John Robert could recall, in permanently available cinematograph, many of the occasions, not immensely large in total number, when he had been with Hattie. He saw her in the senseless baked garden of Whit Meynell’s bungalow in Texas, a little child, not as tall as the flowers. Could he not have made friends with her then, when she reached up her hand and expected him to take it (which he did not), when she had not yet fenced him away with her nervous thoughts? How he perceived it later, that fence: not that he imagined she thought immensely about him, but she had a view of him, a view which paralysed them both at terrible little tea parties at terrible motels. Later in Denver they had gone on some short expeditions to see lakes and waterfalls, to look at a ghost town (Hattie liked ghost towns), to drive to a high place from which, surrounded by scores of other motor cars, they could look at immense empty flanks of snow mountains behind snow mountains into white distances where the eyes failed. (John Robert hated cars but, being a Californian by adoption, had to drive one.) Margot, later Pearl, had come on these jaunts. Occasionally he was alone with Hattie. Of course, it was possible that he felt as he did about the pure child because she was only available as a set of pictures and not as a continuous active imperfect person. But what difference did such speculations make now? He recalled her too, faintly, perceptibly adolescent, in California beside the ocean, walking on the lawns of campuses in the east, in the west, in a desert somewhere standing with Pearl beside his car and drawing cats in the dust upon it with her finger. Had they not, on those occasions, had ‘ordinary talk’, ‘got to know each other’? No. The occasions had been too rare, and they had both, too early, set up their formal self-protective attitudes. These ‘impressions’, these ‘stills’ from her childhood came to him with a piercing sense of her particular odd dim whitish charm and her secluded innocence, her blessed loneliness and awkwardness in anything which showed any danger of being a ‘sophisticated’ or ‘merry’ scene. Of course John Robert had always endeavoured to steer her clear of ‘merry scenes’. He had done his best to preserve her from any touch or even knowledge of the abysses which surrounded her. He could not, short of total captivity, keep her out of the world. Often it seemed that it could not touch her, she was not only too well-protected, she was too naturally fastidious and, perhaps, profoundly naive. At least it could not touch her yet. Still, still, she was preserved from the abominable vulgarity of growing up.
The idea of Hattie simply walking away into a secret world of sexual adventure increasingly tortured the philosopher. It was as if he felt, with a crazed passion: she must not sin. This torment, visiting earlier with premonitory pains, now, as if by destiny, raged in full possession exactly at the time when John Robert began to feel, or imagine, that his philosophical powers were waning. That was one way to put it. It was, too, like a loss of religious faith. He began to mistrust not only what he was doing now, and everything he had ever done, but everything they had ever done, his philosophers, the great immortal ones, in fact to doubt the whole goddamned enterprise. His pen weakened in his hand, his hand which would soon in any case be stiff and monstrous with arthritis. (He had never learnt to use a typewriter, a machine which he found totally inimical to thought.) He felt world-weary, as if the journey was done, his era was over, John Robert Rozanov was finished. There only and so terribly remained alive the future, which was Hattie.
In this desolation the characteristically dotty idea of marrying Hattie off quickly came to him as a salve. Why should he not at least attempt to arrange her marriage, to meddle thus far in her life and her future? It had been one of his most secret and peculiar miseries, one which he continually revived for his discomfort, that he would never be able to know when and with whom Hattie lost her virginity, and moved definitely out of the magic circle in which he had installed her. He would have to wait and guess and never be certain, and could he bear that? Hence there arose the idea of hastening the event and controlling it himself. It remained to find a bridegroom. Again, as in the case of Pearl and, as he hoped, with equal luck, he had at once hit upon a candidate. It might have been expected that the world of possibilities would at once have seemed so giddily large as to defeat reflection. Tom McCaffrey’s amazement at the choice lighting upon him is easily understood. But in fact the area of selection, once essential requirements were met, turned out to be reasonably small; and here Rozanov’s calculations were a strange mixture of extreme self-protective worldly wisdom, and a naivety as great as Hattie’s.
John Robert did not want an American. Americans knew too much. He considered, not seriously but as a clear instance of an impossibility, one of his cleverest younger pupils, Steve Glatz. Steve was a noble youth, but he was already hand- In-glove with life; he lacked that certain awkwardness which characterizes English boys and which, somehow or other, was upon John Robert’s list of requirements. Besides, Steve was too old, being now at least twenty-five. Men of other races were out of the question. (Jews were, of course, not excluded, but the only Jews known to John Robert were American ones.) The chosen one must be English and must not be a philosopher, that too was clear. Philosophical chat with his grandson- In-law was not part of John Robert’s picture of the future. Indeed any chat with this person was rather hard to imagine. The boy must be educated, a university student or graduate. Hattie herself, he supposed, would be proceeding to the university. She would need an educated person, able to earn his living (perhaps as a school teacher) but not too brilliantly clever (nothing like Glatz). Very clever people tended to be, in John Robert’s experience, neurotic, unstable and obsessively ambitious. The chosen one must be English, and must, in practical terms, be an Ennistonian. John Robert still, in that large part of himself which remained untouched by sophistication, regarded Ennistone as the centre of the world. Besides, there was nowhere else in England where he knew so many people. He had quickly passed his academic London friends in review, scrutinizing their families in vain. As soon as it was Ennistone, the light shone upon Tom McCaffrey.
In the wilds of California and Massachusetts and Illinois John Robert had regularly received and studied the Ennistone Gazette. This gossipy sheet mentioned Tom on a few occasions as having acted in a review, been a runner-up in the tennis tournament, played well in the cricket team, obtained a university place: modest achievements, but McCaffreys were news. (The Gazette had also featured Tom’s only publication so far, an extremely bad poem, but this fortunately John Robert had not seen.) McCaffreys were news, and not only to ordinary home-keeping Ennistone, but also to John Robert himself in exile. In an odd way John Robert, bereft of home ties and relations, felt himself connected with the McCaffreys and the Stillowens, the old Victoria Park people, as if they were his family. This connectedness, which did not need to include any real friendship or even acquaintance, passed of course through Linda who had been, at the crucial time, so much at home with these folk. Perhaps indeed something even more primitive had been touched within the philosopher’s soul. George had, without for a second believing it, hazarded, to insult his teacher, the idea that John Robert, when he was young, had resented not being invited to ‘the grand houses’. In fact this was true. John Robert, at a time when he was already well known and admired, was annoyed to find himself ignored, or patronized, by people like Geoffrey Stillowen and Gerald McCaffrey. From this too he retained a deep and mixed feeling about these self-appointed ‘grandees’. From this source came his whim to establish Hattie in the Slipper House, an edifice which amid much social fuss and éclat, he could remember being built, and which had figured in his youth as a symbol of affluence and social power. Perhaps even the very idea of ‘choosing’ Tom arose from some scarcely formulated desire to see his grandchild stoop to marry a McCaffrey. John Robert did not purposefully intend to dominate and trap Tom, yet this he instinctively did and with a perceptible satisfaction.