The Philosopher's Pupil

by Iris Murdoch

‘Good, good, but don’t feel you have to stand so still, I’ve told you before, you’re a singer not a soldier, all right, some singers jig about too much, but you’re too afraid of making faces and moving your hands, don’t be so dignified, too great a sense of dignity can hinder an artist, it’s an aspect of selfishness, give yourself, relax, let it sing through you as the Japanese would say! And keep the sound well up, well up, don’t think of your vocal cords, put yourself right up in your brow, feel it as a vast area full of empty caverns where free spiralling columns of air vibrate! Vibrate! You still haven’t got that absolute high pianissimo which moves away into the distance into a thin whisper of pure sound like a thin thin tongue of faintly trembling steel. Ah, you have much to do — sometimes I think you are just coasting along.’ Mr Hanway’s exhortations, often highly metaphorical, were always accompanied with elaborate mime. ‘Now, dear boy, let us have special exercises and then on to the Bach Magnificat, I shall hear your beautiful Esurient es …’

  As Emma came out into the bright sunshine after his lesson, having failed once more to ‘say anything’ to Mr Hanway, he felt that dazed giddiness again as he shielded his eyes, the vertigo of an abomination of loneliness and loss, where silent endless streaming snowflakes blinded him and obliterated all meaning. He remembered a dream where he had wandered in vast vibrating caverns, realizing with despair that they were caves of ice deep underneath a glacier where he was destined soon to fall to his knees and die.

  ‘Must we have all the light shut out by those bloody plants?’ said Brian.

  ‘I like to have a living thing near me,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Aren’t I a living thing? Do you want me to squat on the window ledge while you wash up?’

  ‘Sorry, I’ll move them.’

  ‘And I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the kitchen, you smoke over the sink, it gets everywhere — ’

  It was two days since the events at the Slipper House (which had occurred on Saturday, it being now Monday). Gabriel and Brian were having breakfast in the kitchen at Como. Brian was cross this morning because it was Monday and because Gabriel, reaching out in the night for the glass of water she always kept beside her, had tapped her wedding-ring upon the glass top of the dressing-table and woken him up, after which he was unable to go to sleep again.

  Sitting on a chair in the corner, Adam was holding Zed on his knee and murmuring to him almost inaudibly. This ritual occurred every morning. Gabriel knew without being told that Adam was explaining that he was only going away to school and would very soon be back and that Zed was to be a good dog and not to worry. Zed listened to these comforting admonitions on each occasion with an air of alert bright-eyed interest, occasionally thrusting forward to lick Adam’s nose. This scene filled Gabriel with the old familiar mixture of intense love and intense fear, each emotion as it were jacking the other up.

  Adam was dressed in his prep school uniform, the ‘togs’ which had pleased Hattie, blue jersey, brown corduroy knee-breeches, and blue socks. Last night Brian and Gabriel had been arguing again about where Adam was to go to school next. Gabriel did not want him to go away from home, but she thought the Comprehensive School was ‘too rough’. There was a small private secondary school with quite a good reputation not far away on the road to London, and could he not go as a day boy, there was a school bus which ran in and out of Ennistone. Brian said this was out of the question, it would be far too expensive, especially as he would soon be out of a job. Gabriel said, good heavens, this is the first I’ve heard. Brian said he just meant everyone would soon be out of a job. Anyway what was wrong with the Comprehensive, it was a good school, the maths were excellent under Jeremy Blackett. Gabriel said what about his French and Latin which he was doing well at, the Comprehensive didn’t start French till fourteen and had never heard of Latin. Brian said he was exhausted and was going to bed.

