The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I’ve made your room so nice’, said Gabriel, ‘and we’ll get you any books, won’t we, Brian, and you must just feel free and on your own and not mind us at all. You know you must rest, I think you should play the invalid for a while, stay in bed and be waited on. Don’t you think, darling, that she should stay in bed?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Brian, smiling.

  Stella, who longed to stay in bed, to lie quiet and sleep for a week, echoed, ‘Certainly not.’

  There was a tap at the door of the room and Father Bernard, who had come in through the kitchen, put his head round. ‘Hello, can I come in?’

  ‘Why, here’s Father to see you!’ said Gabriel.

  Brian said ‘Oh God!’ just audibly, grimacing to Stella who, he thought, shared his view of the ‘creepy priest’.

  ‘I heard you were here,’ said Father Bernard to Stella. ‘Hello, Ruby.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Stella, ‘does everyone know then? Is it a topic of conversation at the Baths?’

  ‘Mrs Osmore told me,’ said Father Bernard, smiling his charming smile. In fact Gabriel had told him by telephone, but he thought it more tactful not to mention this.

  ‘How does she know?’ said Brian crossly. ‘We don’t want Stella bothered with bloody people dropping in.’

  ‘I just thought a little offering,’ said Father Bernard, and handed over a long thin package wrapped in newspaper which turned out to contain half-a-dozen daffodils, still in earliest bud, entirely straight and green and cold, like six little rods.

  Stella thanked him, adding, ‘I’m not an invalid, you know.’

  ‘I’ll just put them in water,’ said Gabriel. ‘What darlings, they’ll soon come out.’ She bustled off with the flowers.

  Stella did not in fact dislike the priest, she might have enjoyed an intellectual conversation with him, but she mistrusted his role and avoided him. She was a little bothered by his being a converted Jew. She discerned in him a desire to see the strong made weak and the lofty made low, and to make those thus afflicted his spiritual prey. This was what Brian saw as the vampirish aspect of the priest’s character. Stella was sickened by the idea that Father Bernard might want to ‘help her’ and that Gabriel had perhaps asked him to come along with this in view.

  Father Bernard looked at Stella with his gentle inquisitive light brown eyes and stroked back his fine girlish dark locks. He understood her attitude to him perfectly. His visit, motivated by curiosity, was at least partly pastoral as well. He did not think it impossible that he might somehow at some time be of assistance to this interesting woman. He did not mind running the risk of seeming an intrusive fool. In his view, people in such matters erred more by not trying than by trying too much.

  He said in answer to Stella’s remark, ‘I know,’ and ‘I just came by to look at you, and to be looked at, like in the hospital. I too exist. A cat may look at a queen.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Brian, thereby playing into the priest’s hands.

  Stella laughed and returned Father Bernard’s smile.

  The priest did not press his advantage. He snapped his fingers noiselessly and said to Brian, ‘I hear Professor Rozanov has arrived.’

  ‘Has he?’ said Brian. ‘Hip hooray.’

  ‘George will be pleased,’ said Gabriel, who had just come back. ‘Won’t he.’

  ‘Delighted,’ said Stella.

  ‘I’ve put the flowers in your room,’ Gabriel told Stella.

  ‘Will he stay long?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t imagine so,’ said Gabriel quickly, as Brian was opening his mouth.

  ‘Someone said he was going to stay — ’

  Somewhere elsewhere Zed could be heard barking. Then the door flew open and Tom McCaffrey came in. Zed ran in, Adam ran in.

  Gabriel cried, ‘Oh Tom!’ Tom, knocking into Ruby as he entered, shouted ‘Ruby’ and kissed her. Gabriel kissed Tom. Brian slapped his shoulder. Adam hung on to his jacket. Tom said, ‘Hello, Father,’ and then scooped up Zed and tried to stuff him inside his jacket pocket. Stella watched the family scene with loathing and sick despair.

  ‘How super, all of you here, well, lots of you. Where have you hidden George? It’s so nice to be back. Is this a conference? What’s up with Stella, why isn’t she booted and spurred? Are you all right? Have you got the ’flu? I had it, there’s an awful variety going round London.’

  ‘Stella had an accident,’ said Brian.

  ‘Oh I am sorry, are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘I mean really OK, please nothing awful?’

