The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  The first and most dramatic change had occurred on a drunken evening in December. Tom was setting out with some friends for a ‘pub crawl’ in central London. As they were leaving Tom’s lodgings they ran into Scarlett-Taylor. Out of an impulse of politeness and curiosity, since he still scarcely knew the Irishman, Tom asked him to join them. Rather to his surprise Scarlett-Taylor agreed, and accompanied them though with a silent and preoccupied air. The ‘crawl’ was to begin at the Black Horse in north Soho, to proceed through the more riotous pubs of south Soho, through Leicester Square, and down Whitehall to the river. The pubs were decorated for Christmas, noisy and rather full. Scarlett-Taylor said little but drank, Tom noticed, a great deal. First beer then whisky. The final objective was the Red Lion at the far end of Whitehall, but by the time they got as far as the Old Shades most of the others had disappeared, leaving Tom, finally, in charge of his rather drunken fellow lodger. When they arrived at the Red Lion it was closed. Tom and Scarlett-Taylor went on to the river, on to the bridge, then along the embankment. The tide was in and, leaning over, they could almost touch the water which was being whipped into wavelets by the east wind. Scarlett-Taylor’s spectacles actually fell off and were caught in mid-air. They began to walk back along Whitehall with their coat collars turned up. Tom, feeling the airy liberated bonhomie of the happily drunk man, took Scarlett-Taylor’s arm, but was not put out when his friend, as he now thought of him, quickly detached himself. Then Tom began, rather loudly, to sing. He had a pleasant modest baritone from which he derived considerable pleasure and which, when it did not seem too much like showing off, he liked to exhibit. He began to sing an Elizabethan song: If she forsake me I must die. Shall I tell her so? In the second verse Scarlett-Taylor joined in. Tom checked his own voice abruptly, stopped in his tracks and held on to a lamp post. Scarlett-Taylor possessed a marvellous counter-tenor voice.

  When we suddenly learn that some unobtrusive fellow is a chess champion or great tennis player, the man is physically transformed for us. So it was with Tom. In the instant, Scarlett-Taylor was a different being. And in the instant too, deep in his mind, Tom made an important and necessary decision. He was interested enough in singing to recognize an exceptional voice and to covet it. There was a quick tiny fierce impulse of pure envy, a sense of passionate rivalry for the world. But almost in the same moment of recognition, making one of those moves of genuine sympathy by which we defend our egoism, Tom embraced his rival and drew him in to himself, making that superb voice his own possession. He would be endlessly proud of Scarlett-Taylor and take what he later called ‘Emma’s secret weapon’ as a credit to himself. Ownership would preclude envy; this remarkable sound and its owner were now his. Thus Tom easily enlarged his ego or (according to one’s point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world: a movement of salvation which for him was easy, for others (George, for instance) very hard.

  The immediate problem, however, was to stop Emma from singing. Tom’s untrained voice had been loud. Emma’s trained voice was resonant, piercing and so extremely strange, almost an uncanny sound. Windows opened in the Horse Guards Hotel. Several people crossed the road from the Old Admiralty Building. Others, leaving the Whitehall Theatre, stopped amazed, gazed about bewildered. Roisterers in Trafalgar Square approached like rats after a piper. A policeman appeared. Tom bundled Emma, still singing, into a taxi, where the Irish boy promptly fell asleep. Tom laughed quietly, profoundly, with tears of pure pleasure in his eyes, all the way back to the digs.

  Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor as he was ‘in himself’ was not soon known to Tom, though they became friends, and doubtless never entirely known (but then who is ever entirely known?). Some general account must, however, be briefly given of him who is Horatio to our Hamlet, or (for they often exchanged roles) Hamlet to our Horatio.

