The Good Apprentice

  Jesse now looked different, the wrinkles on his face seemed to clear, to diminish until they were simply a hair-like veil spread upon a much younger face, which now looked calm and unanxious and lucid. The thick coppice of long straight smooth animal hairs which descended the chest was dark but a little flecked with grey.

  ‘Don’t worry — it’s not time yet — for me to go. Leave me now — Edward — but come back — ’

  ‘Yes, yes — ’

  ‘Tell I lona — ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘No — nothing — she’s a good girl — tell her that. I’d like you to marry Ilona.’

  ‘But she’s my sister!’

  ‘Oh yes — of course — I forgot.’

  ‘How did he know about the poplar trees?’ said Mother May to Bettina.

  Edward had descended from the tower to find the three women sitting waiting for him at the breakfast table like a grim committee. Even Ilona looked solemn. This morning, however, hungry after last night, they were all able to eat bran and oatmeal porridge, potato cakes with soya grits, oatmeal toast, apples.

  ‘He creeps down and listens,’ said Bettina.

  ‘Down all those stairs?’ said Edward.

  ‘He can creep like a toad.’

  ‘He said toads crawled up the ivy into his room.’

  ‘I expect he goes up and down the ivy!’

  ‘We asked you not to see him,’ said Mother May. ‘Why couldn’t you wait?’

  ‘He’s my father.’

  ‘He may never be better now,’ said Ilona, ‘so why wait?’

  ‘But you aren’t really going to cut down those beautiful poplars?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother May.

  ‘We have to live,’ said Bettina, ‘we have to eat, we have to pay rates and taxes, we have to buy food and petrol and — ’

  ‘Have you any idea,’ said Mother May, ‘how much it costs to run a place of this size, a house as large as a palace — ?’

  ‘Yes, but aren’t there other ways? He said to me, “Don’t let them cut down the poplars.”’

  ‘We heard you.’

  ‘I love those trees,’ said Ilona, ‘I think it’s terrible to cut down trees — ’

  ‘You keep quiet,’ said Bettina. ‘You don’t have to make decisions.’

  ‘You don’t let me make decisions!’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Ilona.’

  ‘Ilona, be patient with us,’ said Mother May.

  ‘Couldn’t you sell a picture?’ said Edward. ‘Or some pictures?’

  ‘They’re keeping them till he’s dead,’ said Ilona. ‘They’ll be worth more then.’

  ‘It’s true that they’ll be worth more,’ said Mother May, ‘so it makes sense not to sell any now. It’s ridiculous to be sentimental about the trees, they were planted as an investment.’

  ‘But doesn’t the fact that he doesn’t want you to cut them down settle the matter — that he specially asked me — ’

  ‘Do not get the idea,’ said Mother May, ‘that you are a privileged messenger or interpreter of Jesse’s wishes. He talks all kinds of nonsense and forgets it the next moment. You are a newcomer here, an outsider. You are new to a very complex and in some ways very old situation. You are blundering about in something you do not understand. It is not your fault. But you must realise this and be guided by us. You are our guest.’

  ‘I can’t understand your attitude to Jesse.’

  ‘We are certainly not going to explain it to you!’ said Bettina.

  ‘He says you don’t go to see him,’ said Edward to Ilona.

  ‘We don’t let her go,’ said Bettina.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He lusts after her.’

  ‘Oh — heavens — ’

  ‘I want to see him,’ said Ilona, ‘I want to so much — I’ll go up with Edward — ’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Bettina.

  ‘He’s so helpless,’ said Edward, ‘I don’t see — ’

  ‘He’s not as helpless as you think,’ said Bettina, ‘sometimes he shams to put us off our guard.’

  ‘You said he goes out, and you don’t mind, you let him — ’

  ‘He could go anywhere,’ said Ilona, drying some brief tears.

  ‘Indeed he is much to be pitied,’ said Mother May, ‘he is full of impotent rage. There are no sane limits to the desire to conquer the world.’

  ‘He was a god and has cheated us by becoming a child. It is hard to forgive,’ said Bettina. ‘He is imprisoned in speechless-ness and cries with anger. To know so much and to be without words.’

  ‘That is why he goes into trance-like sleeps,’ said Mother May, ‘when he can no longer endure his consciousness.’

  ‘He really goes into suspended animation,’ said Ilona, ‘you’ll see.’

  ‘His soul wanders elsewhere,’ said Mother May. ‘He has always had this power, only now he uses it more often.’

