The Philosopher's Pupil

Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor was a comparatively new phenomenon in Tom’s young life. In general, Tom liked everybody and was friends with everybody, and in so far as there had been closer ties, these had tended to be contextual. His love affairs, which he thought of as ‘romances’, had been comparatively uncomplicated and unhurtful, largely because of the witty good sense of the girls concerned. (This was pure luck.) Tom did not yet possess the concept of a deep relationship except in the unconscious form of his connection with his family. The Irish boy was something of a novelty. He was two years older than Tom, at an age when two years counted for much. Tom had been vaguely aware of him as being a bit of an intellectual ‘grandee’, tipped to get a ‘first’, a gloomy proud solitary sort of fellow. He had a reputation for being arrogant and rude. He had never been rude to Tom, but then on the other hand he had never paid any attention to Tom whatsoever. When Scarlett-Taylor moved into the shabby and cheap lodging-house where Tom was living, Tom had felt dismay, even annoyance. However, his view of his fellow student soon began to change.

The first and most dramatic change had occurred on a drunken evening in December. Tom was setting out with some friends for a ‘pub crawl’ in central London. As they were leaving Tom’s lodgings they ran into Scarlett-Taylor. Out of an impulse of politeness and curiosity, since he still scarcely knew the Irishman, Tom asked him to join them. Rather to his surprise Scarlett-Taylor agreed, and accompanied them though with a silent and preoccupied air. The ‘crawl’ was to begin at the Black Horse in north Soho, to proceed through the more riotous pubs of south Soho, through Leicester Square, and down Whitehall to the river. The pubs were decorated for Christmas, noisy and rather full. Scarlett-Taylor said little but drank, Tom noticed, a great deal. First beer then whisky. The final objective was the Red Lion at the far end of Whitehall, but by the time they got as far as the Old Shades most of the others had disappeared, leaving Tom, finally, in charge of his rather drunken fellow lodger. When they arrived at the Red Lion it was closed. Tom and Scarlett-Taylor went on to the river, on to the bridge, then along the embankment. The tide was in and, leaning over, they could almost touch the water which was being whipped into wavelets by the east wind. Scarlett-Taylor’s spectacles actually fell off and were caught in mid-air. They began to walk back along Whitehall with their coat collars turned up. Tom, feeling the airy liberated bonhomie of the happily drunk man, took Scarlett-Taylor’s arm, but was not put out when his friend, as he now thought of him, quickly detached himself. Then Tom began, rather loudly, to sing. He had a pleasant modest baritone from which he derived considerable pleasure and which, when it did not seem too much like showing off, he liked to exhibit. He began to sing an Elizabethan song: If she forsake me I must die. Shall I tell her so? In the second verse Scarlett-Taylor joined in. Tom checked his own voice abruptly, stopped in his tracks and held on to a lamp post. Scarlett-Taylor possessed a marvellous counter-tenor voice.

When we suddenly learn that some unobtrusive fellow is a chess champion or great tennis player, the man is physically transformed for us. So it was with Tom. In the instant, Scarlett-Taylor was a different being. And in the instant too, deep in his mind, Tom made an important and necessary decision. He was interested enough in singing to recognize an exceptional voice and to covet it. There was a quick tiny fierce impulse of pure envy, a sense of passionate rivalry for the world. But almost in the same moment of recognition, making one of those moves of genuine sympathy by which we defend our egoism, Tom embraced his rival and drew him in to himself, making that superb voice his own possession. He would be endlessly proud of Scarlett-Taylor and take what he later called ‘Emma’s secret weapon’ as a credit to himself. Ownership would preclude envy; this remarkable sound and its owner were now his. Thus Tom easily enlarged his ego or (according to one’s point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world: a movement of salvation which for him was easy, for others (George, for instance) very hard.

The immediate problem, however, was to stop Emma from singing. Tom’s untrained voice had been loud. Emma’s trained voice was resonant, piercing and so extremely strange, almost an uncanny sound. Windows opened in the Horse Guards Hotel. Several people crossed the road from the Old Admiralty Building. Others, leaving the Whitehall Theatre, stopped amazed, gazed about bewildered. Roisterers in Trafalgar Square approached like rats after a piper. A policeman appeared. Tom bundled Emma, still singing, into a taxi, where the Irish boy promptly fell asleep. Tom laughed quietly, profoundly, with tears of pure pleasure in his eyes, all the way back to the digs.

Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor as he was ‘in himself’ was not soon known to Tom, though they became friends, and doubtless never entirely known (but then who is ever entirely known?). Some general account must, however, be briefly given of him who is Horatio to our Hamlet, or (for they often exchanged roles) Hamlet to our Horatio.

