The Philosopher's Pupil

THE EVENTS IN OUR TOWN

A bird was singing in the cold spring-time afternoon in the garden at Belmont. The sky was radiant on one side, leaden on the other. A rainbow had glowed intensely, then faded quickly.

In the drawing-room a wood fire was burning. Beside the fire stood Alexandra McCaffrey, née Stillowen. Near the door stood her old servant, Ruby Doyle. Ruby had just asked Alex about a pension; she had simply said, ‘What about my pension?’ Alex did not understand. She paid Ruby good wages. Did this mean that she wanted to leave? Ruby had been with her since Alex was sixteen.

‘Do you want to leave?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to stop working?’

Alex asked this question sometimes as a matter of form, but she did not conceive that Ruby would want to stop working; she was in good health, and whatever could she do if she stopped working?

‘No.’

‘Or work less? I told you I would arrange a daily woman.’

‘No.’ Ruby had always jealously resisted the idea of a ‘daily’.

‘If you stopped work I would give you a pension,’ said Alex, ‘but wages are more than a pension. Do you understand? You don’t need a pension. People don’t have pensions and wages too.’

‘A pension.’

‘Just try and understand what I’ve said,’ said Alex, ‘Could you take the tea tray?’ She poured the dregs of tea out of her cup into the pot, as she always did, so that Ruby could save washing-up by using the same cup.

Ruby advanced and picked up the tray, holding it easily in one hand.

‘I saw that fox again.’

‘I told you not to talk about foxes.’

Ruby left the room.

The servant was a tall stout woman, as tall as Alex, with a strong grave face. She had a dark complexion and her eyes stared at the world with unemotional critical curiosity. She had a square face and a straight profile and straight bushy hair, almost black. The brown skin of her powerful arms was rough and resembled fish scales. Someone once said that she ‘looked like a Mexican’, and although this did not make much sense it was accepted as an expressive description. She was a silent woman and wore her skirts very long. She was at first thought to be half-witted, but later on people took to saying, ‘Ruby’s no fool, she’s deep.’ Alex herself declared, ‘She’s a mystery.’ Yet she had not felt this until lately; she had not really believed that Ruby was a substantial alien being with thoughts and passions which she concealed.

Alex could make no sense of Ruby’s statement about a pension. It might be just one of Ruby’s obstinate ephemeral misunderstandings, her tendency to ‘get the wrong end of the stick’. On the other hand, it might have been uttered with a special purpose; it might positively mean something else. In fact, now that Alex reflected, she felt sure that it did mean something else, something which Alex did not like. Alex recalled a world of starched white aprons and caps and extremely long stiff damask tablecloths covered with scarcely visible silvery flowers. She had been little more than a child when her father, Geoffrey Stillowen (so the story runs), ‘discovered’ Ruby in the gipsy camp beyond the Common, in which he took a philanthropic interest, and engaged her as his daughter’s maid. Ruby was two years older than Alex. She had looked then as she looked now, brown and hard and strong, solid with a dark rind. They were joined by an old mutual bond. Was this love? The question seemed out of place. It was more an awesome necessity, as if they lived together in prison. Sometimes Alex felt that she could not stand Ruby’s presence in the house, but the feeling passed quickly. Usually there was no feeling, only the bond. What did it consist of? Perhaps simply of orders. They spoke about shopping and household arrangements easily and without constraint. They mentioned the weather or occasionally television but without anything like conversation. ‘What makes good servants is working with them,’ Alex’s mother had said. Alex had never worked with Ruby. It’s not my fault, Alex thought. Ruby was perfectly intelligent, she was ‘all there’, only she was a non-talker. They had never eaten together. They never touched each other. Alex had had a full life of triumphs and disasters and marriage and children and thoughts. She had a copious past and vivid interesting dangerous future. Ruby lived under another law. Alex did not feel that she herself was old, and had only lately come to think that Ruby was. Was Ruby wondering whether she would tend Alex in Alex’s old age, or Alex her in hers? But something much less rational than that was now at issue.

Alex had never quite dominated Belmont. She had not lived in the house as a child. Her father often let it, and when, between tenancies, the family occupied it for a while Alex felt that she was a visitor. This feeling persisted after she came home to it as a bride. The children, now departed, had made no mark upon the place, and Alan had always regarded it as her father’s house. It was a big white stucco house, one of the finest in Victoria Park, with bow windows and ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ windows and a wide graceful curving staircase and a turret. But in spite of the thick spotless glittering white paint which covered every piece of wood, inside and out, it was a sulky house full of its own moody thoughts. Alex could feel them vibrating. It was a frame within which she and Ruby moved about on their separate paths. The house evaded Alex, a reflex of her loss of grip upon life. It menaced her at night with smells of smoke and fears of fire. She had dreams in which she lost her way in the house and came upon rooms she did not know existed where some other form of life was proceeding, or had proceeded recently and ceased. Not that there were dead people there, but dead things. At these times of evasion it seemed that Ruby was more at home in Belmont than Alex was, and Alex turned to Ruby as to a monumental security. Yet this had an opposite aspect. Ruby’s great silent being could seem to be maliciously in league with the house against Alex. There were places where things disappeared, dropped out of the world or into another one. It was absurd how things vanished. Yet Ruby would always find them. Ruby, with her gipsy blood, was popularly credited with having second sight. But was it not more likely that Ruby could find them because Ruby had, perhaps unconsciously, hidden them?

It’s being alone together at last, thought Alex; we get on each other’s nerves. Ruby had been nurse to the three boys, she had seen them grow up and go. Tom, now a student, had gone last. Ruby had never got on with Brian, but she had been close to George and to Tom. Alex had not felt jealous of Ruby in the past; the idea of jealousy would have seemed absurd. But a little while ago when she had seen Ruby talking to George she had felt her servant as an alien power. And only yesterday she had come into the drawing-room and found Ruby sitting there. Ruby had risen and departed silently. No doubt she had just been dusting and had felt tired. But Alex felt menaced as if she were suddenly diminishing in Ruby’s eyes. Alex’s mother had worked with the servants; she had been at ease with them because the distance between them was absolute. She could never have been where Alex was now and feared what Alex now feared. Was there then a power with which Alex would have to treat? Was she supposed to make some significant move, some concession? If so, the old order was falling and a new law was coming to be. Could there be a sudden failure of obedience, a failure of respect which would bring them face to face in some unimaginably crude and painful encounter? The sulky house echoed and Alex could hear Ruby locking and chaining the doors each night. Did she imagine that Ruby was noisier and rougher and clattered more and banged? Alex told nobody about these irrational insubstantial fears which were perhaps nothing more, though indeed nothing less, than the general shadow of her death.

Leaning at the mantelpiece, her bowed head reflected in the big arched gilt-framed mirror, she gently touched the little encampment of bronze figures which had been there so long, since Alan’s day. The fire licked its wood hungrily and subsided, image of her thought. How sweet and clean the grey ash was which Ruby scooped out into her pan and mingled with the dust: light and sweet and clean as death. The bird was still singing its wild skirling lyrical song, the missel-thrush, ‘the stormcock’ Alan used to call it, and ‘Northwest Jack’. He had liked birds.

Alex moved to the window and looked out. There was a slight rain like pelting silver in the cool light. The green tiled roof of the Slipper House gleamed wet through the reddish haze of the budding copper beech tree. The curving lawn was luridly bright. Something brown moved across it. A fox. Alex never admitted to anyone that she saw foxes. Ruby was afraid of them. Alex loved them.

She looked at her watch. At six o’clock Brian and Gabriel were coming. They would want to talk about George.

‘How was Stella when you saw her?’ said Gabriel to Alex.

‘Less tragical.’

Gabriel was silent.

Three days had passed since George’s exploit. Stella was still in hospital.

For drinks with Alex, they stood. There was a definite time scheme, a symphonic pattern or temporal parabola, definite places; such things calmed the mind. The bow-windowed drawing-room, on the first floor, looked out on the garden. The lamps were on but the curtains were not drawn.

Brian held his glass of apple juice with both hands, like someone holding a candle in a procession. He sometimes drank alcohol, but more and more rarely. He had many things to worry about; money, his job, his son, his brother George. Just now he was worrying about Ruby. He hated the off-hand way in which Alex behaved to Ruby. Yet when he was markedly polite to her (as had happened this evening) Ruby smiled a quick zany mocking smile as if to indicate that she knew he was being condescending.

Brian was not good-looking, but he had an impressive head. Someone had remarked that George and Brian ought to exchange heads. The hearers understood. Brian was pock-marked. He was red-lipped, with sharp wolfish teeth. When younger, with a blond beard, he had looked piratical. Now he was clean-shaven, with very short greyish hair growing in a neat swirl from his crown. He was not very tall, with an assertive face and long blue eyes. He looked anxious and melancholy, and was often irritable. Of course compared with George he was ‘nice’, but he was not all that nice.

Gabriel was taller, anxious too, with restless moist brown eyes. She had a rather long nose and floppy fairish limply curling hair which she tossed from in front of her face, where it often found itself, with a quick pretty jerk which annoyed Alex. She had an air of fatigue, read by some as gentleness and repose. She always dressed up for visits to her mother- In-law.

Alex was tallest, still handsome everyone said, though as the years went by this saying had become traditional and worn away a little. She had an oval face and a pretty nose, and she had remained slim. She had long eyes like Brian’s, of a darker blue, which narrowed by thought or emotion in a fleeting cat-look. (Whereas Brian used to open his eyes wide and stare.) She painted her eyelids discreetly but never used lipstick. She had a long strong consciously mobile mouth. Her sleek well-cut copious hair was a light greyish blond, still managing to glow and gleam, certainly not dyed. She never bothered much with her clothes for these meetings with the Brian McCaffreys. This evening she was wearing a shabby smart rig, an old well-tailored dark coat and skirt, a careless white blouse.

Adam McCaffrey was in the garden with his dog.

‘Did the matron say when she was coming out?’ said Brian.

‘Soon.’

Alex and Gabriel were drinking gin and tonic. Gabriel was smoking.

‘Where do you think she should go then?’ said Gabriel, tossing back her hair.

‘Where do you think?’ said Alex. ‘Home.’

Gabriel looked at Brian who would not catch her eye. Gabriel thought Stella should come and stay with them when she came out of hospital. Not uttering this thought, she said vaguely to Alex, ‘Oughtn’t she to rest, to convalesce?’

‘Go to the sea,’ said Brian, deliberately confusing matters.

‘That makes no sense,’ said Alex. ‘There isn’t anywhere to go to at the sea.’ The seaside house had been sold; Alex had sold it without consulting the children.

‘I suppose we’ll go on our excursion as usual,’ said Brian. The annual seaside family picnic was an old custom. They had observed it last year, even though the house was sold, going to the same place, only a little farther along the coast. Brian and Gabriel had loved that house, that place, that precious access to the sea.

‘That’s the future,’ said Alex, narrowing her eyes. ‘I never know the future.’

‘The doctor says we mustn’t swim in the Enn any more,’ said Gabriel, ‘because of the rat-borne jaundice.’

‘I never understood why you bothered with that muddy river when you have the Baths,’ said Alex.

‘Oh well, Adam likes the river - it’s more natural and - sort of private and secret - and there are animals and birds and plants and - things — ’

‘Did he bring Zed today?’ said Alex. Zed was Adam’s dog. Adam and Zed had run straight out into the garden.

‘Yes. I do hope he won’t root anything up like when — ’ I always wonder why Adam wanted such a little pretty-pretty dog,’ said Alex. ‘Most boys like a big dog.’

‘We wonder too,’ said Brian, aware that Gabriel was hurt and would be deliberately silent. Gabriel knew Brian knew she was hurt, and tried to think of something to say. Alex understood them both and was sorry for her remark but annoyed with them for being so absurdly sensitive.

Adam’s dog was a papillon, one of the smallest of all dogs, a little dainty long-haired black and white thing with floppy plumy ears and a jaunty plumy tail, and the very darkest of blue-brown shining amused clever eyes. Adam had named him. Asked why, he had replied, ‘Because we are Alpha and Omega.’

Gabriel had thought of something to say, not very felicitous perhaps, but she had determined against Brian’s advice to say it this time. ‘I wonder if you’ve thought again about letting Brian and me have the Slipper House? It needs living in, and we’d look after it very carefully.’

Alex said at once with a casual air, ‘Oh no, I don’t think so, it’s too small and not a place for children and dogs, and I do use it, you know, it’s my studio.’

Alex had used to mess around with paints and clay and papier mâché. Brian and Gabriel doubted whether she still did. It was an excuse.

The Slipper House was a sort of folly in the form of a house built at the farther end of the garden in the nineteen-twenties by Alex’s father, Geoffrey Stillowen. It was not all that small.

Alex added, ‘You can live there when I’m underground, which will be any day now, I daresay.’

‘Nonsense, Alex!’ Brian said, and he thought: with George in Belmont? Not bloody likely! The unknown and unmentionable provisions of Alex’s will were of course of interest to the brothers.

Gabriel said, ‘When’s Tom coming?’

‘In April.’

‘Will he be in the Slipper House?’

‘No, here of course.’

‘He did stay there once.’

‘That was in summer, it’s far too cold now and I couldn’t afford the heating.’

‘Is he bringing a friend?’ asked Brian.

‘He mumbled something on the phone about “bringing Emma,” but you know how vague Tom is.’

‘Who’s this Emma?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Anyway a girl, that’s good.’

There was some anxiety in the family about whether Tom mightn’t be homosexual. Tom, now a student of London University, was living in digs near King’s Cross.

‘Have you seen George?’ said Brian, coming at last to the topic of the evening.

‘No,’ said Alex. She awaited George. George would come in his own time.

‘Have you —?’

‘Heard from him, communicated with him? No,’ she added. ‘Of course not.’

Brian nodded. He understood Alex’s feelings. He had tried to telephone George; no answer. And though urged to by Gabriel, he had not written, or again attempted to call.

‘I feel we ought to do something,’ said Gabriel.

‘What on earth can we do?’ said Alex. George was an emotional subject for all of them.

‘People talk so,’ said Brian.

‘I don’t care a damn about people talking,’ said Alex, ‘and I’m surprised to hear that you do!’

‘It isn’t — ’ said Gabriel.

‘Of course,’ said Brian, ‘I care about him, I care if he’s hurt or damaged, by what people — ’

‘I believe you’re thinking of yourself,’ said Alex.

‘I’m thinking of myself too,’ said Brian, staring.

‘Some people say he was heroic,’ said Gabriel, ‘rescuing Stella from — ’

‘You know that’s not what they’re saying,’ said Brian.

‘It’s not what they’re enjoying saying,’ said Alex. She had received sympathetic remarks from people at the Institute, but she had seen the gleam in their eyes. At the frivolous level at which such agreements were reached, it seemed now to be generally agreed that George McCaffrey had indeed tried to kill his wife.

‘I think George should have himself seen to,’ said Brian.

‘What a perfectly horrible phrase,’ said Alex. ‘Why don’t you have yourself seen to?’

‘Maybe I should,’ said Brian, ‘but George - I sometimes feel now that he might do - almost anything — ’

‘What rubbish you talk,’ said Alex, ‘it’s just spite.’

‘I don’t feel like that about him,’ said Gabriel.

‘What do you want him to do about himself anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Brian, ‘see a doctor — ’

‘You mean Dr Roach? Don’t be silly. George drinks too much, that’s all. So does Gabriel.’

‘She doesn’t,’ said Brian.

‘All George needs — ’

‘It’s more than that,’ said Brian. ‘It’s more than just drink, of course it is. Call it a chemical imbalance if you like!’

‘George is like everyone else, only in his case it shows.’

‘Because he’s more honest!’

‘Because he’s a fool.’

‘You know perfectly well that George isn’t like everyone else, it’s gone on too long, he’s violent to Stella — ’

‘Is he? Who says so?’

‘Well, not Stella, naturally. You know he gets into rages and hits people and he lost his job because — ’

‘All right, but — ’

‘It’s more, it’s something deep, it’s not just being tipsy and stupid, it’s — ’

‘You mean it’s something evil, is that what you mean?’

‘No, who am I to judge — ’

‘You seem to be doing nothing but judge.’

‘I think we should try to help him as a family,’ said Gabriel. ‘I think he feels very isolated.’

‘I don’t mean evil,’ said Brian, ‘I mean psychologically deep.’

‘George doesn’t hate anyone,’ said Alex, ‘except himself.’

‘He might talk to Robin Osmore,’ said Gabriel. Robin Osmore was the family solicitor.

‘If he hates himself,’ said Brian, ‘let him act accordingly.’

‘Do you want your brother to commit suicide?’

‘No, I just mean swallow his own bile, not involve other people.’

‘I think — ’ said Gabriel.

‘Get himself some electric shocks.’

‘Don’t drivel,’ said Alex.

Gabriel said, ‘Oh no.’

‘All right then, what about our great psychiatrist, Ivor Sefton?’

‘Sefton is a booby,’ said Alex. ‘He never cured anyone, they come out dafter than they go in. And he charges the earth.’

‘He can have it free on the National Health.’

‘Only in a group, imagine George in a group!’

‘No one would join his group anyway,’ said Brian. ‘At least George has got a good pension, I can’t think why. His pension is about the same as my salary!’

‘George isn’t mad.’

‘I didn’t say he was.’

‘Leave him alone. You know we’ve got to leave him alone.’

‘I wonder if Professor Rozanov could help him,’ said Gabriel.

‘Who?’ said Alex.

‘John Robert Rozanov,’ said Brian. ‘Why should he? Anyway he’s old and pretty gaga by now.’

‘I wonder what happened to the little girl,’ said Gabriel.

‘What little girl?’

‘Wasn’t there a little grandchild, the one Ruby’s cousin or something was looking after once?’

‘I’ve no notion,’ said Brian. ‘I don’t think Rozanov ever saw the child at all, he wasn’t interested; he only cared about his philosophy.’

‘And that’s the man you imagine could help George!’

‘Well, wasn’t he his old teacher?’ said Gabriel.

‘I can’t see George bothering with him,’ said Brian.

‘Leave George alone,’ Alex repeated.

In the silence that followed Gabriel drifted over to the bow window, past chairs and sofas piled with cushions embroidered by Alex. This move was a part of the symphony, the sign that Brian and his mother could now take looks at each other and bring the conversation to a suitable close.

Gabriel saw the reflection of her cigarette grow brighter in the glass pane. Then she could see the familiar burly outline of the trees against a dull darkening sky. The self-contained stillness of that garden always troubled her with emotions - awe, envy, fear. She sighed, thinking of that future of which Alex could say nothing. She looked down. A little white thing sped across the lawn like a ball swiftly bowled, then a boy. They vanished under the dark trees. Such a frail little dog, the very image of her destructible son. Adam was not growing, he was already exceptionally small for his age. She had asked the doctor who told her not to worry.

When Adam arrived in the Belmont garden he went straight to the garage. The garage, which used to be known as the ‘motor house’, was a building with a little French-looking turret which was exactly like the big turret on the big house. There was a row of last year’s martins’ nests under the eaves, but this year’s martins had not yet come. Inside the garage was the white Rolls-Royce which Alan McCaffrey had driven carefully in on some long ago evening, perhaps, as he pressed down the brake, not even knowing that he was about to leave his wife forever. He never came back for the car; and Alex had not touched it since. It was said to be very valuable. Adam climbed into the Rolls and sat holding the wheel and turning it cannily to and fro, while Zed (who always had to be helped up however earnestly he tried) sat complacently upon the soft old smelly leather seat beside him, looking in his white feathery fur like a plump roosting bird. Zed had one or two elegant black spots on his back, and long dark plumed black and brown ears which crowned his head like a wig or hat. He had a little domed head and a short slightly retrousse nose and beautiful dark brown eyes with hints of dark blue like shot silk. He could look magisterial and amused and sardonic, or sometimes flirtatious, hurling himself back in graceful abandoned attitudes; but then, suddenly romping and undignified, his entire concentrated person could express the purest of pure joy.

