As he lay, listening for the voices which had now ceased, he became aware that his mouth was open. He closed it quickly. Several times lately, on waking with his mouth open, he had had a strange conviction. First, he had felt that in the night he had been dead. The mouths of dead people fall open. Then, as something connected with this, he had become aware (or imagined or remembered) that during the night something had crawled out of his mouth and rambled round the room and over the ceiling and had then returned into his mouth again: something like a large crab-like insect or claw-footed worm. This persuasion was extremely vivid and accompanied, as he now quickly closed his mouth, by the rising of a bitter gall in his throat. He wondered, sitting up, whether he had actually swallowed a large spider.
He rose and put on the rest of his clothes (he now slept in his underwear), shaved and drank some coffee standing up in the kitchen. He considered and rejected the idea that today he should ‘do something about Stella’. It was not that he wanted to, or felt that he ought to, do something about Stella. It was just that doing something (anything) would remove a certain discomfort. If he (for instance) sent her a postcard. He wanted to perform some kind of holding or postponing movement, something that would put Stella, for the moment, in cold storage, out of play. He did not want to see her, but neither did he like to think of her as active elsewhere. However, he could not think of anything to do and he dismissed the matter from his mind. He was, indeed, absolved from solving this problem. He himself was in cold storage; he was separated, waiting, as pure and as solitary as an anointed king awaiting coronation or a sacred victim awaiting the knife. This was the loneliness which Diane had sensed round about him, and which he himself felt rather as a frightful agonizing state of grace. It was as if now, in this interim, he could not sin.
He washed up his cup and his plate and made his way by a roundabout route to the Baths, where he went first, as has been recounted, to the Indoor Pool. As he emerged later, ready to swim, from the changing-rooms, he noticed something disturbing. The number 44, which was the number of the cubby-hole where he left his key, was the same as the number of his house and was also the last two figures in the number of his car. It was also his age. Little things were significant. It was a portent and all portents now were frightening.
Swimming, George did not see Diane, he did not see Brian and Gabriel, nor did he see Alex or Adam, all of whom saw him. He swam and swam, tiring himself, passing the healthful healing water through his gills, emptying himself in his solitude of the bitterness of living.
At last, exhausted, he crawled out, hauling himself up the iron steps and moving away from the pool. The pavement beside the pool edge was wet and slightly warm, but a step away the stone was dry and still sparkling with frost. George set penitential feet upon the frost and walked a little, shivering inside his quickly cooling body and turning to look at the footprints made in the frost by his warm feet. He felt slightly giddy and dazed by the emergence not only into the cold air but into the bright light. While he had been swimming in the semi-dark of the merciful steam cloud the sun had come out. The sky was blue. He walked along beside the high beech hedge which protected the Ennistone Rooms garden, and then turned along the other edge of the pool, by the yellow glazed wall, in the direction of the stews. He saw ahead of him, standing at the water’s edge, the tall gaunt near-naked figure of William Eastcote. Eastcote was combing back and checking over with his fingers his thinning but persistent strands of wet hair. He was talking to a fat man whose swimming-trunks clung on almost invisibly beneath his paunch. The fat man had a big bony puckered face and stiff flat brush of grey hair which was evidently still dry. As he now turned his head George recognized John Robert Rozanov. Reaching the pool in three paces, George dived back again into the steam.
Alex had also seen Rozanov. Walking along beside Diana’s Garden toward the stews, she stopped abruptly, then turned back. She did not notice Diane, who was still in the garden bursting to tell George that Rozanov, whom she recognized, was there. Alex’s heart swelled and contracted, warming her whole body with a rush of consciousness. It did not occur to her to walk straight on and greet him. With the first glimpse came the need to hide, to wait, not to know - to know what, what was there to know? Besides, trim and handsome as Alex looked in her green skirted costume, she did not want to meet Rozanov with her hair dripping and her makeup washed away. She hurried along the warm verge of the pool until she came to where Ruby was waiting outside the changing-rooms, holding the bag with Alex’s clothes. She grabbed the bag and whisked inside and pattered over the wet wooden duck-boards which gave out such an old melancholy exciting smell. She found a cubicle and sat down and peeled off her costume and sat there panting and holding her breasts until her face was calm and her heart was quiet. It was a great many years, she hated to think how many, since she had glimpsed Rozanov in the street, perhaps at the time when his mother died. But now, passing over all intermediate time, she recalled so intensely his monstrous handsome youthful face, how he looked when she might have reached out her hand to take him.
Ruby, who had noticed John Robert some time earlier, as he emerged from the changing-rooms with William Eastcote, had no such coy misgivings. She waited dog-like for Alex to come back for her clothes, then, released, she went along the side of the pool looking for him. She noticed Diane in the garden but as usual they exchanged no sign. She found Rozanov standing talking with Eastcote at the place where, coming from the other direction, George had seen him, and she stood quite near, her feet apart, her hands clasped, staring at him. Several other people who had recognized the philosopher were also standing nearby, but not daring to come so close. John Robert did not see her, however, but still talking went with Eastcote down the steps into one of the stews.
The ‘stews’, as I explained earlier, are round holes about twelve feet deep and fifteen feet across, with a seat around the edge at the bottom. An iron staircase winds down into the water, which is just deep enough to allow the head and shoulders of the seated hedonist to emerge. The temperatures, at different graded levels in the different stews, are considerably higher than that of the pool, and in cold weather the atmosphere below is thickly and breathlessly steamy. Ruby peered over the side, but could see nothing of her hero.
John Robert was saying in his rather hard decisive voice to William (Bill the Lizard) Eastcote, as they stewed at 45°C, ‘Thank God there’s still no piped music here.’
‘Yes, some people wanted it, but it would make the whole scene quite unreal, and the great thing about the Baths is it’s such a real place, if you see what I mean.’
‘I see very well.’
The only other inhabitant of the stew, recognizing Rozanov, moved away at once and climbed the steps in shy confusion. (He was in fact Nesta Wiggins’s father, a ladies’ tailor in a small way in Burkestown.)
‘So the Rooms have been done up again,’ said John Robert, ‘and you can book in like a hotel.’
‘Yes.’ Eastcote added, ‘You could be peaceful there, you could work undisturbed.’