Scarlett-Taylor was born in County Wicklow, between the mountains and the sea. His father’s ancestors had been landowners in the west of Ireland, but his father and grandfather, proceeding from English public schools to Trinity College, Dublin, were Dublin lawyers. His mother (nee Gordon) came from Ulster, the County Down, where her ancestors had been sheep fanners, her father a doctor. She had been sent to a ‘finishing school’ in Switzerland and then to Trinity, where she met Emma’s father. Both sides of the family were Protestants and horsemen. Emma was an only child. His father died when he was twelve, and his mother went to live in Brussels, near her sister who had married a Belgian architect. Emma began his growing-up in Dublin in a Georgian house near Merrion Square with a semi-circular fanlight and a shiny black door with a brass dolphin knocker, and continued it in Brussels in a big dark flat in a gloomy respectable street not far from the Avenue Louise, with pollarded plane trees and tall thin peaky houses made of pale yellow brick. His handsome sweet witty mother grew older. The Belgian architect and his wife were no more. Emma, vaguely destined for Trinity, declined to return to his native land. He liked Brussels, not the old grand parts, not the shiny new parts, but the melancholy bourgeois streets, still so quiet and full of a not inaccessible past, where suddenly on a corner there would be found a little bar with red check table-cloths and aspidistras and a black cat. He liked London too, and foresaw his future as a Londoner. He hated, with all his heart and soul, Ireland, the Irish, and himself.

Dr Johnson said that when a man says his heart bleeds for his country he experiences no uncomfortable sensation. With Emma it was otherwise. It had mattered little to him as a child that his great-grandfather’s house had been burnt by ‘the rebels’. He had admired the men of 1916 and the fight for Ireland’s freedom. Ireland, indeed, had made him a historian. His father never talked politics, lived in a narrow company of old friends, seemed more at home with his books. Sometimes it seemed as if his father had had a piece of his past removed; like losing a lung or a kidney, one had to ‘take things quietly’. He easily forgave Emma’s indifference to horses, he wished he had been a scholar, he wanted Emma to be one. He died before the resumption of the ‘troubles’.

Emma had been brought up as a vague Anglican. Both his parents were vague Anglicans, occasional church-goers, whose sacred text was Cranmer’s Prayer Book. Emma’s mother taught him to pray, then left him alone with God. Emma and God parted company, but he felt an attachment to the Church. He went to an English public school where he sang in the choir and obtained his nickname. He had never been anti-Catholic. He envied the ritual, he loved the Latin mass, he approved of the full churches. Religion was history, and history taught tolerance. Then the shooting started. Emma watched the slaughter taking place in the gratuitous untimely cause of a ‘United Ireland’. He saw with unutterable grief the emergence of Protestant murderers, as vile as their foes. He felt guilt and misery and rage. The little town near his mother’s family house was blown apart by a bomb placed in the sad little main street with its white houses and its six pubs. Protestants and Catholics died together. He visited Belfast and saw the handsome city wrecked, its public buildings destroyed, its abandoned streets turned into bricked-up tombs. As it seemed to him nobody cared much, not even the decent English taxpayers who paid the bill, not even the Protestants in the South. So long as the bombs stayed in Ulster, there was even a mild satisfaction in hearing about them. For the first occasion in his own lifetime Emma had a close-up view of human wickedness; and in his very private confused self-rage he rejected his Irishness, he tore it to shreds in sick futile anger, sometimes scarcely knowing what it was he detested most in the stew of hatred for which he so despised himself. He never mentioned Irish matters to his mother, and she never spoke of Ireland either. When their native land was named by others he saw on her face the same frozen look which he felt on his own. He had no country. He envied Tom who had no sense of nationality and did not seem to need one. (That, presumably, was the essence of being English.) Yet when in his mind Emma tried to resolve himself into being English, it was impossible, he was utterly utterly not English. When people said (for his voice, damnably, betrayed him), ‘You’re Irish?’, and he replied, ‘Anglo- Irish’, and they said, ‘Oh, so you’re not real Irish,’ Emma Scarlett-Taylor smiled faintly and said nothing. He felt equally bitter and even more taciturn over another problem to do with his sense of identity. He was not sure whether or not he was homosexual. Perhaps this did not matter too much, however, since after a few unpleasant little adventures he had decided to give up sex.

