christ !’

‘I’m only answering your idiotic remarks. I wish you’d be quiet and drive better.’

‘You needle me all the time with your beastly calm superiority, nothing touches you, nothing, you never cry like a real woman.’

‘Maybe I don’t cry when you’re around.’

‘You don’t cry. You can’t. Tears are human. When you’re alone you sit with a little self-satisfied smile, like a Buddha.’

‘Let’s not talk. I’m sorry —!’

‘Oh, you torment me so —!’

‘You torment yourself

‘People detest you, do you know that?’

‘No.’

‘All right, they detest me too.’

‘I should say you were rather popular.’

‘Because they don’t know what I’m like.’

‘Because they do. Everybody loves a black sheep.’

‘Black sheep! What a banality!’

‘Do you want me to call you something worse?’

‘They don’t bloody know what you’re like. They think you’re a prig. They don’t know you’re a devil.’

‘Oh do be quiet.’

‘I can’t stand your physical proximity.’

‘Stop the car then and I’ll get out.’

‘Oh no you don’t, you stay here. I won’t let you get out!’

‘Oh how it rains!’

‘You provoke me so that you can blame me. I know your tricks. You go on and on about how I lost my job, you keep bringing it up.’

‘You bring it up.’

‘You say you’re sorry, but you think that I’m a rotten contemptible failure.’

‘That’s what you think, not what I think.’

‘I could kill you for saying that.’

‘You only care about losing face, not about the harm that you do, not about things that matter.’

‘Such as you.’

‘Such as being kind to me.’

‘Are you kind to me?’

‘I try to be. I love you.’

‘That’s the most cruel thing of all, to keep saying that when it isn’t true, when I need real love not your bloody power mania, that’s your excuse, you think if you just say that it lets you off and you can do anything you like to me. Christ, you even destroy the bloody language, you stand beside me with your pretended love like a nurse waiting for the patient to collapse. You think one day I’d fall helplessly into your arms, but I never will, never never never. I’ll kill myself first, or you, you make an absolute nonsense of my life. If I’m mad you made me so — ’

‘You’re not mad.’

‘You said I ought to have electric shocks.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You lie.’

‘I said someone else said so.’

‘Who?’

‘Oh never mind.’

‘Who?’

‘The doctor.’

‘Oh, so you’ve been seeing the doctor about me!’

‘No, I just met him at Brian’s.’

‘You said, my husband has gone mad and I want him locked up.’

‘Do stop this farce.’

‘Farce, that’s what you reduce me to. I’m your puppet, you reduce me to a gibbering puppet and put me in your pocket. You’re so hard, so cold, no gentleness, no tenderness, no repose. If I’d married a sweet kind woman I’d be a different man. Oh it’s all so black, so black. Why don’t you go away?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Someone might blame you for once! You hate me, don’t you? You are hating me, you are loathing me, in this very minute. Why don’t you admit it?’

‘I won’t say so.’

‘You mean it’s true, only you won’t say it, so why do you speak of love, you foul hypocrite?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said something different.’

‘I didn’t say that, I said something different! Are you crazy?’

‘I might say I hated you but it wouldn’t be true. I guard my tongue.’

‘You guard your tongue! Our life together is a madhouse. Why did you ever marry me? Everyone was amazed. Your father was stunned. Well, why did you —?’

‘Oh - it doesn’t matter.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You always say that. You’ll say it when I’m dying. You’re a leech, a flea, a blood-sucking parasite. You’re quietly pouring all my blood into your body. You’ll suck me white and dry and prop me up in a corner and say to people, “There’s my husband, poor George!”’

‘You don’t believe any of this, why do you say it?’

‘I do believe it. You imagine that however much I shout I really need you, and as soon as I stop you think it’s all right between us.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a lie, your lie, your illusion. God, if I could only cram it down your throat and put an end to you. Do you think I could talk like this if I didn’t hate you in the deepest part of my soul?’

‘Yes. You don’t hate me.’

‘You’ve been sent by the devil to torment me. Why don’t you go away before I kill you? Can’t you be unselfish enough not to get yourself murdered? But oh no, you won’t go away, you’ll never go away, you want people to admire you and say “There’s long-suffering Stella, the virtuous wife!”’

‘Don’t drive like that, you’re hurting the car.’

‘You’re sorry for the car, what about me?’

‘I wish I could help you.’

‘You’d better help yourself. You’ll be sorry — ’

‘You know perfectly well that I love you and care about you.’

‘What a way to put it, what a tone to use. You ought to take some lessons in being a woman.’

‘How can I put it when you’re like this?’

‘Haven’t you any feelings?’

