The Philosopher's Pupil (53 page)

The unhappy group had struggled away slowly over the sand. Alex had looked once more perfunctorily for her watch but had not mentioned it to anyone. Gabriel packed the last few scattered things, Adam's socks, Zed's lead, dropping her tears over them, into a bag. Brian, who was leading, had just reached the inland rocks that led up to the field when Tom cried, ‘There's George.' They had forgotten George. At first Tom did not understand George's signals. Then he heard him shouting, ‘I've got him! He's all right!'

Tom shouted too. They all turned round and began running back. ‘What is it?' shouted Brian, also running.

Tom reached George and took the dog from him. ‘Oh George, you hero! But he's cold, quick, find a towel, poor Zed!' For a terrible moment holding the dog Tom thought the little thing was dead, so limp and cold and motionless it felt. Then a pink tongue licked the back of his hand.

Gabriel ran up and seized Zed and wrapped him in a dry towel and sat on the sand and rubbed him. Adam, transfigured, leaned against her shoulder wailing with joy. Brian stood behind them holding out his hands in an incoherent gesture and thankful helpfulness. (Tom said later they looked like the Holy Family with John the Baptist.)

‘I'm bloody cold too,' said George.

George, rather plump, stark naked and pink with cold, stood there like some weird manatee. They all ran at him armed with towels, rugs, garments. George sat on a rock, his back hunched, like a big wet sea animal, and they surrounded him and stroked him and patted him as if he were indeed a beneficent monster. Tom tore off his shirt and hopped out of his trousers. Alex handed over Brian's jersey. Brian found an extra pair of socks in Gabriel's bag; Gabriel always packed extra socks. Ruby handed over a mug of whisky. George told the story of the rescue among many exclamations of amazement and praise. Then everyone had hot tea and whisky and felt extremely hungry and ate up all the remaining sandwiches and cheese and veal-and-ham pie. Tom ran in record time in his underclothes all the way to fetch George's clothes, which he put on himself to run back in, looking very comical. It was some time, however, before poor Zed was quite himself again, and Brian felt an anxiety which he did not impart. The little dog, though he wagged his tail, continued to shiver and tremble, though Gabriel opened her blouse and held him against her warm breasts. At last when he seemed to be warm and dry and lively she gave him into Adam's arms. Then Gabriel went to George and kissed him, and Alex kissed him and Tom kissed him too, and Emma and Brian clapped him on the back, and Hattie and Pearl, who had been standing a little in the background of the family scene, waved him a very special wave. Then Tom and George exchanged clothes and they all decided to go home.

The last act was less edifying. As they went along, Alex paused again (in vain) to look for her watch. George and Ruby led the way up the field. Brian ascended more slowly carrying Zed and holding Adam by the hand. He squeezed Adam's hand at intervals, but Adam would not look up at him. Gabriel followed. She suddenly felt mortally tired as if she might fall on her face, and kept stumbling on the slippery yellow grass. Hattie and Pearl, who had somehow become very separate and alien, climbed by a different route, often pausing to look back at the sea and point things out to each other. Tom and Emma came last, having waited for Alex who was complaining that no one would help her to find her watch.

As Brian neared the top of the field he heard a car start. The others were catching up. Ruby stood waiting, surrounded by bags. Bill the Lizard's big Rover began to bump up the track, reached the tarmac, roared round the corner and disappeared. George had disappeared too.

‘My God, the Rover's gone. Where's George?'

Ruby pointed toward the now empty road.

‘Alex, George has taken the Rover!'

Gabriel said, ‘I can understand his not wanting to go back with us after all that.'

‘Oh you can, can you! Alex, did you leave the key in the car?'

‘I always leave keys in cars.'

‘Typical you, typical George!'

Pearl drove Ruby and Alex with Hattie in the Volkswagen. As soon as the car started. Ruby handed Alex her watch. In the Austin, Gabriel sat in the front beside Brian, holding both Adam and Zed in her arms. She and Adam cried quietly all the way home. Brian kept gritting his teeth and murmuring, ‘Typical George!' In the back, Emma fell asleep with his head on Tom's shoulder.