Scarlett-Taylor’s given name had a double meaning, so that he had even entered the world with a dual nationality, under two flags. His father was thinking of the great philosopher, his mother of the Redeemer. His father had regarded Anglicanism as a religion of the Enlightenment, at any rate as a rational protest against the foul superstition with which, in Dublin, he was surrounded. His mother was romantically pious and still attended the English Church in Brussels and sang the old hymns in her sweet fading voice. (She had a pretty soprano and used to do amusing imitations of Richard Tauber.) Emma resembled his father, whom he loved very much: the shock waves of that loss still stirred him. He was, like his father, tall, with straight straw-coloured hair and delicate pale lips and narrow light-blue eyes. He dressed, like his father, in smart old-fashioned suits with waistcoats. (Only, whereas his father had had the best tailor in Dublin, Emma bought his clothes second-hand.) He wore butterfly collars and cravats, and possessed (his father’s) a watch with a chain. He wore narrow rimless glasses in imitation of his father’s pince-nez. He looked like a scholar and a gentleman. He was also athletic. His father had been a good tennis player and had organized ‘the cricket game’ in Dublin. (For Emma’s father cricket, like Anglicanism, was a protest activity.) Emma was also good at tennis, and at school had been able to hit a cricket ball harder and further than anyone else. By now, however, he had given up athletic games, partly because he had become increasingly short-sighted. He had also, more lately, given up chess.

The next thing to give up was singing. Emma was not timidly modest about his accomplishments. He knew that he was, in the academic sense, very clever. He did not need to be told by his tutor that he would get a good first-class degree. Then some time after that he would become a historian. He also knew that he had an exceptionally good voice. Various people had urged him to become a professional singer. Emma regarded the exercise of his gift rather in the light of a temptation. He knew, and part of him clearly loved, the remarkable unique personal sense of power which a good singer experiences, something more psychosomatically personal, perhaps, than the exercise of any other talent. His pleasure in his vocal triumph at school seemed to him sinister, quite unlike the clean satisfaction of academic work. In any case, he now simply had no time for singing. Whenever possible he kept his talent a secret, and was angry with himself for having got drunk (which he rarely, but then extremely, did) and given himself away to Tom McCaffrey, whom he had thereafter sworn to secrecy. However, he had not yet broken off relations with his dangerous and charming gift. He still went to see his singing teacher, a gloomy man, a failed composer, once an opera singer, who lived near Harrods, and from whom he continued to take lessons, and conceal how little he practised. Emma had learnt some harmony from the music master at school; this represented another and different temptation into which also Tom tiresomely entered. Emma had first met Tom when Emma’s piano, being lugged up to his room by some cross removal men, had stuck on the stairs. Tom had never yet heard a sound out of the piano, but invented by himself the idea that Emma could compose music. Tom’s next idea was a pop group, music by Emma, lyrics by Tom, to be called ‘the Shaxbirds’. Emma certainly did not, even momentarily, hate music the way he hated Ireland; but he could not come to terms with it any more than he could with his sex life.

Emma’s first view of Tom was that he was a tactless nuisance. How had it come about that he had let Tom seem to ‘acquire’ him? Tom was indiscreetly anxious to show off his friendship with someone whom he regarded as so superior and difficile. Tom’s thoughtless assumption of the possibility of affection between them alarmed Emma, Tom’s capacity for happiness amazed him. At Christmas Tom had unexpectedly given Emma a book (Marvell’s Poems). To reciprocate, Emma had hastily given Tom a cherished knife. How had that come about? Tom positively wanted to look after him. The trip to Ennistone, awfully unwise perhaps, was part of this process. Emma could not help being moved by the sheer confidence of Tom’s friendliness to him, but he was not at all sure that he wanted to be looked after, or that Tom had the faintest idea what his new friend was really like.

When Alex had returned with Ruby from the Institute, with John Robert Rozanov’s letter burning away in her pocket, she had gone straight upstairs to the drawing-room but had not at once opened the letter. Standing in the bow window, looking out at the cold startled trees and the wet green roof of the Slipper House, she had given herself up to a tide of emotion. Or perhaps it was more like being on a slow dreamy switchback, flying down, then flying up, a sort of giddiness, a moment of anticipation felt in the entrails. There was slight nausea and a sense of being moved suddenly about as in some state of drunkenness. Alex was surprised at her sensations, yet she apprehended too that she had been in an emotional state for some time now, as if expecting something to happen. This was not just the melancholia of the ageing woman; there was something more positive, more like an exasperation with the world expressing itself as a desire for violent change. She recalled that she had dreamed of her nanny last night; that was a portent, not always a happy one.

She took out the letter, fingered it and at last hurriedly opened it. It read as follows:

16 Hare Lane

Ennistone

Dear Mrs McCaffrey,

I wonder if you could be so good as to come and see me? There is something I would like to ask you. Any morning would be suitable. Could you let me know when? I am afraid that I am not on the telephone.

With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

J. R. Rozanov

Alex stared at this text for a long time. It remained opaque, as disturbing and impenetrable as a message in a foreign tongue suddenly flashed upon a wall. Its immediate effect upon her was of disappointment. What had she crazily expected? ‘Alex, you have always been in my heart. I feel I must … etc.’ This formal note ‘with kind regards’ was cold indeed. ‘There is something I would like to ask you.’ No passionate proposal would be heralded by such language. Alex felt, for a moment, intensely childishly let down. She crumpled the letter in her hands. Then she uncrumpled it again.