  ‘Sometimes we think he’s dead,’ said Ilona, ‘only he isn’t. His mouth falls open and — ’

  ‘Oh do stop!’ said Edward.

  ‘He will decide to die one day,’ said Bettina, ‘like an old sick animal who seeks a place, perhaps chosen long ago — ’

  ‘But he is not old!’ said Edward.

  ‘He is older than you think,’ said Mother May, ‘with him, time is unreal. Of course his charm remains. He has charmed you. He may try to use you — ’

  ‘He’s ill, and he can be helped — ’

  ‘You keep saying so, but can you imagine him in a hospital ward?’

  ‘Are we to treat him like a sick dog that one takes to the vet?’ said Bettina

  ‘You don’t know him,’ said Mother May, ‘you don’t know his power, you have no conception of the greatness of his being.’

  ‘Are you telling me he’s still in charge!’

  ‘In an important sense, yes.’

  ‘You are saying contradictory things,’ said Edward. ‘You are confusing me, and you are doing it deliberately.’

  ‘We would be deceiving you,’ said Mother May, ‘if we pretended the matter was simple.’

  ‘He was a god in our lives,’ said Bettina. ‘Then he became a cruel mad god, and we had to restrain him.’

  ‘They left him to starve,’ said Ilona.

  ‘Ilona, stop gassing!’ said Bettina.

  ‘Naturally at times he resents us,’ said Mother May. ‘We appear as an alien authority, we represent the diminishing of his world, the loss of his talents, his dependence on others. We told you he once tried to destroy his paintings, break his sculptures.’

  ‘Hasn’t he a right to destroy his own work?’ said Edward.

  ‘No,’ said Bettina. ‘Thank.’

  ‘He is a supreme artist,’ said Mother May. ‘He has been forever recreating himself. We, taking part in this process, have also to be his guardians, and the guardians of his work. We are responsible to posterity.’

  ‘You need the money, is that it?’ said Edward. ‘Why don’t you show Jesse off to the tourists? He’s the most interesting exhibit here. They’d pay a lot to see him in one of his trances!’

  ‘Please don’t be offensive,’ said Mother May, ‘it doesn’t help any of us.’

  ‘You hide him away because he’s a wreck and not a big romantic genius figure any more, and you send round false reports — I read in a paper that he was still painting — and now you want me to be your accomplice — ’

  ‘I suggest we stop talking to Edward,’ said Bettina, ‘we have already said too much.’

  ‘You asked me here — ’ said Edward.

  ‘We asked you here,’ said Mother May, ‘because we read that a young man had been killed and people blamed you.’

  ‘You read that? No one ever suggested I was to blame.’

  ‘We may have misunderstood,’ said Bettina. ‘The point is we just wanted to do you a kindness.’

  ‘You mearr it wasn’t anything to do with Jesse?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Mother May.

&nb
sp; There was a silence. The three women stared at Edward. He got up and walked away from the table, his sandals, Jesse’s sandals, which were a bit too big for him, tapping softly, audibly, on the slated floor.

  When he got as far as Transition he realised that Ilona was following him. He went on and was about to go up the stairs, but changed his mind and went instead into the Harness Room, which he also thought of as the Spider Room. Ilona came in and shut the door after her. She began to speak rapidly.

  ‘Of course it was to do with Jesse, but it’s hard to explain. I think Mother May wanted a change, any change — ’

  ‘I’ve certainly upset the ecology.’

  ‘She wanted a new person around. They always wanted a son, not us girls. Only you’re no good, you’re too late, you weren’t there when you were needed and anyway you had the wrong mother, it’s all mixed up — ’

  ‘It certainly is.’

  ‘And Bettina and I have been here too long, we can’t help her, we’re just like cats that belong to the house. In a way Mother May is like a Penelope who wants Odysseus to go, to be off on his travels again — ’

  ‘He can’t go — ’

  ‘I don’t know, perhaps he can, he — ’

  ‘But you can go.’

  ‘I wanted to train as a dancer but he wouldn’t let me, he wanted me here, Bettina had a young man, or sort of, but it was impossible and she wanted to go to the university, Jesse stopped it all, and as it is we’re just bad painters, pretend artists — ’

  ‘Oh come, you’ve got your jewellery — ’

  ‘That’s rubbish, you know it is, you didn’t like it — ’

  ‘And Bettina can do all sorts of things — ’

  ‘She mends things, Mother May cooks — Bettina’s jealous now because you prefer me — ’

  ‘Ilona, don’t be so silly! Jesse sent you his love. He said you were a good girl, he told me to tell you.’