  ‘Nothing awful, really not.’

  Tom, even more than Adam, made Stella think of Rufus. She wanted to escape to her room, but wondered if she could climb the stairs unaided.

  ‘Oh good, poor Stella, I’m so sorry. Let me kiss you. Here, I’ll give you Zed, he’ll cure anything.’ Tom came and kissed Stella on the brow, stroked her hair lightly, then put Zed down carefully on the chequered rug in the warm depression between Stella’s legs and the edge of the sofa, where the little dog settled down quietly as at a post of duty.

  Tom McCaffrey, then twenty years old, was certainly the tallest and arguably the best-looking of the three brothers. He was neither sleek like George nor wolfish like Brian. He was slim but not skinny, with a soft almost girlish complexion. He had a great deal of curly brown hair tinted with gold which fell down on to his shoulders. His upper lip was long and smooth, his sensuous mouth glowed like a child’s. He had the bold blue innocent eyes of Feckless Fiona.

  ‘Oh good, what luck to find you all! How is old George, by the way? I’m quite out of the picture. How’s Ma?’

  ‘Ma’s fine,’ said Brian refusing to catch Gabriel’s warning look. Tom evidently knew nothing of ‘George’s latest’.

  ‘I think I’ll go upstairs,’ said Stella. She wondered if she would be able to rise. She rose. The rug and Zed descended to the floor. Stella made for the door. Gabriel followed her out.

  ‘What’s wrong with Stella?’ said Tom.

  ‘George tried to drown her,’ said Brian.

  ‘I must be off,’ said Father Bernard. He moved and his blackness faded from the room. Adam and Zed ran after him.

  Brian said to Ruby, ‘Can’t you find something to do, Ruby? Go and polish something. There must be something to clean somewhere.’

  Ruby gravely set herself in motion. Tom touched her as she went out. He looked at the angry pock-marked face of his brother but did not speak. Gabriel came back. She knew from Tom’s look that Brian had ‘said something’.

  Gabriel said brightly to Tom, ‘What about the girl? Have you brought her?’

  ‘The girl —?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brian, ‘Emma.’

  ‘Oh good heavens,’ said Tom, ‘Emma - I forgot - how stupid.’

  He ran from the room.

  ‘You told him — ’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Oh hang it, what does it matter?’ said Brian. ‘Someone is bound to tell him. What does it matter, what does anything matter? We’re too fastidious, we’re too particular, we’re too fine, in a world reeling with violence and starvation and filth of every sort. What does it matter what George does? I’m sick of George, Stella is sick of George, I’m going out for a walk.’

  But before he could leave, Tom came back accompanied by a tall thin youth with pale blond hair and narrow rimless spectacles.

  ‘This is my friend Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor.’

  Brian said, ‘Oh dear,’ then covered it with a cough. There were friendly exclamations and hand-shakes, during which Scarlett-Taylor gave one abrupt smile but said nothing.

  Gabriel said, ‘Have you been to Belmont yet, shouldn’t you ring Alex and say you’re coming?’

  ‘Oh we won’t be at Belmont,’ said Tom. ‘We’re house-sitting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Greg and Judy Osmore are away. They said we could look after their house. Here’s the key.’ He flourished the key.

  Gregory Osm
ore was the younger son of Robin Osmore the solicitor.

  ‘I think Alex is expecting you,’ said Gabriel, ‘so you’d better ring up and say you’re not coming.’

  ‘But we’ve come!’

  ‘Not coming to stay, I mean.’

  ‘I said as much,’ said Scarlett-Taylor to Tom.

  ‘Oh well, I will ring Alex,’ said Tom, ‘only not now, Gabriel, please — ’

  Scarlett-Taylor’s brief remark had betrayed that he was Irish. Brian with his usual quick tact said, ‘You’re Irish.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Gabriel. ‘The Emerald Isle. A hundred thousand welcomes, isn’t it? We had such a lovely holiday in Killarney once.’

  ‘It rained all the time,’ Brian said, smiling wolfishly.

  Scarlett-Taylor looked at Tom.

  ‘We must be going,’ said Tom. ‘We’ve got this house to sit.’

  Adam and Zed came in.

  Tom said, ‘This is Adam.’

  ‘Dog,’ said Scarlett-Taylor. ‘Papillon.’ He picked Zed up.