When Adam got tired of driving the Rolls he ran across the lawn to the Slipper House, which was locked of course, and peered in through the windows. He had been inside but not often. He liked being outside looking in, watching the quiet old-style furniture in the silent rooms which were now becoming so dark and lonely. With pleasant dread he imagined seeing some strange motionless person standing inside and looking out. After that he had to visit various trees, the copper beech and the birches and the fir tree whose noble reddish trunk twisted up so high, visible here and there amid its heavy piles of dark foliage. He especially loved the ginkgo, so odd and so old. He gently touched the lower parts of the tree where the little stalkless scrolls of green were just beginning to appear. He lay down under the tree and let Zed jump on his chest and sit with neat front paws resting on his collar-bone. However quickly he raised his head, he could not surprise Zed looking anywhere else than straight into his eyes with his provocative intent mocking stare. When they tired of this game, Adam crept away into the long grass trying to avoid hurting the snails whom the rain had tempted forth, and whose weight bent the blades into arches. He crawled under some brambles and under some ivy into the deepest part of the shrubbery beside the old tennis court overgrown with elder bushes, where the foxes lived. Adam, like his grandmother, knew but kept the fox secret. The great earth, under mounds of finely dug soil, had wide dark entrances into which Adam and Zed gazed with awe, only Adam kept a firm hold on Zed in case he should be tempted to go down. (In fact Zed had no intention of going down, not that he was not a brave dog, but he suffered from claustrophobia and the whole place smelt extremely dangerous.)

Adam’s mother called him across the dark garden.

‘Coming!’ He picked up Zed and put him inside his shirt, warm soaking-wet dog against warm soaking-wet boy.

‘Damn, that creepy priest is here,’ said Brian.

‘How do you know?’

‘There’s his bike.’ A lady’s bicycle was propped against the fence.

Brian and Gabriel and Adam and Zed were returning from their visit to Alex. Their house (though it was not in Victoria Park) was not far away. It was dark now and the sweeping headlights showed the bicycle, the fence, the yellow privet hedge, the side of the house, painted pink, as the car turned off the road into the garage.

They tumbled out, Adam and Zed racing first along the side passage toward the kitchen door which was always left open. And into the kitchen indeed, and not for the first time, the creepy priest had penetrated.

When Brian and Gabriel arrived Father Bernard had already established his usual easy relations with Adam and Zed, holding the little dog up aloft in one hand while Adam laughed and tugged at the black robe.

Gabriel, aware of how much Father Bernard annoyed Brian, and of how jealous Brian was of people who got on easily with Adam, quickly, after greeting the priest, put Adam’s supper, which was standing ready, on to a tray. ‘Here, Adam, take your supper, then quick to bed, no television. Good heavens, you’re soaked, find a towel — ’

Adam and Zed vanished.

‘It’s your supper time,’ said Father Bernard, ‘I won’t trouble you, I’m just calling for a little minute, I won’t stay — ’

There could be no question of his being asked to supper. Gabriel, avoiding Brian’s look, said, ‘Have a quick sherry.’

The priest accepted the sherry. Turning politely to Brian he said by way of greeting, ‘Christ is risen.’ It was the week after Easter.

Brian said, ‘I know, he rose last Sunday, I suppose he is still risen.’

‘Good news is never stale,’ said Father Bernard.

Brian thought, he’s come to talk to Gabriel about George. This thought, together with the postponement of his supper, caused him extreme irritation. He could not decide whether to stay and spoil the tête-à-tête which no doubt they both wanted, or go and leave them to it. He decided to go. Gabriel would feel guilty and he would get his supper sooner. He marched into the sitting-room and turned on the television. He despised television but still craved to see the misfortunes of others.

Gabriel and the priest sat down at the kitchen table. Gabriel took some sherry and a cigarette. She touched his sleeve (Gabriel was a ‘toucher’). Of course, being a Quaker, she did not officially belong to his flock, but he took a liberal view of his responsibilities.

Father Bernard Jacoby, a convert of Jewish origin, was the parish priest. He was an Anglican, but so ‘high’ that it did not occur to anyone to call him ‘the Rector’ or address him as ‘Rector’. He was addressed as ‘Father’ by those who approved of him. Many viewed him with suspicion, not least his bishop, who had been heard to remark that Jacoby was ‘not a priest, but a shaman’. Some opined darkly that the time would come when he would celebrate one Latin Mass too many. His Church reeked of incense. He was a comparative newcomer of whose past not much was known, except that he had been a chemistry student at Birmingham and a champion wrestler (or perhaps boxer). He was thought to be homosexual, and lived permanently under various small clouds.

‘Well, Father — ’ Gabriel knew that he had come to talk about George and some excitement stirred within her.

‘Well and well and well indeed. I was refreshed to see Alpha and Omega so happy. We should welcome such glimpses of pure joy and feed upon them like manna.’

‘Not everyone is glad to see others happy,’ said Gabriel. In talking to Father Bernard she adopted a solemn mode of speech which was not her usual manner.

‘True.’ The priest did not pursue this evident but pregnant idea. He gazed amiably at Gabriel with an air of cunning attention.

Father Bernard was fairly tall, a handsome man though odd-looking. He wore his dark straight sleek hair parted in the middle and falling in fine order to the level of his chin. He had a large nose with prominent nostrils, and rather shiny or luminous brown eyes whose penetrating directness expressed (perhaps) loving care or (perhaps) bland impertinence. He was thin, with thin mobile hands. He always wore a black cassock, clean, and of material suited to the season, and somehow managed to make his dog-collar look like old lace.

‘How is Stella?’

‘Wonderful,’ said Gabriel.

‘Of course, but how is she?’

Gabriel, who had seen her that morning, reflected. ‘She only says accurate things. I don’t know what she feels, but whatever it is she’s making some enormous effort to get it right. She cares about her dignity; in her it’s a kind of virtue.’ She added, ‘Why don’t you go and see her?’

‘I have. I wondered what you thought.’

Stella was not to be numbered among Father Bernard’s fans. It was somehow typical of the man to have fans. She did not dislike him, as Brian did, but she was suspicious. She did not believe in God. But then neither did many of the fans.

‘What did she say?’ said Gabriel. This question was prompted by senseless jealousy. She was full of senseless jealousies.

‘We spoke. She said little. I said little. I sat. I went.’

‘I’m sure she was glad.’

‘I don’t know.’

Gabriel wondered if Father Bernard had been disappointed at not having ‘got something out of’ Stella. Brian said he was always scurrying about trying to charm afflicted people.

Gabriel said, ‘About George - if you want me to tell you what really happened I can’t, I mean I only know — ’

‘Oh what really happened - who ever knows what really happened - God knows.’

George was not a fan either, but he was, to Gabriel’s mind, a more promising subject for the priestly charm than Stella was. At any rate, she liked the idea of some finally desperate and broken-down George being mastered by Father Bernard.

‘What do you think happened?’ he said.

‘It was an accident, of course.’

It was remarkable how readily people, including Gabriel, thought ill of George. In fact Gabriel thought George had done it on purpose, and kept in fascinated suspense the idea that he had half intended to kill Stella. She had once only, for a moment, seen George in one of his rages, shouting at his wife ‘I’ll kill you!’ It was a terrifying sight, Gabriel had never seen anything like it. Gabriel knew that Stella would never forgive her for having had that glimpse behind the scenes. Stella tried to conceal George’s undoubted domestic violence, just as she tried (vainly) to conceal his sexual infidelities. He had also attacked people who annoyed him, a gipsy, a bus conductor, a student, perhaps others: ‘losing his temper when drunk’ was one way of putting it. A charge of ‘grievous bodily harm’ was once in view, it was said, only clever Robin Osmore kept George out of court. Alex’s professed view that George was just a random forgivable drunk was not generally held. The absence from his life of ordinary norms of politeness was taken as a sign of deeper moral anarchy. It seemed that there were barriers instinctively erected by civilized citizens, which just did not exist for George. People were afraid of him, and Brian was not alone in thinking that George ‘might do anything’. People sensed a monster, no doubt they wanted a monster. Yet what did the evidence amount to?

Gabriel said, ‘Everyone speaks ill of him.’

‘They like a scapegoat, to have someone at hand who is officially more sinful than they are.’

‘Exactly. Perhaps he’s made worse by our opinions. But I’m sure he is terrible to Stella.’

‘You said it was an accident.’

‘Of course - but I mean - I think she ought to get away from him.’

‘Because he might kill her?’

‘No, to be alone and have another life, she’s obsessed by George, she’s wasting herself, her love doesn’t do him good, it just enrages him. Her love is like duty, like something sublime, made of idealism and awful self-confidence. She thinks she’ll elevate him. She ought to kneel down beside him.’

‘Do you tell her this?’

‘Of course not! She’s too proud, she’s the proudest person I know. I wish you’d talk to George.’

‘And do what to him?’

‘Batter him, break him down, make him weep.’

‘Tears of repentance and relief?’

‘You could save him, George could be changed by love, not Stella’s, another kind. His awfulness is an appeal for love.’

The priest laughed, heartily and too long, then snapped his fingers, a habitual gesture when he wanted the discussion to change course. He stood up. ‘Do you know when Professor Rozanov is coming?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Gabriel, rising too, annoyed at this brusque treatment of her moving appeal.

‘Did you ever meet him?’ Father Bernard knew of our distinguished citizen only by hearsay.

‘No,’ said Gabriel. ‘I saw him in the street once. Brian met him, and of course George was his pupil.’

During the last exchange Brian had turned up the sound of the television considerably in order to demonstrate his displeasure.

‘What does Brian think of him?’ said the priest, raising his voice.

‘Better ask him,’ said Gabriel, raising hers and opening the door. ‘Brian! Father Bernard wants to know what you think about Professor Rozanov.’

Brian came in, walked across to the gas stove and peered into one of the saucepans, pulling its lid off and banging it on again. He stared at the priest who did not, however, at once repeat his question, but said instead, ‘Why is Professor Rozanov visiting us?’

‘He isn’t visiting me. I don’t know, arthritis, come to take the waters — ’

‘Do you know where he’ll be staying?’

‘No idea, Ennistone Royal Hotel.’ (Queen Victoria had visited Ennistone when Victoria Park was building, and went to the Institute where the Prince Consort praised the waters and spoke of Baden-Baden.)

‘He hasn’t been here since his mother died,’ said Gabriel, ‘but people say he’s coming back now for good, he’s going to retire here.’

‘What is he like?’ The television noise from the next room was almost drowning their voices.

‘Rozanov? He’s a charlatan. You know what a charlatan is, a fake, a trickster, an impostor, a busybody who pretends to be able — ’

‘Oh don’t shout,’ cried Gabriel as she ran to turn off the television.

The priest made his adieux.

Later in the evening Gabriel and Brian were still talking about George and Stella and Alex.

‘You must drop that Slipper House idea,’ said Brian, ‘Alex would never let us live there. Besides we’d hate it, right on top of her.’

‘We’d use the back gate — ’

‘Forget it.’

‘I want that house.’

‘You’re so acquisitive. And you think Alex is wasting our substance.’

‘She’s so extravagant — ’

‘You mustn’t think like that, it’s mean, it’s petty.’

‘I know!’

‘You shudder if Alex breaks a cup.’

‘She’s careless, and she will use the best stuff all the time.’

‘Why not, it isn’t your cup, it probably never will be. She’ll leave everything to George. You know we wouldn’t lift a finger.’

‘She might have consulted us before selling Maryville.’

Maryville was the seaside house.

‘It was nothing but trouble, that place; dry rot and then squatters — ’

‘Going to the sea isn’t the same after you’ve lived there; it’s made that lovely piece of coast seem all sad.’

‘There you go again, property, property, property!’

‘Alex doesn’t use the Slipper House. That time last summer I saw her painting stuff, it was just the same as it was years ago.’

‘Maybe she meditates there, it isn’t our business, try to imagine her life, for heaven’s sake. You don’t like this house.’

‘I do because it’s our house, but it’s so small.’

‘The trouble with you is you’ve never got used to being a poor Bowcock.’ Gabriel’s branch of the family had not, for some reason. shared in the ancestral money.

Gabriel laughed. ‘Maybe! But we need more room. If we have Stella here — ’

‘Do we have to have Stella here?’

‘I think so.’

‘She wouldn’t come.’

‘I talked to her again, very tactfully. I think she’s afraid to go back to George.’

‘Husbands and wives often understand each other better than well-meaning outsiders imagine.’

‘Anyway she wants an interval.’

‘You seem to want her to leave George.’

‘She goes on thinking she can cure him, she goes on looking for little signs that things are getting better — ’

‘That’s love.’

‘It’s an illusion.’

‘In a way,’ said Brian, ‘it can’t be an illusion.’

‘I think George really hates her.’

‘That’s something she will never believe.’

‘That’s the trouble. Think of the misery there must be in that house, and George involved with that other woman. I think Stella should have a quiet time to think it over. She’s still in a state of shock, she’s sort of prostrate.’

‘Stella prostrate? Never!’ Brian admired Stella.

‘Do you know, George hasn’t been to see her since the first day?’

‘George is demonic, like Alex,’ said Brian. ‘He would feel it stylish not to turn up, then it would seem inevitable.’

‘You keep saying he’s a dull dog.’

‘Yes, he’s commonplace, a thoroughly vulgar fellow, like Iago.’

‘Like - really! But Alex isn’t demonic, she’s become much quieter, a sort of recluse, I feel quite worried about her.’

‘You love worrying about people. Alex just doesn’t want to see how old and decrepit her friends are. She sees herself as a priestess, she goes on playing the femme fatale, she imagines men falling madly in love with her.’

‘I suppose they did. Wasn’t Robin Osmore madly in love with her?’

‘Dozens of them were. But that was a hundred years ago. And it wasn’t Robin Osmore, it was his father. Thai’s how old she is.’

‘She doesn’t look it.’

‘I keep longing for the time when Alex is just a poor old wreck, a pathetic confused old thing wanting to be looked after, but it never comes.’

‘You’ll hate it when it does.’

‘I shall dance.’

‘You won’t. You’re proud of her, you all are. There’s a sort of governessy grande dame aspect of Alex which supports you.’

‘OK, but that’s a metaphysical matter and strictly private. Just don’t ask me to love her.’

‘You should talk to her about George, it’s no good with me there. I really do think we should take some sort of collective responsibility for George.’

‘Women always want to rescue men, to save them from themselves, or help them to find themselves, or something.’

‘I said collective responsibility — ’

‘George needs electric shocks and some of his brain removing.’

‘I can’t think how he can live with himself.’

‘Stella ought to ship him out to Japan. He’d do well in Japan, they are all Georges there.’

‘He must be in hell.’

‘George in hell? Not a bit of it. He blames us.’

‘Well, we are to blame because we speak ill of him, we’ve turned against him and abandoned him.’

‘I mean he blames us, everybody, the world, everything except George. He has chronic hurt vanity, cosmic resentment, metaphysical envy. George has always behaved as if he were being outrageously cheated, something stolen, something lost.’

‘I suppose he has guilt feelings.’

‘It isn’t guilt, it’s shame, it’s loss of face. He’s probably more worried about losing his driving licence than about having nearly killed his wife. Anything wicked or evil in himself he immediately shifts on to the enemy, the others. He’s lost all sense of ordinary reality.’

‘He feels insecure.’

‘I daresay Hitler felt insecure!’

‘You’re exaggerating wildly. Everyone says how violent George is, but we don’t know the circumstances, it all builds up by hearsay. I think people are just against him because he’s unconventional and that frightens them. They’re afraid of him because he’s not polite!’

‘He’s certainly given up the niceties of human intercourse, but that’s just a symptom. George hates everybody. He makes one understand terrorists.’

‘Can’t you feel pity for him? Do you think a day or an hour passes when he doesn’t think about Rufus?’

‘Loss of child, loss of face.’

‘How can you — ’

‘He probably pitched the child down the stairs in a fit of rage and then convinced himself it was Stella’s fault.’

‘Don’t say that, Brian, I know other people do, but you mustn’t, please -’

‘Sorry, you’re right, don’t cry, for God’s sake what are you crying about?’

Tears, the tears that came so easily, had risen into Gabriel’s eyes. Her happiness was so terribly haunted by fears, images of loss, terrible images, mad images. If Rufus had lived he would have been Adam’s age. She had developed a fantasy that George would kill Zed. Then that he would kill Adam.

Brian did not know what she was thinking (for of course she did not divulge such insane notions) but he knew the sort of things she was thinking. He patted her wet hand on which tears had fallen. ‘There now, there now. It isn’t Rufus, you know. George was a little horror when he was a boy.’

‘I expect you were too.’

‘He enjoyed drowning those kittens.’

‘Don’t tell me that story!’

‘Well, they had to be drowned. Don’t cry about it.’

‘I still think Professor Rozanov might help him,’ said Gabriel, drying her tears. ‘You didn’t really mean what you said about Rozanov to Father Bernard?’

‘No, of course not. I meant it for your creepy friend!’

‘I don’t think he came about George at all, he came about Rozanov.’

‘Makes a change.’

‘George respects Professor Rozanov, he’d pay attention to him. After all, he went all the way to America to see him that time.’

‘Whatever happened on that occasion,’ said Brian, ‘it was certainly not a success. George may have admired Rozanov at one time, but I doubt if he cares a fig for him now. The trouble with George is he gets away with things. He’s popular because people like horrible men. Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. Who’s our most loved king? Henry the Eighth. If only George could get into really serious trouble it might sober him up. Or if everyone ganged up against him and did something, not just gratifying their malice by talking, I think George ought to be lynched. And he will be lynched one day if he goes on. There’s collective responsibility for you.’

‘No,’ said Gabriel, ‘no.’ And ‘Oh dear — ’ She often said that. One of these awful fantasies had taken hold of her. How could George bear to see Adam growing up? To banish it she breathed deeply, breathing in some absolutely quiet air which she knew was really everywhere, but which she only experienced at these moments of refuge. But fear too was in the quiet air. She hoped Adam could not read her mind. He had said to her once, ‘You mustn’t protect me against the sad things.’

She said now, ‘Do you think Adam might be a vet when he grows up, or a naturalist? He cares so much about animals.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Brian. ‘He’s not interested in details, he would never do a botanical or anatomical drawing. This animal thing, it’s different - it’s part of something else - sort of sentimental - well, no, symbolic rather - like a sort of funny little religion — ’ He could not explain, though he felt and saw what he meant. It was all somehow part of Adam’s changeling quality, his strangeness and absoluteness as a boy; and Brian could not imagine Adam grown up and did not want to picture him as a deep-voiced youth with a hairy chest and a sex life. Perhaps he could not imagine the future because the future did not exist. And Adam was not growing. Would his son live on as a dwarf with a child’s mind? And here his deep confused thoughts were perhaps reaching out and touching the deep confused thoughts of his wife.

‘It’ll be good to see Tom again,’ said Gabriel. ‘He hardly ever comes now. Do you think he’s avoiding George - or Alex?’

‘Young chaps avoid possessive mothers.’

‘I think he sheered off because George was jealous.’

‘Because Alex is so attached to Tom? Poor deprived old George. Here we go again. Let’s go to bed.’ Brian stood up. He said, ‘Tom - yes - Tom - he’s happy.’

And you are not, thought Gabriel sadly.

They went to bed.

Brian and Gabriel McCaffrey had known each other forever; they went to the same Friends’ Meeting House, to the same children’s parties, then to the same dances. Brian, growing up, was handsome, a young Viking. Gabriel fell in love. Later Brian did too. He disliked forward sexy girls. Gabriel was pretty, quiet, shy, hiding behind her floppy hair. She peered admiringly at Brian. Brian was a sober and serious-minded young man. He wanted a loyal truthful gentle wife and an open peaceful simple mode of existence. Time proved he had chosen well. Gabriel and Brian continued to love each other although in many ways they belonged to different human tribes.