  ‘A good girl — that’s nothing. There was something great here once, but we’re just carrying it on mechanically in a pretend way. We can’t seem to do anything any more, we can’t even play the recorder any more.’

  ‘But you played to me on that morning.’

  ‘That’s the only tune we can play properly.’

  ‘And you used to weave.’

  ‘Used to, yes. There was something, it’s like remembering history, something long ago to do with salvation by work, and it was anti-religious and anti-God, that was a point, a sort of socialism, and like a kind of magic too, and being beyond good and evil and natural and free — that’s what’s so tragic, it was something beautiful, but the spirit’s gone, it’s gone bad, perhaps it was always sort of too deep a kind of knowledge, with something wrong about it, or rather we failed, we failed, he was too great for us — but that’s what made Jesse so alive and full of power and wonderful as he used to be, as if he could live forever. And of course we had to be happy, and we were happy, I can remember that, and now we have to pretend to be happy, like nuns who can never admit that they made a mistake and that it has all become just a prison.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave?’ said Edward.

  ‘How can I leave? You can’t leave. How could I?’

  So I can’t leave, Edward reflected later when he was by himself, standing in the middle of the floor in his bedroom, gazing at his unmade bed. The brief sunshine had gone, the wind from the sea was rattling the windows, the air in the house was humid, his clothes felt clammy. A rolled piece of paper was jutting from his pocket. He pulled it out and unrolled it. It was Jesse’s drawing of Ilona which Edward had, he now recalled, picked up that morning as he came down through the studio. It represented Ilona as a child of twelve or fourteen. She had a surprised joyful look; perhaps that was in the days when they were all happy and believed in Jesse’s magic. Her hair was done as it was today, the main central strands pulled back and clipped into a slide, the rest hanging free on each side. She was wearing an open-necked shirt-dress with flowers vaguely sketched upon it, which reminded Edward how much the girls’ day dresses now looked like uniform. Even the woven evening dresses looked to him artificial, like pieces borrowed from a museum. He thought, women without men, they doll themselves up for me, but it won’t do. Really they are dowdy, they cannot overcome a carelessness about their appearance, slatternly ways which have gradually come upon them. In the drawing Ilona’s characteristic movement, her impetus forward, was indicated by a few lines representing the free folds of the dress. It was moving and extraordinary, how present Ilona was in the simple, probably hasty, sketch. Edward smoothed the paper out and put it carefully in a drawer, covering it up.

  And why can’t I leave, he thought, what keeps me here? Jesse, love for him, pity, duty. My God, I said I’d stay. And I can’t really trust anyone. I don’t even know how old these women are or which is which. They are all elf maidens. Today as we were talking Bettina looked so old, perhaps she is the mother. Ilona looked old too, and so tired and wrinkled with anxiety, when she was with me just now. And Jesse, did he want me to come, ask them to bring me, does he really know who I am? Did he think about me in the past and want me, or did he, out of his charm, just invent it all as soon as he saw me? Was I brought here to help, to liberate his mind by talking to him, to be the guardian of his last days — brought here by them, by him, by fate? Oh how I shall disappoint them all! Is this a holy place where pure women tend a wounded monster, a mystical crippled minotaur? Or have I been lured into a trap, into a plot which will end with my death? I cannot leave. When Jesse said ‘I want to see your youth’ how could he not hate me for being so young and so alive? He is capable of rage and hate — and lust too perhaps. Have the women lured me here to punish me, to execute some communal revenge upon Chloe? I am the perfect victim, the fine upstanding youth with the wrong mother. Or is it just that, for some reason I shall never know, I have to take part in the final act of a drama which only incidentally concerns me and in which I shall be casually annihilated? God, how they frighten me, all of them. Jesse said they’d poison him. They could poison me any time. I’m always drinking those herbal draughts they put into my hands. Perhaps they are slowly depriving me of my wits, inducing hallucinations, like seeing that electric wire in Transition as the foot of a bird coming out of the wall. I thought I was mad because I was in love with Mark and couldn’t go on living. Wasn’t that why I came here? To lose the old hated self and be given a new one by magic. I was in love with Mark — and now I’m in love with Jesse. Is that my cure, my healing, my longed for absolution? One thing I can be sure of: there are awful penalties for crimes against the gods.