It was cool but was it not nevertheless sufficiently mysterious? After all, if John Robert did want to approach her in sentimental mood he would be far too proud to show his hand at once. In fact such a letter would be exactly the kind which he would write, suggesting a meeting, giving nothing away. He would want to look at her, converse perhaps with a show of indifference, make some estimate of her feelings. At the Baths he had seemed to be looking around in search of someone. Why had he come back to Ennistone? It could not just be to try the effect of the waters on his arthritis. Alex had met John Robert at a period of youth when deep and lasting impressions are made. Had John Robert, attracted by Linda, really loved Alex? He might well have thought that Geoffrey Stillowen’s daughter was beyond his reach. Had he vividly and regretfully remembered her all these years? And in a moment Alex was saying to herself: how could he not !

She checked these speculations, however. A self-protective cunning made her deliberately calmer. She set herself to think more simply about the mechanics of the visit. He did not suggest visiting her, that was understandable. Alex had already devoted some imagination to the scene of her meeting with the philosopher. She had certainly not wanted to confront him at the Baths. She had pictured meeting him here, in her own drawing-room. Ruby would let him in. She would hear his heavy step upon the stair. She had even considered pretexts upon which she could invite him. She was fortunate to have the problem of the first move so promptly solved, though a walk through Ennistone in this weather would not improve her appearance. He too wanted the advantage of his home ground.

Hare Lane. She did not recognize the address. She rang the bell for Ruby. Ruby, with a tread as heavy as Rozanov’s, mounted the stairs and presented her stony face and monumental incarnation.

‘Ruby, Professor Rozanov has written to me from an address in Hare Lane. Where is Hare Lane?’

Ruby replied, ‘It’s in Burkestown, near the level crossing.’ She added, ‘It’s the old house.’

‘What?’

‘It’s his old house, his mum’s place, where he was born.’

Alex considered this. ‘How do you know?’

‘Number sixteen,’ said Ruby. ‘Everyone knows that!’

‘Thank you, Ruby.’

Ruby departed.

Alex felt annoyed that Ruby had known so much. Too much.

Should she reply to the letter at once? It might be a mistake to seem too eager. Suppose she waited a few days, then wrote casually as if his letter had slipped her mind? But she could not feign this. The idea of setting pen to paper was already too attractive. Her reply must catch today’s post. Having decided this, she prolonged her reflections, luxuriated in them up to the neck as in the hot water of the ‘stew’. At last, with slow movements, she went to her desk and set out pen and paper and wrote as follows:

Belmont

Victoria Park

Ennistone

Dear Professor Rozanov.

Thank you for your letter. I could call on you about eleven a.m. on Wednesday (the day after tomorrow). I will assume that suits you unless I hear otherwise. With kind regards,

Yours sincerely,

Alexandra McCaffrey

The tone of the letter presented no problem; her reply must be at least as cool as his request. She was only unsure about ‘kind regards’. Could it sound like a sarcastic parody? ‘Affectionate greetings’? Certainly not. ‘I look forward to seeing you’? No. She sealed up the letter and went out and posted it.

Now it was Tuesday; and tomorrow she would see John Robert Rozanov. She wished now that she could delay the meeting which her ridiculous mind was making so fateful. She was alone. When Tom had telephoned to say that he was not coming to stay at Belmont, Alex had felt a stab of black distress, as if it were a nudge from her own personal private death. Now, with this new thing to think of, she realized that it was better so. She wanted, in whatever battle (as she envisaged it) she might engage in with John Robert, to be alone in the house: visitable, available, unwitnessed. For this action, decks must be cleared. As for the incidental information that Tom’s companion at Travancore Avenue was a male, Alex welcomed it. She affected to share the family anxiety about Tom’s tendencies, but secretly she hoped that he was homosexual. Alex did not care for daughters- In-law.

As she stared once again out of the window at the wind-ravaged daffodils, a fox appeared. Alex saw at once that it was the vixen. The dog fox was larger and had a strong dark diabolical mark. The vixen was graceful, dainty, very feminine, with black stockings. She moved fastidiously, skipping a little sideways, then sat down among the daffodils. She lifted her head and gazed fixedly up at Alex with her pale blue eyes.

John Robert Rozanov was tired of his mind. He was tired of his strong personality and his face and the effect he had upon people. He often thought about death. But something still remained which bound him to the world. It was not philosophy.

He was sitting in the house in which he had been bom, in the room in which he had been born. He had a persistent illusion that as he emerged from his mother’s womb he had heard his father and grandfather talking Russian. John Robert did not know Russian. He wished now that he had learnt it, but it was too late. It was too late for other things he wished he had done.