Brian, unlike his father and grandfather whose relation to Quakerism had been merely sentimental, took religion seriously. He may have been influenced in this by his ‘godfather’, William Eastcote (popularly known as ‘Bill the Lizard’), a very devout person and pillar of the Meeting, and a cousin of the well-known philanthropist Milton Eastcote. The Eastcotes were a wealthy family (also originally ‘in trade’) and William retired early from a career at the bar to devote himself, like his cousin, to good works. Brian, with Gabriel and Adam, went to Meeting every Sunday. He did not believe in God, but the Ennistone Friends were not anxious about this matter. The Mystery of God was one with the Inner Light of the Soul, and the illumined Way was the Good Life, where truthful vision spontaneously prompted virtuous desire. Herein lay the perfect simplicity of duty. Brian pictured himself as austere and pure in heart. He wanted to live the Good Life with his wife and his son, but he found this difficult. He also wanted to do some great thing in the world. (Gabriel had believed in Brian’s great thing.) But now it was clear he would not. He worked on the Ennistone Town Council in the education department.

Brian found the Good Life difficult for simple but deep reasons. He was selfish. He did what he wanted and Gabriel did what he wanted too. This had gone on so long that Brian imagined (wrongly, as it happened) that Gabriel had ceased to notice it. Gabriel wanted to travel. Brian hated travel, he wanted to stay at home and read. They stayed at home and read. Gabriel wanted to entertain. Brian thought social life was insincere. They did not entertain. Brian ate fast, Gabriel ate slow. Meals ended when Brian had finished. Brian was often irritable, sometimes angry, and (but this more rarely) if he was very displeased he withdrew himself from Gabriel. This sulky withdrawal, the result simply of his own ill-temper, he felt as a black iron pain, an experience of hell, yet he could not inhibit this form of violence. He did not display anger to Adam, but felt in his relation to his son a terrible vague inadequacy, a sheer awkward embarrassed clumsiness which distorted communication. Sometimes it seemed to him that Adam understood this and came to him with deliberate olive branches, little touching reassuring gestures of affection, which Brian found himself accepting gracelessly as if he were being condescended to. Brian lusted after other women to an extent which would have amazed Gabriel had she known about it, but this aspect of his frailty he was able to keep strictly under control. Some said there was a George inside Brian waiting to be let out, but so far there had been no manifestation of this hypothetical presence.

Gabriel was aware of her grievances without being obsessed by them. Her chief grievance, apart from Brian’s selfishness to which she quietly gave in, forgiving though not forgetting, was that she had never studied anything and at the age of thirty-four knew nothing. Brian had studied sociology at the University of Essex. Gabriel, after a year at secretarial college, had begun to think she might after all go to a university when she was overtaken by marriage. Now who and what was she? Brian’s wife, Adam’s mother. When she compared herself with Stella or Alex she felt unreal. She was a ‘poor Bowcock’, one of the muddled ones who had no grasp on life. Her father, a municipal engineer in South London, was dead. She had got on well with her mother and her brother but they had gone painlessly to Canada when her brother married and it did not even matter to her now that they detested Brian. Gabriel knew that a certain kind of self-satisfaction was essential to her and she was determined not to become a discontented woman. She made her home her fortress where she was secure and content to be invisible. She was not out in the open, battle-scarred and unhoused like Stella and George whose adventures appalled and fascinated her. She was not like them. When in the early morning she let the cold clear water run and filled the kettle to make tea, she felt innocent and fresh. One of the qualities of her interior castle she had acquired from Adam - a sort of animism whereby everything, not only the flies which had to be caught and let out of windows, the wood lice which had to be tenderly liberated into the garden, the spiders which were to be respected in their corners, but also the knives and forks and spoons and cups and plates and jugs, and shoes, and poor socks that had no partners, and buttons which might become uncherished and lost, had all a life and being of their own, and friendliness and rights. All these became an extension of her existence as they were an extension of his and in this common being, as in a vulnerable extended body, she secretly mingled with her son.

The family at large, though accepted as ‘hers’, meant less to her. She admired and envied and pitied Stella. She liked and was interested in and annoyed by Alex. She was fond of Tom about whom Brian had such mixed up feelings, but she bridled her fondness in case Adam should sustain any tiniest jealous hurt. On the whole she regarded Tom as a simple fellow, blessedly harmless. Like Brian, she envied Tom’s cheerfulness, but on Adam’s behalf not her own. When Adam was twenty would he be cheerful? She doubted it. Would Adam ever be twenty? George was another matter. Gabriel had strange thoughts about George. These thoughts had gained a definition for her from an incident which occurred a few years ago. Gabriel had been sitting in Diana’s Garden at the Baths with some acquaintances and the talk had turned to George and several people (Mrs Robin Osmore was one, and Anthea Eastcote, then a school girl) had said some mildly disobliging things about her brother- In-law. They fell silent when George appeared nearby, having undoubtedly overheard. As he went away Gabriel felt constrained to leap up and run after him. She caught him up as he was coming out of the Institute building into the street. She touched his arm and said blushing, ‘I didn’t say anything against you, I don’t think anything bad about you.’ George smiled, bowed slightly and went on. When she next met him in company, his eyes showed consciousness of the significant occasion. Gabriel was already regretting what now seemed her imprudent impulse, which she had not mentioned to Brian. What she had said was not even true. She did think bad things about him. And now she had made a secret link between them, an invisible bond like a rope the other end of which she could occasionally feel George sardonically, maliciously, ever so gently, twitching. There was some little, very small, piece of Gabriel’s heart which harboured the belief, allegedly so common among Ennistonian women, that she and she alone could save George from himself.

Alex put the key into the door of the Slipper House. It was eleven o’clock at night on the evening of Brian and Gabriel’s visit. As the door opened a damp woody smell emerged. Suddenly frightened, Alex fumbled for the light, went in and closed and locked the door behind her.

The Slipper House had been built by Alex’s eccentric father, Geoffrey Stillowen, in the nineteen-twenties, and was known to the few local persons interested in this matter as a ‘gem of art deco’. It dated from roughly the same period as the Ennistone Rooms. It was made of concrete, once white, now a stained blotchy grey, with curving corners and curving steel-framed windows and a shallow sloping green-tiled roof. There was a sort of Assyrian (or possibly Egyptian) superstructure, originally painted green and brown, over the front door. The door had an oval stained-glass panel depicting very upright stylized red tulips. There was more floral stained-glass on the upper landing and a large stained-glass screen in the drawing-room representing an aeroplane among clouds. The drawing-room also contained a very slippery window seat with carved ends and the original cushions with green and grey wavy designs, a fine large mirror with a fountain cut into the glass, and a table with a glass top supported on a metal arabesque. The flat fat oatmeal-coloured three-piece suite in the drawing-room was also original, and so was a set of tall mauve vases whose members were dotted here and there. The house was sparsely furnished, partly with oddments made of bamboo which Alex had put in during her ‘creative’ period. The floors were all of the most exquisite pale parquet, with designs made out of different woods. It was from this that the house had got its name, since Geoffrey Stillowen had insisted that no ordinary shoes, only soft slippers, be worn in the house, and there still stood beside the door a box of various-sized and coloured slippers which he had provided. Our townspeople made their own assessment of the odd name which sounded in their ears vaguely improper, as it might be of some oriental bower or seraglio, a discreet house of ill fame where exotic women pad.

Brian had not been far wrong in thinking that Alex used the Slipper House as a place of meditation. She liked the emptiness, the spaciness of the house, its lack of clutter after the mass of objects and trophies which filled the big house. Once, she had played at painting there, made figures out of clay and papier mâché and painted them like little gaudy Indian gods. She had done watercolours when she was young and had returned, after Alan left her, to what she thought of as her career as a failed painter. The little study room next to the kitchen was still strewn with paints and brushes which she had laid down a long time ago. She looked at them briefly as she went through the house turning on the lights. As she went she shuddered with a superstitious uncanny feeling which was also a kind of pleasure of aloneness.

Alex had long ago lost the Methodist religion of her childhood, but a religious sense subsisted in her, perverted into a kind of animistic obsession. Adam had some such odd sense of the world, only his pantheism was innocent, partook perhaps of that primal positive innocence which has made so many thinkers want to believe in metempsychosis. Alex’s quickening of the world about her was neurotic and corrupted, the final distortion of those artistic impulses with which she had so irresolutely played. It was as if things appeared and disappeared, dematerialized with malicious whimsy. Some things were like little animals; or rather, they were live things, with the clumsiness of objects, which fell about, shuffled, jolted and rolled. Perhaps Alex’s painted fetishes had been homeopathic attempts to placate these tiny malign deities. There were little thing-creatures that hid things, mouse-like movements in corners which ceased when Alex looked, substantial shadows which she flinched to avoid and which vanished as she moved. Alex had always collected things, but now it was as if they were gradually turning against her. In a way she knew that ‘all this was nonsense’, and although it frightened her, it did not frighten her very much because of a kind of complicit frisson which these experiences brought with them.

This leak of her unconscious mind into her surroundings, this theft of her vitality by malicious forces, was now becoming connected for Alex with the problem of Ruby, and this upset her much more. She did not really think that Ruby deliberately hid things and found them again, but it was as if Ruby had become the human ‘front’ of a revolt against Alex of her most familiar world. Alex could not imagine her life without Ruby, if Ruby were simply to go away. Herein Ruby appeared as a defence, not before recognized as such, against gathering forces. On the other hand, if what Ruby wanted was to be welcomed at last, by some revolutionary change, into an equal and quite different relationship with her employer, this Alex felt to be unthinkable, the final breakdown of sense and order. There were no ordinary gestures of affection and recognition between them which could possibly mediate such a change. It could not be done. Alex would resist it to her last breath.

Frightened by the dark shiny windows of the Slipper House through which beings could look from the outside, she went round closing the shutters, on the inside of which in a faraway time the young Ennistonian painter Ned Larkin, a discovery of Geoffrey Stillowen, had painted powdery garden scenes in pastel shades. The pictures vaguely represented the Belmont garden, the ginkgo, the fir tree, the copper beech, the birch trees, now suitably modified into pastness, with distant views of Belmont and the Slipper House. In the drawing-room, members of the family were similarly represented, in period costume, in antique poses, in a faint golden long ago light. Geoffrey Stillowen in white flannels, blond and youthful, was seated, reading a book with a tennis racket leaning against his knee. His wife Rosemary, standing behind, was opening a white parasol. There was also a picture of Alex as a pretty little girl holding some flowers. And a slim beautiful golden-haired youth, Alex’s elder brother who had been killed in the war, a shadow now, a shade, scarcely ever entering Alex’s thoughts except when she saw his image in this place. She turned from it. The Slipper House lived in the past, Alex’s hall of meditation was a time machine; but the past for which she craved was a faintly scented atmosphere, untroubled by the staring ghosts of individual people.

Tonight, however, individual people pressed upon her, and she could not attain the detached nervous vagueness which her aloneness needed. As she walked, for she always prowled all over the house in these late secret visits, she began to think about George. She wondered if George would come to her and speak to her, as he sometimes used to. She felt every day the minute movement of something which separated him from her. Perhaps this was her sense of old age, so inconceivable yet so near. She had lost George and found him again. Would he come to her now? The woman, a prostitute, with whom George was said to be ‘involved’, was some sort of connection of Ruby’s. Ruby had many such connections, and Alex disliked this connecting up of things which ought to be separate; it had begun to fit in too well with her sense of an evil conspiracy. There was a bad network. Perhaps it was to escape that network that Tom had withdrawn from her. Alex loved Tom; not best, George was best. About Brian she felt little. The women were outsiders; Gabriel with her droopy hair and her paper handkerchiefs, Stella so intelligent, so hard, so bad for George. Adam was a disturbing object, kin to her yet inaccessible.

Another individual occupied Alex’s restless mind this evening: John Robert Rozanov. (Alex had only pretended not to pick up his name when it was mentioned by Gabriel.) Alex had got to know John Robert slightly when he was young, already a little famous (he was older than Alex) and no longer living in Ennistone but returning from his grand university world to visit his mother who still lived in the town. His parents (his grandfather was a Russian emigre) were not well off and lived in the poorer quarter, in an area called Burkestown, remote from leafy Victoria Park. However, the Rozanovs were Methodists (John Robert’s father had married a local girl) and attended the same church (in Druidsdale near the Common) as Alex’s family, hence a slight acquaintance. Geoffrey Stillowen, engaged as a church-goer in various charitable enterprises, met John Robert’s father. Alex vaguely remembered seeing John Robert as a boy, then as a youth. She had never felt any interest in him, partly (she was not snobbish) because she found him physically repulsive. Then when (after the publication of his first book, Logic and Consciousness) he turned out to be ‘brilliant’ and began to be well-known as one of the ‘young philosophers’, it became chic for people in Ennistone to boast about him, announcing casually that they had known him all their lives. Alex, then nineteen, indulging in this little falsehood, caught the attention of one of her friends, a girl called Linda Brent with whom she had been at boarding-school. Linda was now at the university and was thrilled to learn that Alex actually knew John Robert Rozanov. Alex, continuing to show off, asked Linda to come and stay, saying she would exhibit the prodigy. Alex’s stranger mother, another alien, had died not long before, and Geoffrey Stillowen was occupying Belmont. Linda came. A little party was arranged and John Robert was invited. (‘He won’t come,’ said Alex’s brother Desmond. ‘He will, he’ll be delighted,’ said Geoffrey, who had a high sense of his own importance.) He came, and Alex introduced him to Linda. Linda of course (ignoring handsome Desmond) at once fell in love with him. Alex laughed. She laughed less when she read in a newspaper a remarkably short time afterwards that fabulous young John Robert Rozanov, after whom so many clever young ladies were chasing, was about to marry Miss Linda Brent. Alex never forgave either of them. More than that, she became, as she saw it afterwards, temporarily insane. She fell madly in love with John Robert Rozanov herself. Why on earth had she introduced this wonderful person to Linda? It was sheer stupid vanity. Why had she ingeniously done herself this awful damage? Why had she not had the wit and the creative imagination to cultivate this very unusual man? Surely by rights he belonged to her. She ought to have married him!

She did not see Rozanov again until some time later when a slightly apologetic Linda visited Ennistone with her husband, and by then Alex was engaged to charming popular Alan McCaffrey and had recovered from her paranoiac episode. The Rozanovs went to America where Linda later died leaving a daughter with whom, rumour had it, Rozanov never got on. The daughter married an obscure American academic called Meynell; she died and he either died or vanished, leaving behind a child, the little neglected waif before mentioned, about whom, it appeared, Rozanov cared even less. Rozanov came back to England for a time and taught in London, where George McCaffrey became his pupil. Later the philosopher went back to America whither, on the occasion described by Brian as unsuccessful, George followed him. Alex did not see Rozanov during his London period. She had troubles of her own and wanted to hide her unhappiness. (Like George, she hated to ‘lose face’.) Alan had left her and was living in Ennistone with Fiona Gates. Then when Fiona became ill Alex developed her obsession about getting hold of Tom, whom she had always coveted. All this while the John Robert whom Alex, during the brief time of her insane remorse, had so intensely imagined, lay dormant within her: an imprint, a little live ghost, an abiding private double of a man who no longer concerned her. This double now stirred and grew in her imagination with the news that John Robert Rozanov was returning to Ennistone. Why was he returning? Was it possible he was returning for her?

‘What a bloody mess,’ said George. He used to chide Diane for her untidiness. Now he viewed the signs of increasing disorder with a certain satisfaction.

‘Have you seen Stella?’ asked Diane.

‘No. I meant to go again. I felt I ought to go. You charmingly told me to go. I didn’t go. Then it became difficult to go. Then it became impossible to go. Then it became essential not to go. It became a duty not to go, it became a sexual urge. Do you understand?’

‘No. I’m sorry about the mess, I’d have tidied it up if I’d known you were coming, I never know when you’re coming, I wish I did.’

‘So do I. Like the Messiah I am eternally expected. I expect myself.’

‘I miss you. I am starved of love.’

‘If that is so then derry down derry it’s evident very our tastes are one.’

‘I wonder if you’ll ever marry me.’

‘If I married you I’d murder you.’

‘Better dead than unwed.’

‘You yearn for respectability.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Most respectable people yearn to shed their respectability but they don’t know how; they cannot get out, said the starling. Think how lucky you are. You are out.’

‘You mean I have no further to fall.’

‘Change the metaphor. You are free.’

‘Is that a metaphor?’

‘Almost everything we say is a metaphor, that’s why nothing is really serious.’

‘You are never really serious. I think it’s how you try to escape being awful.’

‘It’s how I escape being awful.’

‘Was I free before I met you?’

‘No, you had illusions.’

‘I’m disillusioned now all right.’

‘Unillusioned. I liberated your intelligence.’

‘I’m not free now. I’m a slave.’

‘You love it. You kiss the rod. Don’t you?’

‘Don’t be coarse. I do what you want.’

‘Whores are so fastidious.’

‘Please don’t — ’

‘A verbal point. My service is perfect freedom.’

‘I think I’ve never been free. Who’s free anyway? Is Stella free?’

‘No.’

‘Then is Stella —;?’

‘Shut up about Stella. I don’t like her name in your mouth.’

‘Her pure name in — ’

‘Shut up.’

‘Who’s free?’

‘I know only one person who is free.’

‘Who?’

‘In the end you’ll be my nurse, that’s what you’re waiting for, the smash. You think you’ll pick up the pieces.’

‘I don’t want you smashed. I love you.’

‘It thrills you to tell me my duty. You’d be sick if I did it.’

‘So you think I have no illusions now.’

‘How can you have? I tell you the truth. I am a fount of truth in this place.’

‘I think you do tell me the truth,’ said Diane, ‘and I suppose that’s something.’ She looked at George’s calm round face, his clean white shirt sleeves neatly rolled up, his pale arms covered with sleek silky strokable black hairs. She said, ‘You’re here.’

‘I’m here, kid. Look after me. I’m as full of rapiers as a doomed bull.’

‘You ought to ring up, I might have been out.’

‘Out? You mean you go out?’

‘I go as far as the Baths and the Church. I go to the Food Hall at Bowcocks.’

‘One day I’ll immure you.’

‘We are two people in despair.’

‘You flatter yourself.’

‘You mean you aren’t in despair?’

‘I mean you are not. Women are incapable of despair.’

‘How can you say that!’

‘Oh they can cry, that’s different. God, this room smells of cigarette smoke.’

‘I never smoke when you’re here.’

‘You’d better not.’

‘If you were here more I’d smoke less. Shall I open the window?’

‘No, stay put, Miss Nightwork. I like the cosy stench of face powder and cigarette smoke and alcohol. Only I wish you wouldn’t put those potted plants in the bath. Potted plants in the bath are an image of hell. Chaos and Old Night. Not like your corset on the floor, which I rather like.’

‘It’s not a corset.’

‘Whatever it is. Chaos and Old Night.’

‘Would you like another drink?’

‘Hey nonny nonny - no. You have one, dear daughter of the game. I’ll walk about.’ George rose and began to walk, across the room, out into the hall, into the kitchen, back again to the window. He often did this. Reclining on the sofa with her shoes off, Diane watched him.

Diane Sedleigh was the most genteel prostitute in Ennistone. (The man she had imprudently married once upon a time was called Sedley, but Diane thought that Sedleigh was more elegant.) She was a small slim woman with almost black straight hair which was cut short and clung to her small head, sweeping in a little neat pointed curve round her face on either side. Her dark brown eyes were not large but were ardent and eager, not unlike the eyes of Zed, Adam McCaffrey’s dog. She liked to hint that she had gipsy blood. No one believed this romantic hint but it was none the less true. She was a cousin, possibly a half-sister, of Ruby Doyle. (She had been christened, at St Olaf’s, her mother being Church of England, ‘Diamond’, but early decided that she had enough troubles without owning such a bizarre name. The familiar ‘Di’ easily became the elegant ‘Diane’.) There was a third girl too, sister or cousin. The gipsy father or fathers were legendary beings from another era and there had never been any family life. Diane had very small feet and small nicotine-stained hands. She sometimes wore black silky dresses, very short, with black stockings, and thought of herself as a ‘flapper’. She was dressed like that today, with a barbarous metal necklace which George had given her. His only gifts, apart from money, were cheap exotic jewellery. Sometimes when she wore trousers she posed differently, legs wide apart and shirt coming loose, showing her small breasts, a tiny defiant female pirate. Of course she pronounced her name Dee-ahn, not Die-ann.