‘Not at the moment. I’ve switched off my feelings. If I had feelings now I’d be screaming.’

‘Scream away, I’d like to hear you scream.’

‘One scream is enough.’

‘Why don’t you say that you hate me?’

‘If I say I hate you it’s the end, there’s no more sense in the world, it’s all darkness — ’

‘If you said it you’d make it true? Then it must already be true — ’

‘No, no — ’

‘Roll on darkness. It’s covered me already. God, how you torture my nerves.’

‘Well, don’t say so, why can’t you be silent. Keep all this filth inside yourself. Other people manage to, why can’t you?’

‘Yes, you keep your filth inside, but it stinks all right, it rots and it stinks. You’re sour and foul and rotten all through.’

‘Oh shut up, damn you!’

‘What did you say?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘What did you say?’

‘You’re crazy. You’re crazy with fear because that man is coming.’

‘What?’

‘You’re crazy with fear because Rozanov is coming.’

‘You bitch - you — ’

George struck sideways at her, catching her cheekbone with the back of his hand.

‘George - stop - stop the car - stop —’

‘Hell, hell, hell—’

George wrenched at the wheel, turning the car violently round in the direction of the canal. He dragged at the wheel as if it were some evil plant which he was striving to haul up by the roots. The car swerved, lurching and sliding on the uneven stones, and the lights of the nearest lamp post crackled across the windscreen in a starry trail as the rain struck with a difference and jumped about as if the car were shaking itself like a dog. George felt that in another moment he would suffocate; all his blood seemed to have rushed up into his head and to be bursting out there into a blazing bleeding wet red flower. He thought, I’m having a heart attack or something, I must get out into the air or I’ll die. Gasping for breath, he fumbled the door open and half fell out, slithering on the cobbles and stumbling against the wet slippery side of the car. The rain drenched his burning face. He saw the dark surface of the canal close below him, covered with tiny mobile rings like grey coins. He saw the high elliptical curve of the iron foot-bridge beyond. The car, its wheels almost at the edge of the quay, was moving away from him in automatic drive. He must have braked instinctively as he swung it round. He cried aloud in a furious despairing wail. Why hadn’t it gone away into the water as he had intended it to, why was it all still to do? Let everything pass from him into destruction. His hands were sliding along the wet metal. A vast feeling like sex, like a sense of duty, took possession of his body, a thrill of frantic haste and pure absolute fear. Hurry, hurry, hurry, must, must, must. He fell against the back of the car, bracing his feet against the rough stones of the quay and trying to push with open palms upon the back window. He felt the rainy muddy glass and raised his mad enraged face up like a howling dog. He heard screams, his own and another’s. At the same moment he looked towards the iron bridge and saw that there was a figure on it, a tall figure in a long black coat. It’s the devil, thought George, the devil come at last to —

Then he fell headlong on the stones. Nothing was there, no car, no figure, nothing. He lay with his face in a pool of water. He had heard a great sound, a great hollow explosion like something bursting inside his brain. He lifted up his head.

He lifted up his head. He was in his bed in his room at home, and the daylight was showing through the curtains, present in an insubstantial pattern of yellow flowers. So, he thought, it was only a dream! I dreamt I’d killed Stella. Not for the first time either, by God! And the devil was in the dream too. He was crossing the bridge. I always connect him with water. And Stella was drowned, I drowned her. George often dreamed this, only usually he drowned Stella in a bath, holding her head down below the water and wondering how much longer he needed to do it to be quite sure that she was dead.

He peered at his watch in the dim light. It was seven-thirty. Then he remembered that he had lost his job. In a fit of rage he had destroyed the Museum’s small but very precious collection of Roman glass. Only one little bluey-greeny beaker had survived George’s fury, bouncing in a miraculous manner upon the tiled floor. George pictured the timidly anguished face of the director as, looking ready to weep, he carefully picked up the survivor. Spite against George followed; things always ended in spite against George. Perhaps he ought to appeal. No one got sacked nowadays. Oh to hell with them, he thought. Then he thought, why am I such a bloody fool, I do such damn stupid things, it’s all my own fault, God I am unlucky. He wondered if he should reflect about whether to try to get that job back or whether to get another job and if so what and how, and decided not to reflect.

A stab of pain, a different one, alerted George’s drowsy mind to another matter and he sat up abruptly in bed. John Robert Rozanov. George now pictured John Robert’s face, a huge spongy moist fleshy face, with a big pitted hooked nose and an avid sensual mouth always partly open. He saw John Robert’s red wet lips and his terrible clever cruel blood-shot eyes. At the same time George became fully aware of the frightful headache which had been plaguing him ever since he became conscious. His face felt bruised too. He must have been foully drunk last night. He tried to remember last night but could not. John Robert was coming back. Oh God, oh God.

