The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  At the time of this story some nonsense of this sort was again at large in the community, particularly among the younger people and among the idler older women who liked to have something weird or shocking to gossip about. A large number of letters (so large as to suggest a concocted campaign, though this was never proved) were received by the Ennistone Gazette suggesting that the Bath Institute should be thoroughly shaken up and hustled into the contemporary world. The suggestions were various but similar in tone: the Institute should be renamed (this prompted many facetious proposals), it should be open till midnight, alcohol should be served, there should be regular dancing on the Promenade. One letter signed by some ‘bright young things’, even suggested that a Casino should be established. (One of the signatories was young Gregory Osmore; this caused some distress to his parents.) These letters were not really very shocking, and a number of people, some of them Friends (Quakers), tried to ‘take over’ the ‘outbreak’ by saying that it was indeed not absurd to suggest that the Institute should become a big ‘money-spinner’ for the town and thus help to provide better housing for our poorer citizens. A left-wing group on the Town Council took the occasion to demand changes in the way the Institute was administered. This too was perfectly sensible. However, various less sensible folk chose to see these discussions as symptoms of some local upheaval, and seemed intent on spreading a sort of self-conscious excitement and anticipation of scandals. A group of the ‘bright young things’ before mentioned were discovered to be planning a production of Gideon Parke’s masque The Triumph of Aphrodite in a new and more daring version, which had been unearthed by a solemn scholar, a visitor to the town, who had been delving in the archives. The scholar (called Hector Gaines) was at first dismayed and later flattered at being taken up by our jeunesse dorée. He was rumoured to have found a lot of pornographic lines which had been deleted by a nineteenth-century editor.

  In February of the year of this tale (not long before George McCaffrey’s ‘accident’) an elderly man called William Eastcote, a most respected citizen and pillar of the Friends’ Meeting House, a non-drinking, bridge-playing intimate of Percy Bowcock, saw an unidentified flying object, a large luminous tilted saucer, hanging motionless over the Common, quite low down. No one else witnessed this phenomenon; but a week later several young people, including Greg Osmore and Andrew Blackett, returning from a concert at the Hall, saw something similar rather farther off, and there was one more dubious sighting after that. This was of course a popular topic (with all of us, I must confess) and there were plenty of theorists to link the saucer with the Ennistone Ring by various familiar sorts of wild speculation. Here indeed was a genuine portent, a veridical harbinger of the onset of a ‘funny time’. Another portent followed of which I was myself a witness. Lud’s Rill, the ‘Little Teaser’, the modest hot jet in Diana’s Garden, suddenly became more animated and began sending up great spurts of boiling water to a height of some twenty (when I saw it) or even thirty feet. Some people who were nearby when the jet suddenly first erupted were quite seriously scalded. The garden was then closed. The spring continued to perform for about three weeks and then stopped of its own accord. The garden remained closed for some time and was then reopened after the introduction below ground of some grand new ‘valve’ which, we are assured, would preclude any repetition of such exuberance. There was disappointment and general annoyance at what was felt to be an unjustified interference with a marvel of nature. Most of us would gladly have surrendered the garden to the whims of the scalding jet.

  An account of all this nonsense is not irrelevant to our story, since it was in the first or anticipatory stage of this unhealthy mood that George McCaffrey’s ‘exploit’ occurred, and at another time it might have attracted less notice. The incident with the Roman glass, which had happened over a year earlier and which had led, though because of bureaucratic delays not at once, to his dismissal, had caused less of a stir at the time, partly of course because few people in Ennistone cared deeply about Roman glass, but also because the psychological climate was then less highly charged. As it was, it came later to be regarded as highly significant, and added a new dimension to George’s already considerable reputation or ‘myth’. Past happenings, including the Roman glass, were recalled and refurbished. Better read citizens instanced similar times in Ennistone’s history, as in the case of the man who thought he was Christ, when some violent action (in that case a murder quite unconnected with the poor fellow’s delusion) heralded a period of upheaval. It was interesting that almost everyone, at once and on no evidence, took it for granted that George had driven the car into the canal on purpose, though opinions differed about whether or not he had intended to kill his wife. Serious citizens and prudes who did not care for this kind of irresponsible speculation said that all this showed was how glamorous a thoroughly nasty man can seem to be. Others, however much they disapproved, saw George in a different light. It would be an exaggeration to say that almost every man in Ennistone envied George’s liberation from morals and almost every woman believed she could save him from himself, but it is an exaggeration worth recording. However, I anticipate. All I want to add here is that George’s ‘accident’ was, for whatever reason, taken by the serious-minded as an example of how pure disorder at one level can cause a fall of moral barriers at another.

