The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

  The big fox looked down at Zed with its cold pale eyes, which were sombre and ruthless and sad, awful eyes which knew not of the human world. The fox’s face, with its heavy black marking, looked macabre and wild, a face that devoured other faces. Zed knew that he must stand. If he turned and ran the fox would pursue him and in a few steps those jaws would crack his back. Zed could see the fox’s teeth, wrinkling a little the soft black lip of the muzzle. And still they stared, the fox’s black paw still raised in the attitude in which Zed had surprised him. They were so close that Zed could feel the warm current of his enemy’s breath. He stared up. There was no movement he could make to assert his doghood. At any movement the fox might think he was about to flee, and leap. Zed measured the terrible strength and the more terrible will that confronted him. He stared, calling up his own will and the strange authority which his species derived, alone among other animals, from the society of the human race.

  Then a strange thing happened. The fox turned his head a little and lowered it right down until his muzzle almost touched the grass, still keeping his blue pale wild eyes fixed upon Zed. Then he dropped his black paw and sidled a little, as in a slow dance, moving round the dog. Zed moved slightly keeping his face resolutely toward the fox and staring with his blue-black eyes in which there was reflected so much of the expression of man. The fox continued to move round Zed with his head lowered and his eyes gazing, moving as in a very slow rhythmic dance, and Zed continued, upon the same spot, to turn. Then, quite suddenly, there was a noise nearby, human voices. The fox turned and in a second vanished. Zed sat down where he was. He felt so strange, as if he pitied the fox, or almost envied him, and did not want to return to the world of happiness. After a moment or two, avoiding Brian and Gabriel (for it was they), he ran back toward the garage, where the door was still shut. Outside on the gravel he began playing with the stones, tapping them with his little white paw as if they were his ball, and he forgot about the fox.

  ‘He’s sweet,’ said Hattie, holding Zed in her arms.

  On entering the garden from the back gate, Adam and Zed had run straight on toward the garage, passing the Slipper House toward which the grown-ups wended their slower way. Adam had sat in the Rolls, turning the wheel this way and that, stood up to observe George, sat again, then emerged to find Zed waiting and had inspected the colony of martins underneath the eaves who were busy renovating last year’s nests. Later in the summer the baby birds would be closely visible, propped up in the nests like little dolls with white faces. Then Brian and Gabriel had come to find him, and he had run back with Zed to find Hattie and Pearl standing outside on the grass with Father Bernard. Zed had run straight to Hattie, who had picked him up and was pressing her nose into his furry shoulder while he licked her forehead. The combination of the dry coolish tickly fur and the warm round small body agitated with slightly struggling but trustful doggy affection and the smooth wet tongue caressing her brow quite overcame poor Hattie. She could feel Zed’s heart beating fast and her own heart beat fast too. She wanted to hug the dog and cry. She put him down hastily. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Zed,’ said Adam. He touched the skirt of Hattie’s dress. Hattie had put on a flowery summer dress earlier in the morning, but had changed into a straight many-buttoned navy blue shift over a blue-and-white striped shirt blouse when she decided to put her hair up.

  ‘They are alpha and omega,’ said Father Bernard smiling.

  The cool April sun was shining out of a cool blue sky, making the green tiles of the Slipper House glisten as if they were wet. Dew upon the grass, newly come into the moving sunlight, flashed like diamonds; and a trail of dewy footprints across the lawn from the little copse which occupied the bottom of the garden presaged the footpath dreaded by Alex.

  Pearl, who had persuaded Hattie to emerge, now stood behind her in the doorway of the house. She was wearing over her brown dress an apron which she had deliberately failed to remove when she saw from the window the advancing ‘company’. She had folded her arms in front of her and stood at attention, wearing her calm dour Mexican look, brown as her dress. She was aware of the priest casting curious glances at her and trying in vain to catch her eye with his nervous girlish smile.

