by Iris Murdoch
There was, of course, a sufficiency of simpler motives. The philosopher had been well aware of Tom’s developing existence not only through ancestral memories and regular perusal of the Gazette, but also through his very occasional ‘secret’ visits to Ennistone, when he stayed briefly at the Royal Hotel to arrange the letting or repair of 16 Hare Lane. People talked about Tom, he was popular, he was happy. John Robert had already made his great decision when he had been struck by Father Bernard’s remarks that Tom McCaffrey was ‘innocent and happy, happy because innocent, innocent because happy’. Could such a condition perhaps last? And was not this exactly what he wanted for Hattie?
Yet, when he paused, what strange strange fancies crowded inside his mind! Tom fled or dead, John Robert comforting a Hattie now safe in secluded widowhood. Could he bear to see her in her husband’s house? What sort of old clown’s part would there be his? Could he conceive himself welcome ever? If he were capable of being jealous of Pearl, would he not go mad with jealousy of Tom? Did it come to this, that he had finally given up any hope of a relationship between himself and Hattie? Why was he in such a hurry to give her away? Surely he had not imagined the details? From what horror in himself was he so precipitately fleeing? His giddy and affrightened thought, shying away from this dark question, even at certain moments wildly imagined that having failed with Amy and Hattie he might be able at last to establish some perfect love relation with Hattie’s daughter! Prone as he was to melancholia, there were times when John Robert Rozanov forgot that he was old.
John Robert blinked in the soft dim rainy light of the room where no lamps had been put on and where the pink gas fire quietly purred and fluttered. He was aware at once that Hattie had grown. It was nearly a year since he had seen her. He thought, so she can still grow? He glowered at her from under his hairy eyebrows. He thought, my God, she is like Linda, she is more and more like Linda, how is it possible? Hattie was taller, older, with her hair done in such a sophisticated way.
‘Do sit down,’ said Hattie. She had never before felt like a lady in a house receiving a guest, and such a special guest. It had never been like this in Denver.
John Robert sat in one of the low-slung bamboo chairs which uttered a warning crack. He moved to the window seat. Hattie found an upright chair and sat down.
‘How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you,’ said Hattie. They never managed names or titles.
‘You like the house?’
‘Oh it’s lovely, lovely!’ said Hattie with a fervour which warmed the conversation a little. ‘It’s the nicest, sweetest house I’ve ever been in!’
‘I wish I could buy it for you, I mean I wish I could buy it, only I know Mrs McCaffrey would never sell it. You have met her?’
‘Yes, we met, she’s very nice.’
‘Is she?’ said John Robert absently. Hattie was facing the window and with his eyes now accustomed to the greenish light he scanned her milky-blue eyes, her palest-gold interwoven hair, and the unblemished smoothness of her face and neck. She wore no make-up and her nose shone a little pinkly. Her lips were pale as if simply drawn in with a light pencil outline. These were not Linda’s colours, but the structure of her face was very like Linda’s.
‘Yes,’ said Hattie, continuing by an answer to his question.
‘Well, well. Are you glad to have left school?’
‘Yes — ’
‘You’re quite - almost - grown-up now.’
‘Yes, what am I to do next, please?’
This blunt question rather hustled the philosopher who was prepared to come to this, but not immediately. ‘We’ll have to think about an English university. You’ve got those A level exams, haven’t you? They sent me your marks. How did you get on with Father Bernard?’
Hattie smiled. Her smile was more of a grin than a young lady’s smile, and expressed the amusement she felt at the thought of Father Bernard whom she found rather droll. ‘Very well.’
‘What did he tell you to do?’
‘To do?’
‘To study, to work at.’
‘Oh, nothing. He just told me to read.’
‘To read what?’
‘Anything.’
‘And what are you reading?’
‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses.’ Hattie had, of course, investigated the lines of faded books which had been in the Slipper House since before the war. This copy of Laclos’s masterpiece still showed the shadowy inky schoolgirl signature of Alexandra Stillowen.
‘Oh yes.’ John Robert, who had not read a novel since he left school, had not heard of this one, which sounded rather improper, but he did not pursue the matter. He thought, what does she know? He hated to imagine. ‘What do you want to study at the university?’
‘Oh, languages I guess, that’s all I know. I like reading poetry - and stories - and things — ’
There was a silence.
Then Hattie said, ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘A drink?’ John Robert now noticed on a glass-topped bamboo table toward which Hattie waved her hand, a bottle of gin, a bottle of vermouth, a bottle of tonic water, a container for ice and a glass.
John Robert was a habitual abstainer, having never felt the need to reject the sober habits of his family. However, he was not a fanatic and occasionally at parties, to please his host, took a glass of tonic or soda with a tinge of vermouth in it. John Robert looked with displeasure at this worldly little scenario. ‘You don’t drink, do you?’
‘Good heavens no!’ said Hattie with a laugh. ‘I’ve never had an alcoholic drink in my life!’
