The Philosopher's Pupil

  Ruby, strong as a horse, had helped Pearl carry the numerous suitcases to the house. These contained Pearl’s own clothes and Hattie’s English summer clothes which were stored at Pearl’s flat. Hattie’s school trunk and book box was to come by rail. Pearl and Ruby got the stuff inside and closed the door. They went into the sitting-room and turned on the light and sat down.

  Pearl closed her eyes and said, ‘Oh!’ Some extraordinary painful excitement caught hold of her like a sudden cramp, mixed with very private fear. She wished Ruby would go away. She wanted to explore the house by herself.

  ‘It’s all nice here, we did it,’ said Ruby, wide-legged, staring at Pearl with her brooding predatory stare.

  ‘We —?’

  ‘Me and her.’

  ‘Good - thanks — ’

  ‘I’m to clean.’

  ‘No-don’t- I can.’

  ‘You don’t want me here.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘You don’t. Will you come up to the house and see her?’

  ‘I don’t see that I need to. Do I?’

  ‘Please yourself. Well, there you are. When’s Missie coming?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Everyone here’s mad to see her.’

  ‘How do they know?’

  ‘They know. They’re mad to see his grand-daughter. They want a good laugh.’

  ‘Why should they laugh?’

  ‘People always laugh. What’ll you do with your two selves?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Pearl. ‘Enjoy them, I hope!’

  Ruby said, ‘It’s well for some. She’s not pleased.’

  ‘Mrs McCaffrey?’

  ‘You’d better see her and curtsey, tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh all right. Only I won’t curtsey. I suppose that’s a joke.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  ‘Ruby, dear, don’t be cross.’

  ‘I’m not cross.’

  ‘What’s that strange noise?’

  ‘The horrible fox animal. It lives here, in this garden.’

  Pearl heard the strange noise again later that night as she went up to bed alone. Next morning she went to Belmont and showed herself to Mrs McCaffrey who was aloof and gracious and vague. That evening Hattie arrived.

  ‘What fun this is.’

  ‘But it won’t last.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that, Pearl darling. Aren’t you happy?’

  ‘Yes. That doesn’t stop me from being happy.’

  ‘I’m happy.’

  ‘I’ve never heard you say that before.’

  ‘Don’t sound sad about it, it isn’t your fault.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Our life is so odd.’

  ‘Yes. How you’ve grown up.’

  ‘You mean because I say our life is odd?’

  ‘It is. But a year ago you wouldn’t have said so.’

  ‘There are many things we say now which we wouldn’t have said a year ago.’

  ‘How awfully far off Denver seems.’

  ‘Like a dream.’

  ‘Does this seem real?’

  ‘No, but it’s so present. In Denver we were always looking up.’

  ‘You mean up at the snow?’

  ‘And sort of far away.’

  ‘Perhaps into the future.’

  ‘Oh, the future —! This is all so much more hereness and nowness.’

  ‘That’s what you mean by happy.’

  ‘The snow was like the sea and yet it wasn’t. I do wish we lived by the sea. I wish this house would fly away to the sea. I can imagine this house flying, I’m sure it can.’

  ‘I wish it would fly away somewhere.’

  ‘Away from here? Away from what?’