Now every morning as he assumed the burden of consciousness he reflected upon its strangeness: the mystery of mind, so general and so particular. Why do thoughts not lose their owners? How does the individual stay together and not stray away like racing water-drops? How does consciousness continue, how can it? Could the curse of memory not end, and why did it not end? Did not the instant, of its nature, annihilate the past? Was not remorse a fiction, an effect of a prime delusion? How could a feeling be evidence of anything? All those days and nights he had spent with the many and the one, how little wisdom they had brought him, now when thoughts were changing into living sensa, and appearance and reality contended inside his frame which seemed at times as huge as the universe, and racked with as large a pain. The point of solipsism, often missed, was that it abolished morality. So if the pain he felt seemed like a spiritual pain, must he not be the victim of a mistake? How little it all helped him now when he was pitchforked back into this mess of tormented being. The Other, whose hard fine edge he had aspired to trace, and in whose very absence he had sometimes gloried, was no more than an amoebic jelly, an unsavoury ectoplasm of wandering ideation. Truth was just a concept which had attracted him once.

Who could fathom Plato’s mind? Unless one is a genius, philosophy is a mug’s game. There were not even any books any more. All the books were inside him now. Even the familiar act of reading had been taken from him. It had been his fate not to be interested in anything except everything. If he could live another hundred years, could time reverse its sense and lead him gently into a precious clarity? As it was, he saw through every notion that he had ever had, the ‘insights’ won by a sustained asceticism appeared to him now as so much vacuous rather nasty stuff which he had made up out of nothing. Artists have beauty and nature at their side, but a philosopher must contain his world inside his head until … it be unified, clarified … until he can become a god … or else perceive that his all is nothing. Once long ago John Robert had believed in that which lies beyond. He had felt himself confronted by a thin thin film, something paper thin, through which, if he would, he could pass his hand; and which, in his precious philosophical faith and his precious philosophical patience, he did not yet presume to touch. Now he could see through it all as through some substance which had rotted away into scraggy fibres; and beyond was chaos, the uncategorized manifold, the ultimate jumble of the world, before which the metaphysician covers his eyes. Even some last lingering belief that someone, somewhere, at some time had had a pure unlying thought was, in his mind, a festering sore.

Speculation about Rozanov’s return had not limited itself to conjecture about his arthritis. John Robert did indeed retain an old childish faith in the efficacy of the waters. In America he had gained much benefit from the hot baths at Saratoga Springs. He had already reserved himself one of the Ennistone Rooms for a prolonged treatment. But many Ennistonians preferred the more touching view that the philosopher had ‘come home to write his great book’. (‘Returned like a priest-king to his people’, as Nesta Wiggins’s father, who belonged to the Writers’ Circle, was heard to say.) It was held to be deeply significant that Rozanov had never sold the family house in Burkestown which he had inherited from his parents. In fact, the ‘great book’ (containing the ‘secret doctrine’ if any) was already in existence. Of course no philosophy book is ever finished, it is only abandoned. John Robert could well have settled down in the little terrace house to rewrite his book. But to this he had not made up his mind. Looking at his early childish writings, he could see how much he had learnt in fifty years. Oh for another fifty! If human life were longer, art and science might be much the same, but philosophy would be an entirely different matter. Why had he not written this book when he was younger, and able to go on past it, into the light? But, younger, he could not have. He had formed no intention of publishing it; but there it was, and he knew that if he left it behind it would be published after his death. Half of him, the more authoritative half, hated it. It was extremely long, his final philosophy. Sometimes he told himself he would condense it all into a hundred exquisitely lucid pages. To write down nothing but the truth; had that ever seemed a simple, even an intelligible, project? The crystalline truth, not a turgid flood of mucky half-truths; not even half-truths, but desecrating obfuscations, harryings, muddyings, taunting vilifications of the truth. But here the book itself lay in his way as a major obstruction. He knew how bad it was. Unfortunately he also knew how good it was, how superior to what was being done by others, by lesser men. John Robert was sometimes, puzzled, almost childishly puzzled, by the extent to which his life was still ruled by vanity, even though he had recognized this fault long ago, and had passionately wanted and passionately attempted to overcome it. He had long since stopped resisting the obvious view, to which he was driven by experience, that he was superior to his contemporaries. But his vanity far outpaced such comparisons.

When John Robert Rozanov surveyed his big flabby handsome-ugly face in the mirror and when, as he often did now, he considered his life retrospectively as if he were already dead, he concluded that what he had mainly lacked was courage. He left it to others to charge him with ‘solipsistic dottiness’ or ‘ruthless selfishness’. Courage was the name he chose for that virtue which should have cured his quite particular lack of nerve, his crucial compromises and shilly-shallyings, the imperfection of work which could have been far far better. He ought never to have got married. No philosopher ought to marry. He had loved Linda Brent, he still loved her and could quake for her. But that was just something personal which he ought to have had the strength to toy with and then pass by, as he had done in later fleeting relations with women. The self- Inflicted pain of her loss then would have strengthened him. The pain of her loss later, inflicted by fate, weakened him, wasted his time, and impaired his work over a long period. He had not been a good father. He had resented the little burdensome girl who was left behind, and had never made terms with her. He was widely quoted as saying ‘I detest children,’ an observation which George McCaffrey used to quote with relish.

