When had it become too late? Had it always seemed too late? As time went on John Robert, in the restless painful working out of his remorse, kept moving the moment at which it became too late further and further onward in time toward the present, with which it never caught up. But if ‘too late’ kept moving on in this way, was it not still in his power, looking at the present from the future, to assert that, after all, now was not yet too late? The idea of just this freedom was perhaps what tormented the philosopher most. He could still ‘do something about Hattie’. Or could he? What could he, after all these years, do? What move could he make now which would not mystify, even appal her? Such speculations were being endlessly examined, metamorphosed and refined in his secret thought, while at the same time he struggled with the most crucial problems of his philosophy, his ability thus to brood and suffer matching but not diminishing his giant ability to work.
He thought often of writing Hattie a letter, explaining that he hoped that she realized how much he loved her. But, as in imagination he perused it, this letter seemed to be so stiffly conventional as to be insignificant or even embarrassing, or else to be something extremely melodramatic and startling. Other people solved such problems without even noticing them, or else lived thoughtlessly without their ever arising; he could not. Was it that he loved her? Was this love? Did he after all know so little of the world as not to have thoroughly understood this concept? Was it the same thing now as what he had felt when she was eight (or was it nine)? Perhaps the thing he felt, and thought he could identify, was always changing. Had it, in especial, changed lately, as Hattie grew - older? To say that John Robert was ‘in love’ with his grand-daughter was to employ too vague and dubious a concept. What was certain was that he was obsessed by her.
During years when John Robert thought continually about Hattie he saw her only at rare intervals. He deliberately rationed his visits to her, which had the effect of intensifying her mystery. Of course this was unwise, he later saw; he should have kept the child close to him. But would familiarity have dispelled her charm? He could not see the whole situation or see the situation whole. Certain necessary hypotheses excluded certain other necessary hypotheses, it was like some situations in philosophy. She would have interrupted his work. Would she have made him ‘happy’? Another problematic concept. Inevitably, and in spite of the changes in her life, she seemed complete without him. When he had first ‘noticed’ her, her father had been still alive; but the philosopher’s contempt for Whit Meynell effectively obliterated this figure from the picture in a way in which it had not been possible to obliterate Amy. Amy had been a blot, a thorn, a dismal even sinister growth. Whit Meynell was nothing. In the picture of Hattie which had begun to glow there was not even a shadow. Yet this nothingness, though it made Hattie more visible, did not make her more accessible. She always seemed to be ‘getting on’ in a sort of life of her own in which John Robert must figure as an otiose outsider, one whose arrival was a bit of a trial. Poor Whit, of course, could make no secret of his ardent desire for his father- In-law’s absence, and in this Hattie seemed naturally to share. Later, with Margot, it was much the same. Of course John Robert was aware how scrappy and unsatisfactory, how problematic and provisional, how very unhappy Hattie’s mode of life must be. But this awareness could not help him to any sensible decision. Sometimes vaguely he dreamed of taking Hattie right away with him, capturing her, keeping her with him in some Spanish-style palazzo in some isolated part of southern California and overwhelming her with luxuries and treats. But what would that really be like? Might she not be embarrassed, annoyed, irritated, bored, frustrated, longing to get away? The mere idea of finding her so caused him such anguish as to make the experiment impossible. Was it not better simply to stand by and take such satisfaction as he could in simply watching her grow? His present aloof relation to her at least precluded problems, situations, consequences. Had he not his work to do and must he not protect himself? But … watching her grow … As Hattie became fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, John Robert began to feel his ‘too late’ with an added intensity. If the disclosure of his ‘love’, or whatever it was, was likely to ‘appal’ Hattie, was this not because the ‘love’ was, or was becoming, something ‘appalling’? John Robert, who was not accustomed to stop himself from thinking, here endeavoured to stop.
It is in the context of this secret life of Rozanov that his extraordinary proposal to Tom McCaffrey may become intelligible. But before Tom there was Pearl. John Robert had never liked or trusted Margot Meynell, but for a time he could think of no alternative policy. Pearl was a sudden inspiration, and with amazing luck when he reached out his hand blindly he immediately took hold of exactly the right person. He needed an absolutely reliable watchdog, someone (when she was not imprisoned in her school) who would be with Hattie all the time; for control of Hattie’s time had gradually become a part of John Robert’s obsession. He needed positively to seclude her innocence, he wanted to be able to know where she was and what she was doing, to have, in fact, an effective spy in her life; and this role Pearl, without fully realizing it, performed very adequately. John Robert was aware of Pearl as a strong and able person; he respected strong and able people. (His awareness of her, however, had not revealed her much more intense awareness of him.) Lately, however, he had found himself beginning to feel jealous of Pearl, and resenting her existence as a barrier between him and Hattie; that was how the thing, poisonously, was growing and how mad it had all become.
The notion of Tom was in a sense a notion of the same sort, though also of course completely different. John Robert had for some time been well aware that the period of her life during which he could keep Hattie in a cage was coming to an end. Hitherto, even if he could not imprison her in a Californian palazzo with himself as a gaoler, he had been able to supervise the limitations of her life elsewhere. Pearl was good, the strict old-fashioned boarding school was good, the ‘families’ were very carefully chosen. John Robert did not want Hattie to live free with bands of disorderly young people; this idea sickened him. He was beginning to realize, with another turn of the screw, how crazy his secret possessiveness was destined to become now that Hattie was seventeen.
Was he now to be the helpless spectator of Hattie becoming a woman? Only yesterday she had been a little slim thing with pigtails and a doll and pale solemn eyes, the child who lived in his mind, as she might have lived in his house. He had established his picture of her as an innocent child. He had prepared no picture of her as a young woman. There would be lovers, affairs, scrapes, pregnancies, abortions, all the coarse horror of the world of indiscriminate sex, the degraded sex-mad modern world from which John Robert shrank away with profound moral revulsion. Then there would be no Pearl any more, Hattie would escape from her watchdog and dance about free. Could he bear it, and if not what could he do? Sometimes, walking at night in half-nightmares, it seemed to him that the only solution was to kill her.