  Pearl was silent. It was ten o’clock at night and they had been talking since their picnic supper. Everything had been, since Hattie’s arrival two days ago, a picnic. Continual rain had served as an excuse for staying in the house. They had gone out to shop and Pearl had taken Hattie on a rainy walk round the centre of Ennistone. Not only had Hattie of course never visited Ennistone, where John Robert had never resided during her lifetime so far, she had scarcely until lately heard of the place. John Robert never talked about his past, and Pearl’s life history made no reference to the now so momentous town. Moreover the girls had previously, in their of course fairly frequent talk about Hattie’s grandfather, avoided any deep or searching discussion of him. The mystery of John Robert remained unplumbed and indeed unreferred to. Pearl had felt, when Hattie was younger, that it would be improper to discuss the great man in any way which was in danger of bordering on the disrespectful. Pearl had, also, thoughts of her own about John Robert which she would not have risked revealing. Hattie, in a curious childish way which was peculiar to her own situation, simply did not think much about him at all. He had figured, when she was younger, in the light of a rather burdensome duty. The occasions of ‘having tea’ and answering perfunctory questions about her welfare had been ordeals to be got through without making mistakes. The atmosphere of these meetings was, in Hattie’s memory, heavy, soggy, airless, infinitely depressing, and faintly menacing. She was always a bit, though not exceedingly, frightened of John Robert. Pearl was also, and more, frightened of him. Now, for the first time, they were both, it appeared, settled in a place where he too, for the moment at any rate, was living. It so ‘appeared’ simply from the fact that the address given on his letters was 16 Hare Lane, Ennistone. No doubt John Robert would manifest himself. Both the girls tried not to worry about that.

  With the house to play with, it was not too hard not to worry. After Hattie had had her glimpse of the town they settled down to arrange and inhabit. Hattie’s trunk and box of books had come. They set out books and hung up clothes. They moved the furniture about. Hattie placed on her chest of drawers the brown china rabbit scratching his ear, the sleek black slug-like Eskimo seal, and the little pink-and-white Japanese vase, into which she put some primroses which she had intrepidly picked down at the Forum Way end of the garden. They had run about everywhere and opened every drawer and every cupboard and swung out every painted shutter. In a room downstairs they had been startled to open a cupboard door and be confronted by a staring bevy of little gods, made out of clay and papier mâché and painted in gaudy colours. These were Alex’s old ‘fetishes’ which she had meant to remove, but had forgotten when she ‘gave up’ the Slipper House after learning that it was not destined to contain John Robert. She had removed the paint and brushes, sad picturesque reminders of her old life as a failed painter, but she had left the little gods behind. Hattie had carried one of them, a red dog-headed thing with staring eyes, up to her bedroom to join the rabbit and the seal and the Japanese vase, but some superstitious scruple soon made her return him to his cupboard. On her first night alone Pearl had elected to sleep in the smaller bedroom which faced Belmont (which Alex had destined for John Robert’s study) rather than the larger room (with the dog and the airship) which looked down the rest of the garden toward the back gate. But Hattie, when she came, had preferred the view towards Belmont because it contained a birch tree and the copper beech and the ginkgo.

  ‘I suppose I really ought to go and see Mrs McCaffrey tomorrow.’

  ‘The professor said not to bother her. I told her we’d come. We’ll meet her in the garden.’

  ‘I suppose we can go in the garden.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything about the garden.’

  ‘How near the trains sound in the night air. Did you lock the door?’

  ‘Yes.’

  They were sitting in Hattie’s bedroom, Hattie in her mauve-and-white long-sleeved school nightdress. Pearl in a dark blue petticoat and dark blue stockings. Hattie sat on the bed, Pearl in one of the oriental bamboo chairs. They sat up straight, intent, alert, as at a meeting. Hattie’s almost silver hair was in a long thick plait down her back; it had a strange sleek vegetable look, like something which might be found growing in an exotic tree. Her marble-pale eyes roved
anxiously as if she might suddenly see, in what surrounded her, some unexpected fault or void. One hand was at her lips, while the other touched her brow as if settling or adjusting some dim turban-like aura which hung about her head. Her childish complexion was smooth and translucent, unmarked by any line. Tonight Pearl did not look her stern age. She had just washed her dark brown hair, bringing out reddish lights in it, as it hovered for a brief time buoyant and frizzy about her face. Even tomorrow it would be darker and straighter and stiff once more. Sometimes Pearl’s sallow brow and the thin nose which ran from it so unwaveringly straight, like a line drawn down to point to her thin straight mouth, had a brownish puckered look which could almost be described as ‘weather-beaten’. Today, Pearl’s brownness was waxen, handsome, slightly burnished, touched as by a southern sun, and her brown-green eyes were pensive and not fierce.