  The Brian McCaffreys returning from a shopping expedition (it was Saturday) had met Father Bernard who had proudly announced his destination. Gabriel was at once anxious, with this excuse, to ‘drop in’ and catch a glimpse of the famous girl. The news that John Robert Rozanov’s grand-daughter was installed at the Slipper House was the talk of the Institute. Her appearance there was eagerly awaited. In a sudden gust of possessive emotion, about which she felt secretive and almost guilty, Gabriel felt that she must see the waif and establish a special relation with her before she became the property of everybody. She tried to conceal the quality of her interest from Brian and Adam. She also wanted to find out whether John Robert had committed Hattie to Alex’s care. She had suggested a subsequent visit to Alex, but Brian was in no mood to see his mother. Although he complained he was, however, not unwilling to demonstrate his independence of her by visiting the Slipper House, and he too wanted to look at the girl.

  Gabriel had impulsively handed over a cake (purchased for Leafy Ridge tea-time) which Hattie had handed to Pearl who had put it inside the front door on the floor. Gabriel’s earnest wet eyes were fixed with diffident sympathy upon Hattie. Gabriel had today had the infelicitous idea of tying her floppy hair back with a ribbon. Her face looked strained and shiny, her nose red in the April wind. Arrived, she felt embarrassed and apologetic, having awkwardly refused Hattie’s suggestion that they should come in. She now regretted this refusal, but could think of no way of retrieving the blunder which kept Hattie out on the grass shivering slightly in the cold wind. Gabriel was also upset because she had seen for a moment, just as she arrived at the Slipper House, the figure of George standing near the back door of Belmont and looking down the garden.

  Hattie’s simple pinafore dress made her look schoolgirlish, although her white-blond hair had been assembled, without Pearl’s aid, into a large woven bun which climbed up the back of her head. She looked thin, almost ill (which she was not), untouched by sun, her pallid unmarked complexion damp like the stem of a winter plant. Her face, timid again, now after she had set Zed down, so lacked emphasis and colour that she seemed like a study in white by a painter whose whim it was to make a girl’s face scarcely appear from the faint hues of a uniformly milky canvas. Only her lips, poised and pouting a little with some persisting question, showed a faint natural pink. And her eyes, marbled with whiteness, were a faint but very clear pale blue.

  Brian, standing behind Gabriel and smiling, showing his wolf teeth, thought, what a funny little drowned rat of a thing. And yet in two or three years that could be a beautiful woman.

  Gabriel was saying, ‘If you need anything, please just let us know. Our telephone number, I’ll write it down, sorry I haven’t got a - Brian, could you write down our telephone number for — ’

  ‘It’s in the book,’ said Brian.

  ‘Oh, of course, anyway I expect Mrs McCaffrey is looking after you?’ Even after years of marriage it did not really occur to Gabriel that there was any Mrs McCaffrey except Alex. She cast a glance toward Belmont. The figure of George had disappeared.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Hattie, ‘we’re on our own. I haven’t even met Mrs McCaffrey. I suppose I ought to have done?’ She turned for a moment to Pearl, who remained rigid with folded arms.

  ‘I expect your grandfather drops in to see you have everything — ’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen him either - we don’t know, do we, Pearl - whether he’s - where he is exactly — ’

  ‘Oh dear!’ said Gabriel, ‘I mean — ’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ said Brian.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hattie, not comically but awkwardly, making Brian’s brusque question seem even ruder. Realizing this she added, ‘I expect I shall be studying.’

  ‘We shall
be studying,’ said Father Bernard smiling.

  ‘What will you study?’ said Gabriel.

  ‘I don’t know — I don’t really know anything much — ’

  ‘Can you swim?’ said Brian.

  Oh yes — ’

  ‘Then I expect we’ll see you at the Baths. Everyone in Ennistone comes to the Baths. Eh?’

  There was a pause. Adam had withdrawn with Zed and was standing behind Brian on the side toward the back gate, looking as if he wanted to go away. He stood with his feet wide apart, wearing the corduroy knee breeches and brown jersey which was the uniform of his school. His round brown eyes scanned Hattie with the puzzlement of a young savage.

  Hattie looked at him and said, ‘I like your togs.’

  The word ‘togs’ emerged from Hattie’s lips betokening, in a way which all present obscurely understood, her curious unbelongingness, her statelessness, her lack of a native tongue and a native land.

  Adam bowed.