  Looking at Adam and Zed, Gabriel thought about the awful scene at the seaside, and about her adventure with the fish. She had not talked to anybody about the fish. This connected in her mind with something weird which had happened last week. By herself in the house in the afternoon, washing some saucepans at the kitchen sink, she had heard Zed barking in the garden, and looking out between the potted plants had seen the amazing sight of a completely naked man hurrying across the lawn. She did not see him soon enough to see where he had come from, whether over the fence or down the side passage from the road. He seemed to be concerned with getting out of the garden by climbing one of the fences, either the one on the right or the one at the end, both of which he attempted in a helpless perfunctory way. Both fences were made of upright wooden slats about five feet high; the one at the bottom had two horizontal beams nailed along it, the one on the right had not, but had branchy shrubs growing against it which would afford footholds. Gabriel saw that the runner was wearing brown laced-up shoes with no socks. He had greasy longish grey hair, and a look of preoccupied anxiety on his face which she could see clearly as he tried to climb into an old rosemary bush, breaking the brittle branches with loud cracks and trampling them down. After the first moment of shock Gabriel felt no fear of the man, only pity and fear for him, for the pathetic pale soiled vulnerability of his flabby unyoung flesh, as he now struggled at the bottom of the garden, gripping the top of the fence (which Gabriel knew to be jagged and full of splinters) with two hands, and trying to lodge his awkward shoes upon the sloping transverse beams off which they kept slipping. All this time Zed was continuing to dance round the man’s heels barking fiercely. Gabriel imagined him astride upon that sharp jagged fence and covered her eyes, not knowing what to do. She wanted to run out into the garden, to soothe him (for she did not doubt that he was mad, this was no youngster’s jape), bring him inside, give him clothing and a cup of tea. But at this point she did feel frightened. Suppose he were violent? Should she not telephone Brian, telephone the police, get help somewhere? Oughtn’t she to lock the doors? She ran out into the hall, then ran back to lock the garden door, then ran back into the hall and lifted the telephone, then set it down again. She decided she ought to go out into the garden. She hurried back to the kitchen window, but now the garden was empty and Zed had stopped barking. Gabriel unlocked the door and went out. Zed trotted towards her beaming with the satisfaction of duty done. Gabriel searched around, looking over the fences and into the shed, but the man was nowhere to be seen; he had vanished like a hallucination. Gabriel went slowly back to the house. She decided not to telephone the police. The police might arrest him, be rough with him, charge him, imprison him, whereas if he were left alone he might recover and find his way home, or someone might befriend him and look after him as she might have done if only she had had more courage! Then she remembered the Indian man at the Baths, whom she had never seen again. In the evening she told the story to Brian, but making light of it, laughing a bit, then suddenly crying. Brian got the impression that she was being brave about a terrible experience. (And in a way it had been a terrible experience, an ordeal of helpless and frustrated pity.) He said that she ought to have telephoned the police, but now there was no point. (Brian was reluctant to get in touch with the police, because he hated ‘trouble’ and anything to do with publicity, which might get his name mentioned in the papers.) The next day however at the office he changed his mind and rang the police but without alerting Gabriel. Confronted by a policeman on the doorstep, Gabriel was instantly certain that either Adam or Brian was dead. When the policeman solemnly made clear the reason for his visit she was incoherent with relief. ‘Oh, I didn’t mind that at all!’ ‘Are you telling me, madam, that you don’t mind finding a naked man in your garden?’ ‘I don’t want him to be hurt!’ Tears. ‘I can see, madam, that the episode has upset you very much.’ And so on. It turned out soon after that the poor man was a patient of Ivor Sefton’s and was now in hospital. Brian, that evening, positively forbade Gabriel to go and visit him. That night she dreamed about fishes suffocating.

  ‘Good God!’ said Brian, who had been reading t
he Ennistone Gazette over breakfast.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re in the bloody paper!’

  ‘About the streaker?’

  ‘No, not that! I mean Tom and George, not us, but we’ll be dragged in. Good grief! whatever have they been up to, damn them? Tom wants thrashing and George ought to be put away, nothing but trouble and it’ll land on us. Look at this awful muck in their filthy gossip column!’ He handed the paper over to Gabriel.

  MCCAFFREY PRACTICAL JOKE GOES TOO FAR

  Extraordinary scenes took place on Saturday night at the so-called ‘Slipper House’, luxury abode in Victoria Park lately purchased from Mrs Alexandra McCaffrey by Professor John Robert Rozanov as a home for his grand-daughter Miss Harriet Meynell and her maidservant. ‘Rehearsals’ of The Mask of Aphrodite in the Ennistone Hall broke up in confusion when George and Tom McCaffrey led a drunken rabble to lay siege to the two damsels in their flossy seclusion. Drinking and shouting, the revellers, who included parish priest Reverend Bernard Jacoby, attempted to gain access to the house, and failed, proceeded to wreck the garden, fouling the lawns and damaging valuable trees and shrubs. Stones were thrown at the windows, one of which shattered a pane of antique stained-glass. Also present were a number of young men in outrageous ‘drag’ and their sponsor, our own Madame Diane. At last, with the connivance of the maidservant who opened the back door to him, George McCaffrey was enabled to enter the house, while his brother Tom howled with laughter outside. What happened next is not recorded! One fact has emerged. The so-called maid, Pearl Scotney, is no other than the sister of the afore-mentioned Madame D, who is the intimate friend of G. McCaffrey! What makes the whole episode more mysterious (or does it?) is that Tom McCaffrey, with professorial prodding and rather suggestive haste, has lately become engaged to the professorial granddaughter. Miss Meynell may or may not have found the evening amusing. Picking up the pieces should constitute an interesting problem in moral philosophy.

