Frightened by the dark shiny windows of the Slipper House through which beings could look from the outside, she went round closing the shutters, on the inside of which in a faraway time the young Ennistonian painter Ned Larkin, a discovery of Geoffrey Stillowen, had painted powdery garden scenes in pastel shades. The pictures vaguely represented the Belmont garden, the ginkgo, the fir tree, the copper beech, the birch trees, now suitably modified into pastness, with distant views of Belmont and the Slipper House. In the drawing-room, members of the family were similarly represented, in period costume, in antique poses, in a faint golden long ago light. Geoffrey Stillowen in white flannels, blond and youthful, was seated, reading a book with a tennis racket leaning against his knee. His wife Rosemary, standing behind, was opening a white parasol. There was also a picture of Alex as a pretty little girl holding some flowers. And a slim beautiful golden-haired youth, Alex’s elder brother who had been killed in the war, a shadow now, a shade, scarcely ever entering Alex’s thoughts except when she saw his image in this place. She turned from it. The Slipper House lived in the past, Alex’s hall of meditation was a time machine; but the past for which she craved was a faintly scented atmosphere, untroubled by the staring ghosts of individual people.
Tonight, however, individual people pressed upon her, and she could not attain the detached nervous vagueness which her aloneness needed. As she walked, for she always prowled all over the house in these late secret visits, she began to think about George. She wondered if George would come to her and speak to her, as he sometimes used to. She felt every day the minute movement of something which separated him from her. Perhaps this was her sense of old age, so inconceivable yet so near. She had lost George and found him again. Would he come to her now? The woman, a prostitute, with whom George was said to be ‘involved’, was some sort of connection of Ruby’s. Ruby had many such connections, and Alex disliked this connecting up of things which ought to be separate; it had begun to fit in too well with her sense of an evil conspiracy. There was a bad network. Perhaps it was to escape that network that Tom had withdrawn from her. Alex loved Tom; not best, George was best. About Brian she felt little. The women were outsiders; Gabriel with her droopy hair and her paper handkerchiefs, Stella so intelligent, so hard, so bad for George. Adam was a disturbing object, kin to her yet inaccessible.
Another individual occupied Alex’s restless mind this evening: John Robert Rozanov. (Alex had only pretended not to pick up his name when it was mentioned by Gabriel.) Alex had got to know John Robert slightly when he was young, already a little famous (he was older than Alex) and no longer living in Ennistone but returning from his grand university world to visit his mother who still lived in the town. His parents (his grandfather was a Russian emigre) were not well off and lived in the poorer quarter, in an area called Burkestown, remote from leafy Victoria Park. However, the Rozanovs were Methodists (John Robert’s father had married a local girl) and attended the same church (in Druidsdale near the Common) as Alex’s family, hence a slight acquaintance. Geoffrey Stillowen, engaged as a church-goer in various charitable enterprises, met John Robert’s father. Alex vaguely remembered seeing John Robert as a boy, then as a youth. She had never felt any interest in him, partly (she was not snobbish) because she found him physically repulsive. Then when (after the publication of his first book, Logic and Consciousness) he turned out to be ‘brilliant’ and began to be well-known as one of the ‘young philosophers’, it became chic for people in Ennistone to boast about him, announcing casually that they had known him all their lives. Alex, then nineteen, indulging in this little falsehood, caught the attention of one of her friends, a girl called Linda Brent with whom she had been at boarding-school. Linda was now at the university and was thrilled to learn that Alex actually knew John Robert Rozanov. Alex, continuing to show off, asked Linda to come and stay, saying she would exhibit the prodigy. Alex’s stranger mother, another alien, had died not long before, and Geoffrey Stillowen was occupying Belmont. Linda came. A little party was arranged and John Robert was invited. (‘He won’t come,’ said Alex’s brother Desmond. ‘He will, he’ll be delighted,’ said Geoffrey, who had a high sense of his own importance.) He came, and Alex introduced him to Linda. Linda of course (ignoring handsome Desmond) at once fell in love with him. Alex laughed. She laughed less when she read in a newspaper a remarkably short time afterwards that fabulous young John Robert Rozanov, after whom so many clever young ladies were chasing, was about to marry Miss Linda Brent. Alex never forgave either of them. More than that, she became, as she saw it afterwards, temporarily insane. She fell madly in love with John Robert Rozanov herself. Why on earth had she introduced this wonderful person to Linda? It was sheer stupid vanity. Why had she ingeniously done herself this awful damage? Why had she not had the wit and the creative imagination to cultivate this very unusual man? Surely by rights he belonged to her. She ought to have married him!
She did not see Rozanov again until some time later when a slightly apologetic Linda visited Ennistone with her husband, and by then Alex was engaged to charming popular Alan McCaffrey and had recovered from her paranoiac episode. The Rozanovs went to America where Linda later died leaving a daughter with whom, rumour had it, Rozanov never got on. The daughter married an obscure American academic called Meynell; she died and he either died or vanished, leaving behind a child, the little neglected waif before mentioned, about whom, it appeared, Rozanov cared even less. Rozanov came back to England for a time and taught in London, where George McCaffrey became his pupil. Later the philosopher went back to America whither, on the occasion described by Brian as unsuccessful, George followed him. Alex did not see Rozanov during his London period. She had troubles of her own and wanted to hide her unhappiness. (Like George, she hated to ‘lose face’.) Alan had left her and was living in Ennistone with Fiona Gates. Then when Fiona became ill Alex developed her obsession about getting hold of Tom, whom she had always coveted. All this while the John Robert whom Alex, during the brief time of her insane remorse, had so intensely imagined, lay dormant within her: an imprint, a little live ghost, an abiding private double of a man who no longer concerned her. This double now stirred and grew in her imagination with the news that John Robert Rozanov was returning to Ennistone. Why was he returning? Was it possible he was returning for her?
‘What a bloody mess,’ said George. He used to chide Diane for her untidiness. Now he viewed the signs of increasing disorder with a certain satisfaction.
‘Have you seen Stella?’ asked Diane.
‘No. I meant to go again. I felt I ought to go. You charmingly told me to go. I didn’t go. Then it became difficult to go. Then it became impossible to go. Then it became essential not to go. It became a duty not to go, it became a sexual urge. Do you understand?’
‘No. I’m sorry about the mess, I’d have tidied it up if I’d known you were coming, I never know when you’re coming, I wish I did.’
‘So do I. Like the Messiah I am eternally expected. I expect myself.’