  ‘Zed,’ said Adam.

  Scarlett-Taylor then smiled his real smile, which was rather logical and intellectual, the smile of an older man. He handed Zed to Adam with a graceful formal gesture.

  Adam did not smile, but looked approving.

  ‘What are you going to do here?’ said Brian.

  ‘Do?’ The question puzzled Tom. ‘Oh - have fun.’

  They all reached the front door. ‘Come and see us.’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  Brian, as the door closed, said, ‘Fun? What’s that? Ah, youth, youth. Oh God, Ruby’s still here, can’t you get rid of her? And Stella’s upstairs! I’d forgotten that too!’

  Tom pressed the key, which he had proudly waved before his brother, into the lock and turned it. It functioned. The door opened. Tom had not quite believed beforehand that this would happen. It was like something in a fairy-tale which was too good to be true. Some demon or wicked godmother would put a binding spell upon the door, or else it would open upon some weird alien scene, empty or else full of silent hostile people, then closing again, quietly and irrevocably, behind the hapless hero. None of this happened. The door opened. The rather dark interior of the house was recognizably that of Greg and Judy Osmore. It was also immediately clear that the house was empty. It smelt empty, already a little musty and full of echoes. Another less far-fetched of Tom’s fears had been that it would turn out that Greg and Judy were still there and had not gone away at all.

  ‘Whoopee,’ said Tom, softly and appreciatively, standing in the hall.

  Emma followed him in.

  Tom did not in fact know Gregory Osmore very well, but he had known him all his life, and in Ennistone that counted for a lot. Meeting Greg recently at a party in London, he had heard him lamenting about having to leave his house empty while he spent a month in America, with Judy, on a business course. Burglary and vandalism, once unknown in the town, were on the increase. Tom saw, quick as a flash, that sublime concatenation of duty and interest for which we so often wait in vain. He offered his services. He would spend the vacation working in Greg’s house and keeping it safe and happy. Greg and Ju agreed. For Tom, the plan had everything. Apart from anything else, it provided a very good excuse for not staying at Belmont. Alex would probably have put up with Scarlett-Taylor, but would Scarlett-Taylor have put up with Alex? Tom wanted to show his native town to his new friend. On the Belmont basis he had envisaged only a brief visit. Now, however, given this glorious independence, they could spend the whole vacation there, see a bit of the countryside, be amused by the dear silly old town, and get away from their cramped dingy London digs and their censorious landlady.

  Tom and (to use his nickname) Emma were at the same college in London. Emma was a little older, now in his third year of studying History. Tom was in his first year of studying English. They had known each other vaguely for a while, then lately much better after Emma had taken lodgings in the same house as Tom. Emma wanted to see the Ennistone antiquities and to visit the Museum. He did not imagine he would be very interested in the Ennistonians whom Tom promised him as the chief entertainment. Emma looked a little critically upon Tom’s tendency to like everything and everybody.

  ‘Our house,’ said Tom. ‘Our very own for now. Oh good!’

  He had never in his life been the proprietor of so much domestic space. He began to run about, opening doors, peering into cupboards, racing up and down stairs.

  Emma glanced into the sitting-room, then found Greg’s study and began to look at the books. He noted with pleasure a number of historical works. (Greg had studied History at York.) Emma went over the shelves systematically. He pulled out Pirenne’s History of Europe and sat down, and was instantly absorbed in reading.

  Meanwhile Tom was in a state of rapture. He investigated the kitchen. No crouching in grates or cooking on gas rings here. Tom liked cooking, in a random eccentric sort of way. He investigated the larder and the fridge. He went into the sitting-room and studied all the pictures and ornaments. He had been in the house before, of course, but only on social occasions, and he had never seen the sitting-room empty. Tom liked pictures, he liked things, he appreciated the visual world. He would have liked to be a rich man and be able to collect. However, he had no plans for becoming a rich man; he had as yet no plans.

