The Philosopher's Pupil (69 page)

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

‘Enough for somebody to pick up an idea.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Damn the parquet. Come, girl.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A row?'

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

‘But you'd seen him since Saturday?'

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

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

‘What happened?' Emma asked him.

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

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

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

‘Pearl has got the boot,' said Emma.

‘You mean he's sacked you?'

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

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

‘That's what I told her,' Emma said.

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

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

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

‘Why?' said Emma.

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

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

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

‘Yes, if she'll let me.'

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

‘I don't know.'

Tom went out into the hall.

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

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

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

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

‘Goodnight.'

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

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

‘Emma.'

‘Yes, yes, yes.'

‘All right?'

‘Yes. Goodnight.'

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

‘Let's go up, Pearl.'

‘No, I like it here.'

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

‘Perhaps sitting on the stairs suits us.'

‘It suits me anyway.'

‘You're a funny girl.'

‘Almost as good as no girl at all.'

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

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

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

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

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