‘Yes, George. I sometimes wonder whether you won’t kill me in the end.’
‘Just look at your hand. You’re like a Pakistani girl. When will you give up smoking?’
‘When you marry me.’
‘This place stinks, your hand stinks, your hand is stained, your hand is brown and dry, my heart is brown and dry, it’s like an old dry smelly leather bag. And yet - all will be well - I must go — ’
‘When will you come again?’
‘I don’t know. In a hundred years. Watch and pray.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the cinema.’
‘Good morning, Pearl.’
‘Good morning, Sir.’
Pearl, who had opened the Slipper House door to John Robert’s ring, curtseyed. Only for him did she curtsey. It was part of the playacting which was not play-acting which she put on for John Robert.
‘How are you?’
‘Very well, thank you. Why, you’re all wet!’
The philosopher was indeed all wet and did not need to be reminded of it. He frowned.
He had dressed with some care for his visit, putting on a clean shirt and a dark suit which he kept for best. He had shaved carefully, sliding his razor (not electric) into all the folds of his jowl and of his dry saurian neck and removing the old man’s grey stubble which had so fascinated George. He had combed his crisp frizzy hair making it stand up on end, and he had put on his overcoat. It was not until he had proceeded a little way along Ennistone High Street, and passed Bowcocks, that he perceived that it was raining, and he then deemed it too late to return to fetch his umbrella, hat and scarf. The rain was not much. However, it increased, and he arrived at Forum Way with his head and neck thoroughly soaked and, in spite of having put up his coat collar, water running down his chest and back. He felt uncomfortable and undignified and chilly. He disliked getting his hair wet.
Of course the girls, alerted by his telephone call earlier that morning, had been expecting him for some time (it was now almost noon), peering out of the window to see him come along the muddy path between the trees. Before that they had been busy, rushing about the house to put it to tiptop rights. (Pearl jealously prevented Ruby from cleaning. She did it herself with help from Hattie.) They also had to decide how to array themselves, whether Hattie should wear her new pretty summer dress and put her hair up. Hattie decided against the new dress which would look out of place on such a dismal wet morning, but she allowed Pearl to help her to stack up her hair. She wore a cinnamon-brown light woollen dress with dark brown stripes and a high collar which made her look older, and, after consultation, knotted a silk scarf round her neck in a way they thought to be sophisticated. Pearl had got herself up to look like a servant in an opera, with a navy blue dress and a rather smart striped pinafore.
When Pearl opened the door, Hattie remained standing in the sitting-room where they had turned on the gas fire. She did not run to the door to welcome her grandfather. She waited and smoothed her dress and fluffed up her scarf and patted her hair and breathed fast. Pearl had taken John Robert’s coat away to the kitchen to dry. She had omitted to indicate where Hattie was. John Robert, who had not entered the Slipper House since he kissed Linda Brent in an upper room during a Methodist fete at Belmont over fifty years ago, looked about, then peered in through the sitting-room door to see Hattie standing there. At that moment Pearl ran back holding a towel.
‘What’s this?’
‘To dry your hair.’
‘Oh.’ Standing in the doorway he vigorously rubbed his hair and face and neck, then threw the towel back to Pearl without looking at her, entered the room and closed the door behind him.
Of the three persons involved in this little arrival scene or ceremony. John Robert Rozanov was not the one least moved. His heart beat as fiercely as Hattie’s as they faced each other.
John Robert had never managed to get on with his daughter Amy. He loved his wife who had died so soon after the child’s birth. He mourned Linda, he resented Amy, he did not like children, he had wanted a son anyway. Amy was an awkward suspicious hostile child, he had made her so. She showed no spark of any intelligence which might have interested him. He engaged nurses and housekeepers, then dispatched Amy to a boarding school. Just when he was arranging for her to go to college she ran off with that fool Whit Meynell. Then there was another little girl.
John Robert was never sure later on exactly when he had begun to notice Hattie; perhaps not until she was about eight or nine, and her mother, whom she had been so drearily ‘part of, was already dead. She was a solemn child, aloof and shy, but, unlike Amy, not patently intimidated. She had Whit’s Icelandic mother’s stone-blue eyes and silver-gilt hair. But in the totality of her face and tenure she resembled Linda. John Robert’s heart had long ago been walled up and frozen; or rather his heart had become an intellectual organ and it was as such that it could beat strongly and warmly. He was at the height of his philosophical powers and in the grip of intense and continual mental turmoil. He had never deeply desired any woman except Linda. As a young widower he had been pursued, especially by powerful American women intellectuals, but any brief involvements had been much regretted by him, and even more by them. This period was short. His relations with his pupils were sometimes intense, but for John Robert these relations were strictly a function of intellectual excitement. When they ceased to be able to interest him philosophically he forgot them. He enjoyed talking with his colleagues on intellectual academic topics, where his interests and his knowledge ranged beyond the field of philosophy (he could have been a historian). But his pleasure in these encounters was concerned with ideas not with people, although there were not a few clever men and women who would dearly have liked to become his intimates. The last thing in the world that he expected was that he should suddenly find himself moved by a child.
John Robert was indeed surprised to find himself, confronted with the young person, experiencing a new emotion. What was it? Interest, tenderness, affection? Whatever it was, he kept it strictly to himself. He had long ago decided upon his ‘way of life’, and his experience, especially his dismal relation with his daughter, had amply confirmed the decision, also of course confirmed by the world-consuming satisfaction which he found in philosophy. There was no room for anything else now. Yet there was something else, Hattie. She appeared to him like an awkward unnerving extra, a kind of contingent excrescence upon the perfect circle of his life, something outside. John Robert reflected deeply upon this, and found that the phenomenon persisted. He began to think about his grand-daughter with certain obscure flutters of the heart. But, to her, he exhibited no emotion whatsoever. Later on, much later on, he had times of the most bitter remorse, that biting ‘Oh if only — ’ which can gnaw its way into the very centre of the soul and there set up a pain which mixes itself with every experience. Remorse, at times, even distracted Rozanov from philosophy. If only he had, earlier on, established some direct affectionate relation, some ordinary modus vivendi with Hattie. Other grandfathers, as he could see from looking at his colleagues, were friends with their granddaughters, held their hands, hugged them, set them on their knees, kissed them. Except for occasions when he sat next to her in the car or on an aeroplane, he never touched Hattie. He did not pat her head or shake her hand. And, as he sometimes reflected, when he did (rarely) happen to sit next to her, not only did he discreetly shrink from her, she also shrank from him. How could he, he wondered as the years went by, go on and on so thoroughly doing what he did not feel? If only he had been braver and more intelligent, he could have had an ordinary affectionate relationship with Hattie ever since she was a small child. This might not have been anything wonderful but it would have been a door to open wider at need. Had he at the beginning so hardened his heart that change could not any more happen? But it was exactly his heart which was no longer hard. If only he had, years ago, seized the child in his arms. Would she have shrunk from him? Was it simply the fear of that which had made this long misunderstanding between them? There remained this thing which other people found so simple which he had never in all the years learnt how to do. And now it was too late.