  Greg and Judy, who were still childless, lived in a pleasant part of Ennistone, on the far side of the town from the Common on the way towards the Tweed Mill. This area was called, for some reason, Biggins, and consisted largely of Victorian terrace houses, lately gentrified, their brick façades painted different colours. Of course the place to live in Ennistone was the Crescent, near the eighteenth-century bridge, the abode of Eastcotes and Newbolds and Burdetts. However, there were parts of Biggins which were regarded as very desirable residential areas, quite the equal of Victoria Park. The ‘best road’, called Travancore Avenue in memory of some Ennistonian who had served the Raj in that city, started in some splendour near the Crescent and ended more humbly but agreeably enough on the edge of the countryside, with views of the Tweed Mill. House agents described the residences, all sought after, as being ‘at the Crescent end’ (or ‘adjoining the fashionable Crescent’) or ‘at the Tweed Mill end’. Ivor Sefton occupied a late eighteenth-century villa at the Crescent end. The Gregory Osmores lived in a pretty little detached house behind plane trees at the Tweed Mill end. Greg had purchased this house when, after working in London as an accountant, he had (quite recently) become an all-purpose businessman in the management of the Glove Factory, where, it was said, he was certain to become quite a ‘big cheese’. His elder brother, equally successful, was a barrister in London.

  Tom inspected the bedrooms. There were four, all good rooms. All the beds were made up with clean sheets. Excluding Greg and Ju’s room, Tom liked best the one with the view over the garden, though the front ones were nice too, whence the minaret chimney of the Tweed Mill was visible between the planes. He decided to let Emma choose. Biggins occupied a ‘healthy eminence’, and standing at the back window Tom could see most of the principal monuments of Ennistone: the Institute, the gilded cupola of the Hall, the blunt grey tower of St Olaf’s, the striated spire of St Paul’s (Father Bernard’s ‘shop’), the thin spire of the Catholic ‘tin church’ in Burkestown, the bulky Methodist church in Druidsdale, the Friends’ Meeting House, Bowcocks department store, the gasworks, the Glove Factory (a castellated nineteenth-century brick building) and the new controversial Polytechnic building beyond the Common.

  Tom inspected the bathroom. The bathroom at his London digs (near Kings Cross) was a squalid penitential room, not clean and probably not cleanable, shared by a number of male lodgers. The Greg and Ju bathroom was a bower of luxury (Judy had a thing about baths) with the king-size bath set low in the tiled floor, and a matching basin and bidet all made of curiously fat and sensuously rounded red porcelain. The tiles were black. The taps and towel-rails were made
of (presumably imitation) gold. Fat fluffy black towels trimmed with red hung from the rails. Upon a gleaming black shelf was a row of jars and bottles containing (Tom had no doubt and he soon checked) celestial unguents. A tiled curtained archway concealed a shower, another such archway the loo. Tom decided that he must have a bath at once. He began to run the water, pouring in the oil and wine of the unguent shelf. A heavenly smell arose.

  While this was making he went into Greg and Ju’s bedroom and opened the sliding door of the huge wall cupboard which ran the length of the room. A glittering array of garments met his eye. Both Greg and Judy were vain about their appearance; they were a handsome pair and loved clothes. Tom feasted his gaze upon Greg’s numerous well-tailored suits (he never wore jeans), sleek evening dress, fancy shirts, some with lace. A thousand silk ties. Ju’s clothes were nice, too, and smelt nice. She wore very feminine stuff with flounces, tucks, ruffs, gathers, nonsense, which she wore long and pulled in with little belts, to her slim waist. In winter she wore fine light tweed dresses over brilliantly coloured blouses with smart scarves even silkier than Greg’s ties. Her summer dresses were made of that sort of feather-weight polyester which is what cotton is like when it goes to heaven. Tom fingered some of these dresses and sighed. He reflected that these yummy clothes must represent Greg and Judy’s second team. The first team was even now gladdening the eyes of Americans in Florida.

  As the clothes slid silently and easily along the rail upon their sleek hangers, Tom’s hand fastened on something which looked as if it was made of feathers and felt as if it was made of gauze. He drew it out: a very pale blue négligé with multiple cufflets and collarettes. He thrust his hands into the sleeves and pulled it on and gazed at himself in the long swinging mahogany-framed mirror which must so often have reflected that beautiful and fortunate pair. With his tumbling curly locks and his smooth fresh complexion Tom looked, well, quite extraordinary. He looked at himself for a moment with surprise and admiration, then decided to go and show himself to Emma. He skipped daintily down the stairs and flounced into the study.