‘Have they all gone?' said Stella.

‘Yes.' said May Blackett. ‘I watched the cars go.'

‘When is N arriving?'

‘He should be here in half an hour or so.'

Stella had moved downstairs to the big first-floor drawing-room at Maryville, with its wide bow windows overlooking the sea. One casement was open and a white curtain blew in and out. The sea was pale grey now, sheened over by a dimming pearly light. From the upstairs corner room, which was her bedroom, Stella had at intervals watched through long-distance glasses the various antics of the McCaffreys on the beach. Hidden, she had seen Ruby come and stand like a totem portent gazing at the house. And she had watched George coming walking along the road and pass by. After George disappeared she stopped looking out and came downstairs. May Blackett checked at intervals to see if the cars were still there.

‘He can't have known?'

‘George? No.'

‘Ruby stared so at the house.'

‘Just curiosity.'

‘She has second sight.'

I should explain that I, N, the narrator, am about to intrude (though not for long) into the narrative, not to exhibit myself, but simply to offer an unavoidable explanation. People in Ennistone had been wondering whither Stella had fled, where she had so mysteriously gone to. Well, she had gone to me.

On the day, so much lamented by Gabriel, when Stella disappeared from Leafy Ridge, she had not set off for London or for Tokyo. She had taken one of Gabriel's umbrellas (it was raining on that day), and thus concealing her conspicuous dark head ‘like that of an Egyptian queen', had walked the distance, not great, to my house, not far from the Crescent, and there, one might say, gave herself up. When I use this phrase I simply mean that she came as one at the end of her tether and (let me emphasize) with no special thought in her head except to get safely away from the McCaffreys. I have had, and have, no ‘sentimental' association with Stella, nothing of that sort is involved. I am considerably her senior. I am, as I said at the beginning, an Ennistonian, and I have known the McCaffreys, though not intimately, all my life, and Stella since her marriage. I think I may say that we are friends, and I do not use the word lightly. And we are both Jewish. Stella came to me as to the nearest ‘safe house', a place ‘out of the world', out of the pressure of time, where she could rest and think and decide. She fled from the kindness of Gabriel, and the smallness of her bedroom at ‘Como', and from Adam, who made her think of Rufus, and from a place where George could find her. She came to me, not seeking for advice, or support in some ‘policy', but just because she trusted me and knew I would hide her. (She is not the first person I have hidden.) Whether this particular flight was a good idea was something upon which doubt could be cast, and we did, in later discussions, cast it. At any rate, once the door of my house had closed upon Stella, a course of action was set and had to be followed. As Stella put it once, she was ‘in blood so stepped, returning were as tedious as go o'er'.

Stella's removal from my house, Bath Lodge, to Maryville was my idea. I removed her simply because we had, for the moment, talked enough. Of course I gave her advice; it was impossible in conversations of such intensity not to. She did not take it; but indeed any view which I could form of the matter was tentative. And Stella was no sickly waif, she was a strong rational self-assertive woman who had, as she realized as time went on, put herself in an impossible position. She was paralysed between different courses of action and, with her pride at stake, unable to decide to move; and the longer the silence and the secrecy went on, the harder it was to see how it could be ended. Stella seemed to me in danger of settling down into an idea of being trapped, which the minute discussions she enjoyed with me tended to reinforce. I suggested an abrupt change of scene, and she agreed to go to Maryville, consigned to the care of a much longer-established friend of mine, May Blacken, the mother of Jeremy and Andrew. Stella was fond of May and respected her. The situation as it then was may best be clarified, at any rate exhibited, by a transcription of the conversation which took place that evening after dinner between Stella and me.

‘I see you've set out the netsuke, my old friends.'

‘Yes — '

‘I especially like that demon hatching out of his egg.'

‘You would. You were the only person who really
looked
at them. I'm glad I rescued them from George, he would have enjoyed smashing them. The idea was certain to occur to him some time.'

‘Have you written to your father?'

‘Not like you said. I just sent a note to say I'd be away in France for a while.'