Diane had been beautiful when she was young, and had experienced the claims upon the world which beautiful women feel, especially if they are poor. She was now nearly forty. She came from a poor home in the Burkestown area of Ennistone. Her father left her mother, her mother went away with another man. Diane lived unhappily with a series of vague ‘aunties’, whose relationship to her and to each other remained conjectural. When she left school she worked as a waitress, then as a shop assistant in Bowcocks, then as a clerk in a betting office. One day she let her boss take some photographs of her in the nude. Was that the beginning of it all, was it fated, could it have been otherwise? It was a long story, the old story, Diane preferred not to remember how it went. She became pregnant twice, each time abandoned, and had to look after her expensive secret abortion herself. She was briefly married to that Sedley somewhere along the way. Men were beasts. She took to prostitution as a temporary, she thought, expedient in a moment of misery, not really for the money but as a kind of suicide because she didn’t care. A Mrs Belton whom she met at the Baths told her there was a ‘vacancy’ in a ‘nice house’. She offered it as a kind of privilege. Diane did not stay long in the house, but already she felt it impossible to ‘go back’. What was there to go back to? She was by now not indifferent to earning money easily. She saved herself from real suicide by acquiring a more positive image of her trade. She picked up and treasured the word ‘courtesan’. Some of her clients told her tales of whores in other lands, exotic women in cages in Calcutta, motherly women knitting in lighted windows in Amsterdam. She set herself up in a flat and affected to be ‘merry’. She decorated her flat ‘tastefully’ and became more ‘exclusive’. Respectable men arrived and endowed her with a kind of odd derived respectability. Older men came and discussed their wives, not always unkindly. Young men and adolescents came for initiations and to talk about ‘life’. Diane began to feel that she was a wise woman performing an important public service. Her earliest clients had been rough fellows. Then men with fast cars took her out to road houses. Later these were joined by professional men. She had a fantasy about a rich bachelor, no longer young, and despairing of finding a woman to understand him, who would suddenly carry her away into a secure and cherished married life. For a time she even kept a suitcase packed for the advent of this impetuous admirer. But then Diane’s respectability had taken a new and strange turn.

George had come her way many years before, but casually. They met at the Baths. He had come to her once or twice unmarried, then once or twice married, aloof and sardonic, as if carrying out some private wager. The polite precise way in which he treated her as an instrument maintained a distance between them, which was also an easy bond. Then he fell in love with her. Well, surely he did fall in love? George was rewriting history so fast, it was hard to remember what had really happened. What was now taken for granted between them was that she was in love with him. George had certainly become extremely possessive. He announced that she was to have no other clients. He moved her from her tasteful flat to a smaller flat in Westwold of which he paid the rent. George gave her money and visited her, though he never spent the night. (‘If I did I would detest you in the morning.’) Diane tried to think that she was no longer a common prostitute, she was George’s mistress. Even the phrase ‘kept woman’ could console her a bit. But she knew in her heart that she was not George’s mistress. That was not how it was between them. She was just a reserved prostitute, like a reserved table.

Diane knew that George was supposed to be ‘an awful man’, though equally she had the fascinated forgiving feeling about him which she shared with other Ennistone ladies. She felt nervous with him at first and awaited the sudden uncontrolled rages for which George was famous. They did not come. George and Diane, it appeared, simply got on well together. George was often moody and irritable and sarcastic, but never seriously angry. Diane, it must be admitted, knew how to keep her head down. She did not contradict. He spoke of how he could rest with her, find repose. They chattered easily. George disliked ordinary expressions of tenderness. Profound or sentimental topics were equally banned. There was a sort of lightness and hardness in their converse. Diane learnt a new language, a new kind of banter, which was their usual mode of communication, and it was in teaching her this that George might reasonably have claimed that he had ‘awakened her intelligence’. For a time, and although his visits were entirely irregular and whimsical, their ease together was such that Diane had dreams of a ‘real life’ somehow to be realized with George. Time would perhaps change their relationship, redeem it, and in doing so redeem him. If she had been a shrewder woman, and if she had been less afraid of him, for she remained afraid of him, even though he behaved so quietly with her, she might have tried to prompt the redemptive process and encourage him to leave his wife by threatening a withdrawal of her favours at a time when he was most addicted to them. However, Diane did not do this. Such blackmail would sort ill with the ideal role which she planned for herself in George’s life, and anyway she lacked the nerve and the wit. Meanwhile she was gratified to know that George, so outrageous elsewhere, was a lamb to her, and this gave her a comforting sense of superiority. In this she paused and rested. She knew that she was envied by women who would of course never have admitted it. (Though neither of them spoke of their relationship it had become common knowledge.) However, Diane also knew that George’s kindness to her depended on her good behaviour. At first she had embraced his monastic ‘rule’ as one in hopes of heavenly joy. Later the narrowness of her life irked her and although her love for George did not diminish, she had less hope of salvation. She lived in a world of idleness and waiting. She smoked and drank. She watched television. She had once hoped to gain some sort of education from George, but now if she got an ‘improving’ book from the library he just laughed at it. She experimented with cosmetics and altered her clothes. She went to Bowcocks and to Anne Lapwing’s Boutique and bought scarves and cheap ‘accessories’ to cheer herself up. She went to the Institute, then hurried back. George came less often now and it was some time since he had made love to her, though he remained as possessive as ever. Once, recently, he had said to her in a gentle tone, ‘If you ever have anything to do with either of my brothers, I will kill you.’ He smiled and Diane laughed.

Would George be able to ‘afford her’ now that he had lost his job? She was poorer, kept by George, than when she had plied her trade freely. Would she not, for him, face poverty, destitution? For him, with him, yes. But as it was? Would it not have to end, must it not end, yet how could it end? She had made loving George her sole occupation. She had no friends, no social life. There were a few women with whom she talked at the Baths, but these were not the women she would have chosen to talk to. Nun-like, she did not look at men, and they avoided her. She did not envisage running away, it was impossible to vanish, it was too dangerous and too expensive. Besides she did not want to, she had given her life to George, thoughtlessly, stupidly, but just as tenderly and devotedly as if he had been her dear husband. A Women’s Lib group in Burkestown had made themselves known and indicated that if ever she needed help they would ‘stick by her’, hide her, spirit her away, they appeared to suggest. They seemed kind and sincere but Diane did not pursue the acquaintance. They thoroughly disapproved of George and she was afraid he might think she was plotting with them. She began to be afraid of things he might imagine, lies people might tell him. She was aware that people eyed her in the street, stared at her at the Baths, but Diane pretended not to notice, not even caring to know whether the looks were friendly or hostile. In the past Gabriel McCaffrey had smiled at her. So had Tom McCaffrey. They certainly knew of her relation with George, yet they had smiled. Diane could not be glad since she could not respond and these mysterious tokens increased her sense of isolation. She did not from day to day imagine that George intended to leave her. Yet lately she had begun to feel that a time of crisis was at hand. Perhaps this was simply an expression of her own unconscious desire for a crash, a final solution. Did she not sometimes, darkly, fear that in spite of everything George would kill her in the end?

‘I’m more popular than ever now that I’ve killed my wife,’ said George.

‘I am not amused.’

‘Well, I had a good try. Better luck next time.’

‘You ought not to speak like that about her,’ said Diane. Her mission to ‘save’ George scarcely now extended beyond such improving remarks, which pathetically hinted at a complicit superiority. Who was she to tell George how to behave, or to indulge in cries of ‘poor Stella’? Sometimes it seemed as if George were prompting just such admonitions so as then to crush them with violent sarcasm.

‘I hoped she’d drown, but alas it was not to be.’

‘Don’t talk silly.’

‘I’ve had several more of those letters from women. Bash your wife and get sympathetic letters from women. Shall I read you one?’

‘No.’

‘“Dear George McCaffrey, I feel I must write to express my sympathy. I have thought a lot about you and feel I know you well. People are so unkind they don’t try to understand. I know you are a lonely unhappy man, and I feel sure that I would be able to —”’

‘Oh stop!’

‘“Please feel free to telephone me —”’

‘Horrid, stop!’

‘Why horrid? It’s well meant.’

‘Well meant!’

‘Maybe a kind word does help. Maybe we don’t say enough kind words.’

‘You despise kindness.’

‘You would like to think so.’

‘I don’t mean — ’

‘Lonely women sitting in lonely rooms. You ought to be sorry for them.’

‘I am a lonely woman sitting in a lonely room. I am sorry for myself.’

‘I think I’ll ring her up.’

‘Go on then, there’s the telephone.’

‘God bless women, they never write a man off. Men judge, women don’t. What would we do without them? That women’s world of quietness and forgiveness to which we return battle-scarred. You soothe and animate our images of ourselves.’

‘What about our images of ourselves?’

‘You have none. Yours are illusions.’

‘You think that women — ’

‘Oh don’t, women’s problems are so boring, they even bore women.’

‘When you get those letters — ’

‘Oh damn the letters. It’s no fun, I can tell you, being the local âme damnée. What’s the matter with you, kid? You seem nervy today.’

‘Nervy! God!’

Diane wanted to cry, but she knew that George hated tears. Curled into a little black ball like a disturbed spider, she tucked her black-stockinged feet in and fingered the jagged metal necklace which they laughingly called her ‘slave’s collar’.

‘When is Stella coming home?’ she asked.

‘Buzz buzz. Hickory Dickory Dock.’

‘I suppose she is coming home?’

‘You dream that one day she won’t. You dream that she will get fed up and leave me one day. That day will never come. Stella will never leave me. She will cling to me with the little steel claws of her love until violent death ensues for her or for me.’

‘Violent death?’

‘All death is violent.’

‘I’ve stopped expecting her to leave you.’

‘Stella would like me in a wheel chair and her pushing it.’

‘Do you really think — ’

‘Oh shut up about her, I told you to, didn’t I? Say something interesting, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Let’s go to France, I’ve never been out of England, let’s go to that hotel in Paris, the one you mentioned, where you used to go as a student, I always remember that hotel, I think of it in the night — ’

‘Well, don’t. You’ll never go there. Forget it.’

‘Oh do sit down, darling, wild beastie, stop walking like that, stop padding and pacing, you make me want to scream, come and hold my hand. I’m full of darkness today.’

‘I’m always full of darkness.’

Westwold, where Diane’s flat was situated, is a ‘mixed’ area of small shops and modest suburban houses and cottages, tucked in between the river Enn and the railway, with Druidsdale on one side and Burkestown on the other. The railway, I should explain, passes beneath the common in a long tunnel, another feat of Victorian engineering. It emerges on the Burkestown side of Ennistone where the railway station is situated, most inconveniently for the inhabitants of Victoria Park, whose ancestors insisted on this remote siting. Westwold, together with the part of Burkestown round St Olaf’s Church (fourteenth century, Low Church of England), contains some of the oldest houses in Ennistone, none unfortunately of any size or interest. There is also a pub called the Three Blind Mice. Diane’s flat was not far from here in a quiet street of two-storey terraced houses, above a small Irish-linen shop where an elderly man quietly unfolded large white towels for infrequent customers.

The area in which George was now walking was cluttered up not only by Diane’s clothes, her ‘corsets’ and things which he was treading on, but also by her possessions, little things bought to console her, stools, baskets, plants, a leather elephant, a yellow china umbrella-stand full of walking-sticks, a rack for shaggy magazines, objects which filled the interstices between the larger articles of furniture. Among the latter was an upright piano with an inlaid floral pattern and brass candle-holders. Diane, who could not play, had bought it cheap for the use of some hypothetical pianist client. She had pictured a tender scene, candle-lit. (There were occasional tender scenes.) But no piano player had come and the piano was, even to her ear when she idly strummed it, patently in need of tuning. The top of the piano was crowded with small objects, miniature dolls, bits of china, toy animals. ‘These are your children,’ one of her clients once told her, ‘you express your frustrated maternal feelings by taking pity on these bits of junk in shops!’ The speaker had a wife and four fine children, Diane saw them at the Baths. After he went away she cried for a long time.

George brought a chair near to the sofa and sat and held her hand, facetiously at first, then seriously. George was wondering whether it mattered that the priest had (had he?) seen him pushing the car. Not that he imagined that the priest would tell the police or say anything which George could not safely deny. What troubled George was the bond which had now come into being between him and the priest. He had sometimes felt that the priest was ‘after him’, though in just what way was never clear. All sorts of baneful and inauspicious bonds joined George to the people who surrounded him; almost any incident could make a bond, create an enemy. These bonds were the cords with which people tried to tie him down, to net him as a quarry to be killed. He was the doomed maypole round which people danced to truss him as a victim. The priest, as witness, was but one more symptom of the mounting crisis in George’s life; of course George’s life had always been in crisis, in the sort of crisis where ordinary morality is felt to be abrogated, as it is in wartime. But now he felt at moments that it was the lutte finale.

He looked down at Diane’s little nicotine-brown hand, like a child’s hand with tiny bitten finger-nails. He lifted it and smelt it, then kissed it and continued absently to hold it.

‘What is it?’ said Diane. ‘Is it Professor Rozanov?’

George had briefly mentioned his teacher’s return, Diane was guessing.

George did not answer this, but said, ‘You spend time gossiping at the Baths, you hear what people say. Who will he come to?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Who are his friends here?’

‘What about N?’

‘He quarrelled with N.’

‘William Eastcote?’ (This was Bill the Lizard, Brian’s godfather and the man who saw the flying saucer.)

‘He’s about that age, he’s the sort of person Rozanov might tolerate — ’

‘Is Rozanov as old as that?’ said Diane.

‘That’s not old.’ George let go of her hand. ‘What made you think of Eastcote?’

‘Someone said he’d had a letter from Professor Rozanov.’

‘Well, keep your ears open, kid, watch and pray.’

George’s face in repose had a calm benevolent expression. His ceaseless troubles had not yet made marks upon that bland surface. He had the darker brown hair of the McCaffreys (the Stillowens were blonds) which he wore cut short and sleek in an old-fashioned mode. (It was even rumoured that he used hair oil.) He was taller than Brian but not as tall as Tom. He had been slim but was now heavier. He had fine wide-apart brown eyes, which could suddenly narrow, but his ‘cat-look’, unlike Alex’s, was amused and quizzical. His face was rather round, his nose was rather short, and he had small square separated teeth set on a wide arc, giving his face a boyish frank look when he smiled. He wore light grey check suits with waistcoats, and was often to be seen (as he was now) wearing the shiny-backed waistcoat without the jacket. It was this habit which prompted people to say he looked like a snooker player. A remark made by Brian that ‘bar billiards’ was George’s game manifested more malice than insight and reinforced in Brian’s critics the view that Brian was something of a blunt instrument. George was not a frequenter of bars and there was something at least superficially stylish about him. He had been a graceful cricketer when young.

George, more than most people, lived by an idea of himself which was in some ways significantly at odds with reality. To say he was a narcissist was to say little. We are mostly narcissists, and only in a few, not always with felicitous results, is narcissism overcome (broken, crushed, annihilated, nothing less will serve) by religious discipline or psycho-analysis. George was an accomplished narcissist, an expert and dedicated liver of the double life, and this in a way which was not always to his discredit. That is, he was in some respects, though not in others, not as bad as he pretended to be, or as he really believed himself to be. Herein perhaps he intuitively practised that sort of protective coloration which consists in sincerely (or ‘sincerely’, sincerity being an ambiguous concept) giving one’s faults pejorative names which conceal the yet more awful nature of what is named. All of which goes to show that it is difficult to analyse human frailty, and certainly difficult to analyse George’s.

When George was younger he used to say, ‘Que faire? I love good food and good wine and pretty women.’ This, which George did not regard as a falsehood, was misleading, not only because George was not seriously interested in food and drink, but because he was not (in the crude accepted sense) seriously interested in women. He pictured himself as ‘highly sexed’, as no doubt a great many men like to do. (When does one ever hear a man announce that he is not highly sexed?) In fact he was a good deal less erotically interested in women than was his brother Brian. He was credited with some brief affairs both before and after marriage, but these were (in my view) probably nervous cravings rather than great passions. His relation with Diane was the only ‘illicit’ union which had lasted, and in this conventional lust played a minor role.

Stella in some way stunned George, as if she had hit him very hard on the forehead. (They met at London University as fellow students.) Perhaps this initial coup was what he could never forgive. She was the cleverest strongest woman that he had ever met. Though later he said that he was never in love with Stella, only obsessed and hypnotized, there is no doubt that he was in love. She was in love too, though for some reason people always wanted to explain this away by saying things like, ‘She took him on as a challenge.’ George early gained the idea that Stella intended somehow to ‘break’ him; and there was perhaps such an element in her love. She had begun to feel that she was the stronger, and George could not bear this. Violence was his answer. It was a menage which lacked the language of tenderness. Yet George admired and, in a way, prized his wife, and Stella’s love was love, loyal absolute commitment, the love of an intelligent realistic person capable of unselfishness. She was one of the few women who were entirely unsentimental about George. People argued about whether Stella ‘knew what he was like’ when she married him. I think she did; but she overestimated the influence of her kind of love upon this kind of man. She was without feminine wiles, and could not conceal her strength as a more cunning or intuitively tactful woman might have done. She never soothed or accepted George’s manner of being himself. Strength and love were one for Stella, love redeeming strength, power corrupting love. ‘I’ve married a policewoman,’ George complained early on, before things became very bad, and before Rufus died. (About the death of the child and its effect opinions differed.) Stella’s father, a diplomat, detested George and a coolness arose between Stella and her parents. When Stella’s mother died, David Henriques retired and went to live in Japan, whence he sent presents and affectionate letters in which George was not mentioned. Henriques became an expert on netsuke.

Many men are violent (the sealed doors of houses conceal how many). George conformed to a less usual type in that he made violence his trademark. He made a point of his aggressiveness and bad temper to define his esse; and this in some quarters actually made people more tolerant and forgiving. As Brian said, George ‘got away with things’. Some smilingly described his conduct as ‘rudeness à outrance’, others pointed out (and this had an element of truth) that he was prudentially violent; or else he was lucky. (That he was lucky was something that George believed too, a belief he managed to combine with seeing himself as a ‘doomed bull, full of rapiers’.) The causes of a habit of violence are mysterious and not often lucidly studied, since those who take an intelligent interest in violent cases usually have deep psychological reasons for preferring certain explanations. (This is almost always true in politics, and often in analysis.) Alex said (and half believed) that George simply drank too much. Others said it was because of Rufus, some blamed Stella, some Alex, some Alan. Yet other theories saw George as a repressed homosexual, or an Oedipus victim, or a one-man protest against the bourgeoisie. He figured indeed upon many flags which were flown. And although George never systematically took up the game of explaining himself, he dabbled in it to the extent of tinting his excesses here and there with ameliorating hints of a more interesting ethical background. He felt, or affected to feel, that his chaotic and unbridled personality was in some important sense more real than the decorous natures that surrounded him. George was supposed to be closer to awful aspects of the world which other people preferred to ignore, and was thereby somehow sympathetically joined to the afflicted and the oppressed. I once heard him say of his brother Brian, ‘He doesn’t realize how terrible and how serious life is.’ This use of the word ‘serious’ is idiosyncratic but highly significant. I may add that, on the occasion in question, George then laughed. In such contexts Brian was in turn perhaps quite right to hazard that George helped one to understand terrorists.

Frustrated ambition, or as some more plainly put it George’s chagrin at discovering that he was no good, was also mentioned as a cause or an excuse. As a student, George had studied philosophy, then history and archaeology. Later, although he got a first-class degree, he failed to get the academic posts which he coveted. He wrote plays which no one would perform and (it was rumoured) poems which no one would publish. There is no doubt that he was consumed with envy of artists and thinkers. He did some historical research, inclining to call himself an archaeologist although he had done no field work beyond a fortnight’s junior grubbing at the Roman Wall. He entered the ‘museum and archive’ world and held one or two posts, then becoming deputy keeper at our Ennistone Museum, where he also drew a stipend as ‘research scholar’. He was said to be compiling some important work. However the fact remained that at the age of more than forty he had published nothing except A Short History of The Ennistone Museum. (This little work, which is still in print, is well written but necessarily of limited importance.) George was in fact a clever man, he was the lively gifted promising person whom Stella had loved and married. (She could not have loved a fool.) Only somehow he had never managed to do anything substantial with his talents. Instead he set about destroying himself. No one was very surprised when he ended his museum career by smashing all that Roman glass.