George decided that what he needed now was milk, a nice long drink of creamy cold milk from the fridge. Slowly and gingerly, holding his head with one hand, he pulled back the bedclothes and moved his legs to dangle over the edge of the bed. He put his feet carefully on the floor. A kind of cramp seemed to be curling them into balls, and they refused to uncurl into flat surfaces which could be stood upon; it was like trying to stand on two fists. He managed to stand awkwardly, holding on to the bedpost, then hobbled to the window and drew back the curtains. The sun was shining upon George’s small garden and upon a poplar tree which Stella had planted when … Lord, how full of pain the world was. The tree was tall now, its young buds glowing. The sun also shone upon George’s little triangular green view of the Common, and upon the intrusive curious malignant windows of other houses. George turned away. He stumbled over something.

It was the pile of his clothes, lying upon the floor. This was where they usually lay. But what was odd was that they were all soaking wet and black with mud.

George remembered. It was not a dream. It had all really happened. The car had fallen into the canal with Stella in it. Was Stella dead then?

He walked unhurriedly out of the bedroom door and across the landing to Stella’s room. The room was bright with sun, the curtains pulled back, the bed not slept in. George sat down on a chair. No, Stella was not dead. Was he glad? Christ, what a lot of bloody trouble he had landed himself in, he would lose his driving licence. He recalled painfully, shamefully, remorsefully the way things had happened last night. He could see it all now.

When George had sat up upon the wet rainy cold stones of the quay, and found that the car had gone, he was at first confused. Where had it gone to? Some terrible ghastly frightening noise had taken place. His arm was hurting, strained somewhere by a violent effort. He jumped up and ran to the edge of the quay. The lamp light showed the canal waters, black with mud, foaming and churning and boiling as if the devil himself were rising up to the surface like a black whale. In the midst of this turmoil was a gleaming pale expanse which it took George a moment to identify as the roof of the car. George executed a sort of dance upon the edge of the quay as if he were about to walk straight out into the air; then he began to run along the edge and to descend a flight of slimy greenish stone steps of whose existence he had somehow known. He even put his hand confidently on to a great iron ring which was hanging from the wall half-way down the steps. The cold water took hold of his trouser legs.

George was a good swimmer. Yelping with fear and horror and the cold he reached the car. Down in the canal everything was confused and dark and terrible. No light seemed to come from above. He felt he was about to lose his senses. He had no conception of the shape of the car or what to do with it. He could not make out how high the water had risen inside. He held on helplessly to the rim of the roof. Even as he touched the car he could feel it sinking, slowly settling down into the mud. His knee touched something. A door was open. With what he remembered as a curious blind slowness George fumbled at the black aperture, holding on to the door with one hand and trying to bring his legs down at the side of the car. The end of the door struck him in the face. Stella came out like a creature sliding from a chrysalis, like a moist dark bat from a cranny, like a dream of a child being born. It seemed to George as if he had then led her back to the steps; he could not recall pulling her through the water. On the steps it was different. She was a heavy inert dripping sack which had to be hauled up step by step; and at that moment it occurred to him that she was dead. Up on the quay it was at once apparent that she was not. She lay on the stones, moving, gasping, writhing like a worm. George recalled without surprise what he had done next. He had kicked her soggy limp body, shouting, ‘You bitch! You bitch!’

An ambulance came. The police came. Stella was taken to the hospital. George was taken to the police station where he made a confused statement and sat moaning while it was established how drunk he was. He had not recalled then, but he recalled now the identity of the black-clad figure who had been passing across the bridge. It was the priest, Father Bernard Jacoby. He must have raised the alarm. He must have seen George pushing the car. Did that matter? Christ, what a mess.

‘How are we feeling?’

The questioner was Gabriel McCaffrey, Stella’s sister- In-law.

Stella continued to cry, saying nothing.

Gabriel herself often cried. Not that she had anything very terrible to cry about, since she was happily married and had a lovely son, but she cried often for the anguish of the world because of its little vulnerable places, or because of the frailty of everything she loved. Stella on the other hand had always plenty to cry about. However, Gabriel had never before seen her crying or even imagined her crying.

The two women were not intimate friends and not allies but they liked each other. Stella might well suppose that Gabriel pitied her because Gabriel was married to nice Brian while Stella was married to awful George. On the other hand, Gabriel might well imagine that Stella thought that George was interesting, whereas Brian was boring. The relations of Stella and George were a mystery to Gabriel and Brian. Of course, Stella had been to a university and was educated and clever. Yet she had made nothing of her cleverness, while Gabriel, who had not been to university, had a more successful ‘life’. Gabriel was happier. But was not battle-scarred Stella ‘more real’? There were, indeed, further complexities, of which they were both aware and above which, usually, they were able to look at each other calmly enough.