John Robert had lived for so many years in the foggy space of his own thoughts, never pausing, never resting, the prey of incessant anxiety, carrying innumerable abstract interconnections inside his bursting head. He could feel the billion electric circuits of his frenzied brain, and how his mind strained and slipped like a poor overloaded horse. And was he now to work as he had never worked before? Sometimes he seemed to traverse vast heavens, sometimes to be enclosed in an iron ring, tied to one place, rooted in one spot. Sometimes it seemed to him that in all those strenuous metamorphoses he had hold of only one idea. He descended into primeval chaos and rose grasping some encrusted treasure which instantly crumbled. He pursued quarries into thickets, into corners, into nets, and at the end found nothing there. Such were his own images of his terrible addictive trade. If only he could get down deep enough, grasp the difficulties deep deep down and learn to think in an entirely new way. He perceived amazing similarities, startling light-bringing connections, problems which seemed utterly disparate merged into one, suddenly and with dream-like ease, then when the great synthesis seemed at last at hand, fell apart into strings of shallow aphorisms. He gazed and gazed with amazement at what was most ordinary, most close, until the light of wonder faded, leaving him unenlightened, without clue and without key. Philosophy may be called a sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest. But what is closest is what is farthest. He longed to live with ordinariness and see it simply with clear calm eyes. A simple lucidity seemed always close at hand, never achieved. He longed for thoughts which were quiet and at rest.

He had lived for so long among the problems with which the greatest minds of the past had fumbled like children. He had contemplated, almost indeed become, the images of the great metaphysicians, spawning his own imagery with a foaming spontaneity worthy of any madhouse. He had fled from these warm shades to the clean company of non-sensible things, numbers, mathematical forms; and had returned refreshed and hungry. He had created a moral system based on the Timaeus, and wondered in the silent night why great Plotinus spoke at last of touching, and not seeing, the One. Long did he live with the Ontological Proof, and try to frame a language wherein to speak about the Form of the Good. He indulged, then denied, then indulged again his heady image-making power, and sometimes, holding his head, cursed the luck which had so authoritatively made of him a philosopher and not an artist. Sometimes his life seemed to him to have been, not a progression of pictures, but noise, continuous noise, not music yet containing ever-elusive hints of musical form. And now, when there might perhaps burst forth some great symphonic finale, the crown of his laborious trial, at the crucial point demanding the purest most refined thinking of all, he was old, losing the clarity of his mind, losing his words and mislaying his thoughts. Could he stop thinking? What could he do but think?

Contrary to what many believed, John Robert’s metaphysical strivings had nothing to do with religion. That distinction had always been for him a clear one. His interest in the Ontological Proof was purely philosophical. What lay behind all that was certainly not God. John Robert was sometimes described as a metaphysical moralist, but if the tag was just, it did not imply that his morality was to turn out (perhaps in the alleged ‘secret doctrine’) to be religion after all. He was concerned with ‘the real’ and thus by his own confident implication with ‘the good’. He regarded religion, as he understood it, as a phenomenon of a different kind, something on which philosophy could not pronounce. Dogmatic belief he had none, nor was he troubled by its absence; and his own personal morality had a simplicity (some might say a naivety) which his philosophy certainly lacked. He had of course been indelibly marked by his Methodist childhood. As his would-be biographers, already hanging around like hyenas waiting for him to die, liked to remark in their ‘perceptive’ articles, Methodism had made of him a puritan with an obsessive guilt-ridden sense of truth which some saw as a motive for philosophy. If he had any convenient traditional label (he gave himself none) he was perhaps a stoic; and this too might be connected with the rigorous and bracing moral atmosphere in which he had lived as a child. His Eros was Amor Fati. He had been practising dying all his life, but had never, and certainly not now, been emotionally interested in death. He would have considered any quasi-religious collection of his soul as deluded sentimentality. He was aware of death as the imminent cessation of his labours. As a thinker, he was content to regard it as inconceivable.

And now his purposes had brought him back to Burkestown, to the house and the room where he was born, where the old shabby graceless furniture was much as it had been when he had leapt into the world as his ancestors were conversing in Russian. He did not look at those old patient shabby things, nor did they touch his heart. He had never cared for the external world. He was sitting on the bed and thinking, but not about conceptual matters. He needed, like a drug, someone to talk to, preferably another philosopher. He wanted to talk philosophy even if he could not (at present) write it. All his life he had talked with pupils and colleagues. He felt ill now with the deprivation.