I confess that I cannot offer any illuminating explanation. Every human being is different, more absolutely different and peculiar than we can goad ourselves into conceiving; and our persistent desire to depict human lives as dramas leads us to see ‘in the same light’ events which may have multiple interpretations and causes. Of course a man may be ‘cured’ (consoled, encouraged, improved, shaken, returned to effective activity, and so forth and so on) by a concocted story of his own life, but that is another matter. (And such stories may be on offer from doctors, priests, teachers, influential friends and relations, or may be self- Invented or derived from literature.) We are in fact far more randomly made, more full of rough contingent rubble, than art or vulgar psycho-analysis lead us to imagine. The language of sin may be more appropriate than that of science and as likely to ‘cure’. The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone’s life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge. There was some deep (so deep that one wants to call it ‘original’, whatever that means) wound in George’s soul into which every tiniest slight or setback poured its gall. Pride and vanity and venomous hurt feelings obscured his sun. He saw the world as a conspiracy against him, and himself as a victim of cosmic injustice.

At the time of this story not much was known about George’s relations with John Robert Rozanov, so those relations did not figure in the ‘George theories’ or the ‘George legend’. George became John Robert’s pupil when he was studying philosophy in London. George was twenty, John Robert in his fifties. The Rozanovs were, as has been related, a poor family living in Burkestown. The grandfather, a Marxian socialist, had fled from Czarist Russia. (He was related, it was said, to the painter of the same name.) He came to England, freedom, poverty, obscurity and disappointment. His son, John Robert’s father, married a local girl, a Methodist, became a Christian and lost, indeed had never shown much, interest in politics. He was an electrician, sometimes unemployed. The grandfather lived long enough to be consoled by realizing that his grandson at least was some sort of remarkable creature. John Robert, an only child, proceeded to Ennistone Grammar School (now alas defunct) and then to Oxford. After graduating, he went to study in America, where he taught in California, then in New York. He returned to teach in London, then went back to America, thereafter making regular, sometimes prolonged, visits to the English philosophical scene. As he retained a tender relation with his parents, his face was occasionally, until his mother’s death, to be seen in Ennistone, and his fame was kept green among us. He had few friends here, however, and was generally said to be no maker of friends. He kept up with William Eastcote and with an eccentric old watchmaker with whom he had philosophical conversations.

George McCaffrey was deeply affected by his teacher. He ‘fell in love’ with Rozanov, with philosophy, with Rozanov’s philosophy. However, his soul was so shaken that (and this too was no doubt due to Rozanov’s influence) he never told his love; and although he spoke admiringly of Rozanov when he went home he never revealed how absolutely this man had taken possession of his soul. Whether George was ever a ‘favourite pupil’ is open to question. What is certain is that Rozanov advised George to give up philosophy and George took the advice. A brief word is necessary here about Rozanov’s philosophical views. (I should mention that I am not a philosopher and cannot offer any commentary or detail.) As a ‘brilliant’ young man, John Robert was a sceptic, a reductionist, a linguistic analyst, what is (incorrectly I am told in this context) popularly called a ‘logical positivist’, of the most austerely anti-metaphysical school. His Methodist upbringing had it seemed slipped from him painlessly or been with a certain naturalness transformed into a methodical sort of atheism. He was and remained deeply puritanical. In America he became interested in philosophy of science (he had a considerable knowledge of mathematics) and spent a lot of time arguing with physicists and attempting to clear up their philosophical mistakes. He had already published his two youthful books; one, Logic and Consciousness, a demolition of the views of Husserl, the other about Kant’s view of time. He now added a long book called Kant and the Kantians which established his reputation as something considerably more than a ‘clever boy’. His well-known studies of Descartes and Leibniz followed, then Against the Theory of Games, and the seminal work, Nostalgia for the Particular. He then became, by way of Kant, interested for the first time in moral philosophy, which he had dismissed when young; became for a while an obsessive student of Plato and wrote a book called Being and Beyond, considered marvellous but eccentric, about Plato’s Theory of Ideas. (He also wrote a short book, difficult to find now, on Plato’s Mathematical Objects.)

It was at this rather chaotic and eclectic stage of his development that George encountered him, when he was (as William Eastcote later put it) ‘letting off fireworks in all directions’. The next news about John Robert was that declaring (as he did from time to time) that philosophy was ‘impossible’, ‘too hard for human beings’, and that his own mind had ‘gone to pot’, he had decided to become a historian. He had been interested in Greek history since his Oxford days, and during a sabbatical year he composed and published a study of the causes of the Peloponnesian War. He also wrote a short book, considered a classic, about Greek ships and sea warfare. (There was arguably an engineer as well as a mathematician hidden inside John Robert.) He then further amazed everyone by writing a book about Luther. After that he went back to philosophy. There is some dispute about this later phase. Some said that he had become a neo-Platonist. He certainly published some fragmentary stuff about Plotinus. Others said he had ‘taken up religion’. There was said to be a ‘secret doctrine’ and a ‘great book’.

Some pupil-teacher relationships last a lifetime. George maintained his side of the relationship, though it is doubtful whether Rozanov animated his. George later regretted having taken his master’s advice and given up philosophy. As a graduate student he still haunted John Robert’s lectures and classes. He tried to ‘keep up’ and ‘keep in touch’. He even submitted to a semi-learned journal an article which purported to ‘explain’ John Robert’s philosophical position. The editor informed the philosopher, who sent George a curt note, and the article was promptly withdrawn. George made no further attempt to ‘popularize’ Rozanov’s work, but he continued to regard him as his teacher and on one occasion followed him to America.

George had kept the tally against fate. He knew what he was owed: something great, little less than salvation. Why was John Robert coming back to Ennistone? Was it for him, the lost sheep, the one just man, the justified sinner? He had always believed in magic, and he knew that John Robert Rozanov was a magician.

‘What’s on telly, Di? Roll on the San Francisco earthquake. That’s what I want to see pictures of.’

‘I left my evening bag behind at the Blacketts’,’ said Gabriel.

‘You’re always doing that!’ said Brian.

Jeremy Blackett was a master at the Comprehensive School. He and his wife Sylvia were dedicated bridge players. Gabriel did not play bridge, but Jeremy’s sister Sarah and his brother Andrew made up the foursome when Brian and Gabriel went to the Blacketts’. (Gabriel always took a novel.) It was to the powerful widowed mother of these Blacketts, May Blackett, that Alex had so disgracefully sold Maryville, the seaside house.

‘Jeremy will be here,’ said Gabriel, ‘or Sylvia or Sarah.’

‘Why can’t you bloody remember your stuff?’

‘Sorry — ’

It was Saturday morning. Everybody went to the Baths on Saturday. (I was there myself on that particular Saturday.) It was a frosty morning and the Outdoor Bath was covered by a thick blanket of steam. The life guard upon his ladder could only glimpse a swimmer here and there as the white cloud rolled about in the brisk easterly breeze.

Brian and Gabriel and Adam were in the Promenade, looking out through the window. They had just arrived. The window was misted, but they had rubbed three round holes at different levels through which they looked at the steamy scene outside. Behind them a few people were sitting at the tables drinking coffee.

Gabriel never failed to feel a curious visceral excitement when she came to the Institute, even though she did so nearly every day. ‘It’s like a Time Machine,’ she said to Brian, and then could not explain what she meant. From behind the studded bronze door which concealed the spring there was often the sound of a beating pulse, and the whole building seemed to tremble. Gabriel had learnt to swim in these waters. Yet it was as if some kind of not unpleasant guilty or expectant emotion attached to them. There was a delicious faint thrilling feeling as one slipped into these warm pools, especially in winter time when the hot spring seemed such a miracle and bathing in it such an exotic rite.

‘When are you fetching Stella?’ said Gabriel.

‘About five.’

Stella, detained in hospital, was today coming to stay with Brian and Gabriel. Gabriel had suggested. Stella had agreed. It was significant that Stella was not going back to her own house. This significance, on which no one had yet commented, frightened Gabriel. George had still not been to see his wife. Although she wanted Stella to come, Gabriel felt afraid with a tremor which vibrated in harmony with the guilty thrill inspired by the steaming water. She wanted now to swim, quickly, quickly, quickly.

‘There’s Sylvia Blacken,’ said Brian.

‘Oh yes — ’ Gabriel waved her little wave to Adam, waggling her fingers. Adam did not like this wave and frowned. Gabriel went out through the door and turned along the edge of the pool toward the changing-rooms.

‘Twelve o’clock,’ said Brian to Adam, meaning they should meet in the Promenade at twelve. The McCaffreys went their separate ways at the Baths. That was part of the pleasure of the place, as if each one’s enjoyment was especially private. It was an aspect of what Gabriel felt as its ‘dangerousness’.

Adam inclined his head. He walked a little way away and stopped, to signify that he had withdrawn from society and was now alone.

Brian followed Gabriel out of the door.

Adam was small and compact, a dark McCaffrey, round-headed, round-faced, with dark straight short hair, resembling Alan, indeed slightly resembling George. He had none of his father’s wolfish Viking look. He had brown intent eyes and rarely smiled. He went to a private preparatory day school, Leafy Ridge School, in a suburb of that name, not the Comprehensive where Jeremy Blackett taught. His father was uneasy about this, but he wanted Adam to learn at least two foreign languages, and the Comprehensive was not very successful in teaching one. Gabriel wanted him to be protected from rough boys. (In fact there were rough boys at the prep school too, but Adam did not tell his mother this.) She also liked the uniform, brown knee breeches and long sky-blue socks. Adam did not like boys. He did not like girls either, though he rather wanted to be one. The awkwardness which separated him from his parents made him solitary at school, where he was also conspicuously small for his age. His mysterious refusal to grow seemed to signal a quiet hostility to any public role. Of course he loved his parents, and sympathized silently with their attempts to communicate with him. Sometimes they seemed to him almost grotesque in their efforts to behave naturally. He often looked at his mother and when she looked at him he would smile and go quickly away. He rarely looked at his father, but he sometimes touched him encouragingly.

He stood now a while staring at nothing. He was wondering what Zed was doing with himself at home. He often wondered this. Occasionally he had managed to spy on Zed, to see the little animal playing all by himself in the most imaginative way. But Adam was never sure that Zed did not somehow know that he was being watched and had put on a show for his master’s benefit. Wittgenstein says that a dog cannot be a hypocrite or sincere either. Adam, who had not yet read Wittgenstein, considered Zed to be quite capable of hypocrisy.

He did not follow his parents through the outside door. Unlike his mother he was in no hurry to swim. He enjoyed the special before-swim tension which made everything look vivid and strange and somehow slow. He went back across the Promenade vaguely aware that there were one or two people whom he knew (or rather who knew him, Mrs Osmore for instance) sitting at the tables, but he did not look that way. He dreaded conversation, even the catching of an eye. He passed through a communicating door into the area of the Indoor Bath. Adam very much wished to bring Zed to the Baths, only dogs were not allowed, except in the Promenade. He kept imagining how it would be, just Zed in the Indoor Bath, breaking the smooth silky surface of the water with his quiet confident rat-like motion. Zed swam well. Adam had often swum him in the river, only now this was not allowed either because of something the doctor said.

The Indoor Bath was a peaceful scene on weekdays, since a notion persisted among the older Ennistonians that it was a rather ‘sissy’ place, even unhealthy. However it had recently been ‘taken over’ by the ‘jeunesse dorée’ of Ennistone, who used it, at weekends, as a rendezvous. This jeunesse, it should be said, tended to be women, at present most notably Valerie Cossom, the Eurocommunist, and Nesta Wiggins, one of the Women’s Libbers who had tried to befriend Diane, Olivia Newbold, one of the Glove Factory Newbolds, and Anthea Eastcote, great-niece of William Eastcote. Gavin Oare, editor of the Ennistone Gazette, who liked to hang around these ladies, was treated with a certain disdain. On the other hand, Michael Seanu, a cub reporter, a little scamp just out of school, was a current pet, and Maisie Chalmers (daughter of the Institute Director) who did the Women’s Page on the Gazette, was a valued recent recruit to right ideas. At the moment of Adam’s entrance there was a great deal of splashing in the pool which he felt ought to be so quiet and water-ratty, as Valerie was racing lengths with Peter Blackett. Peter was Jeremy Blackett’s son, not very much older than Adam, but as tall as Jeremy. Valerie’s father, Howard Cossom, was a dentist who lived in Leafy Ridge and was famous for being unable to swim. Valerie and Nesta were studying sociology at the Ennistone Polytechnic. On the steps, their feet in the surging water, sat and stood a group of young women in very scanty swim-wear, their long wet hair streaked in darkened tresses over their necks and shoulders. Their slim soft bodies were faintly tanned by a winter of daily outdoor swimming. They were as tall and lithe and pleased with themselves as young Spartans. Above them upon the slippery wet marble, his shoes splashed, his glasses misted, stood Hector Gaines. They were discussing The Triumph of Aphrodite which was to be played, with Hector’s shocking new material, at the Ennistone Midsummer Festival. Hector and Anthea were to direct it. Valerie Cossom was to be Aphrodite. The set and costumes were to be designed by Cora Clun who was studying dress design at the Poly. Hector was confused and excited, partly because he was in love with Anthea, and partly because, among so many delightful naked figures, he still had all his clothes on. This dejeuner sur l’herbe effect positively made his head swim. The central part of the Indoor Bath, the pool itself and its surround and the double row of Corinthian columns, were made of white black-webbed marble, but the outer area, covered with potted plants, was merely tiled. The place had its own peculiar smell, thrilling to devotees, compounded of warmth and water and chemicals and healthy wet green foliage. Adam loved this smell. He did not approach the pool but went in among the plants. He touched their strong shiny powerful leaves. The girls noticed him, and Anthea and Nesta waved. Adam waved back. He did not mind the jeunesse dorée as he knew that, with the tact or indifference of youth, they would not want to talk to him. He stood a while, smelling the plants and looking with satisfaction at the wet marble and hugging the private thrill of his own soon-to-be-swimming sensations. Then he turned slightly and looked across the pool and saw George McCaffrey, who had just entered on the other side.

George gazed at the pool and the scene. He was not especially interested in the almost-naked young women, the sight of whom did not produce in him the mechanical excitement which it would have aroused in his brother Brian. It was the place and the smell which he liked. He paused and sniffed. Anthea Eastcote, who had known George all her life, called out ‘Hello!’ Valerie Cossom, who was secretly in love with him, stopped swimming and rose silently in the shallow end, revealing her beautiful body.

George smiled vaguely, not looking at Anthea, turning his head and narrowing his eyes, and was about to pass on in the direction of the Promenade when he saw Adam. As soon as their eyes met, Adam sat down. He did not hide, but sat down among the plants, holding his knees, his head emerging from among the leaves. With intent unsmiling eyes, he stared at George. George (who was fully clothed) stared back. Once, some time ago in Adam’s short life, when he had been looking thus at his uncle (it was in the garden at Belmont), George, turning towards him, had suddenly, silently, winked. This episode had made, for the boy at least, a curious bond, intimate yet menacing. The ambiguous signal was never repeated, and yet, Adam sometimes felt, it still flashed, magically, frightfully, in any exchange of looks between them.

George stopped in his tracks at the sight of Adam as abruptly as a Japanese might be stopped by a badger. He did not want to pass his nephew, nor did he want to impede his progress should Adam want to proceed to the changing-rooms by the interior route. George receded into the corridor and turned off it into the clinical chamber of the Infants’ Pool. This room, which seemed small by contrast with the Indoor Bath, was by other standards quite large. It was a remnant of the Institute arrangements which predated the Ennistone Rooms. The Infants’ Room, as it was also called, was early Victorian hospital style, unadorned, with plain tiles and dark linoleum. Its only charm was the pool itself, white-tiled, round and breast-deep, sunk into the floor and filling most of the room. It had been intended for the genteel dipping of rheumatic patients or of persons recovering from injured limbs, sufferers who were later accommodated in the Rooms. Now the famous waters, tinted blue, contained, as George entered, a number of cooing smiling mothers and as many swimming, splashing or floating infants. The aquatic infants were indeed an amazing sight. Tiny children, some less than six months old, who on land crawled with awkward sprawling arms and legs, took to the water in the most uncanny way, like funny little animals of some quite other species. Ivor Sefton was extremely interested in the whole phenomenon and had published an article about it in The Lancet. This practice, pioneered in Ennistone, and now occasionally to be met with elsewhere, has had to make its way against prejudice and misunderstanding. Adam longed to ‘swim’ Zed and was joyful to see a walking running dog become a swimming dog. (Adam and Rufus had both swum in the Infants’ Pool when scarcely larger than Zed.) Most dog-owners share this instinctive urge, which is discussed in Sefton’s article. But the Ennistone mothers had not felt any instinctive desire to swim their infants, and had to be taught, and to see many successful demonstrations, before they believed it desirable or even possible. Many outsiders still regard this aspect of ‘growing up in Ennistone’ as dangerous or slightly scandalous. (Special attention must be paid to the chemicals in the water.) It was originally proposed that the Infants’ Room should be ‘Mothers only’, but the reasonable wishes of fathers had to be met too, and the Room was eventually opened to all. An attendant controls the numbers of spectators, and only women are allowed in the water.

Standing in the middle of the pool, offering quite unnecessary help and encouragement, amid the tiny naked swimming forms and wet protective arms, was Nesta Wiggins. She was drawn to the place because it was a rendezvous of women. The sound of excited exclamatory voices, rebounding from the domed tiled roof, made a shrill cacophony, pleasant as bird-song to Nesta’s ears. Nesta hoped to indoctrinate some of the cooing mammas. But, in spite of her disapproval of matrimony and child-bearing, she could not help being delighted with the scene, to which she often returned.

There was a slight lull in the chatter when George appeared. Ennistone had few tourists in March, and the mothers had had the place to themselves that morning. Indeed fully clothed males always seemed out of place, and were duly shy. Most of the women knew who George was; but even those who normally felt a secret indulgent sympathy for him were here affronted. Some deep female solidarity drew them together against George as he lounged, staring. Nesta, who really hated George, sensed this communal emotion with satisfaction. George sensed it too, also with satisfaction. Nesta, tall and large-breasted in the midst of the bubbling cauldron of wet ample female flesh and slithery babies, glared at George. George, who knew her by sight and found her physique vaguely pleasing, did not meet the glare. He looked instead, with an amused thoughtful face, at the splashing infants and thought, How I’d like to drown the little beggars! He imagined pressing a large firm hand down upon those little pink faces.

Alex had arrived with Ruby. Ruby could not swim, never had swum, never would swim, she hated water. However, she attended Alex to the Baths, and had done so ever since they were girls together, when (so remote were those days) she had come as a chaperone. Now she came because she always had, to see people and hear the gossip (she rarely uttered any herself) and to look after Alex’s clothes. The changing-rooms, strange wet slippery smelly places where people padded nervously, consisted of four areas: in the first one disrobed in a cubicle, in the second one placed one’s clothes in a locker, in the third one placed the key of the locker in a numbered cubby-hole, in the fourth one took a shower; then one emerged to swim. Alex, who never trusted the security of the system, preferred to put her clothes in a bag which she handed to Ruby waiting outside. This she did now as she came out, slim, handsome, wearing her green-skirted costume (she deplored bikinis) and no cap (caps were not worn at the Institute). The chill air coated her warm body and made her gasp. She tiptoed cautiously across the sparkling frosty pavement and dived gracefully into the cloud of steam which hid the pool. She swam beautifully in the warm kind water under the merciful white cloud.