  Scarlett-Taylor was born in County Wicklow, between the mountains and the sea. His father’s ancestors had been landowners in the west of Ireland, but his father and grandfather, proceeding from English public schools to Trinity College, Dublin, were Dublin lawyers. His mother (nee Gordon) came from Ulster, the County Down, where her ancestors had been sheep fanners, her father a doctor. She had been sent to a ‘finishing school’ in Switzerland and then to Trinity, where she met Emma’s father. Both sides of the family were Protestants and horsemen. Emma was an only child. His father died when he was twelve, and his mother went to live in Brussels, near her sister who had married a Belgian architect. Emma began his growing-up in Dublin in a Georgian house near Merrion Square with a semi-circular fanlight and a shiny black door with a brass dolphin knocker, and continued it in Brussels in a big dark flat in a gloomy respectable street not far from the Avenue Louise, with pollarded plane trees and tall thin peaky houses made of pale yellow brick. His handsome sweet witty mother grew older. The Belgian architect and his wife were no more. Emma, vaguely destined for Trinity, declined to return to his native land. He liked Brussels, not the old grand parts, not the shiny new parts, but the melancholy bourgeois streets, still so quiet and full of a not inaccessible past, where suddenly on a corner there would be found a little bar with red check table-cloths and aspidistras and a black cat. He liked London too, and foresaw his future as a Londoner. He hated, with all his heart and soul, Ireland, the Irish, and himself.

  Dr Johnson said that when a man says his heart bleeds for his country he experiences no uncomfortable sensation. With Emma it was otherwise. It had mattered little to him as a child that his great-grandfather’s house had been burnt by ‘the rebels’. He had admired the men of 1916 and the fight for Ireland’s freedom. Ireland, indeed, had made him a historian. His father never talked politics, lived in a narrow company of old friends, seemed more at home with his books. Sometimes it seemed as if his father had had a piece of his past removed; like losing a lung or a kidney, one had to ‘take things quietly’. He easily forgave Emma’s indifference to horses, he wished he had been a scholar, he wanted Emma to be one. He died before the resumption of the ‘troubles’.

  Emma had been brought up as a vague Anglican. Both his parents were vague Anglicans, occasional church-goers, whose sacred text was Cranmer’s Prayer Book. Emma’s mother taught him to pray, then left him alone with God. Emma and God parted company, but he felt an attachment to the Church. He went to an English public school where he sang in the choir and obtained his nickname. He had never been anti-Catholic. He envied the ritual, he loved the Latin mass, he approved of the full churches. Religion was history, and history taught tolerance. Then the shooting started. Emma watched the slaughter taking place in the gratuitous untimely cause of a ‘United Ireland’. He saw with unutterable grief the emergence of Protestant murderers, as vile as their foes. He felt guilt and misery and rage. The little town near his mother’s family house was blown apart by a bomb placed in the sad little main street with its white houses and its six pubs. Protestants and Catholics died together. He visited Belfast and saw the handsome city wrecked, its public buildings destroyed, its abandoned streets turned into bricked-up tombs. As it seemed to him nobody cared much, not even the decent English taxpayers who paid the bill, not even the Protestants in the South. So long as the bombs stayed in Ulster, there was even a mild satisfaction in hearing about them. For the first occasion in his own lifetime Emma had a close-up view of human wickedness; and in his very private confused self-rage he rejected his Irishness, he tore it to shreds in sick futile anger, sometimes scarcely knowing what it was he detested most in the stew of hatred for which he so despised himself. He never mentioned Irish matters to his mother, and she never spoke of Ireland either. When their native land was named by others he saw on her face the same frozen look which he felt on his own. He had no country. He envied Tom who had no sense of nationality and did not seem to need one. (That, presumably, was the essence of being English.) Yet when in his mind Emma tried to resolve himself into being English, it was impossible, he was utterly utterly not English. When people said (f
or his voice, damnably, betrayed him), ‘You’re Irish?’, and he replied, ‘Anglo- Irish’, and they said, ‘Oh, so you’re not real Irish,’ Emma Scarlett-Taylor smiled faintly and said nothing. He felt equally bitter and even more taciturn over another problem to do with his sense of identity. He was not sure whether or not he was homosexual. Perhaps this did not matter too much, however, since after a few unpleasant little adventures he had decided to give up sex.

