Such thoughts flitted in her head as she sat now on her white school bed, and held her warm brown-stockinged foot in her hand. They flitted around with lots of other thoughts, memories of snowy slopes mauve with aspens, of that melancholy lake in Texas, of her dear father frowning with anxiety as he prepared his lectures, of the awful little flatlet where she had cried so much before Pearl came, of the kindly nervous guilty face of Margot Meynell, now Mrs Albert Markowitz, and distantly distantly dimly of Hattie’s mother, the unhappy dead lady who had once been Miss Rozanov.
A distant bell rang. Hattie thrust a clean handkerchief into her knickers, and emerged substanceless as a seed into the brown spaces of the landing and the stairs which she was destined to dream about for the rest of her life.
John Robert Rozanov was floating like an enormous baby in the hot flowing waters of his private bath in the Ennistone Rooms. His bath was a large boat-shaped affair made of white tiles with blunt ends. At each end there was a seat which was under water when the bath was full. There was a fan which expelled the steam, but John Robert had not put it on; he liked steam. The hot curative waters flowed in, indeed roared in, from the fat glistening brass taps which were never turned off by day or night, so that the Rooms were full of a ceaseless roaring to which the inmates were quickly accustomed and said to deafened visitors ‘I don’t hear it!’ ‘They may not hear it, but it affects them,’ someone said darkly to the Director of the Institute, Vernon Chalmers, who quickly prepared and kept in reserve a little monograph on the therapeutic powers of sound. Dazed, almost drowsy, with unheard noise John Robert floated, his white-skinned whale-belly huge before him. His big flipper-like hands kept him buoyant, moving slowly to and fro in the space of the bath, while the steaming water fell from the taps at a controlled temperature of forty-two degrees Centigrade. The bath could be filled by turning a brass handle to close the plug at the bottom, after which the water rose to an outlet vent near the top. When the plug was lifted, the water subsided to a uniform level of about a foot, spitting and gurgling under the violence of the jets from above.
Last night John Robert had dreamt that he was being pursued by a lot of squealing piglets who turned out to be human infants running very fast on all fours. Later he saw the same creatures lying on the ground as if asleep, only now they were dolls, and he thought, ‘they were dolls after all.’ Some of them lay quiet, and these he took to be dead; others were moving and twitching slightly, and these he took to be dying. He thought, but surely dolls must be dead. He picked up one of the dead ones and put it in his pocket. His mother came and asked to see it. When he brought it out he saw with horror that it was alive and in pain. In the morning he woke up early and went out for a walk. He looked into the big bright clean Methodist church where he had worshipped as a child. He had not been there for a long time and felt a weird shock when he recognized the numbers of the hymns. He then visited the little corrugated- Iron Roman Catholic chapel where his mother had once told him that they worshipped a goddess. Why had she frightened him by saying that, was it meant to be a joke? He looked inside into the dark which was full of images. An aged priest appeared who said that he remembered his grandfather. People in Burkestown all knew John Robert, smiled at him and said, ‘Good morning, Professor.’
John Robert propelled himself to one end of the bath and adopted a sitting position, his head and shoulders now above the water. He mopped his red swollen steamy face with an adjacent towel, and began to go through the exercises which his Japanese doctor in California had recommended for his arthritis. When John Robert went to Texas and Arizona his arthritic symptoms disappeared. Since his return into the English spring he had felt old familiar pains together with new strange ones. As he rotated his head and twitched his shoulders and turned his arms into snakes he sighed, then groaned into the hurly-burly of the roaring stream. The warmth was kind to his bulky pain-ridden body. As he swayed himself gently in the waters he could not but believe in their therapeutic power. But for the weary diminishing cells of the mind there was no alleviation, unless it might be a strong electric shock to shake them all up again like counters in a game. He was so tired and so old, and he had so much to decide and such terrible things to do.
Meanwhile outside at that very moment the sun was shining on the Outdoor Bath, which was less steamy today because the air temperature was higher. The sky was blue, clothes and bodies looked bright and hard-edged and clear, and the cries which people always utter in swimming-pools echoed in the sunny northern light. In Diana’s Garden Ruby, Diane and Pearl were standing together, a rare conjunction, not marked since few people in Ennistone knew Pearl by sight. Pearl had been to visit her foster-mother who lived in Kilburn and who had written to her asking for money. Pearl could have sent the money by post, but decided to visit the old lady at least partly so as to exhibit her own affluence and sophistication. The foster-mother, visited, made a point of not being interested in Pearl’s life. Then she wept self-pityingly. Pearl left, upset and cross. Unhappy stirred up memories then made her suddenly want to go to Ennistone, where there was no particular reason for her to be and where she rarely went, since she knew that it was out of bounds under John Robert’s rules. She came to the Baths looking for Ruby.
Diane was wearing a dark blue tweed coat which she had bought at the second-hand shop. She ought not to have bought it. She had savings, but George’s non-appearance was reducing her spending money. It can’t go on, she told herself. She was not sure what this meant, but at least it suggested that her troubles would end somehow. Everything was disorderly and menacing. A lot of things had been stolen on the day when the lights went out at Bowcocks. Supposing someone were to accuse her of thieving? Everyone would be thrilled to believe it, she was vulnerable to any accusation. Suppose her money ran out, could she ask Ruby or Pearl for a loan? Impossible. Ruby regarded Diane as a fallen woman, someone who had ruined herself and was finished. Diane could not forgive this. Nor could she forgive Pearl for being young and free, and for looking so horribly healthy and independent in a corduroy jacket and trousers. Diane felt close to tears. How pleased everyone would be to see her crying in public. Everyone, that is, except George, who would be furiously angry. Fortunately George was absent. I had better go, thought Diane, I’ve been away for long enough, perhaps he’ll come - Oh, if only I could go to the cinema like ordinary people do. Where will I be a year from now? Will I be somewhere else, could I be? Will I be dead? Will he be dead? The idea that George was going to commit suicide had now lodged in her mind. This did not appal her, it gave her a kind of relief, not because she felt she would survive George, but because she apprehended it as her own death.