Diane had swum earlier and now, wearing a smart woollen jersey, a smart woollen cap, matching gloves, woollen socks pulled up over her trousers, an overcoat, scarf and boots, was sitting in Diana’s Garden. On the side farthest from the pool and separated by a fence were the Roman excavations, a few low walls and some holes, very significant no doubt but not picturesque. At one end of the garden was the little spurting hot spring known as Lud’s Rill, or ‘the Little Teaser’ which had caused such a scandal some time ago by suddenly hurling its jet of water high up into the air. The water of the Rill was extremely hot, at boiling point as it emerged, but its normal intermittent spittings were not dangerous since they only reached a height of about three feet, and the basin into which they fell was now surrounded by an unsightly railing which excluded the darting youngsters whom the Little Teaser used chiefly to tease. The basin was rugged and massive and unadorned, made of the brownish-yellowish local stone. It was about five feet in diameter and three feet deep, with a hole or crack in the middle where the scalding spitting water jetted up and ran away. The general belief was that the water came up ‘on its own’ from deep in the earth and was not ‘laid on’ from the main system. The official guide-book is, perhaps deliberately, unclear on this point.

Beside the basin there were some wooden seats, and on one of these, having flicked the frost away with her copy of the Ennistone Gazette, Diane was sitting with Father Bernard and Mrs Belton. Mrs Belton was the ‘Madam’, now very old, who had inducted Diane many years ago into her present profession. Diane usually avoided her because she was a reminder of horrible things and because she affected a grand and irritating ‘knowingness’. She, like Diane herself, had risen in the trade. Mrs Belton, who had been good-looking and no fool, had indeed realized one of Diane’s former ambitions, and acquired a fine house where (so it was said) artists and intellectuals resorted for drink and talk. It was at one time the height of chic to go to Mrs Belton’s not for sex but for conversation. (However this may have been a myth; I never myself went along to see.) Mrs Belton’s glory was past, however, and even Diane could now feel sorry for her. After a police raid (there was talk of drugs) she had sold the fine house, and had now the air of a shaggy neglected old woman. Diane had sat in the garden hoping to catch a glimpse of George whom she was at that moment very anxious to see. George’s rule was that at the Baths they never spoke or gave any recognition sign; but he might now, she felt, break the rule if he saw her alone. However, Mrs Belton had promptly arrived, and then the priest.

Sitting beside Diane and leaning across her to Mrs Belton, Father Bernard was trying to persuade the old woman to come to his church.

‘Come to service, Mrs Belton, it’s beautiful, you’ll see.’

‘I’ve never been in your church, well, I been in. It’s like a bazaar.’ Mrs Belton was a non-conformist.

‘You don’t go to your own church, come to mine. Come to the warmth and light. You are cold and your soul is dark.’

‘Who says my soul is dark?’ said Mrs Belton.

‘I do. Come where love is.’

‘It’s like a shop at Christmas time, all scarlet, not my idea of Church.’

‘Such precious goods, and all for free! Ask and you shall be given, knock and it shall be opened. Come to the bazaar! Scarlet for sin, and scarlet for redeeming blood. Wash in the blood of the Lamb, immerse yourself and swim unto salvation. You knew all these things once, recall them now, be as a little child, be born again, be justified, be saved.’

‘There’s nothing beyond the grave,’ said Mrs Belton.

‘The Kingdom of God is now,’ said the priest. ‘The mystery of our salvation is not in time. You need a magician in your life. You have one. His name is Jesus. Stand before him and say simply - help - help — ’

While he was speaking, leaning ardently forward, Father Bernard, unseen by Mrs Belton, was holding Diane’s hand. He had got his own hand inside her woollen glove and was kneading her palm. Diane, though used to some of her pastor’s eccentricities, still did not know what to make of him.

Mrs Belton got up. She said, ‘You got no right to think things about me, I know what you think, and set yourself up so. Leave meddling with others, get some help yourself, you’ll need it one of these days, from what I hear.’ To Diane, ‘Good-bye, dear. I’m going to swim.’

As she moved away, stiff with the dignity of arthritis, George, in swimming-trunks, suddenly appeared at the edge of the pool. Diane wrenched her hand away, losing her glove to the priest. She wondered if George had seen. George dived into the pool and disappeared under the steam.

‘Silly old bitch,’ said Father Bernard, ‘I hope she drowns.’ He absently returned Diane’s glove. ‘I preach the good news. No one listens. Automatic salvation. No time, no trouble. Turn a switch and flood your soul with light.’

‘You don’t say that to me,’ said Diane.

‘You haven’t got simple faith. She has.’

‘Have you?’

‘I am old, old — ’

‘You’re not — ’

‘Salvation is not in time. Did you see that apparition of George?’

‘Yes. Why apparition?’

‘Unreal. Made of ectoplasm.’

‘I wish you’d help George.’

‘Everyone wants me to help George. I can’t. If I laid my hands upon him, took him by the throat, I would hold only melting yielding stuff like toasted marshmallow. That is my damnation, not his.’

‘Don’t talk of damnation. Tell him about Jesus. Tell him something.’

‘If God brings him to me, God will give me words. Meanwhile he bores me. Come and see me, child. Come to the old scarlet bazaar. I’m going to swim now. It is the solution to all problems in this blessed town.’

Diane thought, George is so alone, he has made himself alone. Perhaps that’s what Father Bernard means by saying he’s unreal. And she shuddered at the thought of her return now into her own solitude.

In the vast expanse of the Outdoor Pool some people splashed quickly, privately, others swam about purposefully, looking for their friends, others systematically, obsessively, swam length after length, seeing nothing, their heads deep in the warm water. Alex, idling across the centre, ran into Adam. They seized each other, laughing. On land, their bodies could not communicate. Alex never kissed her grandson, never touched him. In the water it was different; they had new bodies, beautiful and free, warm and full of grace. Suspended, they dandled each other. They sometimes met like that, as it were in secret. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ ‘Yes.’ This simple praise of the waters was always exchanged as if this daily blessing always came as a surprise. ‘How’s Zed?’ said Alex. ‘Fine. How are you, are you all right?’ Adam always asked Alex if she was all right when he met her in the water. ‘Yes, fine. Lovely to see you.’ ‘Lovely.’ They parted and swam away.

George, leaving the nauseating sight of the swimming babies behind him, and having instantly forgotten about Adam, had proceeded to the changing-rooms and was soon in the pool. He had walked along the side, looking for a space among the swimmers, before diving in, but he had not noticed Diane nor was he thinking of her. He was now, with his perfect effortless Ennistonian crawl, doing lengths, his head well down, his hand extended at each end to touch the wall lightly as he turned. His dark hair swirled about the crown of his head, looking like Brian’s hair. He breathed unobtrusively, mysteriously, deep in the water, as if he had indeed become a fish and the healing stream were flowing through his gills.

Gabriel, who had had her swim and was now dressed, standing upon the edge of the pool, noticed George as he approached along his strong self-chosen line. (‘Doing lengths’ was a priority activity, and other swimmers kept out of the way of these blind fanatics.) She moved so that she was directly above him as, without raising his head, he curled and turned. She saw (as of course she had seen before) the way George’s hair grew, that it was like Brian’s, only this was obscured by George’s hair being combed from a side parting over the crown. This observation always gave Gabriel pleasure. She was pleased too by being able to watch him unobserved and by the way that George’s hand, touching the wall of the pool as he turned, was just below her feet. He disappeared almost instantly under the hanging cloud of steam. Gabriel waited for him to return. Brian, also now clothed, standing nearby, watched Gabriel watching George. He came forward.

Gabriel said, ‘I just saw George. Don’t you think we should write to him to say that Stella is coming to us?’

‘Hasn’t she told him?’

‘She says not.’

‘Let the bugger find out.’

‘I think we should write to him. It seems so unkind not to.’

‘No.’

For George the day had begun early with a sound of pigeons speaking in human voices. He had heard this before: the soft murmur of people speaking close to him, frightening intruders, people near him where no people should be. Burglars, police, intruders of some more terrible nameless kind. Perhaps it was just the pigeons.

He was surprised, as he was every morning now, to find himself not upstairs in his own bed, but downstairs on the large drawing-room sofa where he had been sleeping ever since Stella left, or went to hospital, or whatever she had done. There was a downstairs lavatory and wash-place. He did not need to go upstairs any more. He and Stella occupied separate bedrooms, but her presence somehow lingered upstairs, not in smells (she used no scented cosmetics) but in other signs, clothes, the always disturbing sight of her bed. Downstairs was more open and anonymous and public. He had stowed away various objects, including ornaments and a picture. The kitchen was already chaotic, that of a bachelor. George could feel that he was camping or back in ‘digs’. He woke to this strange sensation of being in a new place. He also woke to the being of Stella, Stella’s world, her existence, her consciousness, her thoughts, still continuing. God, how alive she was.

As he lay, listening for the voices which had now ceased, he became aware that his mouth was open. He closed it quickly. Several times lately, on waking with his mouth open, he had had a strange conviction. First, he had felt that in the night he had been dead. The mouths of dead people fall open. Then, as something connected with this, he had become aware (or imagined or remembered) that during the night something had crawled out of his mouth and rambled round the room and over the ceiling and had then returned into his mouth again: something like a large crab-like insect or claw-footed worm. This persuasion was extremely vivid and accompanied, as he now quickly closed his mouth, by the rising of a bitter gall in his throat. He wondered, sitting up, whether he had actually swallowed a large spider.

He rose and put on the rest of his clothes (he now slept in his underwear), shaved and drank some coffee standing up in the kitchen. He considered and rejected the idea that today he should ‘do something about Stella’. It was not that he wanted to, or felt that he ought to, do something about Stella. It was just that doing something (anything) would remove a certain discomfort. If he (for instance) sent her a postcard. He wanted to perform some kind of holding or postponing movement, something that would put Stella, for the moment, in cold storage, out of play. He did not want to see her, but neither did he like to think of her as active elsewhere. However, he could not think of anything to do and he dismissed the matter from his mind. He was, indeed, absolved from solving this problem. He himself was in cold storage; he was separated, waiting, as pure and as solitary as an anointed king awaiting coronation or a sacred victim awaiting the knife. This was the loneliness which Diane had sensed round about him, and which he himself felt rather as a frightful agonizing state of grace. It was as if now, in this interim, he could not sin.

He washed up his cup and his plate and made his way by a roundabout route to the Baths, where he went first, as has been recounted, to the Indoor Pool. As he emerged later, ready to swim, from the changing-rooms, he noticed something disturbing. The number 44, which was the number of the cubby-hole where he left his key, was the same as the number of his house and was also the last two figures in the number of his car. It was also his age. Little things were significant. It was a portent and all portents now were frightening.

Swimming, George did not see Diane, he did not see Brian and Gabriel, nor did he see Alex or Adam, all of whom saw him. He swam and swam, tiring himself, passing the healthful healing water through his gills, emptying himself in his solitude of the bitterness of living.

At last, exhausted, he crawled out, hauling himself up the iron steps and moving away from the pool. The pavement beside the pool edge was wet and slightly warm, but a step away the stone was dry and still sparkling with frost. George set penitential feet upon the frost and walked a little, shivering inside his quickly cooling body and turning to look at the footprints made in the frost by his warm feet. He felt slightly giddy and dazed by the emergence not only into the cold air but into the bright light. While he had been swimming in the semi-dark of the merciful steam cloud the sun had come out. The sky was blue. He walked along beside the high beech hedge which protected the Ennistone Rooms garden, and then turned along the other edge of the pool, by the yellow glazed wall, in the direction of the stews. He saw ahead of him, standing at the water’s edge, the tall gaunt near-naked figure of William Eastcote. Eastcote was combing back and checking over with his fingers his thinning but persistent strands of wet hair. He was talking to a fat man whose swimming-trunks clung on almost invisibly beneath his paunch. The fat man had a big bony puckered face and stiff flat brush of grey hair which was evidently still dry. As he now turned his head George recognized John Robert Rozanov. Reaching the pool in three paces, George dived back again into the steam.

Alex had also seen Rozanov. Walking along beside Diana’s Garden toward the stews, she stopped abruptly, then turned back. She did not notice Diane, who was still in the garden bursting to tell George that Rozanov, whom she recognized, was there. Alex’s heart swelled and contracted, warming her whole body with a rush of consciousness. It did not occur to her to walk straight on and greet him. With the first glimpse came the need to hide, to wait, not to know - to know what, what was there to know? Besides, trim and handsome as Alex looked in her green skirted costume, she did not want to meet Rozanov with her hair dripping and her makeup washed away. She hurried along the warm verge of the pool until she came to where Ruby was waiting outside the changing-rooms, holding the bag with Alex’s clothes. She grabbed the bag and whisked inside and pattered over the wet wooden duck-boards which gave out such an old melancholy exciting smell. She found a cubicle and sat down and peeled off her costume and sat there panting and holding her breasts until her face was calm and her heart was quiet. It was a great many years, she hated to think how many, since she had glimpsed Rozanov in the street, perhaps at the time when his mother died. But now, passing over all intermediate time, she recalled so intensely his monstrous handsome youthful face, how he looked when she might have reached out her hand to take him.

Ruby, who had noticed John Robert some time earlier, as he emerged from the changing-rooms with William Eastcote, had no such coy misgivings. She waited dog-like for Alex to come back for her clothes, then, released, she went along the side of the pool looking for him. She noticed Diane in the garden but as usual they exchanged no sign. She found Rozanov standing talking with Eastcote at the place where, coming from the other direction, George had seen him, and she stood quite near, her feet apart, her hands clasped, staring at him. Several other people who had recognized the philosopher were also standing nearby, but not daring to come so close. John Robert did not see her, however, but still talking went with Eastcote down the steps into one of the stews.

The ‘stews’, as I explained earlier, are round holes about twelve feet deep and fifteen feet across, with a seat around the edge at the bottom. An iron staircase winds down into the water, which is just deep enough to allow the head and shoulders of the seated hedonist to emerge. The temperatures, at different graded levels in the different stews, are considerably higher than that of the pool, and in cold weather the atmosphere below is thickly and breathlessly steamy. Ruby peered over the side, but could see nothing of her hero.

John Robert was saying in his rather hard decisive voice to William (Bill the Lizard) Eastcote, as they stewed at 45°C, ‘Thank God there’s still no piped music here.’

‘Yes, some people wanted it, but it would make the whole scene quite unreal, and the great thing about the Baths is it’s such a real place, if you see what I mean.’

‘I see very well.’

The only other inhabitant of the stew, recognizing Rozanov, moved away at once and climbed the steps in shy confusion. (He was in fact Nesta Wiggins’s father, a ladies’ tailor in a small way in Burkestown.)

‘So the Rooms have been done up again,’ said John Robert, ‘and you can book in like a hotel.’

‘Yes.’ Eastcote added, ‘You could be peaceful there, you could work undisturbed.’

John Robert was silent.

At that moment Adam came down the iron steps into the steamy hole. He stood on the steps with the very hot water up to his knees and looked to see who was there. He hoped the stew would be empty. He recognized Eastcote, but not Rozanov whom he had never seen.

William said, ‘Hello,’ but Adam had already turned and skipped back up the steps.

Rozanov said, ‘How very like his father Rufus has become. That was Rufus, wasn’t it?’

‘No. Don’t you remember. I told you ages ago, Rufus died as a child. That is the other boy, Brian McCaffrey’s son, Adam.’

‘Oh yes - you told me in London.’

The old friends had met occasionally over the years in the metropolis when Rozanov made philosophical visits.

‘He does resemble George, or rather Alan.’

‘I’m sorry Alan’s not still around; an interesting man, though I scarcely knew him. You tell me Hugo’s gone too.’

‘Yes, Belfounder died several years ago.’

‘What about all those valuable clocks?’

‘He left them to that writer, I forget his name.’

‘I’d have liked another talk with Hugo.’

‘There must be someone here for your purposes.’

‘For me to make use of!’

‘I don’t mean it like that.’

‘Of course not, Bill. Damn it, there’s you!’

‘I still play bridge, but that’s not your scene! What about N?’

‘No.’

‘George McCaffrey, you said — ’

‘No.’

‘Well, there’s the priest. I told you — ’

‘A Jew?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Shall I —?’

‘Don’t do anything. I want everything to happen slowly.’

‘Are things going to happen then?’

‘Perhaps only in my mind.’

‘Will you come to Meeting with me on Sunday?’

‘I love your Quakerish Meeting and your Quakerish ways, but it would be false.’

‘You mean it would seem false.’

‘You should have been a philosopher. How is your cousin Milton, still busy saving people?’

‘Yes, he’s very well.’

‘How are you, Bill? You’ve got very thin.’

‘I’m fine.’ But Eastcote had just had some disturbing news from his doctor.

‘I wish I was thin, I feel lean and hawk-like. May I have lunch with you? What a pity Rose has gone, I loved to see her at your table, it was like visiting some wholesome past.’

‘Well, she has gone too.’

‘Don’t say “soon it will be our turn”.’

‘I wouldn’t say that to you!’

‘You can say anything to me! Come, let’s go, I’m boiled.’

They clambered up the steps, holding hard on to the iron rail, and emerged into the cold air, coming out of the steam into the sunshine.

‘There’s the priest,’ said Eastcote.

Not far away Father Bernard, not yet immersed, stood looking down at the water. He sported a certain peculiarity, not wearing swimming-trunks but a full-length black costume, rather loose and rumoured to be made of wool, as if it might be a bathing-cassock.

‘He looks a clown,’ said Rozanov.

‘He is not that,’ said Eastcote, ‘but he is an odd man.’

‘Why does he wear that costume? Is he scarred?’

‘I don’t know.’

At that moment Father Bernard sat down on the edge of the pool and let himself slide down gingerly into the water, then swam away with an awkward breast-stroke. He was not a good swimmer.

‘Can’t he dive?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Eastcote.

‘He doesn’t look as if he can swim either. He’ll be in difficulties directly.’

‘Some non-swimmers are not fools.’

‘Do you tell me so? I live so out of the world! Where did I leave my glasses?’

As John Robert turned he came face to face with Ruby, who was still standing near the railed top of the stew. He recognized her.

‘Why, Miss Doyle. It is Miss Doyle, isn’t it?’

The recognition, without his glasses, was something of a feat, since John Robert had not seen Ruby for some years.

Ruby smiled her wide rare huge smile. She was overjoyed at being recognized by Rozanov. She hoped that one or two people whom she knew who had been standing nearby were still there to witness the scene. She nodded her head. She stared rapturously up at the philosopher. It did not occur to her to speak.

At this moment Ruby heard, from across the steam-covered expanse of the Bath, the voice of Alex calling her. ‘Coo-ee, coo-ee.’ This, very high-pitched, was Alex’s special call for Ruby, which she used, regardless of surroundings, in all sorts of situations, in shopping centres, swimming-pools, parks, as well as in the garden at Belmont. Ruby ignored the call.

‘Now wait a moment please, Miss Doyle,’ said John Robert. ‘Bill, where are my glasses?’

‘Here.’ William Eastcote fetched the glasses, in their case, from a seat.

John Robert opened the case and drew out a sealed envelope folded in two.

‘Coo-ee, coo-ee!’

‘Now would you give this - is she still in service with Mrs McCaffrey?’ He did not seem to expect her to speak.

‘Yes,’ said Eastcote.

‘Would you give this to your mistress, please? I thought I would probably run into one or other of you at the Baths.’

‘Coo-ee!’

Ruby nodded and took the letter.

John Robert said, ‘It’s quite like old times, isn’t it?’

He smiled, and Ruby, smiling again, turned quickly away. Ruby, unknown to Alex, had carried the correspondence of lovers between John Robert and Linda Brent.

‘Wherever did you get to?’ said Alex as they left the Institute. It was not a long way to Belmont and they always walked. Ruby carried the bag with the swimming-things, now wet and heavy.

Ruby did not respond to these words which were not intended as a question. The two women walked along together in the bleak spring sunshine, dressed in their winter overcoats. They did not walk fast.

Ruby touched John Robert’s letter in her pocket. She drew out the seconds and the minutes. It was like waiting for a natural function, like waiting for a sneeze, pleasurable. At last she produced the envelope.

‘He gave me this for you.’

Alex did not know Rozanov’s writing, which she had not seen since he wrote to thank her for the expensive wedding present which she had sent to him and Linda. But of course she did not need to be told who ‘he’ was. She said nothing and put the letter into her handbag. She and Ruby walked on together, stony-faced, like two marching goddesses. Robin Osmore, raising his hat unnoticed on the other side of the road, turned and stared after them.