Gabriel did not feel calm now. She had always known and feared George’s capacity to introduce absolute disorder into all their lives. George could destroy us all, she sometimes felt, and sometimes, George wants to destroy us all. Of course this was irrational, though it was equally irrational to regard George as simply ‘accident prone’. How I hate bullies, Gabriel thought, thank heavens I’m not married to one.

Father Bernard Jacoby had telephoned Brian and Gabriel on the previous night to tell them about the accident, the car in the canal, Stella and George safe, Stella in hospital, George gone home. He suggested (to Brian’s relief and Gabriel’s disappointment) that it was too late for visits, both of the victims would be asleep. It was now nine o’clock in the morning. Stella, in a private room, was propped up in bed. She had a black eye and a cracked rib and what the nurse called ‘severe shock’. George had not answered telephone calls. Brian was going round to see him.

‘Please stop crying,’ said Gabriel, ‘you are tiring yourself and upsetting me.’ This firm calm manner, unnatural to Gabriel, was how her sister- In-law preferred to be addressed.

Stella had been crying into a handkerchief. She now laid this aside and revealed her wet swollen bruised face, shocking to Gabriel. Stella began rolling her head to and fro upon the pillow, visibly trying to control her respiration. Gabriel touched her arm lightly. Stella did not like hugging and kissing. Gabriel had never kissed her.

‘Shall I stay, shall I talk to you?’

‘Tell me something.’ The stream had abated, though Stella kept blinking tears out of her eyes.

Gabriel, who was good at decoding, knew that this meant: tell me anything. ‘It’s a sunny day. You can’t see from here, but the sun’s shining.’

‘Did you come by car?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you park?’

‘In the hospital car park, there’s plenty of room.’

‘You’ve got a new dress.’

‘I bought it in Bowcocks sale. Do you know, you can see the High Street from the window, and the Botanic Garden and the Institute — ’

‘I haven’t looked.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Terrible.’

‘What happened? Or would you rather —?’

‘George was drunk. He jumped out. Then he pulled me out.’

‘All’s well that ends well,’ said Gabriel, who hoped that this banality would irritate Stella into saying something more.

‘It was my fault,’ said Stella.

‘I know that’s not true.’

The family often discussed Stella’s situation, how she put up with George’s tantrums and his infidelity, how she persistently imagined that her love would cure him. She kept hoping, looking for little signs. Gabriel thought, it’s odd how stupid a clever person can be. She feels that not blaming George will somehow make him improve.

‘I argued,’ said Stella. ‘I said a particular thing that annoyed him. Then the car went out of control.’

‘He’s easily annoyed!’

‘George was crazy as a fox last night.’

‘Always was, always will be. One day he’ll go too far.’

‘If he ever does he’ll get better.’

‘You mean repentant?’

‘No.’

‘You always make excuses for him, he can get away with anything, he’s always forgiven and first of all by you!’

‘It’s my privilege to be first.’

What a hypocrite she is, thought Gabriel, and yet she’s sincere. Can there be sincere hypocrites? Yes, and they’re the most maddening of all. There was no doubt that Stella was an odd fish, an alien, a changeling. She was a handsome tall strong woman. She sees him as a challenge, thought Gabriel, she sees it as a fight, and she thinks that’s love. George ought to have married a gentle submissive girl, not this noble ridiculous person. And she thought, this is the most intimate conversation I’ve ever had with Stella.

‘You ought to go away for a while, have a holiday from George.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘You should, you should go to some foreign city.’

‘He’ll lose his driving licence.’

‘Poor George!’

‘He wanted us to walk away.’

‘You mean last night? Just walk away, after that? Before the police came, I suppose!’

‘I would have walked if I could,’ said Stella.

‘Oh God, here he comes.’

Through the open door of the room Gabriel saw George approaching along the corridor.

‘Good-bye, Gabriel, thank you for coming to see me.’ With a little wave to Stella, Gabriel moved out of the room. George advanced, walking with a characteristic self-conscious deliberation as of someone fairly confidently walking on water. He leaned forwards as he walked, setting his feet down noiselessly on the thick, soft, spongy pale grey hospital linoleum. His arms swung in a light poised manner. He looked like an athlete, off duty, aware of being photographed. When he saw Gabriel he narrowed his eyes and smiled a faint amused smile. Gabriel, disturbed by mixed emotions, made an impatient gesture with her hand. She frowned, but her mouth could not help smiling in an involuntary nervous spasm.