  ‘It’s his school uniform,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘How nice — ’

  ‘Well, we must go,’ said Brian. ‘We must leave you two to your studies! Come on, Gabriel.’

  ‘You will, won’t you — ’

  ‘Yes, of course— ’

  ‘Good-bye, then — ’

  ‘So kind — ’

  Brian and Gabriel emerged from the back gate into Forum Way. Adam and Zed had run out before them.

  ‘Well, what did you think?’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Was that her school uniform?’

  ‘Of course not! It was rather smart, I thought — ’

  ‘She’s an infant. She ought to be in white frills.’

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  ‘Nothing. She’s a skinny little American.’

  ‘She hadn’t much of an American accent, more English public school.’

  ‘Yuk!’

  ‘I thought she was sweet.’

  ‘Of course you did. She thought Zed was sweet.’

  ‘Why are you so cross?’

  ‘I’m always cross.’

  ‘You were quite rude.’

  ‘So were you, you were salivating with curiosity.’

  ‘Oh dear — ’

  ‘And what on earth possessed you to give her our cake?’

  ‘We can get another.’

  ‘They’ll all be gone.’

  ‘Did you see George?’

  ‘George? Has he got himself inside that house already?’

  ‘He was standing up near Belmont - I think — ’

  ‘You imagined it. I didn’t see him. You’ve got George on the brain.’

  ‘We ought to have said something nice to the maid,’ said Gabriel. ‘No one spoke to her.’

  ‘I suppose she’s American.’

  ‘No, someone at the Baths said she was some sort of relation of Ruby’s.’

  ‘Of Ruby’s? How perfectly horrible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it makes things connect. I don’t want things to connect.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘All connections are sinister. I don’t want anything to connect with anything.’

  ‘Did you like her, the little girl, Miss Meynell?’ Gabriel asked Adam whom they had just caught up with.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  Gabriel thought, Oh dear, he’s jealous! And he wasn’t really pleased because I’d bought the cracked jug, well, he was pleased but not enough. And Brian thinks I think about George. And I do think about George. I suppose that was George I saw and I didn’t imagine it? I do wish I had more children. I’d love a little girl like Hattie. I wish George was my child too. Oh what nonsense my poor head is full of. She said, ‘Let’s invite her round.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Miss Meynell of course. She must be lonely — ’

  ‘She won’t be lonely for long,’ said Brian. ‘Mark my words, that girl will be a troublemaker.’

  ‘I can’t think why you — ’

  ‘And we will not invite her round. For heaven’s sake, don’t let us mess about with anything to do with Rozanov. Everything about that man brings bad luck. And do take that bloody ribbon off your hair, do you want to look sixteen too?’

  After the Brian McCaffreys had disappeared out of the back gate and Hattie and her ‘tutor’ had gone into the sitting-room, Pearl Scotney was left alone. She put Gabriel’s impulsive cake away in a tin and put on her coat and went out into the garden. Near the Slipper House the lawn, broad and tree-dotted near the house, began to narrow to a meander of green, coming to an end in the thicker maze of trees and shrubs at the end of the garden. Here there was a garden shed, a space for a bonfire, and an area which had once been a grass tennis court. There was also the remains of a small vegetable garden. (The old gardener no longer came regularly.) Pearl walked this way, away from Belmont, and threaded between lilac and viburnum and buddleia and azalea and rhus and small Japanese maples which were putting out vivid curly red buds which looked like decorations made out of coral. Here and there were some taller trees, fir and chestnut and an old ilex. This region, which mixed higher and lower vegetation, was sometimes called ‘the shrubbery’, sometimes ‘the copse’. The paths were grassy, or else of sad dark earth grown over with green moss.