  ‘I must mend this nightie. Look, it’s tearing at the shoulder.’

  ‘I’ll mend it,’ said Pearl, ‘just leave it around tomorrow.’

  ‘No, why should you mend my clothes?’

  Pearl did not answer this question. A kind of unnerving background to such questions had been assembling itself for some time. She said instead, ‘It’s time you bought some more clothes. You are a funny girl, most girls are mad about clothes.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Hattie. Then she said, ‘We must save money.’

  This gave another of those unnerving vistas.

  ‘We?’ In fact Pearl was saving money, she saved a lot of her own salary, and she had also saved Hattie’s money in that it had so far proved difficult to persuade Hattie, who was still remarkably indifferent to clothes and ‘good living’ generally, to spend much of it. ‘The professor’ (as Pearl always called him) did not inquire, and Pearl did not feel it her duty to tell him that Hattie’s allowance was piling up in the bank. One day Hattie might need that money. Pearl, with her straight thin nose and her straight thin mouth, kept her head, and this ‘keeping’ included not speculating too much about the giddy-making openness of the future. She was glad that the money, hers and Hattie’s, was there; and this, her relief, and Hattie’s, in all the circumstances so puzzling and question-raising ‘we’, brought up for them something which was distressing. Although they never said so, neither of them altogether trusted Rozanov, so powerful, so unpredictable, so extremely peculiar.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to go to London to buy some clothes? We could make a sensible list. There are things you need.’

  ‘No, Pearl, no. I want to stay here.’

  ‘Then we could go to Bowcocks, that’s the big shop in Ennistone.’

  ‘No. When I say here I mean here. I want to stay in this house and hide. I’m so happy here with you. Let’s not get involved with other people and going about.’

  ‘Hattie, dear heart, you mustn’t hide, it’s bad for you. Now you’ve left school.’

  ‘Oh I know, I know — ’

  Tears were suddenly in Hattie’s eyes.

  Pearl ignored them. ‘You must come into the town, you must come swimming, you know you love swimming.’

  Hattie had heard about the Baths. The idea of the hot spring tempted her.

  ‘But people would see me. Well, I suppose they wouldn’t bother because they wouldn’t know who I was, and why should they bother even then? But I don’t want to be looked at. I couldn’t wear a bikini.’

  ‘Why not? People do here!’

  ‘I’ll get a proper costume, I don’t want to wear a bikini any more anyway.’

  ‘So we’ll have to go to the shops!’

  ‘I think I won’t go to the Baths, it must be so public.’

  Pearl recalled Ruby’s remarks about ‘people laughing’. Of course the news about Rozanov’s granddaughter must be all round Ennistone. The curiosity about Hattie would be intense, and not altogether benevolent. Hattie’s fear at being looked at was prophetically just. Pearl said, ‘Oh don’t be so silly.’

  ‘Pearl.’

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘About sex.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘I know we’ve talked about it and I didn’t want to ask you what you didn’t want to say.’

  Pearl did not help Hattie out with her questions.

  ‘Pearl, whatever is it like?’

  Pearl laughed. ‘You mean — ’

  ‘Oh, you know I know everything - but - don’t laugh - I know - and I’ve read - but what is it really like?’

  ‘You mean, is it nice?’

  ‘I just don’t see how it can be. Am I very odd? I find the whole idea absolutely disgusting.’

  Pearl did not say, as she was suddenly tempted to, that that was exactly how she had found it. She said, ‘You’re not odd, just childish, like a girl from the past. Most girls of your age - Hattie, don’t worry about it. It all depends on people. If the man is nice sex is nice, I daresay.’

  ‘So you didn’t like it! Sorry, I know once before you wouldn’t talk about it — ’

  ‘I didn’t like the men, those particular ones - I was a fool.’

  ‘I don’t think I shall ever like any men,’ said Hattie. She began slowly to unplait her hair. Pearl got up to help her.