George McCaffrey had been spared the visit of his brother Brian by having left the house before Brian arrived. Before leaving, George had telephoned the hospital and learnt that Stella was ‘comfortable’. He set off, but went first of all to the canal.

The canal was no longer in use. It ought to have been beautiful, as it curved into the town, with the cobbled road beside it and the huge square granite slabs at the edge of the quay and the great rings upon the walls where the painted barges used to tie up. The elliptical foot-bridge was reproduced (reflected in still water) upon postcards, and the small elegant container (still in use) of the nearby gas works, with its fretted cast- Iron coronet was a period piece prized by industrial archaeologists. But somehow the sluggish brown stream looked dirty and melancholy, and attempts to rejuvenate it for purposes of pleasure always failed. The canal remained in mourning for its useful past, expressing the grim puritanical character of local history rather than any desire to be reborn as charming. The area on the far side remained derelict, except for a scattering of poor post-war housing, mostly condemned, and was known as ‘the wasteland’. Against the rusty railings which fringed the road only the uglier weeds grew; the grass between the tilting cobbles was flabby and sad, and the glittering points in the square granite slabs looked like symptoms of a post- Industrial disease.

It was beginning to rain when George arrived. Several people were standing looking down at the car. (The drama had of course been reported in the Gazette.) Aware of being recognized, George joined them. Several of the on-lookers walked hastily away. Those who remained removed themselves to a little distance.

The car was upright, its white roof just breaking the surface. It must have settled down in the mud since last night. The brown rain-pitted canal water, very slowly passing it by, possessed it as if it were a rock or a clump of reeds. It looked peaceful.

George had never had any fantasies about driving cars over quaysides, though he had had plenty about drowning, death by water, his own or another’s. He had fantasies, or were they dreams, of drowning someone, as it might be Stella, and burying the corpse in a wood and visiting the quiet grave regularly as the months passed and the years passed and the seasons changed and the wild flowers grew upon the place and no one ever suspected. Sometimes he dreamt that he had killed Stella and then suddenly met her again alive and then realized that it was not her, but a twin sister of whose existence he had never known.

How could I have done that, he thought, looking down. As on similar occasions in the past, he felt a cleavage between himself and the George who did things. Yet he was that person and felt easy with him, chiding him gently. What a damn stupid thing to do, he thought, now that he was in the land of consequences. I was fond of that car. What will the insurance people say, I wonder. God, if only we could have got away before the police came.

Stella had started crying again when George arrived. She was very anxious indeed to stop. She regarded crying as a kind of rather shameful and unusual disease. It gave her no relief. She rolled her head about, trying to breathe slowly, but could not stop her lower lip from shuddering convulsively and her heart from racing. She put her hand to her damaged side and panted, turning her wet mouth away from her husband.

‘How are you?’ said George.

‘OK.’

‘Are you feeling OK?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve got a black eye.’

‘Yes.’

‘So have I, at least it’s swollen, can’t think how I got it.’

‘Oh — yes — ’

‘The people here seem nice, the nurse was nice to me.’

‘Good.’

‘You’re not in pain?’

‘No.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I can’t stop crying.’

‘Not to worry.’

‘I suppose it’s hysterical. Not like me.’

‘No. Gabriel got here early.’

‘Yes.’

‘What did she say to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘I told her nothing.’

‘I can’t remember much about last night.’

‘I’m glad you can’t, neither can I.’

‘If you can’t remember, why are you glad I can’t?’

‘It was a horrid accident, better to forget it.’

‘We do a lot of forgetting. How long will you be in here?’

‘I don’t know. You could ask matron.’

‘Do you want anything, flowers or books or anything?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘I feel awfully tired.’

‘You’re suffering from shock.’

‘Yes, that’s it, I suppose I am.’

‘Better go home and rest.’

‘No, I think I’ll go swimming, that always does me good.’

‘Yes, go swimming, that’ll do you good.’

Pat-ball, thought George, pat-ball. It’s either this or rows. Stella can’t talk to me, that’s her trouble; she can’t make silly jokes or play about like other people, she can’t really talk to anyone, she’s cut off from the human race. She’s grand like royalty, I married a princess. I hate seeing her crying, it’s so unnatural, she looks like a wet pig. She hasn’t any soft warm being, no haven there, no safety. Oh God, how much fear I feel now, how much help I need, with him coming. Why must I always suffer so, this is hell. Familiar black resentment rose in his heart, in his gorge. I am poisoned, he thought.

‘Here’s Alex,’ said Stella, and checked her weeping.

George rose quickly and made for the door. His mother stood aside to let him pass. They exchanged a quick bright look but no words.