  As there are quite a large number of McCaffreys in the story that follows, I might, before concluding these introductory remarks, give a brief account of the family. The McCaffreys, as I have already mentioned, were originally commercially minded Quakers. (The name of course is Scottish, but no connection north of the border remains on record.) George’s great-great-grandfather, William McCaffrey, had inherited money and some sort of leather business from his father, who was said to be a saddler. William built up a flourishing leather trade and founded a glove and shoe manufactory which he passed on to his son Albert, and which Albert passed on, in a less flourishing condition, to his son Gerald who was George’s grandfather. George’s father, Alan McCaffrey, was not interested in the business and Gerald sold it in due course to the Newbolds, an Anglican family associated with St Paul’s Church, Victoria Park. (The glove factory still exists partly under their management.) In his later years Gerald McCaffrey left his wife and went to live with a Danish mistress in Copenhagen where he was said to have ‘gambled away the family fortune’. He seems in fact to have left Alan reasonably well off, though there were some who said darkly that Alan had inherited more than money from his father, meaning that he inherited a rather unsatisfactory temperament. (The word usually employed was ‘raffish’.) Alan became a doctor, reputed to be a good one, and served in a medical capacity in the Second World War. When still fairly young he married Alexandra Stillowen, whose family, also Ennistonians, were Methodists, formerly involved in trade (connected with the defunct Tweed Mill) but now professional people of various kinds. Alan was clever and handsome, and Alexandra was a high-spirited beauty, and the marriage gave general satisfaction, to which predictions that she would ‘rue the day’ also contributed. The old McCaffrey house in the Crescent had by now been sold to the Burdett family, and the happy pair moved into Alexandra’s father’s house, Belmont, which her father, a successful lawyer who had moved to London, had only intermittently occupied. In due course two sons were born, first George, then Brian. It also appeared in due course that the gloomy prophets were right. Alan was restless, said to be interested in other women, though without producing any very palpable scandal. Alexandra was said to be concealing her unhappiness. However, Belmont life went on, and the two boys continued to grow up into and indeed out of their teens before anything decisive occurred. Theories differ about exactly how and when the marriage finally broke down, and how this related in time to the advent of Fiona Gates. In fact, to do Alan and Fiona justice, it was fairly clear that Alan and Alexandra were already alienated from each other by the time Fiona appeared on the scene, and divorce proceedings had been talked of, perhaps instituted. Again, the Fion
a Gates story is told in several different versions - of which I give the one which I credit most myself.

  Fiona, the child of sensible ordinary parents living in East Anglia (her father worked in a bank), being then eighteen years old, at a pop festival jumped impulsively on to the back of a teenage boy’s motor cycle with the intention (which she fulfilled) of running away from home. She ran away with her handbag but without a coat. Her youthful ‘abductor’ took her on his bike as far as Ennistone where, after an argument, he abandoned her. The first person she then met was Alan McCaffrey. She spent the night with Alan (where is not recorded) and then and there (so the legend has it) conceived a child. This child, after causing its parents some initial dismay and indecision, forged resolutely ahead and was duly born and soon thereafter known as Tom McCaffrey. Alex divorced Alan (I shall start to call her ‘Alex’ now as this is how she is familiarly known) and Alan married Fiona with whom it appeared he was genuinely in love. ‘Feckless Fiona’, as she was called, must have been a person of charm. ‘A dotty girl’, people would say, and as they said so they would smile indulgently. And they said that she had ‘a happy temperament’. However, Fiona was not destined to be happy for long, since she died of leukaemia when Tom was three years old. It is not true that when she was dying Alex entered the room and took the child away. What is certain is that Tom went to Belmont to join his brothers, with Alan’s consent, soon after his mother’s death. Alan, very evidently afflicted, left Ennistone and went into practice in Hong Kong where he died three years later in a mysterious accident in a laboratory without ever seeing his youngest child again.

  Tom was of course very much younger than George and Brian, who were by this time grown-up. It was said that Alex doted on her little stepson to the exclusion of her sons, causing the latter to conceive a deep hatred for the child. A variant story has it that although Alex adored Tom she never got over her original passionate attachment to her first-born, George, and that although George may have hated Tom, Brian developed a protective fatherly relationship to the newcomer. Meanwhile it should be recounted that George and Brian were busy getting themselves married. George married Stella Henriques, not an Ennistonian, daughter of an English diplomat of Sephardic Jewish extraction. Stella was said to be ‘academic’ and ‘awfully clever’, though she gave up her studies on marriage. Brian married Gabriel Bowcock, a cousin of Percy Bowcock who runs the big shop (the Bowcocks are also Quakers). Two other McCaffreys deserve mention: Adam McCaffrey, son of Brian and Gabriel, and Rufus McCaffrey, son, deceased, of George and Stella. Rufus died as a small child in some sort of mishap at his home. Those who take a tolerant view of George’s ‘temperament’ attribute it to continued shock as a result of this loss. Others, less tolerant, put a more sinister construction upon the child’s death. At the time of this story Alex is sixty-six, George is forty-four, Brian is forty-one, Tom is twenty, and Adam is eight.

  THE EVENTS IN OUR TOWN

  A bird was singing in the cold spring-time afternoon in the garden at Belmont. The sky was radiant on one side, leaden on the other. A rainbow had glowed intensely, then faded quickly.