Stella McCaffrey, née Henriques, was lying on the sofa in the sitting-room at Brian and Gabriel’s house. Brian and Gabriel lived in the sober and not very new housing estate called Leafy Ridge. Their house had been called ‘Como’ by its previous owner, and although (since Brian despised such pretensions) the name was not used as an address (the address being simply number 27), it lingered on as a family nickname.

Stella was lying back propped up on cushions. Her legs were extended and covered with a blue-and-white chequered rug. Adam had just placed Zed on top of her, positioning him carefully just below her throat. The little dog had stretched his front paws forward in a gesture which seemed protective. She could feel his blunt claws against her neck. He looked into Stella’s face with a mixture of curiosity and affection which she found quite unbearably touching. Afraid that tears might come, she coughed and lifted the little creature up, feeling the frailty of the skeleton which she could almost have crushed between her hands. Adam came forward and took Zed back. He stared at Stella unsmilingly but with concern. Then he went out through the glass doors into the garden.

At the foot of the sofa stood Brian. He also, with an expression resembling his son’s, looked at his sister- In-law with grave concern. He admired and valued Stella. He could not put a name to his feelings for her; of course he loved her, but ‘love’ denotes many things. There was a mutual shyness between them. Sometimes when he kissed her, as he did rarely, for instance at Christmas, he squeezed her hand. He would have liked to be sure that she understood his esteem. His hostility to George was partly compounded of his sense of how unappreciated Stella was. He wished he could have an easy family comradeship with her. He imagined a happy family life in which he would effortlessly enjoy Stella’s company, chat with her, make jokes with her, work with her, have supper with her, play bridge with her (Stella was a good player). None of this happened. Now that Stella was suddenly away from George, in Brian’s house, he did not know what to do with her, he did not know what it meant or what it would bring about.

Gabriel, also gazing at the phenomenon of Stella lying on the sofa, was also at a loss. It had been her idea to bring Stella here; she had wanted it very much, she could not now remember exactly why. She too loved Stella. She wanted to help her and protect her and spoil her, to tend her and cherish her. She wanted to touch that proud head with a sympathetic hand. She wanted to rescue Stella, at least for a while (or perhaps, why not, forever) from her dangerous life. She wanted to give Stella a holiday from being bullied, a holiday from fighting. She wanted to get Stella right away from George. She wanted George to be isolated and accursed. She wanted Stella to be vindicated and rescued. She wanted to condemn George to loneliness, she wanted to think of George as being alone, she wanted to think of him as absolutely shut away in that tragic solitude which she had so much felt when she last looked down at his dark unconscious wet swimming head which scarcely broke the surface as he turned. Such thoughts and feelings, half-conscious and thoroughly mixed up together, conflicted in Gabriel’s bosom as she gazed at her handsome clever afflicted sister- In-law. Gabriel was of course aware of Brian’s admiration for Stella, and it caused her a very small local pain, but there was nothing dark or ill in her sense of this connection, and she too would have liked an ordinary happy family life wherein Stella would come to supper and talk and play bridge while Gabriel made sandwiches in the kitchen and listened to them all laughing.

Standing watching Stella from near the door was Ruby Doyle. Ruby had been ‘sent over’ by Alex to ‘help out’ in ‘settling Stella in’. Alex might have been expected to come herself, but she did not want to and did not. Instead (as on other comparable occasions) she sent Ruby, as a monarch might send a diplomat or a valued craftsman. In fact Ruby, at Como, was rarely of any use at all and Gabriel did not know what to do with her. Gabriel had no servant, no maid, no char; she was temperamentally incapable of having an employee, she did everything herself. She did not want help. Brian sometimes vaguely and insincerely exhorted her to improve her mind: ‘Take up some study,’ ‘Do a degree or something.’ Nothing came of this, and to persuade herself of its impossibility Gabriel liked to be fully occupied. She enjoyed housework. She had enjoyed preparing and arranging Stella’s room and putting in daffodils. There were three bedrooms at Como, two middling-sized ones and one little one. Adam occupied the little one so as to leave a decent ‘guest room’, and because he preferred it. Although they hardly ever had guests, since Brian detested them, Gabriel had taken pleasure in making the guest room attractive, choosing ‘guest books’, arranging reading-lamps, writing-paper. When Ruby arrived, there was nothing relevant to Stella which Gabriel could think of for Ruby to do. Gabriel had already washed up breakfast and cleaned the bathroom. She could not ask Ruby to weed the garden. She made Ruby a cup of coffee.

Ruby liked Gabriel, though mutual shyness made them speechless with each other. She did not like Brian, since she regarded him as hostile to George, and she had ‘taken over’ Alex’s view of Brian as somehow not quite a member of the family. Ruby liked Adam, with whom she had a silent semi-secret friendship. As a small child he had held on to her skirts, and sometimes still touched or twitched her dress as a remembrance of old times. She did not like Zed, a tiresome yappy little rat-like thing upon which she was always in danger of treading (she was short-sighted); but she inhibited her irritation for Adam’s sake. She did not like Stella, whom she regarded as the sole cause of George’s misfortunes.

Stella, lying on the sofa and looking at the way her upturned feet made a bump in the chequered rug, felt altogether alienated from her customary reality, or was perhaps realizing that she had not, and for some time now had not had, any customary reality. She looked past Brian at the tiny garden, the overlapping slats of the fence, some horrible yellow daffodils jerking about in the wind. She very much wanted to cry. She lifted up her head and hardened her eyes and wondered what on earth she, she, was doing in this place among these people.

Vanity, she thought, not even pride, vanity. I am stiffened by it, it is my last shred of virtue not to be seen to break down. I married George out of vanity, and I have stayed with him out of vanity. Yet she loved George. She had often wished George dead, painlessly removed, blotted out, made never to have been. Her father was right, George was a vast mistake, but he was her mistake, and in that her was all her vanity and all her love, jumbled together into something mysterious and valuable. If she could have done so she would have taken him away, would even now take him away, to some other place where no one knew the old George, where he was not surrounded by people who licked their lips and thought they understood him better than his wife did. Stella would like to have been alone, shipwrecked on a desert island with George, amid dangers.

Stella felt her particular Jewishness as an alienation from English society, as a kind of empty secret freedom, as if she were less densely made than ordinary people. She had perceived, but had never understood, George’s alienation, which she had seen first as a virtue, later as a charm. He had charmed her, he charmed her still. But what an ugly graceless mess it all was, and what a doom was upon her. She lifted up her handsome Jewish head and smoothed down her strong dark hair which grew up like a crown or turban above her brow. Her father had made her feel like a queen. Why on earth had she talked to dear well-meaning Gabriel and allowed herself to be brought to this house?

For the first time in her life Stella was feeling really ill and tired. She must be unusually weak to be, as she now was, afraid of George, afraid that he might actually kill her, of course by accident. He might, on seeing her, become, for an instant, mad with rage because of the car accident, which had been her fault, because she had needled him into a frenzy, because she had survived. Disgust at what had happened might work in George as a sudden irresistible urge to ‘finish it off’, and by this well-known method to destroy himself. Stella felt too weak and too confused to go back, too weak to fight George physically as she had sometimes done in the past, to hold him off until the impulse of rage should fall back into dull self-hatred. People who thought that Stella lived in hell were not wrong; but like all those who do not, they failed to understand that hell is a large place wherein there are familiar refuges and corners.

Lately a new and poisonous growth had developed in Stella’s mind: jealousy. Of course she had known for years that George ‘frequented’ Diane Sedleigh, and some ‘well-wisher’ had made it her business to inform Stella that George had ‘set up’ the little prostitute in a flat for his own exclusive use. Something of Stella’s own original respect for George had made her virtually ignore these tidings. She knew how low George could sink, but there were ways and ways of sinking, there were styles of it. She saw George as proud, even in his own manner fastidious, and with this she connected her own conception of how high, in spite of everything, he placed his wife. (Some of those who intuited these thoughts of Stella’s considered them completely daft.) He and she remained, Stella felt, above and apart from anything which George might do with a whore. Now, perhaps as a result of physical shock and debility, this agnostic magnanimity was shaken. Stella began, like any crude ordinary person, to imagine George with another woman. That way real madness lay, and a kind of ignoble detestation of her husband which she had never yet allowed herself to feel. When she felt this poisonous pain she became weak, with the weakness which had made her come to Gabriel to be safe and looked after: the weakness which made her sometimes yearn to take a taxi to Heathrow and a ticket to Tokyo. She pictured her father’s wise clever gentle loving face, and she felt the accursed wild tears again trying to flood her eyes out.

‘I’ve made your room so nice’, said Gabriel, ‘and we’ll get you any books, won’t we, Brian, and you must just feel free and on your own and not mind us at all. You know you must rest, I think you should play the invalid for a while, stay in bed and be waited on. Don’t you think, darling, that she should stay in bed?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Brian, smiling.

Stella, who longed to stay in bed, to lie quiet and sleep for a week, echoed, ‘Certainly not.’

There was a tap at the door of the room and Father Bernard, who had come in through the kitchen, put his head round. ‘Hello, can I come in?’

‘Why, here’s Father to see you!’ said Gabriel.

Brian said ‘Oh God!’ just audibly, grimacing to Stella who, he thought, shared his view of the ‘creepy priest’.

‘I heard you were here,’ said Father Bernard to Stella. ‘Hello, Ruby.’

‘Oh,’ said Stella, ‘does everyone know then? Is it a topic of conversation at the Baths?’

‘Mrs Osmore told me,’ said Father Bernard, smiling his charming smile. In fact Gabriel had told him by telephone, but he thought it more tactful not to mention this.

‘How does she know?’ said Brian crossly. ‘We don’t want Stella bothered with bloody people dropping in.’

‘I just thought a little offering,’ said Father Bernard, and handed over a long thin package wrapped in newspaper which turned out to contain half-a-dozen daffodils, still in earliest bud, entirely straight and green and cold, like six little rods.

Stella thanked him, adding, ‘I’m not an invalid, you know.’

‘I’ll just put them in water,’ said Gabriel. ‘What darlings, they’ll soon come out.’ She bustled off with the flowers.

Stella did not in fact dislike the priest, she might have enjoyed an intellectual conversation with him, but she mistrusted his role and avoided him. She was a little bothered by his being a converted Jew. She discerned in him a desire to see the strong made weak and the lofty made low, and to make those thus afflicted his spiritual prey. This was what Brian saw as the vampirish aspect of the priest’s character. Stella was sickened by the idea that Father Bernard might want to ‘help her’ and that Gabriel had perhaps asked him to come along with this in view.

Father Bernard looked at Stella with his gentle inquisitive light brown eyes and stroked back his fine girlish dark locks. He understood her attitude to him perfectly. His visit, motivated by curiosity, was at least partly pastoral as well. He did not think it impossible that he might somehow at some time be of assistance to this interesting woman. He did not mind running the risk of seeming an intrusive fool. In his view, people in such matters erred more by not trying than by trying too much.

He said in answer to Stella’s remark, ‘I know,’ and ‘I just came by to look at you, and to be looked at, like in the hospital. I too exist. A cat may look at a queen.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Brian, thereby playing into the priest’s hands.

Stella laughed and returned Father Bernard’s smile.

The priest did not press his advantage. He snapped his fingers noiselessly and said to Brian, ‘I hear Professor Rozanov has arrived.’

‘Has he?’ said Brian. ‘Hip hooray.’

‘George will be pleased,’ said Gabriel, who had just come back. ‘Won’t he.’

‘Delighted,’ said Stella.

‘I’ve put the flowers in your room,’ Gabriel told Stella.

‘Will he stay long?’

‘Oh, I don’t imagine so,’ said Gabriel quickly, as Brian was opening his mouth.

‘Someone said he was going to stay — ’

Somewhere elsewhere Zed could be heard barking. Then the door flew open and Tom McCaffrey came in. Zed ran in, Adam ran in.

Gabriel cried, ‘Oh Tom!’ Tom, knocking into Ruby as he entered, shouted ‘Ruby’ and kissed her. Gabriel kissed Tom. Brian slapped his shoulder. Adam hung on to his jacket. Tom said, ‘Hello, Father,’ and then scooped up Zed and tried to stuff him inside his jacket pocket. Stella watched the family scene with loathing and sick despair.

‘How super, all of you here, well, lots of you. Where have you hidden George? It’s so nice to be back. Is this a conference? What’s up with Stella, why isn’t she booted and spurred? Are you all right? Have you got the ’flu? I had it, there’s an awful variety going round London.’

‘Stella had an accident,’ said Brian.

‘Oh I am sorry, are you OK?’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘I mean really OK, please nothing awful?’

‘Nothing awful, really not.’

Tom, even more than Adam, made Stella think of Rufus. She wanted to escape to her room, but wondered if she could climb the stairs unaided.

‘Oh good, poor Stella, I’m so sorry. Let me kiss you. Here, I’ll give you Zed, he’ll cure anything.’ Tom came and kissed Stella on the brow, stroked her hair lightly, then put Zed down carefully on the chequered rug in the warm depression between Stella’s legs and the edge of the sofa, where the little dog settled down quietly as at a post of duty.

Tom McCaffrey, then twenty years old, was certainly the tallest and arguably the best-looking of the three brothers. He was neither sleek like George nor wolfish like Brian. He was slim but not skinny, with a soft almost girlish complexion. He had a great deal of curly brown hair tinted with gold which fell down on to his shoulders. His upper lip was long and smooth, his sensuous mouth glowed like a child’s. He had the bold blue innocent eyes of Feckless Fiona.

‘Oh good, what luck to find you all! How is old George, by the way? I’m quite out of the picture. How’s Ma?’

‘Ma’s fine,’ said Brian refusing to catch Gabriel’s warning look. Tom evidently knew nothing of ‘George’s latest’.

‘I think I’ll go upstairs,’ said Stella. She wondered if she would be able to rise. She rose. The rug and Zed descended to the floor. Stella made for the door. Gabriel followed her out.

‘What’s wrong with Stella?’ said Tom.

‘George tried to drown her,’ said Brian.

‘I must be off,’ said Father Bernard. He moved and his blackness faded from the room. Adam and Zed ran after him.

Brian said to Ruby, ‘Can’t you find something to do, Ruby? Go and polish something. There must be something to clean somewhere.’

Ruby gravely set herself in motion. Tom touched her as she went out. He looked at the angry pock-marked face of his brother but did not speak. Gabriel came back. She knew from Tom’s look that Brian had ‘said something’.

Gabriel said brightly to Tom, ‘What about the girl? Have you brought her?’

‘The girl —?’

‘Yes,’ said Brian, ‘Emma.’

‘Oh good heavens,’ said Tom, ‘Emma - I forgot - how stupid.’

He ran from the room.

‘You told him — ’ said Gabriel.

‘Oh hang it, what does it matter?’ said Brian. ‘Someone is bound to tell him. What does it matter, what does anything matter? We’re too fastidious, we’re too particular, we’re too fine, in a world reeling with violence and starvation and filth of every sort. What does it matter what George does? I’m sick of George, Stella is sick of George, I’m going out for a walk.’

But before he could leave, Tom came back accompanied by a tall thin youth with pale blond hair and narrow rimless spectacles.

‘This is my friend Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor.’

Brian said, ‘Oh dear,’ then covered it with a cough. There were friendly exclamations and hand-shakes, during which Scarlett-Taylor gave one abrupt smile but said nothing.

Gabriel said, ‘Have you been to Belmont yet, shouldn’t you ring Alex and say you’re coming?’

‘Oh we won’t be at Belmont,’ said Tom. ‘We’re house-sitting.’

‘What?’

‘Greg and Judy Osmore are away. They said we could look after their house. Here’s the key.’ He flourished the key.

Gregory Osmore was the younger son of Robin Osmore the solicitor.

‘I think Alex is expecting you,’ said Gabriel, ‘so you’d better ring up and say you’re not coming.’

‘But we’ve come!’

‘Not coming to stay, I mean.’

‘I said as much,’ said Scarlett-Taylor to Tom.

‘Oh well, I will ring Alex,’ said Tom, ‘only not now, Gabriel, please — ’

Scarlett-Taylor’s brief remark had betrayed that he was Irish. Brian with his usual quick tact said, ‘You’re Irish.’

‘Yes.’

‘How nice,’ said Gabriel. ‘The Emerald Isle. A hundred thousand welcomes, isn’t it? We had such a lovely holiday in Killarney once.’

‘It rained all the time,’ Brian said, smiling wolfishly.

Scarlett-Taylor looked at Tom.

‘We must be going,’ said Tom. ‘We’ve got this house to sit.’

Adam and Zed came in.

Tom said, ‘This is Adam.’

‘Dog,’ said Scarlett-Taylor. ‘Papillon.’ He picked Zed up.

‘Zed,’ said Adam.

Scarlett-Taylor then smiled his real smile, which was rather logical and intellectual, the smile of an older man. He handed Zed to Adam with a graceful formal gesture.

Adam did not smile, but looked approving.

‘What are you going to do here?’ said Brian.

‘Do?’ The question puzzled Tom. ‘Oh - have fun.’

They all reached the front door. ‘Come and see us.’

‘Yes, sure.’

Brian, as the door closed, said, ‘Fun? What’s that? Ah, youth, youth. Oh God, Ruby’s still here, can’t you get rid of her? And Stella’s upstairs! I’d forgotten that too!’

Tom pressed the key, which he had proudly waved before his brother, into the lock and turned it. It functioned. The door opened. Tom had not quite believed beforehand that this would happen. It was like something in a fairy-tale which was too good to be true. Some demon or wicked godmother would put a binding spell upon the door, or else it would open upon some weird alien scene, empty or else full of silent hostile people, then closing again, quietly and irrevocably, behind the hapless hero. None of this happened. The door opened. The rather dark interior of the house was recognizably that of Greg and Judy Osmore. It was also immediately clear that the house was empty. It smelt empty, already a little musty and full of echoes. Another less far-fetched of Tom’s fears had been that it would turn out that Greg and Judy were still there and had not gone away at all.

‘Whoopee,’ said Tom, softly and appreciatively, standing in the hall.

Emma followed him in.

Tom did not in fact know Gregory Osmore very well, but he had known him all his life, and in Ennistone that counted for a lot. Meeting Greg recently at a party in London, he had heard him lamenting about having to leave his house empty while he spent a month in America, with Judy, on a business course. Burglary and vandalism, once unknown in the town, were on the increase. Tom saw, quick as a flash, that sublime concatenation of duty and interest for which we so often wait in vain. He offered his services. He would spend the vacation working in Greg’s house and keeping it safe and happy. Greg and Ju agreed. For Tom, the plan had everything. Apart from anything else, it provided a very good excuse for not staying at Belmont. Alex would probably have put up with Scarlett-Taylor, but would Scarlett-Taylor have put up with Alex? Tom wanted to show his native town to his new friend. On the Belmont basis he had envisaged only a brief visit. Now, however, given this glorious independence, they could spend the whole vacation there, see a bit of the countryside, be amused by the dear silly old town, and get away from their cramped dingy London digs and their censorious landlady.

Tom and (to use his nickname) Emma were at the same college in London. Emma was a little older, now in his third year of studying History. Tom was in his first year of studying English. They had known each other vaguely for a while, then lately much better after Emma had taken lodgings in the same house as Tom. Emma wanted to see the Ennistone antiquities and to visit the Museum. He did not imagine he would be very interested in the Ennistonians whom Tom promised him as the chief entertainment. Emma looked a little critically upon Tom’s tendency to like everything and everybody.

‘Our house,’ said Tom. ‘Our very own for now. Oh good!’

He had never in his life been the proprietor of so much domestic space. He began to run about, opening doors, peering into cupboards, racing up and down stairs.

Emma glanced into the sitting-room, then found Greg’s study and began to look at the books. He noted with pleasure a number of historical works. (Greg had studied History at York.) Emma went over the shelves systematically. He pulled out Pirenne’s History of Europe and sat down, and was instantly absorbed in reading.

Meanwhile Tom was in a state of rapture. He investigated the kitchen. No crouching in grates or cooking on gas rings here. Tom liked cooking, in a random eccentric sort of way. He investigated the larder and the fridge. He went into the sitting-room and studied all the pictures and ornaments. He had been in the house before, of course, but only on social occasions, and he had never seen the sitting-room empty. Tom liked pictures, he liked things, he appreciated the visual world. He would have liked to be a rich man and be able to collect. However, he had no plans for becoming a rich man; he had as yet no plans.