  Gabriel read it through with little mews of distress. ‘But it can’t be true, it can’t be true!’

  ‘It’s true now,’ said Brian. ‘We shall never hear the end of this.’

  It was never known for certain later on who was the author of this scurrilous piece. The general view was that it was the editor, Gavin Oare, who was annoyed with Hattie for her slightly haughty letter refusing an interview, and who had an old grudge against George because of a humiliation he had suffered at George’s hands some years ago (an incident at a party). It seems likely that the innocent occasion of the article was Maisie Chalmers, the Women’s Page girl, who had gone along with the others from the Green Man, without any malicious intent, and in fact left fairly early, soon after Anthea Eastcote. The next morning, laughing about it all, she gave the editor an account of junketings in the Belmont garden. Gavin Oare immediately sent out his spies (Mike Seanu was one) and pieced together a fuller and more interesting account. On the day after the Gazette’s revelations, its rival, The Swimmer, the weekly trade paper, also ran the story, taking up as usual a different ‘angle’ from that of the Gazette. According to The Swimmer, the ‘orgy’ had been arranged by Miss ‘Hattie’ Meynell herself, who had turned out to be considerably less stuffy than was at first imagined. The paper also struck a note of its own, reporting that ‘Our Sapphic Sisterhood of Women’s Libbers were also there in force, and the so-called “maid” was to be seen hugging and kissing, clasped to the bosom of another long-haired Amazon.’ The Swimmer repeated, even more suggestively, the tale that Tom and Hattie had become engaged in a hurry at the insistence of ‘our learned Professor’. George also figured prominently. One sentence read, ‘Miss Hattie, so hastily pledged to Tom, appears also to be on friendly terms with George, which goes to show that a McCaffrey will do anything for another McCaffrey.’ (The meaning of these words was much discussed.) The article was headed Prof’s grandchild launched in Ennistone.

  Not long after the Brian McCaffreys’ Monday breakfast time Tom, who never read the Ennistone Gazette, was packing to return to London. He had in fact just been round to Leafy Ridge to see Gabriel and ask her to try and mend and clean Judy Osmore’s dress, but no one was there when he arrived, Brian had gone to the office, Adam to school, and Gabriel was out shopping. Tom played a while with Zed, then left the dress in the kitchen with a note. Emma had left on the previous day full of remorse and repentance. Tom, also remorseful and repentant, had tried to cheer him up. Emma had brought Tom, wordlessly, the ruined dress, and Tom had told him first that Judy Osmore was not the sort of girl to mind a thing like that, and that second, anyway he would take the dress to Gabriel who was awfully clever at mending things and removing stains. Emma had gone away uncomforted. Seeing him depart, Tom had an urge to run after him. They had of course referred to the disastrous evening but not discussed it. Tom felt both that it had upset Emma very much and that he, Tom, might have appeared (since he made a joke or two) to regard the whole thing in a frivolous light. Emma’s stern eyes seemed to charge him with frivolity. Tom felt unhappily that he was somehow, where Emma was concerned, failing to ‘keep up’, and had become lately a more ordinary, less extraordinary person for his friend. Tom was used to being loved and valued and his vanity was engaged. He admired Emma very much and regarded him as, in important respects, his superior, so that he was sad and irritated to think that Emma’s image of him might diminish. This unworthy anxiety prevented the communication which might have removed it. They were awkward with each other and Tom, failing to discover any way of expressing his affection, found himself playing the fool in front of an increasingly silent Emma.

  Tom had also, throughout that rather unhappy Sunday, been thinking about George. George had never been, as the years went by, very far away from Tom’s heart and mind. At times Tom felt, as he felt now, as if he were being positively prompted to help George, perhaps willed by George himself to come to him. Yet such an impulsive warm approach, as Tom conceived it, could scarcely be imagined in detail. Reflecting on the recent drama, there did seem to be one point of hope. George had been defeated, and easily defeated, by mass ridicule. This could scarcely be a precedent since the circumstances were so unusual, but was it not a good sign? It made Tom see George as comic, and with this came notions of forgiveness and change. Maybe we take him too seriously, Tom thought. He should be laughed out of it all, persecuted by laughter. And Tom thought, I’ll go and see old George, I ought to have before, I’ll go next weekend. But next weekend was a long way off, and Tom had still to contend with the image of George inside that window with Hattie.

