The Philosopher's Pupil

I won’t distress you

If I can’t possess you.

Don’t feel it a sin

You can pack it in at any time,

It’s not a crime,

I’ll bear it and I’ll grin!

I’ll be a hero most of all in this,

I’ll let you go with a loving kiss,

My heart is full of fear,

But you are free,

Don’t go away, my dear -

But if you do, I’ll smile and say

Good-bye, don’t cry, for you are you,

And I am only me.

Don’t tear yourself apart, darling,

How much I love you, you know, that’s not in doubt,

I don’t want to bruise your heart, darling,

You’re always free to go - out.

I won’t scream and shout.

Why should you love me after all,

There’s no good reason.

Any time can be the fall,

You can leave in any season.

I want you for my wife,

I want you all my life,

But if you fly away, and we can’t be together,

I won’t die, I’ll say

Good-bye, good flying weather, from only me.

I want you but only forever

Nothing else will do,

I want you but only forever,

That is my only you.

If you take flight

I won’t die out of spite,

I won’t cry out of spite,

I won’t be unkind

If you change your mind,

I won’t torment you,

Hide the pain in my heart,

Make it easy to part,

I won’t prevent you.

I want your happiness,

I won’t be bad,

I’ll say good-bye, God bless you,

And don’t be sad, darling -

It’s only me.

Tom was pleased with his pop song which had developed so quickly out of Adam’s germinal idea about the two snails. Later in the evening, after the conversation recorded above, he and Emma had got rather drunk together, and Tom had then retired to his bedroom to polish up his ode. Now it was after midnight. Tom occupied the back room with the view over the garden, and beyond over the town where the floodlight upon the cupola of Ennistone Hall had just been switched off. The town, beneath dark night clouds, composed a pattern of yellow dotted lines, a few pale window squares still visible here and there. The Ennistonians went early to bed. Tom had given himself over to the song, imagining in touching detail the situation which it portrayed: he, the hero, in love, but restraining his fierce possessive desire, the girl shy, gentle, timid, (a virgin?) unable to decide. He respects her indecision, even loves the vagueness which torments him, the fuzzy shadowy helpless non-logical uncertainty and lack of definition which Tom somehow associated with the girl whom he would one day love. (That very evening he and Emma had decided that neither of them had ever really been in love.) Tom, the hero, stands back, gives to the girl freedom, space and time, pressing down in his heart the fear of failure together with the painful need which would attempt to cage her. He wants her, but only forever, and must therefore envisage her loss, though this now seems like death. Tranquillizing his anguish of suspense, he is gentle with her, making her feel how simple, how friendly and kind, how very undangerous he is, just her old familiar admirer. But do girls like that sort of chap, Tom wondered suddenly. Well, in this song they do. Perhaps he would now write another song with a different sort of hero, not a gentleman. But in fact Tom did himself aspire to be a gentleman and believed that he was one. He could, he felt, never descend to the base level where sex is coarsely spoken of and women are deemed to be cattle. Of course Tom’s imagination occupied itself with women. He imagined protected girls who snuggle down in virgin cots at night. He thought too about rather wicked wild girls, who had run away from home, but he did not associate them with his mother. Perhaps Tom’s thoughts about women were influenced more than he ever realized by the shade of Feckless Fiona, eternally young Fiona, waif and victim, whom it was somehow his task to save and keep unmarked by the world. And for her perhaps he had remained a little childish, and still thought of himself as innocent. As he had said to Emma, he felt unfallen and did not yet understand how wickedness began.

Emma was in bed in the larger front bedroom where the budding green plane trees filled the window, their speckled branches swaying in the wind, visible in the light of the street lamps of Travancore Avenue until Emma had drawn the curtains. He had spent some time earlier on trying to straighten out the frame of his glasses which had become twisted in the tumble down the slope in the railway cutting. He fiddled for a while, screwing up his eyes and occasionally rubbing the red mark which the wire bridge made upon his nose. Desisting at last, he had got into bed and resumed his reading of The Origins of Military Power in Spain 1800-1854.

Now he had closed his book and was thinking about his singing teacher, Mr Hanway. Emma and Mr Hanway had been together for several years, but their relations had remained formal. Emma called Mr Hanway ‘Sir’, never by his first name which was Neil, and Mr Hanway called Emma ‘Scarlett-Taylor’. The formal pattern of their dealings did not however prevent Emma from suspecting, it went no further than suspicion, that Mr Hanway felt for him a love which exceeded the natural affection of a teacher for a gifted pupil. Sometimes, as it seemed, through the conventional gauze of their converse, Mr Hanway’s eyes blazed momentarily at Emma with some involuntary signal of emotional need.

Emma was not unduly disturbed by this suspicion. His moral temperament was fastidiously reticent and agnostic, devoid of the eager curiosity which often masquerades as benevolence. In any case, music made a holy world within which Emma and Mr Hanway could lead safe intelligible lives, making sense of each other through the bond of a transcendent necessity. When Emma sang to his teacher, or when they sang together, they were joined in a communion which was not only more spiritual than any alternative but more satisfying. Sometimes when Mr Hanway criticized his pupil or chided him for carelessness or laziness or forgetfulness of precept, Emma felt an emotion which resonated far away at the back of Mr Hanway’s calm pedantic tones. But Emma felt sure that Mr Hanway did not want to change anything, suspecting as he must that no change could better him, and finding perhaps a satisfaction, which went beyond anything which Emma could imagine, in the state of affairs as it was. Thus their relationship could have gone on and on, as such relationships between singers often do; only now Emma had come, in a terrible way, to question the value and doubt the future of his own talent.

It was not that he was tired of singing. The physical joy of that strange exercise still transported him, and the sense of absolute power with which it filled him was undiminished. Singing, the creation of sound by a disciplined exercise of mind and body, is perhaps the point at which flesh and spirit most joyfully meet. There is a travail and a bringing forth as a purified sound enters the world. The perfected cry of an individual soul. Somewhat of this did Emma think and feel. Nor did he undervalue his endowment and what he had made of it. But it was just beginning to seem, since he could not give his whole life to it, pointless to go on. His discouragements were in part his own, personal and metaphysical, and in part those which he shared with other counter-tenors. (Mr Hanway had, of course, other pupils, but arranged the timetable so that Emma, at least, never met any of his fellows. When he was with his teacher it always seemed that Mr Hanway had endless time to spare for Emma alone. Of course this impression may simply have arisen from his being a good teacher.) The counter-tenor voice is a highly developed falsetto, not a boy’s voice nor a castrato’s. (Purcell was a counter-tenor.) It has a narrow range, and the counter-tenor repertoire is small and perceptibly finite. Emma had pretty well been its rounds. He had sung many English lute songs; the gloomy sadness of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and music suited him well. He sang Purcell and Handel. He and Mr Hanway had combed the ‘early music’ offerings, and the formal love-banter of the eighteenth century had been for them a natural tongue. Now Mr Hanway was taking Emma through the part of Oberon in Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, singing the other parts himself with his remarkable voice which was able to become so many ‘other voices’, as his piano was able to become an orchestra. Mr Hanway (a tenor) had been an opera singer once; but he never spoke of those days.