Greg and Judy, who were still childless, lived in a pleasant part of Ennistone, on the far side of the town from the Common on the way towards the Tweed Mill. This area was called, for some reason, Biggins, and consisted largely of Victorian terrace houses, lately gentrified, their brick façades painted different colours. Of course the place to live in Ennistone was the Crescent, near the eighteenth-century bridge, the abode of Eastcotes and Newbolds and Burdetts. However, there were parts of Biggins which were regarded as very desirable residential areas, quite the equal of Victoria Park. The ‘best road’, called Travancore Avenue in memory of some Ennistonian who had served the Raj in that city, started in some splendour near the Crescent and ended more humbly but agreeably enough on the edge of the countryside, with views of the Tweed Mill. House agents described the residences, all sought after, as being ‘at the Crescent end’ (or ‘adjoining the fashionable Crescent’) or ‘at the Tweed Mill end’. Ivor Sefton occupied a late eighteenth-century villa at the Crescent end. The Gregory Osmores lived in a pretty little detached house behind plane trees at the Tweed Mill end. Greg had purchased this house when, after working in London as an accountant, he had (quite recently) become an all-purpose businessman in the management of the Glove Factory, where, it was said, he was certain to become quite a ‘big cheese’. His elder brother, equally successful, was a barrister in London.

Tom inspected the bedrooms. There were four, all good rooms. All the beds were made up with clean sheets. Excluding Greg and Ju’s room, Tom liked best the one with the view over the garden, though the front ones were nice too, whence the minaret chimney of the Tweed Mill was visible between the planes. He decided to let Emma choose. Biggins occupied a ‘healthy eminence’, and standing at the back window Tom could see most of the principal monuments of Ennistone: the Institute, the gilded cupola of the Hall, the blunt grey tower of St Olaf’s, the striated spire of St Paul’s (Father Bernard’s ‘shop’), the thin spire of the Catholic ‘tin church’ in Burkestown, the bulky Methodist church in Druidsdale, the Friends’ Meeting House, Bowcocks department store, the gasworks, the Glove Factory (a castellated nineteenth-century brick building) and the new controversial Polytechnic building beyond the Common.

Tom inspected the bathroom. The bathroom at his London digs (near Kings Cross) was a squalid penitential room, not clean and probably not cleanable, shared by a number of male lodgers. The Greg and Ju bathroom was a bower of luxury (Judy had a thing about baths) with the king-size bath set low in the tiled floor, and a matching basin and bidet all made of curiously fat and sensuously rounded red porcelain. The tiles were black. The taps and towel-rails were made of (presumably imitation) gold. Fat fluffy black towels trimmed with red hung from the rails. Upon a gleaming black shelf was a row of jars and bottles containing (Tom had no doubt and he soon checked) celestial unguents. A tiled curtained archway concealed a shower, another such archway the loo. Tom decided that he must have a bath at once. He began to run the water, pouring in the oil and wine of the unguent shelf. A heavenly smell arose.

While this was making he went into Greg and Ju’s bedroom and opened the sliding door of the huge wall cupboard which ran the length of the room. A glittering array of garments met his eye. Both Greg and Judy were vain about their appearance; they were a handsome pair and loved clothes. Tom feasted his gaze upon Greg’s numerous well-tailored suits (he never wore jeans), sleek evening dress, fancy shirts, some with lace. A thousand silk ties. Ju’s clothes were nice, too, and smelt nice. She wore very feminine stuff with flounces, tucks, ruffs, gathers, nonsense, which she wore long and pulled in with little belts, to her slim waist. In winter she wore fine light tweed dresses over brilliantly coloured blouses with smart scarves even silkier than Greg’s ties. Her summer dresses were made of that sort of feather-weight polyester which is what cotton is like when it goes to heaven. Tom fingered some of these dresses and sighed. He reflected that these yummy clothes must represent Greg and Judy’s second team. The first team was even now gladdening the eyes of Americans in Florida.

As the clothes slid silently and easily along the rail upon their sleek hangers, Tom’s hand fastened on something which looked as if it was made of feathers and felt as if it was made of gauze. He drew it out: a very pale blue négligé with multiple cufflets and collarettes. He thrust his hands into the sleeves and pulled it on and gazed at himself in the long swinging mahogany-framed mirror which must so often have reflected that beautiful and fortunate pair. With his tumbling curly locks and his smooth fresh complexion Tom looked, well, quite extraordinary. He looked at himself for a moment with surprise and admiration, then decided to go and show himself to Emma. He skipped daintily down the stairs and flounced into the study.

‘Aren’t I lovely?’

Emma was still reading. He read: ‘Luther was merely advancing still further upon the path which had been trodden before his time by Wycliffe and John Huss. His theology was a continuation of the dissident theology of the Middle Ages; his ancestors were the great heretics of the fourteenth century; he was absolutely untouched by the spirit of the Renaissance. His doctrine of justification by faith was related to the doctrines of the mystics, and although, like the humanists, though for very different reasons, he condemned celibacy and the ascetic life, he was in absolute opposition to them in his complete sacrifice of free will and reason to faith. However, the humanists did not fail to applaud his sensational debut.’ He looked up. He was not pleased to see Tom in drag. Emma himself suffered from secret transvestite fantasies; Tom’s caprice struck him as the idle profanation of a mystery. He said coldly, ‘You ought to telephone your mother.’

‘Not now,’ said Tom.

‘Yes, now.’

‘Oh, all right.’

The telephone was in the hall.

As Tom dialled the number his heart sank. It also beat faster. He hated the telephone. He particularly hated talking to Alex on it. He felt guilty at not being at Belmont, at not having told her, at a hundred matters arising from his imperfect conduct.

‘Yes?’ said Alex at the other end. She always said ‘Yes?’ in that disconcerting way.

‘Hello, it’s me, Tom.’

‘Where are you, when are you coming?’

‘Look, I’m sorry, I should have told you.’

‘What?’

‘I should have said, I met Gregory Osmore in London — ’

‘Who?’

‘Gregory Osmore, and he absolutely begged me to look after his house — ’

‘To what?’

‘To look after his house.’

Emma rose and closed the study door. He did not think it proper to overhear Tom’s conversation with his mother. He regretted that he had already heard Tom tell a lie. He had been present at the party where Tom met Gregory Osmore, and the boot had rather been on the other foot. It was Tom who had (discreetly) insisted to Greg that the house-sitting idea was such a good one. Emma did not approve of lying, and it caused him pain that his friend occasionally indulged in suppressio veri and suggeslio falsi.

‘You know Greg and Judy have gone to Florida?’ said Tom.

‘Where?’

‘To Florida.’

‘Have they?’

‘Yes, and they asked me if I would occupy their house while they were away, to keep it safe, you know. So I won’t be - I won’t be able to stay with you - but I’ll come round and — ’

‘You aren’t going to stay at Belmont?’

‘No.’

‘Where are you now?’

Tom thought of saying ‘in London’, but he did, after all, possess some sense of truth. He said, ‘I’m at their place, at Travancore Avenue.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Am I —?’

‘Are you alone there?’

‘No, I’ve got a friend with me, a chap.’

‘A man?’

‘Yes.’

‘When are you coming to see me?’

‘Oh, soon - tomorrow, I ~ I’ve got to fetch some stuff— ’

‘Telephone first, would you?’

‘Yes, sure.’

They were both silent. Alex hated the telephone too. Neither of them was good at ending a conversation.

‘Good-bye then,’ said Alex, and put the ‘phone down.

Tom replaced the receiver. He felt curiously uneasy, as if disappointed. He had hoped that Alex would not make a fuss about his not staying with her. Well, she had seemed not to mind too much. Of course on the telephone one couldn’t tell. He hated fuss. Yet he wanted her to mind.

He opened the study door.

‘All right?’ said Emma.

‘All right. I say, let’s go out, let’s go shopping.’

‘Shopping? Why?’

‘To buy something for lunch.’

‘I don’t want any lunch.’

‘Well, I do, I’m starving.’

‘You go, I’m reading.’

‘I wish I could read like you.’

‘You can read.’

‘Not like you. Put you down anywhere and you start reading. And you remember what you read, it goes into a slot in your mind. My mind has no slots. Let’s have a drink. I found a cupboard absolutely crammed with bottles.’

‘We can’t drink their stuff.’

‘We can replace it.’

‘Do take that thing off.’

‘Sorry, I forgot I had it on. My God, I left the bath running!’

Tom raced upstairs. He thought, the sitting-room ceiling will come down and we’ve only been here half an hour!

But all was well. An interesting funnel at one end of the bath conveyed the overflowing water into a depression in the tiled floor where it ran away harmlessly through a grating. Tom took off his shoes and socks and danced on top of the grating, feeling the steamy exuberant water running away between his toes. He tucked up his trouser ends, but the hem of Ju’s négligé got a little wet.

Tom McCaffrey was an object of interest in Ennistone ‘society’. ‘Society’ in Ennistone was, by this time, classlessly elitist; it was also plural. This was particularly evident of the Institute. Indeed the existence and peculiar nature of the Institute helped this process. History too assisted. Ennistone had lost its ‘landed gentry’ early on, and had become democratic and non-conformist well before the nineteenth century. Some notion of ‘the best families’ persisted, well mixed up with high ideals and moral leadership, but even this, by the time of our story, had virtually disappeared. To take an instance, the mind of William Eastcote, an exceptionally good man, probably contained some grain of irrational superiority, while I believe that absolutely no blemish of this sort existed in the mind of Anthea. Snobbery was with us intellectual and moralistic rather than social in the old sense. Groups of people freely ‘set themselves up’ as arbiters and judges with pretensions to cultural or moral superiority. There was, in so far as such initiatives were concerned, an atmosphere of ‘free enterprise’. There were of course members of the Victoria Park ‘old school’ who simply disliked change, there were those who ‘kept themselves to themselves’, and those who hated everybody. There were differences of opinion and differences of style. My point is simply that those who thought well of themselves tended to think they were right rather than that they were grand. Our old Quakerish Methodistic priggishness promoted this advance, if it was an advance; I think it was.

Our ‘society’ looked tolerantly on Tom McCaffrey. Perhaps this was likely to happen since Alex, George and Brian were in their different ways looked at askance: George for obvious reasons, Alex because she was ‘stuck up’, and Brian because he was brusque and sardonic, and in his own way rather priggish. Tom was seen, by contrast, as young, unspoilt, and ‘rather sweet’. He was also pictured somewhat as setting out on life’s journey with a plume in his helmet and a sword at his knee. He was good-tempered and had as yet been guilty of no outrages, in Ennistone at any rate. Mothers sometimes held him up as an example to their sons. ‘There’s Tom McCaffrey, he’s not on drugs or chasing girls all day, he’s got himself into the University, he’ll make something of his life.’ ‘He chases girls in London,’ the sons sometimes darkly muttered. ‘Well, he does it discreetly,’ the mothers would reply, thus further confusing the moral sense of their offspring. It was true that Tom was not seen to chase Ennistone girls. Many of the potential chasees were sorry about this, but were at least spared the chagrin of seeing a rival preferred. Match-makers had long ago decided that Tom and Anthea Eastcote were made for each other. What these two young people thought was still obscure. Tom was also noteworthy and even popular because of the legend of ‘Feckless Fiona’, and folk memories of her charm, her ‘dottiness’, her cheerful happy ways, and her sad early death.

Tom had indeed, after a worthy career at Ennistone Comprehensive School, got himself into a distinguished London college, where he was supposed to be ‘doing well’, though some said he was ‘talented but lazy’. Darker critics predicted a nervous breakdown: after all, the boy had lost both his parents very early and had been brought up by an eccentric emotional step-mother, with two strong-willed mutually hostile half-brothers playing the role of father. However, of this breakdown there was admitted to be no sign.

Tom had, unlike his introspective friend Scarlett-Taylor, little conception of himself; at any rate he did not reflect much about himself, about his character, abilities and prospects. He was not ambitious and had no plans. It is true that he wrote verses, and was even spoken of in Ennistone as a ‘poet’, which Tom knew perfectly well that, as yet, he was not. His future remained enormously far away, separated from him by a vast cornucopious present. He enjoyed his studies and intermittently tried to do well. He was perhaps lazy, at any rate easily deflected to other pleasures, of which he had a great many. Among those pleasures sex was not obsessively primary. Tom was credited, by some of his ex-schoolfellows, with many sexual conquests in London. This supposition was needed to explain his apparent lack of interest in Ennistone girls. Of course some said that he was homosexual, but this was not the general view. In fact, although Tom did not trouble to deny the supposition, he had had fewer adventures than was supposed. He had had adventures but was ruefully aware that he had rarely initiated or controlled these. ‘Knowing girls’ had on occasion decoyed Tom into bed, and Tom had not complained; moreover his vanity was flattered. But whether he had ever been in love was a subject which he often discussed with Scarlett-Taylor.

He often thought about his parents but with a carefully bounded vagueness. He imagined Fiona arriving on that motor bike and at once meeting Alan, as the legend ran; the absolute chance that had initiated his existence. These thoughts were very private. Other people tactfully avoided the subject. There was felt to be something both touching and awful in the circumstances in which Tom had been born and orphaned. Tom felt this too and was gentle with himself. Fiona Gates’s family had not figured in Tom’s life, he was never entirely sure why. Robin Osmore, ‘feeling it his duty’, had said something about the matter when Tom was a schoolboy. It seemed that Fiona, living unmarried with Alan, had written to assure her parents that she was well, but probably without revealing her whereabouts. When she wrote later to announce Tom’s existence and her marriage plans, her parents were shocked and upset. Whatever it was (and Tom had no idea) that had induced Fiona to leave home had certainly not been mended by time and her antics. Heated letters passed between Alan and the father. Alan took the pretext to be angry, and relations were, it was then assumed temporarily, broken off. In fact it seemed that Fiona’s parents were mild inoffensive people, bullied by Fiona, intimidated by Alan, and after Fiona’s death by the McCaffrey phalanx in the form of Alex, George and Brian momentarily united. Stunned by their daughter’s death (they had lost her brother as a child), they went to join cousins in New Zealand. From here, later on, they wrote occasional sad inarticulate letters to Tom, to which he never replied since (he never knew this) Alex in her wisdom destroyed them on arrival. Once she had made Tom her property, Alex never tolerated even the most shadowy hint of any other claim upon him. Alex never spoke of these obscure grandparents, and it was Robin Osmore who told Tom of their decease. Later Tom wished that he had ‘done something’ about them. Later still he felt it was a mystery better left alone. He felt the same, with much more intensity, about his father’s death. Alan had died in some ‘medical experiment’ in a laboratory in Hong Kong. No details ever emerged. When he was a schoolboy Tom thought he might go there one day and find out. He even wondered whether his father had been murdered. He vaguely pictured him as someone who might have been murdered. But more recently he had decided to leave Alan in peace. He was afraid of some awful hurt, some awful pain, which might result from probing. He knew there were demons in his life. He thought he could remember Alan. He could not remember Fiona. He possessed some photographs of his parents: his handsome dark-haired father, a figure of authority, his mother, so curly-haired and pretty, so childish-looking, always laughing. If she were still alive she would not yet be forty years old. He also had, and kept in a little wooden box, her wedding ring. (Robin Osmore had given it to him.) On what appalling evening, in what quiet room, had Alan McCaffrey drawn that ring from the thin white finger of his dead wife?

Tom had loved and accepted Alex, from his earliest childhood, with the whole of his heart, but he had never thought of her as his mother. Some simple person, Ruby perhaps, had told him early on that his mother was an angel, and thus he had pictured her, a curly-haired and rather boyish angel, recognizing her image in the hermaphrodite winged figures in the Victorian stained-glass windows of St Paul’s Church, which he occasionally visited out on walks with Ruby. Alex was something else, something wonderful and very powerful which he adored. Ruby was the dear animal being in whose smell he took refuge from power. George and Brian figured as dual fathers vying for his affection, then suddenly and incomprehensibly punishing. It was Brian who particularly set up as his moral mentor, correcting and admonishing, and leading him every Sunday to the Friends’ Meeting House. Meanwhile Alex watched these fraternal influences jealously, particularly irritated by signs of mutual affection between Tom and George. Tom early learnt to be tactful, even circumspect. This combination of rivalry and possessiveness and authoritarian love, the lack of stability between the rulers of his life, often made up, for the child, a difficult regime. Under these strains Tom could have been forgiven for being a sad crazy mixed-up boy, but he simply was not. His guardian-angel mother, always so young, had somehow preserved in him intact her own unquestioning faith in life, her capacity for joy, her vast indomitable self-satisfaction.

Tom did not reflect upon the dynamics of these various relationships which would have been (and indeed were) of such interest to (for instance) Ivor Sefton. He loved Alex, Ruby, Brian and George thoughtlessly and in differing ways which he apprehended but did not analyse. He did not want to bother his head about such matters, and if they ever started to puzzle him he would shake his head as if to send away a swarm of bees which seemed to wish to settle in his brain. They were easily dispelled. He hated rows and walked away from them and found (such was his felicity) that his nearest and dearest did not in fact want to involve him, had already instinctively invested him with a kind of blessed neutrality, a status of someone not to be enlisted or dragged into taking sides. His easiest relations were with Ruby and Brian. With Ruby his ordinary natural selfishness simply ran riot in the space which the servant opened to him. He never found himself wondering what she thought or whether she judged. Brian was an alien whom he loved and respected and who had quite convincingly played the role of father. (In a sense, Brian had been more resolute as Tom’s father than he was being as Adam’s.) He was not ‘close’ to Brian, but he knew that in a shipwreck he and Brian would know how to stand shoulder to shoulder. Alex and George were the ‘funny ones’. When Alex annexed Tom (not walking into Fiona’s room and seizing him from the cradle), Brian, in early independence, was beginning his long revenge upon his mother Tor having always so patently preferred George. George, meanwhile, especially unhappy at this period of his life, was taking his revenge on Alex for her possessive and undisguised affections. Alex, who pictured herself as a fighter, felt alone, menaced and rejected. Tom was the key, the godsend, the new love object. (Alan brought Tom to Belmont in his arms, the child clinging to the lapels of his coat like an animal; Alex had difficulty in detaching the fierce little claw-like hands.) Of course she loved and wanted the little boy for himself; love was always Alex’s game. She had coveted the child from the moment he existed, and no doubt her jealousy was salved by the triumphant possession of Fiona’s son. But she needed him too, instinctively, as a weapon against his two brothers, especially against George.

How far this plan of establishing a rival worked in practice was never clear; perhaps in a way it worked only too well. Brian was certainly annoyed, but his sense of duty consoled him here, as it had always done in his other trials. Brian, the owner no doubt of a difficult temperament, was actually capable of being cheered up by the exercise of rational activity. Tom was in danger from Alex’s emotions, from George’s ‘frightfulness’. Brian waded in, as if he had seen the child struggling in a river. He must be hauled out, shaken, dried, stood up, told what was what; and Brian could not help loving what he thus served and protected. George, in so far as he exerted himself in loco patris, did so with motives more obscure. Tom, as a child, was sometimes afraid of George, but only in a rather immediate sense. He was, on a few memorable occasions, at the receiving end of George’s violence. He felt no resentment, however. The strange thing was that while Brian, who was certainly more like George than Tom was, simply did not understand George at all, Tom did somehow understand him. Tom had not in his being one iota of that which made George what he was, but Tom saw and apprehended that, not intellectually or theoretically, but with (for of course he loved George) a loving intuition. This led the now adult, or almost adult, Tom to fear George in a new way and to fear for him. Something in this understanding led Tom to make the only conscious move he had so far made in relation to his family. In the obscure machinery of the familial stars and planets it was time for George to move back towards his mother. They were two of a kind, Alex and George, and Tom’s special task was in a sense done. The old pact between George and Alex had never really been broken. Tom began to move aside, to move away; and as he retired, George came quietly, loping on dark paws, into the space near Alex which Tom was leaving. As they thus passed each other, did they exchange a glance? Perhaps. If so, it was a very ambiguous one.