  ‘Pearl dear — ’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About my grandfather.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You do like him?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Pearl’s quick ringers undid the thick cold pale rope of hair at the nape of the warm neck.

  ‘Do you think he thinks much about us?’

  ‘Not much. But enough.’

  ‘Pearl - oh how I wish - no matter - I was thinking about my father.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was such a good dear man, so quiet and sort of - lost — ’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pearl, you won’t ever leave me, will you? I couldn’t be parted from you now, we’ve grown together, like - not like sisters exactly, just like us. You’re my only person, and I don’t want anyone else ever. I’m so all right with you.’

  ‘I’ll be around,’ said Pearl.

  She hated this conversation, which stirred up her own fear with an exact and accurate touch, like a finger far outstretched to disturb a wound.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll ever grow up. I’ll crawl into a crack and go to sleep forever.’

  ‘Hattie, stop, don’t be so feeble, think how lucky you are, you’re going to the university — ’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘And you’ll meet lots of nice men there, gentlemen, not like the ones I knew.’

  ‘Gentlemen!’ Hattie began to laugh, a sort of wild groaning laugh, tossing her silky hair all round her face.

  There was a sudden screeching sound down below, then another. The telephone. The girls looked at each other in amazement and alarm.

  ‘Who can it be, so late? You go, Pearlie.’

  Pearl darted down the stairs on her slippered feet. Hattie followed barefoot, her warm feet leaving sticky prints on the gleaming parquet which Ruby had polished so carefully.

  Pearl in the hall was saying, ‘Yes. Yes.’ Then, ‘Hattie, it’s for you.’

  ‘Who —?’

  ‘I don’t know, a man.’

  Hattie took the telephone. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Miss Meynell? This is Father Bernard Jacoby.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m the - did your grandfather tell you —?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m the - the clergyman - your grandfather asked me to - to — ’

  ‘Yes?’

  I should have worked this out beforehand, thought Father Bernard at the other end, and I ought not to have had that last glass of port, and dear me, it’s so late, and I do think he might have told the girl.

  ‘He asked me to have a talk with you about your work.’

  ‘My work - you mean - like a tutor?’

  ‘Sort of, not quite - don’t worry, we’ll invent something. I mean we’ll work something out - just a talk really. Could I come round tomorrow morning
, about eleven say?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know where —?’

  ‘Oh yes, I know the Slipper House, we all know the Slipper House!’

  ‘Oh - yes - thank you.’

  ‘Goodnight, my child.’

  Good heavens, what a bungler I am, thought Father Bernard. He had even managed to chuckle in a suggestive way when talking about the Slipper House. The girl had sounded quiet and civil, but you never knew with Americans. He poured out another glass of port.

  ‘He said he was a tutor, a clergyman,’ said Hattie. ‘He’s coming round tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, never mind tomorrow, let’s go to bed.’

  ‘Oh, Pearl, what’s that noise?’

  ‘That’s the fox barking. It lives here in the garden.’

  Pearl opened the front door. A wave of silent moist warm fragrant spring air came with a great slow stride into the house. Pearl turned off the hall light and they looked out into the darkness.

  ‘Foxie,’ said Hattie softly, ‘dear foxie - he lives right here in our garden — ’

  ‘Would you like to go out, dear? I’ll get your coat and shoes. We could walk on the lawn.’

  ‘Oh no, no, no. Foxie, oh foxie — ’ Tears began to stream down Hattie’s face and she gave a little sob.

  ‘Hattie, stop. You’re not ten years old now! Go to bed, you silly idiotic baby.’

  ‘Yes, I will. Don’t come. I’m going to turn out my light. Stay here a little. I’d like to think you were outside - only don’t go far - and don’t forget to lock the door.’

  Hattie fled up the stairs.

  Pearl walked out on to the grass. The shutters were closed upstairs, only a little light came dimly through the stained-glass landing window. A lighted upstairs window at Belmont could be seen through the trees.