  Pearl, who liked plants and trees, noticed her surroundings and, as human beings can, took a little pleasure in them in the middle of her general large unhappiness. She felt as she walked, giddy, suffering one of those fits of non- Identity which probably attack most souls at some time. As she had stood at attention behind her ‘young mistress’ at the door of the house she had felt, in her apron uniform, invisible. Well, the priest had noticed her; but she had not liked his notice. That young Mrs McCaffrey had thrown her one or two of her vague over-sweet smiles, but that meant nothing. Hattie’s ‘we’ meant nothing too. Well, it meant something just now in Hattie’s heart; but Hattie’s heart was entering a danger zone, vulnerable to the world, soon to be public property. Her heart which now hugged its little world in a small space, curled up as in a womb, would soon be enlarged to welcome many, perhaps very many, new loves. New desires, new attractions, new knowledge must come now. Hattie was at the end, the very last soft inaudible breath, of her childhood. It was the time, the logical time, for Pearl to let go, indeed to be forced to let go. A mother might feel like this, she thought. But after all a mother is forever. I am not Hattie’s mother or her sister or even her second cousin. Hattie has no conception of my relationship to her, and will easily begin to feel it to be unreal and to belong to the past.

  Pearl had thought these thoughts many times before, prophetically. Now that the time had come to think them for real, she was so tired of them that she could not regard them as posing any problem she could possibly solve. She had wondered whether, in putting Hattie and herself into the Slipper House, like two dolls put away in a doll’s house, John Robert had had any particular end in view. Pearl had imagined, continuing her unremitting guesswork about John Robert’s mind, that he had intended Mrs McCaffrey to ‘keep an eye’ on Hattie, perhaps to take her over. But this peril, which Pearl had been determined to resist, had not so far materialized. Meanwhile she discouraged Hattie from seeing Alex. It seemed that they were really ‘on their own’. After all, had they not always been so? Only when Hattie was a child ‘on their own’ had had a different sense. Hattie had survived marvellously, they had both done, without a social world. They knew a few of Margot’s (new very respectable) friends. They had made, in their tramping about Europe, no permanent acquaintances, and this had been partly, Pearl now recognized, because of Pearl’s possessiveness as well as because of Hattie’s shyness. Hattie had school friends (Verity Smaldon, for instance) to whom Pearl had surrendered her for brief visits. But these were fragile attachments, mere contextual connections. Hattie, so infinitely and emptily ready for the world, was still, unless Pearl possessed her, unpossessed.

  But what about John Robert? Thro
ughout the years of Pearl’s regime the philosopher had manifested an extraordinary combination of absolute correctness and absolute indifference. Money and plans and instructions materialized with prompt effective clarity. Go here, go there, do this, do that. But mainly the great man had remained invisible, and when he did appear his attentions to Hattie were vague, distracted, absent-minded and reluctant. He was always ‘elsewhere’. He notoriously ‘did not like children’, and had never made any serious attempt to ‘get on’ with his grand-daughter, whose wordless diffidence matched his own monumental awkwardness and lack of tact. His relations with Pearl had been even more, though correct, without substance. John Robert had taken one look at Pearl and had decided to trust her absolutely. It seemed to her that he had never looked at her since. How much he must have understood in the first look. Or more likely, how carelessly he had gambled with Hattie’s welfare and her happiness. If Hattie had detested Pearl she would never have told John Robert. Did he realize this, did he care? The absoluteness of the trust, the large sums of money involved, the larger sums of more important matters, sometimes stunned Pearl and touched her with a terrible deep touch. At the same time, once the trust was given, she became invisible, she received only instructions, never encouragement or praise. These she would more cheerfully have done without if she had felt that John Robert thought of her even sometimes as something other than an efficient instrument of his will.

  Pearl had, at the start, been frightened of John Robert and of the whole situation, though also, of course, excited and elated by it. It was later, when Pearl felt calm and secure enough to observe Rozanov, herself unobserved (and since she was ‘invisible’ she had many such chances) that the terrible ailment began. How charmless that big, awkward man was, careless about Hattie, egotistically absent-minded, consulting always his convenience and oblivious of theirs. How ugly he was too, fat and flabby and wet-mouthed with jagged yellow teeth. (This was before he had acquired the false ones commented on by George.) His big head and big hooked nose made him look like a vast puppet in a carnival. His movements were graceless and clumsy. His stare was startled and disconcerting as if, when he looked at someone, he simultaneously recalled something awful which had nothing to do with the person looked at. With all this there went a certain decisive precision which Pearl, reciprocating his trust, relied upon. Where the girls’ arrangements were concerned, he meant and did what he said. But what he said to her were only orders. They never had a conversation.