  Scarlett-Taylor’s given name had a double meaning, so that he had even entered the world with a dual nationality, under two flags. His father was thinking of the great philosopher, his mother of the Redeemer. His father had regarded Anglicanism as a religion of the Enlightenment, at any rate as a rational protest against the foul superstition with which, in Dublin, he was surrounded. His mother was romantically pious and still attended the English Church in Brussels and sang the old hymns in her sweet fading voice. (She had a pretty soprano and used to do amusing imitations of Richard Tauber.) Emma resembled his father, whom he loved very much: the shock waves of that loss still stirred him. He was, like his father, tall, with straight straw-coloured hair and delicate pale lips and narrow light-blue eyes. He dressed, like his father, in smart old-fashioned suits with waistcoats. (Only, whereas his father had had the best tailor in Dublin, Emma bought his clothes second-hand.) He wore butterfly collars and cravats, and possessed (his father’s) a watch with a chain. He wore narrow rimless glasses in imitation of his father’s pince-nez. He looked like a scholar and a gentleman. He was also athletic. His father had been a good tennis player and had organized ‘the cricket game’ in Dublin. (For Emma’s father cricket, like Anglicanism, was a protest activity.) Emma was also good at tennis, and at school had been able to hit a cricket ball harder and further than anyone else. By now, however, he had given up athletic games, partly because he had become increasingly short-sighted. He had also, more lately, given up chess.

  The next thing to give up was singing. Emma was not timidly modest about his accomplishments. He knew that he was, in the academic sense, very clever. He did not need to be told by his tutor that he would get a good first-class degree. Then some time after that he would become a historian. He also knew that he had an exceptionally good voice. Various people had urged him to become a professional singer. Emma regarded the exercise of his gift rather in the light of a temptation. He knew, and part of him clearly loved, the remarkable unique personal sense of power which a good singer experiences, something more psychosomatically personal, perhaps, than the exercise of any other talent. His pleasure in his vocal triumph at school seemed to him sinister, quite unlike the clean satisfaction of academic work. In any case, he now simply had no time for singing. Whenever possible he kept his talent a secret, and was angry with himself for having got drunk (which he rarely, but then extremely, did) and given himself away to Tom McCaffrey, whom he had thereafter sworn to secrecy. However, he had not yet broken off relations with his dangerous and charming gift. He still went to see his singing teacher, a gloomy man, a failed composer, once an opera singer, who lived near Harrods, and from whom he continued to take lessons, and conceal how little he practised. Emma had learnt some harmony from the music master at school; this represented another and different temptation into which also Tom tiresomely entered. Emma had first met Tom when Emma’s piano, being lugged up to his room by some cross removal men, had stuck on the stairs. Tom had never yet heard a sound out of the piano, but invented by himself the idea that Emma could compose music. Tom’s next idea was a pop group, music by Emma, lyrics by Tom, to be called ‘the Shaxbirds’. Emma certainly did not, even momentarily, hate music the way he hated Ireland; but he could not come to terms with it any more than he could with his sex life.

  Emma’s first view of Tom was that he was a tactless nuisance. How had it come about that he had let Tom seem to ‘acquire’ him? Tom was indiscreetly anxious to show off his friendship with someone whom he regarded as so superior and difficile. Tom’s thoughtless assumption of the possibility of affection between them alarmed Emma, Tom’s capacity for happiness amazed him. At Christmas Tom had unexpectedly given Emma a book (Marvell’s Poems). To reciprocate, Emma had hastily given Tom a cherished knife. How had that come about? Tom positively wanted to look after him. The trip to Ennistone, awfully unwise perhaps, was part of this process. Emma could not help being moved by the sheer confidence of Tom’s friendliness to him, but he was not at all sure that he wanted to be looked after, or that Tom had the faintest idea what his new friend was really like.