  Midge McCaskerville was at Quitterne, the McCaskervilles’ country cottage, sitting at her bedroom window. It was the afternoon, she hated the afternoon. Her knee was stiff, hot and painful, her hands were red and visibly grazed; she kept putting them to her cheeks to feel their roughness. She was near to tears, would welcome them soon, remembering the fall, and how, a day before, at Meredith’s school concert, she had been moved to weep by the high sound of the boys’ voices singing. Meredith’s voice was not among them as he affected not to be able to sing. I’m always crying these days, she thought, rubbing her aching knee.

  She got up and wandered about the room, touching her cosmetics which she laid out neatly like tools, then returned to the window. She had intended after lunch to make a big flower arrangement, but then it had seemed pointless. God, how restless I feel, she thought, I can’t rest, all my limbs have that creeping restless ache. She had a feeling, familiar to her now, of needing to do something very odd simply to preserve her sanity. I want to do something, she thought, like to break something or jump into a river or out of the window, it’s like wanting to brush something off, like a purification. But how can I be purified? Any action which it is possible for me to perform is evil. And there is Thomas weeding the border. I hate the way he leans down so deliberately and then puts the weeds in a neat heap with all the roots together, he’s so meticulous. And he wants to have a bonfi
re and then he always gets excited and looks stupid. He’s not thinking about me. But he’s a psychologist. How can he not know what is streaming through my head all the time?

  Midge had wakened up that morning early, hearing the maddening hurtful singing of the birds, and at once thinking about the ‘weekend’ on which Harry was so much insisting and which now seemed impossible. Desire for Harry, for his embrace, most of all simply for the blessed relief and happiness of his presence, burnt in her now, making her rise again for another tour of her room. Only in Harry’s presence was she collected and good. So was Thomas the cause of all her evil? Must she not have the strength to hate her husband and to join her lover? Perhaps it was so. Oh for freedom, to be out of this cage of lies and pain at last! She looked into her dressing-table mirror, at her beautiful hair and her distorted face, and for a moment opened her eyes wide and resumed her old insistent animated look which said ‘like me, like me’. And was it she, whom everybody liked and petted, who was soon to cause such grief, such scandal and such chaos? She turned away from the mirror. ‘You’re always moving these days,’ Meredith had said that morning. What had Meredith seen? What had he heard and understood? Perhaps nothing, she persuaded herself. The memory of that scene was already blurred. After the ‘sighting’ he had disappeared as if he had never been. She had said nothing to Harry.

  Quitterne was a small pretty house, two red-brick cottages made into one, woodmen’s cottages perhaps since it stood in the middle of a wood. Civilisation, because of convenient access to London, had neared it, but its immediate surroundings were still unspoilt. The McCaskervilles had lived at Quitterne for twelve years. Their predecessor had put on a slate roof instead of thatch and made a gravelled drive, and surrounded the house with an area of rounded sea stones, black and glittering when wet, speckled and grey when dry. The garden, which had possessed rose beds as well as two long herbaceous borders, had been simplified by Thomas. There was now a plain lawn, showing off a fine copper beech tree, and one piece of flower bed up against the long box hedge which had been allowed to grow ragged. The wilder garden which blended into the wood was full of huge gross rhododendron bushes, soon to be covered with mauvish blooms, and dotted about with wellingtonias and macracarpas and a few elegant birch trees. The woodland, once so amazing to Midge, was of tall thinnish oaks and chestnuts, with a few big wild cherry trees, and places where filtering light had encouraged an undergrowth of ferny bracken. Among last year’s brown debris where young shoots were emerging, patches of bluebells were here and there coming into flower. It had all seemed a paradise to Midge once, but now the little wild plants which used to please her no longer did so. She was alienated, frightened by the wood, tired by the stones. She would have preferred a pavement round the house and the (unthinkable to Thomas) complete removal of the copper beech. The dark intrusive tree exuded melancholy, even brushed the bathroom window with its drooping fingers. And now farther off in the wood where the McCaskerville territory ended some people called Shaftoe had built a horrible little modern house and a tennis court. Midge had heard the sound of falling trees and of distant alien human voices. Thomas and Meredith had been inclined to fraternise, but Midge had discouraged this. Thomas kept talking of retiring and living at Quitterne all the time. He said Meredith could have a dog then. At the thought of the dog Midge’s eyes filled with tears at last.