He looked at his watch. It was still early, not yet ten. It was Wednesday morning. At eleven o’clock he was expecting Alexandra Stillowen.

Suddenly the bell rang. He had not heard the bell with its old funny familiar voice (it was an electric bell which made a conspiratorial hissing sound) since his return to 16 Hare Lane, and he shuddered. It was too early for his expected visitor. He rose and peered down through the lace curtains. The person at the door was George McCaffrey. John Robert moved abruptly back.

He never swore, his Methodist upbringing had made such vulgarity impossible. He frowned slightly and shook his head to and fro. It did not occur to him not to answer the bell. That would have been a lie or subterfuge. He thought, I shall have to see George sooner or later. I had better see him now. He went down and opened the door.

George McCaffrey had, like his mother, meditated carefully upon exactly how soon and how he was to present himself to John Robert Rozanov. He had fled promptly from his teacher’s apparition at the Institute: a meeting then would have been a miserable botched affair. Though, on the other hand, George felt later, it would have been, now, a relief to his mind if he could simply have got over the ‘first sighting’, for instance by passing by and giving and receiving a friendly nod. He observed, with calculating detachment, his mounting frenzy. He could not absent himself too long. He had to be in Rozanov’s presence, with all the danger which that represented.

One thing encouraged him. He knew that, wherever he was in the world, Rozanov had to have someone with whom he could talk philosophy: a colleague, or failing that a pupil. George was the only person in Ennistone who fitted this role. (It was often said that Rozanov did not make or need friends: he only needed people to argue with.) At moments now George saw (or heartily attempted to see) the philosopher as lonely, abandoned, awaiting rescue. In the very early days George had aspired to be a favourite pupil, imagined himself the beloved disciple. He had even thought himself destined to be the prime interpreter of John Robert’s thought to the world. There was a kind of helplessness about the philosopher, some absolutely monumental lack of common sense, which seemed to demand the assistance of a more worldly chela. Now that George appeared to be without competitors, might he not be, without comment, simply ‘resumed’ into John Robert’s life? It was possible. Yet George also knew how terribly wrong, through no fault of his own as he so often agonizingly thought, his relations with Rozanov had gone. It was not just that John Robert had ‘ruined George’s life’ by discouraging him from philosophy and thus somehow in effect from an academic career. John Robert had also mortally wounded George’s soul, setting at the same time therein the eternal need to be justified, to be healed, to be saved by the executioner himself. He and only he who had dealt the wound could heal it. What it was, and how and even when it had happened, was now unclear to George. He knew that his attempts to return to philosophy after he had, with such stupid obedience, left it, his pretentious letters (unanswered), his hauntings of John Robert’s classes, had annoyed the philosopher. He recalled (he tried deliberately to forget, stirred and muddied his memories in vain) one or two awful occasions when John Robert had been positively angry with him. No, it was not anger, it was cold as if the philosopher, while crumpling George up and casting him aside, had been thinking about something else. There had been psychological analysis, moral summary, spiritual devastation, inward wreck. He was not accused or savaged, simply annihilated. Nonetheless at a later time he had had to, had to, follow Rozanov to America and once more haunt him, waiting around under palm trees on hot dusty roads in California. It was almost as if anything, a gesture of the hand which recognized his existence, could cure him, so great was his need, so humble his expectation. Rozanov had been casual, but somehow awful. He had made it clear that he did not want to see anything more of George. George had become more persistent, then crazy, furious. Was he not ruining his life to spite a charlatan? He had been suddenly possessed by wild destructive hatred; only it was not really hatred, he could not hate John Robert, it was madness. Rozanov had responded with a ferocity suited to the occasion. George tried to see him again, tried to apologize. He returned to England and from there wrote a number of extremely long letters, some indignant, some abject, which received no answer. Of course he told nobody about this nightmarish pilgrimage. However, the idea somehow got around in Ennistone that George McCaffrey had pursued Professor Rozanov to America and been rebuffed. George felt he could murder the people who sent these rumours about, no doubt repeating them with satisfaction.

Sometimes it was the very vagueness of the situation which tortured George most. If he had committed some definite crime for which he had been punished by exile, this period might intelligibly be expected to come to an end. If he had offended he might be forgiven. Yet what was his crime, was there one, in Rozanov’s eyes? In Rozanov’s eyes, where his reality subsisted. He had been, very often, a damn nuisance, and once, very rude. But had Rozanov really noticed? He could not even put it to himself that he had failed John Robert, let him down, disappointed some cherished expectation. There had been no such expectation. One day I’ll commit a real crime, George thought, since I’m being tortured for nonexistent ones. Why should I be made invisible in this way? And yet, how could he not hope, in spite of everything, that John Robert would undertake his salvation after all? Was it not significant that the philosopher had returned to Ennistone? Why had he returned? There were meanings in the world. He had seen his own double in the Botanic Gardens. Perhaps it was just someone very like him, but that had meaning too. Twice now he had seen this double, capable of anything, walking about and at large. Once, talking to someone in his office, he had seen through the window a man fall from a high scaffolding. He had immediately apprehended that man as himself. He said nothing about this at the time or later. There were meanings in the world. He had seen the number forty-four chalked on a wall.