  When Alex had returned with Ruby from the Institute, with John Robert Rozanov’s letter burning away in her pocket, she had gone straight upstairs to the drawing-room but had not at once opened the letter. Standing in the bow window, looking out at the cold startled trees and the wet green roof of the Slipper House, she had given herself up to a tide of emotion. Or perhaps it was more like being on a slow dreamy switchback, flying down, then flying up, a sort of giddiness, a moment of anticipation felt in the entrails. There was slight nausea and a sense of being moved suddenly about as in some state of drunkenness. Alex was surprised at her sensations, yet she apprehended too that she had been in an emotional state for some time now, as if expecting something to happen. This was not just the melancholia of the ageing woman; there was something more positive, more like an exasperation with the world expressing itself as a desire for violent change. She recalled that she had dreamed of her nanny last night; that was a portent, not always a happy one.

  She took out the letter, fingered it and at last hurriedly opened it. It read as follows:

  16 Hare Lane

  Ennistone

  Dear Mrs McCaffrey,

  I wonder if you could be so good as to come and see me? There is something I would like to ask you. Any morning would be suitable. Could you let me know when? I am afraid that I am not on the telephone.

  With kind regards,

  Yours sincerely,

  J. R. Rozanov

  Alex stared at this text for a long time. It remained opaque, as disturbing and impenetrable as a message in a foreign tongue suddenly flashed upon a wall. Its immediate effect upon her was of disappointment. What had she crazily expected? ‘Alex, you have always been in my heart. I feel I must … etc.’ This formal note ‘with kind regards’ was cold indeed. ‘There is something I would like to ask you.’ No passionate proposal would be heralded by such language. Alex felt, for a moment, intensely childishly let down. She crumpled the letter in her hands. Then she uncrumpled it again.

  It was cool but was it not nevertheless sufficiently mysterious? After all, if John Robert did want to approach her in sentimental mood he would be far too proud to show his hand at once. In fact such a letter would be exactly the kind which he would write, suggesting a meeting, giving nothing away. He would want to look at her, converse perhaps with a show of indifference, make some estimate of her feelings. At the Baths he had seemed to be looking around in search of someone. Why had he come back to Ennistone? It could not just be to try the effect of the waters on his arthritis. Alex had met John Robert at a period of youth when deep and lasting impressions are made. Had John Robert, attracted by Linda, really loved Alex? He might well have thought that Geoffrey Stillowen’s daughter was beyond his reach. Had he vividly and regretfully remembered her all these years? And in a moment Alex was saying to herself: how could he not !

  She checked these speculations, however. A self-protective cunning made her deliberately calmer. She set herself to think more simply about the mechanics of the visit. He did not suggest visiting her, that was understandable. Alex had already devoted some imagination to the scene of her meeting with the philosopher. She had certainly not wanted to confront him at the Baths. She had pictured meeting him here, in her own drawing-room. Ruby would let him in. She would hear his heavy step upon the stair. She had even considered pretexts upon which she could invite him. She was fortunate to have the problem of the first move so promptly solved, though a walk through Ennistone in
this weather would not improve her appearance. He too wanted the advantage of his home ground.

  Hare Lane. She did not recognize the address. She rang the bell for Ruby. Ruby, with a tread as heavy as Rozanov’s, mounted the stairs and presented her stony face and monumental incarnation.

  ‘Ruby, Professor Rozanov has written to me from an address in Hare Lane. Where is Hare Lane?’

  Ruby replied, ‘It’s in Burkestown, near the level crossing.’ She added, ‘It’s the old house.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s his old house, his mum’s place, where he was born.’

  Alex considered this. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Number sixteen,’ said Ruby. ‘Everyone knows that!’

  ‘Thank you, Ruby.’

  Ruby departed.

  Alex felt annoyed that Ruby had known so much. Too much.

  Should she reply to the letter at once? It might be a mistake to seem too eager. Suppose she waited a few days, then wrote casually as if his letter had slipped her mind? But she could not feign this. The idea of setting pen to paper was already too attractive. Her reply must catch today’s post. Having decided this, she prolonged her reflections, luxuriated in them up to the neck as in the hot water of the ‘stew’. At last, with slow movements, she went to her desk and set out pen and paper and wrote as follows: