‘No, I haven’t seen him either - we don’t know, do we, Pearl - whether he’s - where he is exactly — ’
‘Oh dear!’ said Gabriel, ‘I mean — ’
‘What are you doing here?’ said Brian.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hattie, not comically but awkwardly, making Brian’s brusque question seem even ruder. Realizing this she added, ‘I expect I shall be studying.’
‘We shall be studying,’ said Father Bernard smiling.
‘What will you study?’ said Gabriel.
‘I don’t know — I don’t really know anything much — ’
‘Can you swim?’ said Brian.
Oh yes — ’
‘Then I expect we’ll see you at the Baths. Everyone in Ennistone comes to the Baths. Eh?’
There was a pause. Adam had withdrawn with Zed and was standing behind Brian on the side toward the back gate, looking as if he wanted to go away. He stood with his feet wide apart, wearing the corduroy knee breeches and brown jersey which was the uniform of his school. His round brown eyes scanned Hattie with the puzzlement of a young savage.
Hattie looked at him and said, ‘I like your togs.’
The word ‘togs’ emerged from Hattie’s lips betokening, in a way which all present obscurely understood, her curious unbelongingness, her statelessness, her lack of a native tongue and a native land.
Adam bowed.
‘It’s his school uniform,’ said Gabriel.
‘How nice — ’
‘Well, we must go,’ said Brian. ‘We must leave you two to your studies! Come on, Gabriel.’
‘You will, won’t you — ’
‘Yes, of course— ’
‘Good-bye, then — ’
‘So kind — ’
Brian and Gabriel emerged from the back gate into Forum Way. Adam and Zed had run out before them.
‘Well, what did you think?’ said Gabriel.
‘Was that her school uniform?’
‘Of course not! It was rather smart, I thought — ’
‘She’s an infant. She ought to be in white frills.’
‘What did you think of her?’
‘Nothing. She’s a skinny little American.’
‘She hadn’t much of an American accent, more English public school.’
‘Yuk!’
‘I thought she was sweet.’
‘Of course you did. She thought Zed was sweet.’
‘Why are you so cross?’
‘I’m always cross.’
‘You were quite rude.’
‘So were you, you were salivating with curiosity.’
‘Oh dear — ’
‘And what on earth possessed you to give her our cake?’
‘We can get another.’
‘They’ll all be gone.’
‘Did you see George?’
‘George? Has he got himself inside that house already?’
‘He was standing up near Belmont - I think — ’
‘You imagined it. I didn’t see him. You’ve got George on the brain.’
‘We ought to have said something nice to the maid,’ said Gabriel. ‘No one spoke to her.’
‘I suppose she’s American.’
‘No, someone at the Baths said she was some sort of relation of Ruby’s.’
‘Of Ruby’s? How perfectly horrible.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it makes things connect. I don’t want things to connect.’
‘But why?’
‘All connections are sinister. I don’t want anything to connect with anything.’
‘Did you like her, the little girl, Miss Meynell?’ Gabriel asked Adam whom they had just caught up with.
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
Gabriel thought, Oh dear, he’s jealous! And he wasn’t really pleased because I’d bought the cracked jug, well, he was pleased but not enough. And Brian thinks I think about George. And I do think about George. I suppose that was George I saw and I didn’t imagine it? I do wish I had more children. I’d love a little girl like Hattie. I wish George was my child too. Oh what nonsense my poor head is full of. She said, ‘Let’s invite her round.’
‘Who?’
‘Miss Meynell of course. She must be lonely — ’
‘She won’t be lonely for long,’ said Brian. ‘Mark my words, that girl will be a troublemaker.’
‘I can’t think why you — ’
‘And we will not invite her round. For heaven’s sake, don’t let us mess about with anything to do with Rozanov. Everything about that man brings bad luck. And do take that bloody ribbon off your hair, do you want to look sixteen too?’
After the Brian McCaffreys had disappeared out of the back gate and Hattie and her ‘tutor’ had gone into the sitting-room, Pearl Scotney was left alone. She put Gabriel’s impulsive cake away in a tin and put on her coat and went out into the garden. Near the Slipper House the lawn, broad and tree-dotted near the house, began to narrow to a meander of green, coming to an end in the thicker maze of trees and shrubs at the end of the garden. Here there was a garden shed, a space for a bonfire, and an area which had once been a grass tennis court. There was also the remains of a small vegetable garden. (The old gardener no longer came regularly.) Pearl walked this way, away from Belmont, and threaded between lilac and viburnum and buddleia and azalea and rhus and small Japanese maples which were putting out vivid curly red buds which looked like decorations made out of coral. Here and there were some taller trees, fir and chestnut and an old ilex. This region, which mixed higher and lower vegetation, was sometimes called ‘the shrubbery’, sometimes ‘the copse’. The paths were grassy, or else of sad dark earth grown over with green moss.
Pearl, who liked plants and trees, noticed her surroundings and, as human beings can, took a little pleasure in them in the middle of her general large unhappiness. She felt as she walked, giddy, suffering one of those fits of non- Identity which probably attack most souls at some time. As she had stood at attention behind her ‘young mistress’ at the door of the house she had felt, in her apron uniform, invisible. Well, the priest had noticed her; but she had not liked his notice. That young Mrs McCaffrey had thrown her one or two of her vague over-sweet smiles, but that meant nothing. Hattie’s ‘we’ meant nothing too. Well, it meant something just now in Hattie’s heart; but Hattie’s heart was entering a danger zone, vulnerable to the world, soon to be public property. Her heart which now hugged its little world in a small space, curled up as in a womb, would soon be enlarged to welcome many, perhaps very many, new loves. New desires, new attractions, new knowledge must come now. Hattie was at the end, the very last soft inaudible breath, of her childhood. It was the time, the logical time, for Pearl to let go, indeed to be forced to let go. A mother might feel like this, she thought. But after all a mother is forever. I am not Hattie’s mother or her sister or even her second cousin. Hattie has no conception of my relationship to her, and will easily begin to feel it to be unreal and to belong to the past.
Pearl had thought these thoughts many times before, prophetically. Now that the time had come to think them for real, she was so tired of them that she could not regard them as posing any problem she could possibly solve. She had wondered whether, in putting Hattie and herself into the Slipper House, like two dolls put away in a doll’s house, John Robert had had any particular end in view. Pearl had imagined, continuing her unremitting guesswork about John Robert’s mind, that he had intended Mrs McCaffrey to ‘keep an eye’ on Hattie, perhaps to take her over. But this peril, which Pearl had been determined to resist, had not so far materialized. Meanwhile she discouraged Hattie from seeing Alex. It seemed that they were really ‘on their own’. After all, had they not always been so? Only when Hattie was a child ‘on their own’ had had a different sense. Hattie had survived marvellously, they had both done, without a social world. They knew a few of Margot’s (new very respectable) friends. They had made, in their tramping about Europe, no permanent acquaintances, and this had been partly, Pearl now recognized, because of Pearl’s possessiveness as well as because of Hattie’s shyness. Hattie had school friends (Verity Smaldon, for instance) to whom Pearl had surrendered her for brief visits. But these were fragile attachments, mere contextual connections. Hattie, so infinitely and emptily ready for the world, was still, unless Pearl possessed her, unpossessed.