‘Hattie - dear Hattie - I’ve acted for the best, I mean I’ve tried to act well, to do right, it hasn’t been easy.’ A curious almost whining tone of self-pity here invaded John Robert’s voice.
Hattie at once realized that something had changed, that some emotional statement was about to come out. She said more gently. ‘I’m sure you have always meant well, I mean wished me well.’
‘Oh Hattie, if you only knew — ’
‘Knew what?’
‘How I’ve yearned over you and wanted you. You think I don’t care about you, but that isn’t true, it’s the opposite of true.’
Hattie stared at the huge face of the philosopher which seemed suddenly like a relief model of something else, a whole country perhaps. She stared at the flat head, the lined bumpy fleshy brow and the very short electric frizzy hair, the big birdlike nose framed by furrows in which grey stubble grew, the pouting prehensile mouth with its red wet lips and the froth of bubbly saliva at the corners, the fiercely shining rectangular light brown eyes which seemed to be trying so hard to send her a signal. The soft plump wrinkles of the brow, pitted with porous spots, so close to her across the table, gave her especially the sense of something so sad, so old. She felt frightened and full of pity. She said, just in order to say something soothing, ‘Oh don’t worry, don’t worry, please — ’
‘I’ve deprived myself of your company simply because I cared so much. I think now I was wrong. Was I wrong, is it too late? I thought you might just find me appalling, a monster. I found myself so. I was afraid, yes. And yet I should have had more courage, more faith and trust, I should have got to know you, kept you with me, tended you — ’
‘But you have been very kind,’ said Hattie. ‘You mustn’t reproach yourself, you are always so busy, you wouldn’t have time for a child, it isn’t as if you were my father.’
‘I deprived myself of you. I could have had time, I wanted time, what better could I have done with my time. If I had felt less, had felt differently, I might have - but I wanted to keep you as something precious and I didn’t dare to be too close to you.’
‘I’m sure I would have bored you very much!’ said Hattie in what was intended to be a light tone.
‘You haven’t understood, better so, better so — ’
‘Please tell me what you mean — ’
‘Even if it makes you shudder, even if it makes you run? I love you, Hattie, I’ve loved you for years. For God’s sake, don’t leave me now that I’ve found you, don’t go away — ’
Even before John Robert spoke the first words confessing that he was ‘in love’, Hattie had begun to understand what he was telling her. His trembling voice, the pleading movements of his hands, the painful ring of his ardent words, the glare of his light eyes, conveyed to her the dreadful importance of what was happening between them; and she did shudder, and she did want to run, but she felt also a most intense pity and a weird excitement, together with a shocked dismay at the spectacle of the man she had feared and revered reduced to a sort of babbling beggar in her presence.
‘Well, that’s all right,’ said Hattie nervously. She put her hand on her breast, her fingers upon the collar of her brown dress, and pushed her chair an inch or two backwards.
‘It’s not all right!’ John Robert smote the flimsy table with his hand, making several knives leap to the floor. He stood up and stumbled to the other end of the room and stood with his back to her leaning his head against the wall.
Hattie looked at him with horror. She said, in a timid breaking voice, ‘Please be more ordinary, please be calm, you frighten me. Nothing can be so awful. I’ve always respected and trusted you. Just be quiet, be as you used to be — ’
‘I can’t be as I used to be!’ The words came out in a kind of bubbling roar, and John Robert turned round, wiping his wet mouth with the back of his hand, and gazed at the girl with eyes blazing with anguish. ‘Yes, you respected me. You never loved me. Can you love me, is it possible? I need you, I crave for you. Oh God, what stupidity, what wickedness to talk to you like this — ’
‘I’m all right,’ said Hattie, ‘don’t worry for me. I just want so much that you shouldn’t be unhappy — ’ Appalled by the effect of his revelation upon John Robert himself, she could not measure the enormity of it or decide how best to calm him or to express the pity which she felt. She could hardly bear to look at him, at the cool dignified remote philosopher, the guardian of her childhood, suddenly transformed into this pathetic spitting moaning maniac. At the same time she felt his presence, his closeness to her in the room, as that of a large uncontrolled animal.
John Robert stood now against the wall, stooping a little, his hands hanging, his big head and his lips thrust forward. He said, ‘She was right to say that I shouldn’t be with you here.’
‘Who was right?’
‘Pearl. She taunted me with this, she laughed about it.’
‘Oh - no — ’
‘They’ll all know, she’ll tell them, everyone will know.’
‘No, no, no — ’
‘Don’t leave me Hattie. Just for today stay with me, let us be quietly together. I’m sorry I’ve behaved in this beastly way. But I’m glad that I love you and that I’ve told you, really. I’m in awful pain but I’m happy. Don’t go to the Slipper House, don’t leave me alone, don’t drive me mad by going - just after - all this. Just give me today, please.’
‘Was that then,’ said Hattie, ‘why you wanted me to marry Tom McCaffrey?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll stay with you,’ she said.
On Friday Tom did not know what to do with himself. It was impossible to return to London and resume his ordinary life. His visit to Diane now seemed like a dark nightmarish cavern out of which there opened an indistinguishably large number of exits into hell. He kept wondering whether, after he had gone, George had quietly strangled Diane. He imagined her little body, with the fringed skirt and the pathetic boots, lying upon the chaise tongue and George looking down on it and smiling that weird mad radiant smile. His shoulders hurt where George had gripped them. He felt as if he had been kicked downstairs. His imagination was utterly fouled up, haunted by filthy loathsome apparitions. The vision had returned of Hattie as a witch, as an evil enchantress, a temptress, a devilish enticing doll, the wanton spoiler of his innocence and freedom. He imagined her in a nurse’s uniform, smiling frightfully, armed with a syringe which she was about to plunge into his arm in order to destroy his sanity. (Perhaps he had dreamed that last night?) He shook himself, shook his head as if literally to hurl the hateful visions out, to make them come away like gobbets of wax out of the ear. He thought, I’ve got to see Hattie, I’ve got to see her, then all this will stop. At any rate something will change if I see her, something will become clear, I’ll ask her something, some question, I’m not sure what. And in this resolve he felt almost a kind of fury. But I’ll wait till dark, he said to himself. If I were to meet Rozanov or George in the street I should start to scream. He felt an urge, during the morning, to go out and buy a paper to see if Diane had been murdered, but he resisted the urge, and consigned his thoughts on this subject to the class of apparitions. He spent the day feeding on ectoplasm.
As Tom, in extreme agitation, was walking through Victoria Park at twilight, with his own mackintosh and Greg’s umbrella, he thought about Alex and how he ought to call on her, only not now of course. It only now occurred to him that he ought to say something to her about last Saturday night. He also saw at once that this was not only impossible but unnecessary. Alex, at least, was capable of swallowing things without demanding explanations. He saw her like a huge fish gulping it all down. He paused outside Belmont, seeing a light in Ruby’s room. He had intended to walk round to the gate in Forum Way, but decided to go straight through into the garden from Tasker Road. He walked down the side of the house past the garage and looking up saw that the lights were on in the drawing-room and the curtains drawn.