That morning he had woken early with the clear conviction that today was the day. He could wait no longer. Had he expected a summons, a letter, had he even hoped for one? In his mind he had composed letters himself, suppliant letters, proud letters, asking for a meeting, but he had not written them. Receiving no reply would be too terrible an experience, and he must cherish himself. He must simply go and knock on John Robert’s door. The resolution filled him with a strange fierce exciting emotion, as he got up from the crumpled sofa and wandered with energetic restlessness from the dining-room to the sitting-room to the kitchen and back. He felt anxious to do something, as if there were something to be done in the house, some task which he had left unfulfilled; and he found himself again in the kitchen, opening a drawer and taking out a hammer. He looked at the hammer, swinging it, weighing it in his hands; then he ran quickly up the stairs and into Stella’s bedroom.

Stella had, some time ago, moved into her own room the little collection of Japanese netsuke, gifts from her father, which had once stood upon the sitting-room mantelpiece. She had ranged them upon the white window-sill facing the end of her bed. George burst in with this hammer, eagerly anticipating the work of destruction. But the window-sill was bare. He looked about the room, opened the drawers: gone. The little gaggle of ivory men and animals had disappeared. Stella must have come, foreseeing his rage, and taken them away. She treasured them as tokens of her father’s love. George felt a pang of jealous misery and frustration. He went to the dressing-table and swept off it on to the floor the few oddments, some little silver boxes, make-up, a hand mirror, which had lain there untouched since the evening when he and Stella had set off to see Alex, a hundred years ago. He kicked the delicate legs of the dressing-table, cracking one. Then it suddenly seemed to him strange and rather amusing that Stella should actually have come to the house, secretly, fearfully turning her key in the door, and put the little netsuke into her pocket. Or perhaps she had sent someone else to fetch them. George did not proceed to wonder where his wife was now. Wherever she was, she would be being well looked after. She was all right. He went downstairs and put on his overcoat. It was a cold dull windy day. He had not breakfasted, of course; breakfast was out of the question.

George and Stella lived in a modest pretty house, an old cottage long modernized and painted blue, which backed on to the Common. There was a view of the monoliths, the Ennistone Ring, from the upper windows. The area was called Druidsdale in homage to the legendary creators of the Ring; it was not very far from Victoria Park and counted marginally as one of the ‘nicer parts’ of the town. The quickest way from Druidsdale to Burkestown was by taking the path along the edge of the Common as far as the level crossing. However, George avoided the Common since a contentious encounter with a white-heather-selling gipsy. (There is, and has long been, a gipsy camp, persistently persecuted by Ennistonians, on the far side of the Common.) Passing through the town, it would be possible to cross the River Enn by the Roman bridge and go past the Glove Factory, or else to cross by the New Bridge and go past the Ennistone Royal Hotel (whose sumptuous grounds coted the river). For Hare Lane, the way by the hotel was slightly shorter, but George wanted to avoid the vicinity of Travancore Avenue. Bill the Lizard, from whom he had learnt of Rozanov’s whereabouts, had also told George of Tom’s advent. Eastcote cared about George and thought about him a lot. It was by now general knowledge at the Baths that Tom McCaffrey was in town and living in Greg and Ju Osmore’s house with a mysterious male friend. (Tom himself had not yet turned up to swim because he could not persuade Emma to come with him.)

As George was crossing the Roman bridge he became aware, in the cloudy daze in which he was walking, of an awkwardness. He had put the hammer into the pocket of his coat and it was knocking regularly against his knee. He took it out and went onward holding it in his hand, passing a row of little modern houses called Blanch Cottages, built after a bomb had devastated this piece of Ennistone during the war. Some of the front gardens had bushy evergreen shrubs which leaned out over the pavement. George dropped the hammer over a low fence into the branches of a yellow privet bush. He was beginning to wish that the walk could last forever. He knew the house in Hare Lane since he had been long ago, in his very earliest Rozanov days, invited to tea there when John Robert, teaching in London, had come to Ennistone to visit his mother. Mrs Rozanov, a sturdy bonny Ennistonian Methodist, not at all in awe of her famous son, had been kind to George. George did not want to remember that occasion. He must have been very happy.

Now at last, sick with apprehension and horrible frightened joy, he had reached the door and rang the bell.