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 the 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.