Rozanov thought, she’s never had one. But she will. And I won’t be there. Then he thought, but I could be there. Why not now? I can witness her first alcoholic drink, even if I can’t witness … He said, ‘Tell Pearl to bring another glass.’
Hattie darted up. In the hall she cannoned into Pearl who was continuing her opera-maid act by listening outside the door and even stopping to peer through the keyhole. ‘He wants another glass,’ said Hattie breathlessly. Pearl fled to the kitchen and returned. Nothing in the nature of a wink or a nod or a smile or a glance passed between the two girls. It had always been a rule between them, equally willed by both, that they never made jokes about John Robert or spoke of him other than with the most solemn respect.
Hattie returned with the glass and stood beside the bottles holding it in her hand. She said, ‘Shall I mix you a Martini? I know how it’s done!’
‘How do you know?’
‘Margot showed me once. She thought it might be useful.’
John Robert did not like the idea of Margot teaching Hattie things, yet he found himself smiling. There was something so infinitely touching and moving in the spectacle of Hattie so eagerly holding the glass, and for once, for a moment, his feeling for her expressed itself simply as pleasure. He heaved himself off the window seat. ‘I’ll mix the drinks.’ He went to the table and took the glass from Hattie. He put ice into the glass, then a very small measure of vermouth and a lot of tonic water. It was the mildest drink which could possibly be called a drink, but it was a drink. He handed it to Hattie and made a similar mixture for himself. They continued to stand, and this was significant.
John Robert took a sip of the mixture. It seemed to go instantly to his head. Hattie still stood, rather wide-eyed, holding her glass. ‘Drink,’ he said; and as he said it he felt like some old enchanter.
Hattie sipped the drink. It went straight to her head too. ‘Oh!’
John Robert rambled back to his place and they both sat down.
Hattie said, ‘It’s nice.’
‘Do you miss America?’ he asked her. He did not often ask such direct, even such interesting questions. He felt as if he had never really questioned her before.
Hattie considered. She took another sip of her exciting drink. ‘I don’t think I believe in America. I think it’s a fiction. I mean it is for me. I imagined it.’
This was the most thought-provoking observation J
ohn Robert had ever elicited from her, it seemed to him very meaningful. ‘Yes. I feel that too in a way, though I’ve lived there much longer than you, of course, I grew up in England. Why is it, do you think?’
‘I don’t know - I’ve only just thought of this idea,’ said Hattie. ‘Perhaps it’s just a sort of transferred image of the largeness of it and the empty spaces - as if a human being couldn’t survey anything so huge. It’s as if one has to make a special effort on its behalf for it to be there at all. One would never feel like that about Europe. And then there’s the lack of past. I suppose all this is obvious really.’
The notion that Hattie was very intelligent had never figured in John Robert’s obsession about her. Of course she was not a fool. But she patently did not regard herself as particularly clever, and John Robert had never speculated on the point. Perhaps she was clever, perhaps (the terrible thought came to him) Hattie might one day become a philosopher. Was philosophical talent inherited? He could think of no examples. Keeping his head he said, ‘The physical being of the country has always seemed to me unconvincing, as if for real landscape we had to go elsewhere. That may be a matter of scale or because the country hasn’t been worked for so long. We recognize ourselves in our work.’
‘But it applies to the wild places too. I mean the Alps are more real than the Rockies. I’ve always felt the Rockies are a kind of hallucination. I wonder if it’s to do with the sort of paintings we’ve looked at.’
John Robert never looked at paintings but he was prepared to pick up the point. ‘Artists offer us shapes. European art had a good start. Is it the apparent shapelessness of America that strikes us here? That could affect us as a transferred image, to use your good phrase. What is shapeless is unreal.’
‘Some people like that,’ said Hattie. ‘I mean they think what’s shapeless is more real, more sort of informal and spontaneous, like a wild garden or dropping in for lunch.’
‘Good,’ said John Robert appreciatively, ‘but perhaps we should put the problem the other way round. Isn’t the trouble with us too that we don’t quite feel American. Do you feel American?’
‘No. But I am half American, and I value that. I’ve got an American passport.’
‘Perhaps what we’re feeling short of isn’t the landscape at all, it’s feeling American, and that makes us feel unreal. And then if there are two things, one real and one unreal, we have to take it that we are the real one, so we transfer the unreality to the other.’
‘Feeling American is terribly special. It’s such an achievement. It’s so miraculously solid, like something demonstrated and proved.’
‘Whereas being English isn’t. So we are the ones who are turning out to be unreal!’
‘No, no,’ said Hattie. ‘I won’t let you turn it round like that! America is something imaginary. California is imaginary.’
‘Oh California — ’
‘Of course I love the Rockies, I love Colorado, the lovely feeling of the snow at night and the aspens red and then mauve, you know, and the light - but I think I like the ghost towns best — ’
‘Not the wild country or the big cities but the ruins.’
‘Yes - somehow those derelict places - the old empty broken houses and the old mine workings and the wrecked wagons and the wheels lying in the grass - because it’s all so sort of recent and yet so absolutely gone and over, it seems somehow more touching and more past and more intense and more - real — ’
‘So you’ll believe in America when it’s all over!’
‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Hattie. ‘After all I’ve been - happy - In America.’ She paused here as if about to add wistfully: haven’t I?
‘Do you feel English?’
‘Oh no, how could I? I don’t feel I’m anything; that is to say, I suppose I’m unreal, whatever I am!’
John Robert saw for a moment, as in an insipid wedding photo, the strained anxious faces of Whit and Amy. Perhaps they had actually given him such a photo once. I could have made things different, he thought, and yet could I; it always seemed, for everything I ever thought of, too late. I left her in an empty desert of a childhood, that is her unreal America. And must she not now be recompensed? But not by me. Pain which had been mercifully and briefly absent returned. Then he remembered Tom McCaffrey. He had forgotten his mission, his plan, his final solution. Should he now hesitate, wait, reconsider? He had not rehearsed any speech and everything came out vaguely and casually. Later on he thought that this was probably the best way.
‘I must be off. By the way, you’ve got an admirer.’ He rose to his feet as he spoke.
Hattie, who was not expecting him to go, jumped up too, putting down her glass which was now almost empty. ‘Oh really, what sort of admirer?’
‘What sort do you think? A young man. Tom McCaffrey. He’ll probably ring you up. That’s what young men do these days.’
‘McCaffrey! He must be related to Mrs McCaffrey.’
‘Her son, well, step-son, the youngest one. Anyway I thought I’d warn you! I’d like that. He’d make you a nice husband!’ The last bit was intended to sound jocular but could not help seeming a bit portentous.
However, Hattie did not take it in, she was trying to imagine how he knew she existed. ‘But he can’t even have seen me!’
‘A lot of people have seen you, a lot of people are interested in you.’
‘How horrid.’
‘Anyway, I thought I’d mention his name in confidence, you know, as an introduction, so that you won’t just send him away.’
‘But I don’t want an admirer! It must be a joke!’
‘You are not a joke,’ said John Robert, and all his awkwardness returned. He said, ‘Well, if you don’t want an admirer, what do you want?’
‘I want a black cat with white paws!’ Hattie said this in a jesting tone, but now she was maladroit and awkward too. She added, ‘But of course, that’s not serious, I couldn’t have one, I mean unless I lived somewhere like here, and I don’t, and even here - there are foxes in the garden - did you know? - I wonder if a fox would attack a cat?’
‘Better no cat,’ said John Robert.
‘Better no cat.’ Suddenly for a moment it looked as if Hattie was going to cry, there was a kind of little gauzy hazy cloud in front of her eyes. She said, ‘You asked me what I missed. I miss my father. But that’s different. The cat made me think of him.’
Promptly banishing the inconvenient ghost of Whit, John Robert thought how important it was that they had talked about America as if they had between them placed and disposed of that great continent, thereby clearing the decks. Then he thought, if Hattie married Tom they could live right here in the Slipper House.
Pearl was standing in the hall holding his overcoat which was now warm and dry after its proximity to the central heating boiler. Pearl clicked her heels and helped him on with the coat; at any rate standing on tiptoe she held it up while he fought with it, blindly waving his arms behind him and staring at Hattie. Pearl opened the front door, but John Robert suddenly made for the sitting-room again. Hattie, who had followed him, hopped out of the way. He emerged carrying the gin and vermouth bottles. He said, ‘I don’t want you girls to drink. Please don’t keep any liquor in the house. Good-bye then — ’ He blundered out into the rain.
With a sudden energy of exasperation Pearl spoke after him. ‘I hope we will see you again soon, Professor Rozanov.’ Pearl could have a strong penetrating voice when she chose to put it on.
John Robert stopped, amazed, but did not turn round. He said, ‘Yes, yes,’ but went on, not talcing the path to the back gate into Forum Way, but going across the wet grass in the direction of Belmont. Pearl shut the door sharply.
Hattie said, ‘Ouf!’ Then, ‘I liked talking to him. It wasn’t as difficult as usual.’
‘That’s because you were both tipsy!’ said Pearl.
‘He was nice.’ Hattie thought, I held my own, I had a real conversation with him!
Pearl had other thoughts. Sh
e had seen, in the sharp cameo of her keyhole, John Robert staring at Hattie, and she had not liked what she saw.
They separated, Hattie returning into the sitting-room where she wanted to be alone for a few moments and think about John Robert. Pearl stood in the hall with her hand still upon the door. Then, without a hat or coat, she ran out into the rain. She ran among the trees of the copse where foxie lived, and laid her head against the smooth trunk of a young beech tree.
John Robert meanwhile had walked past the garage and along the path beside the house and into the front porch of Belmont. The porch was a large structure rather like a little chapel with Victorian stained-glass windows. There was a seat in the porch which he remembered and on this he put down the two bottles which he intended to leave there. As the rain just then came on in a fiercer flurry he sat for a moment beside the bottles. Dressed in a mackintosh and head scarf, Alex came out.