Beside each bed there was a chest of drawers, and on these the junior girls were allowed to place only three personal objects. Senior girls could please themselves so long as decorum was observed. Make-up was of course forbidden, as was jewellery and anything suggestive of display. Hattie had few possessions. On her chest there was a brown china rabbit scratching its ear, which had come up with her through the school, and which she could not bear to put away though other girls derided it; there was a long sleek Eskimo seal made of black soapstone, and a little pink-and-white Japanese vase (into which she never put flowers as that was not allowed). The dormitory was a weird place, though not terrible like the big dormitories in which, as a younger girl, she had cried herself to sleep every night. The stairs and landings, which were blurred by her little weeping ghost, stained by her tears, had always been strange haunted spaces to her, as if already removed into the brown haze of the past. Was it her future sadness which made the place so dim and foggy? It was hard to believe that soon she would be leaving it forever.
Hattie, though thin and pale, was very healthy and hardy, good at games and gymnastics. She was a pale straight girl, neither tall nor small, with long straight white-blond hair and blue eyes of a disconcerting pallor, as if they had great blobs of creamy whiteness mixed into the blue. Her father, Whit Meynell, had had an Icelandic mother. Hattie had never met her father’s parents. Her mother had died when she was a small child. After that she travelled with her father during his academic peregrinations. Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. No one would publish his book, however many times he rewrote it. He was a loving though extremely fretful and anxious and inefficient father. He set up his tents in various different universities, from all of which he was soon tactfully evicted. He never achieved ‘tenure’. His frightful anxieties about the future were mercifully ended by a fatal (entirely accidental) motor crash. Hattie was ten.
After that, Hattie went to live for a time with her aunt, Whit Meynell’s younger sister, who lived in a small town called Westfield, original home of the Meynells, situated in a woody desolation beside a muddy lake not far from Austin, Texas. Hattie missed her father agonizingly and wept longer than anyone thought at all proper. She got on quite well with Whit’s sister Margot, but the arrangement only lasted a couple of years because Margot, who was unmarried, driven by a sudden and interesting desperation, decided to go and seek her fortune in New York, and could not see how to include Hattie in this enterprise. Margot wrote to this effect to Hattie’s only other visible relative, John Robert Rozanov. John Robert had of course ‘turned up’ in Hattie’s life at intervals. He had never got on well with Hattie’s mother, Amy, though he maintained the forms of communication. Whit he could not stand and was at pains not to see. (There were kinds of intellectual muddle so degrading that John Robert preferred not to be reminded of their existence.) If he was ‘giving a paper’ anywhere near where Hattie’s house happened to be, he would occasionally come and take the child out to tea. These ‘treats’ were rather glum, since Hattie, who heard no good of her grandfather at home, was frightened of him, and both of them were thoroughly awkward. Here too, however, the proprieties were observed, and John Robert replied promptly to Margot’s letter. His idea was that the best way now to dispose of Hattie was to put her in an English boarding school. (He had made himself financially responsible for the child since Whit’s death.) He expressed the wish that Margot might ‘have’ her in the holidays. Hattie was by now twelve. The holidays were at first a jumbled business, with Hattie dispatched to France or Germany to stay with strange families, on arrangements made by the school in accordance with John Robert’s wishes, then whisked across the Atlantic to live in rooms near Margot’s flat, since Margot’s way of life could not just then be shared with an innocent young girl. Margot had by this time got as far towards New York as Denver, Colorado, where she finally married a Jewish lawyer called Albert Markowitz, and was able to establish a respectable home to which Hattie could come, but that was a little later.
Meanwhile something unusual, even odd, had happened in Hattie’s life. An idea had germinated in the brilliant, but (in worldly matters) rather naïve and confused mind of John Robert. Perhaps he felt a bit guilty about having been inattentive, and wished to defend himself against a charge of wilful neglect. Perhaps he wanted simply to save himself the trouble of organizing and supervising Hattie’s movements round the world. Whatever the reason, he decided that Hattie must have a permanent female companion, a person who in the old days could have been called her ‘maid’. And in order to find such a person John Robert came back to Ennistone. He wanted an English girl, he needed advice, he did not want to waste time on the operation. He arrived and established himself (at the Ennistone Royal Hotel, 16 Hare Lane being let at the time). He had written beforehand to William Eastcote (Rose Eastcote was already dead) but Eastcote happened to be away at a Friends’ conference in Geneva. The only other person in Ennistone whom he cared to trust in this matter was Ruby Doyle. John Robert had conceived, not exactly an affection, but a kind of respect for Ruby in the old Linda Brent days when Ruby, then young but looking much the same, had been so discreetly helpful. There was a kind of monumental thing- In- Itselfness about Ruby which pleased the philosopher. Ruby, scarcely capable of speech, was incapable of lies. He felt that Ruby would do the few things that she could do without fuss and without the interference of any messy general ideas. She also knew how to keep her mouth shut. John Robert, by nature secretive, did not want his project discussed in Ennistone. He wrote to Ruby and summoned her to the hotel. Ruby could not read or write but, so I am told, she took the letter to the gipsy camp. She certainly said nothing to Alex. When John Robert had explained what he wanted, Ruby responded promptly and without emotion that she had a connection, a cousin, who was now unemployed and who might suit the professor. How exactly the young woman in question (Pearl Scotney, she was called) was related to Ruby, and to Diane, was a matter of speculation. Some said they were all half-sisters, probably none of them knew for certain. Ruby bore, she said, her father’s surname, Pearl bore her unmarried, abandoned, mother’s name, and Diane had borne her unmarried, abandoned, mother’s name (Davis) until her marriage with the disastrous Sedley. It might even have been that the connection between them had been originally suggested by their being called Pearl, Ruby and Diamond. John Robert interviewed Pearl in London and decided that she would do. He gave her an airline ticket to Denver and instructions about where to find Hattie. He also wrote to Margot, who was surprised, annoyed and relieved. Pearl arrived and found Hattie spending her first summer holidays in a dim flatlet in the large complex where Margot lived, and trying to do her holiday tasks while suffering from agonizing loneliness and chronic tears. Hattie was thirteen, Pearl was twenty-one.
John Robert had not, in conceiving his project, worked it out in any detail; he had not for instance wondered what Pearl was to do when Hattie was at school, and had to have this problem brought to his attention by Pearl. Pearl had no home in Ennistone, and in any case John Robert had made it clear that he did not want her to sojourn, perhaps talk, in his native town. It was decided that Pearl should continue to live where she had been living in north London and, when not in attendance upon Hattie, to continue if she wished her part-time secretarial work, without any diminution of the generous salary which John Robert paid her. Hattie’s boarding school was in Hertfordshire, and here it was also Pearl’s duty to visit her, and see she was contented and supplied with all that she needed.