  Hattie was hardest of all to think about and most painful. Tom kept saying to himself, I have to give it up, leave it alone, do nothing, there’s nothing I can do, I don’t understand and I’d better not try. If only George hadn’t got mixed in, it was all bad enough without that. Tom had resisted an impulse to send Hattie a long rambling letter of apology. Better to say nothing. What did Hattie think after all, how much did she know, and how much would she say to Rozanov? Tom saw Hattie as a girl capable of saying very little or nothing. She might well feel that the whole incident was best left to disappear without further comment. George, who seemed so significant to Tom, might seem considerably less so to Hattie. And surely Hattie could not really think that Tom had led that mob into the garden on purpose to annoy her. Perhaps she was already laughing about the whole thing. An apology might simply have the effect of accusing himself of crimes of which it had not occurred to her to accuse him. Tom even began to think it reasonable to hope that Rozanov would not hear of the ‘little escapade’ at all.

  All the same, he thought, after he had finished his packing and was standing at the back window looking out over the garden at the view of the town, all the same, I will write to her, I will see her, but not yet, later on. And as the image of Hattie defying George, her bare arm outstretched, came back vividly to his mind, he felt that this was not the last time that he would want to brood upon it. He stood looking out over Ennistone, funny little town, where t
he sun was shining upon the gilded cupola of the Hall, ‘just like Leningrad’ as the Official Guide touchingly said, and he thought now about Emma and about George and about Hattie, and he felt sad and alone.

  At that moment in his reflections the telephone bell rang. It was Gavin Oare, asking if he had any comment to make on today’s issue of the Gazette. When Tom said that he had not seen today’s issue, Gavin Oare chuckled and said that he had better go out and buy one. Tom ran from the house.

  Pearl saw the paper on Monday morning when she went out shopping. She ran back at once and then could not bring herself to tell Hattie who was quietly reading. However, with Pearl so upset (and the more she thought the more upset she became) concealment proved impossible. The girls, in tears, agreed that now there was nothing to be done but wait. (Hattie did try to write a letter, but soon gave it up.) John Robert Rozanov did not catch up until Tuesday. On Monday morning he went early to the Institute (he had spent the night at Hare Lane where he was sorting out some papers) and swam in the Outdoor Pool before retiring to his den in the Rooms, where he worked all the morning and had a sandwich lunch brought to him. He soaked in his hot bath, then had his sleep as usual. He worked on till late in the evening and went to bed. No one, during that time, dared to approach him. When he woke on Tuesday morning he found that a copy of Monday’s Gazette and of Tuesday’s Swimmer had been thrust under his door.

  George, shut up in his house in Druidsdale and oblivious of articles in newspapers, had decided to give John Robert another chance. He had phrased it in his mind as ‘a last chance’, but he could not bear those words and changed them. For no reason that he could have thought of, had he decided to reflect about it which he did not, a warm spring-like breeze of hope was blowing in his soul. It was not a desire for happiness. George had never, even as a young man, allowed himself a desire for happiness. It was something involuntary, mechanical, a primitive self-protective jerk of the psyche. It now seemed to George that he had been seeing his situation in an entirely irrational light, and that he had built up an entirely false picture of his old teacher. In a way, thought George, egoism is the trouble, I’m just being too much of a solipsist. I imagine John Robert thinking a lot about me and hating and despising me in quite an elaborate way as if this were a major activity in his life creating a vast complex barrier between us. But it isn’t like that. He doesn’t think about me all that much. After all he’s got other troubles. And what did he always think about nearly all the time anyway? His work. I’m a minor problem. So is everybody else, everybody else, it isn’t just me. So I mustn’t attach too much importance to the peevish hostile things he says when I arrive and interrupt him. Of course I’ve been very tactless, I’ve even been aggressive. John Robert is a tremendous one for his dignity. No wonder he was sharp with me. In a way it’s a sign he cares for me, he cares how I behave. Well, I’ll behave better. I’ll write him a very careful letter, I’ll write him an interesting letter. John Robert always forgives people who interest him.