  In the drawing-room a wood fire was burning. Beside the fire stood Alexandra McCaffrey, née Stillowen. Near the door stood her old servant, Ruby Doyle. Ruby had just asked Alex about a pension; she had simply said, ‘What about my pension?’ Alex did not understand. She paid Ruby good wages. Did this mean that she wanted to leave? Ruby had been with her since Alex was sixteen.

  ‘Do you want to leave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to stop working?’

  Alex asked this question sometimes as a matter of form, but she did not conceive that Ruby would want to stop working; she was in good health, and whatever could she do if she stopped working?

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or work less? I told you I would arrange a daily woman.’

  ‘No.’ Ruby had always jealously resisted the idea of a ‘daily’.

  ‘If you stopped work I would give you a pension,’ said Alex, ‘but wages are more than a pension. Do you understand? You don’t need a pension. People don’t have pensions and wages too.’

  ‘A pension.’

  ‘Just try and understand what I’ve said,’ said Alex, ‘Could you take the tea tray?’ She poured the dregs of tea out of her cup into the pot, as she always did, so that Ruby could save washing-up by using the same cup.

  Ruby advanced and picked up the tray, holding it easily in one hand.

  ‘I saw that fox again.’

  ‘I told you not to talk about foxes.’

  Ruby left the room.

  The servant was a tall stout woman, as tall as Alex, with a strong grave face. She had a dark complexion and her eyes stared at the world with unemotional critical curiosity. She had a square face and a straight profile and straight bushy hair, almost black. The brown skin of her powerful arms was rough and resembled fish scales. Someone once said that she ‘looked like a Mexican’, and although this did not make much sense it was accepted as an expressive description. She was a silent woman and wore her skirts very long. She was at first thought to be half-witted, but later on people took to saying, ‘Ruby’s no fool, she’s deep.’ Alex herself declared, ‘She’s a mystery.’ Yet she had not felt this until lately; she had not really believed that Ruby was a substantial alien being with thoughts and passions which she concealed.

  Alex could make no sense of Ruby’s statement about a pension. It might be just one of Ruby’s obstinate ephemeral misunderstandings, her tendency to ‘get the wrong end of the stick’. On the other hand, it might have been uttered with a special purpose; it might positively mean something else. In fact, now that Alex reflected, she felt sure that it did mean something else, something which Alex did not like. Alex recalled a world of starched white aprons and caps and extremely long stiff damask tablecloths covered with scarcely visible silvery flowers. She had been little more than a child when her father, Geoffrey Stillowen (so the story runs), ‘discovered’ Ruby in the gipsy camp beyond the Common, in which he took a philanthropic interest, and engaged her as his daughter’s maid. Ruby was two years older than Alex. She had looked then as she looked now, brown and hard and strong, solid with a dark rind. They were joined by an old mutual bond. Was this love? The question seemed out of place. It was more an awesome necessity, as if they lived together in prison. Sometimes Alex felt that she could not stand Ruby’s presence in the house, but the feeling passed quickly. Usually there was no feeling, only the bond. What did it consist of? Perhaps simply of orders. They spoke about shopping and household arrangements easily and without constraint. They mentioned the weather or occasionally television but without anything like conversation. ‘What makes good servants is working with them,’ Alex’s mother had said. Alex had never worked with Ruby. It’s not my fault, Alex thought. Ruby was perfectly intelligent, she was ‘all there’, only she was a non-talker. They had never eaten together. They never touched each other. Alex had had a full life of triumphs and disasters and marriage and children and thoughts. She had a copious past and vivid interesting dangerous future. Ruby lived under another law. Alex did not feel that she herself was old, and had only lately come to think that Ruby was. Was Ruby wondering whether she would tend Alex in Alex’s old age, or Alex her in hers? But something much less rational than that was now at issue.

  Alex had never quite dominated Belmont. She had not lived in the house as a child. Her father often let it, and when, between tenancies, the family occupied it for a while Alex felt that she was a visitor. This feeling persisted after she came home to it as a bride. The children, now departed, had made no mark upon the place, and Alan had always regarded it as her father’s house. It was a big white stucco house, one of the finest in Victoria Park, with bow windows and ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ windows and a wide graceful curving staircase and a turret. But in spite of the thick spotless glittering white paint which covered every piece of wood, inside and out, it was a sulky house full of its own moody
thoughts. Alex could feel them vibrating. It was a frame within which she and Ruby moved about on their separate paths. The house evaded Alex, a reflex of her loss of grip upon life. It menaced her at night with smells of smoke and fears of fire. She had dreams in which she lost her way in the house and came upon rooms she did not know existed where some other form of life was proceeding, or had proceeded recently and ceased. Not that there were dead people there, but dead things. At these times of evasion it seemed that Ruby was more at home in Belmont than Alex was, and Alex turned to Ruby as to a monumental security. Yet this had an opposite aspect. Ruby’s great silent being could seem to be maliciously in league with the house against Alex. There were places where things disappeared, dropped out of the world or into another one. It was absurd how things vanished. Yet Ruby would always find them. Ruby, with her gipsy blood, was popularly credited with having second sight. But was it not more likely that Ruby could find them because Ruby had, perhaps unconsciously, hidden them?