‘It must have been odd to see the McCaffreys at play.'

‘A shock, yes. It made me feel such a traitor to them all.'

‘Because you've taken refuge with the enemy.'

‘Yes. Well, for George everyone is the enemy. But where have I been all this time, what on earth can I ever tell them?'

‘Lies. I'll think of some.'

‘Don't be facetious. How loathsome it all is. And I've involved you.'

‘Don't worry about me. I'm stormproof.'

‘I've put myself in the wrong, and that paralyses my willpower. I feel I'm in a steel box or something.'

‘People get out of boxes, it's often easier than they think.'

‘I can't see how to get out of this one. Have you any new idea? God, as if you hadn't other things to think of.'

‘What did you instantly feel when you saw George pass by this afternoon?'

‘So close, so
close.
Frightful fear, like an electric shock. Then when I saw he wasn't coming here, an intense desire to run out after him and that was like fear too. He looked so lonely.'

‘You don't feel you could just go back to Druidsdale, just turn up?'

‘No.'

‘Or write to him simply to say you're OK?'

‘No. I'm not OK. And he doesn't care.'

‘Just to have written the letter would be a step. Move one piece and you alter the board.'

‘Yes, yes, like you said.'

‘Any act might change the scene in ways you can't now foresee, and I don't see that this one would do harm. I'd post the letter in London. It would make for a kind of vagueness, less intensity, more space.'

‘I know what you mean. But anything I do would commit me and I'm terrified of making a mistake. I can't do anything until I've cleared my mind. That makes sense, doesn't it?'

‘Not necessarily.'

‘At least now I'm free — '

‘I thought you were in a steel box.'

‘I mean I can
think
about it. I feel I'm poised - like a rocket that might go off different ways. Better to wait.'

‘You regard George as a problem to be solved. Maybe you should relax and give up.'

‘You mean go bobbing back to him like a piece of flotsam, like an
ordinary person?
All right, laugh!'

‘Why not go to Tokyo?'

‘And tell my father he was right?'

‘Or invite him here. You know how much I've always wanted to meet him.'

‘Oh, you two would get on terrifyingly well. Invite him into this shambles? No.'

‘You want to get everything right all at once. Why not fiddle around with the bits? What does May think now?'

‘She thinks I ought to plan carefully how to be happy for the rest of my life! You know, sometimes the thought of happiness torments me. This house reeks of happiness, it drives me mad. Sometimes I'm happy in my dreams. Then it's as if George was blotted out, as if he's never been.'

‘Well, why not blot George out?'

‘You said go on a journey, only the journey must be a pilgrimage. There isn't any holy place for me to go to.'

‘Jerusalem?'

‘Don't be silly. That means something to you. It means nothing to me. I used to think that if I went to Delphi I'd receive some sort of illumination, but I know now that Delphi is empty too. My holy place is George. And it is an abomination.'

‘I meant to blot him out effectively, write saying you want a divorce, and
imagine
how he'd curse, and then he'd smile and then he'd cheer.
Conceive
that he might be better off without you. That would be one way of taking the weight off yourself!'

‘All right, I am self-obsessed. But I couldn't divorce George. It's not possible. All that unfinished business.'

‘You want power over him. You want to save him your way. One can't always finish business, put that picture out of your head. If you can't decide to leave him, then go back, without waiting for the right time, without knowing what it's all about and without the intention of fixing or finishing or clarifying anything. You
can
talk to George,
that
remains — '

‘Yes, in a way, but — '

‘He envies you, he fears you, give up your power.'

‘As if that was easy.
You
should know.'

‘You're the particular principle of order he rejects. That's as important as the particular religion one doesn't believe in.'

‘You flatter me. That sounds like a rational link. There are links, but they are deep and awful.'

‘Yes, I know. Do you mind if we go over one or two things again?'

‘No. All right, you ask the questions.'

‘And you forgive me?'

‘One has to forgive the executioner. Not to would be fearfully bad form. You told me to keep off tranquillizers and endure it all, I am enduring it all, it hasn't made me wise.'