Moreover, as the day went on and Hattie did not come, Pearl began to imagine how Hattie’s resistance might have been broken down, how Hattie’s mind might have been poisoned. Could Hattie be brainwashed, made to believe that Pearl had betrayed Rozanov’s plans, had plotted with George McCaffrey, had deceived Hattie and was altogether a different person from the one she seemed to be? Was such a total change of view possible? Could Hattie be thus led to think that it was time to give up a childish fancy for her old nursemaid? Hattie had never resisted Rozanov’s will. She had, it was a fact, gone away with him last night. Was not the picture of a rebellious Hattie speaking up for Pearl quite unrealistic, a wishful dream? When Pearl reflected how loyal she had been, how totally she had given over her life to those two people, she felt an anger against Rozanov which gave a little relief to her pain. But the pain was terrible. Her love for the monster raged in her heart, and the more she rehearsed his sins the more she loved him: she loved him, protectively, tenderly, forgivingly with an absolute self-breaking sweetness as if she had made him up or he were her child. She held him secretly, possessively, in her heart with such a strength of passion that at times it was hard to believe that he was a separate person with other concerns who knew and cared nothing about how she felt. The desire to tell love is a natural ingredient of love itself; love feels it is a benefit, a blessing, a gift that must be given. No doubt the desire to tell Rozanov, always present, had grown stronger in her heart, and with the shock of his attack on her, became irresistible: the desire by some sort of passionate magic to join together the captive loved image and the terrible free real reality. That was one pain. The other, perhaps even worse, pain was her love for Hattie, not a lurid secret devotion of the imagination, but a real bond, a daily bread love, a lived reality of family life such as Pearl had never known before: an absolute entwining of two lives, a connection the breaking of which had seemed inconceivable. This too, as the day went interminably on, she almost cursed. How could she have become so blindly attached to what she could so suddenly and so completely lose?
When Emma rang up, about five o’clock, Pearl was sure it must be Hattie, and this disappointment made a final degree of desperation, a final signal. She had in fact become, alone in the house so long and with such thoughts, appalled and frightened. She had not thought much about Emma, she had indeed very little conception of him, but now she found herself needing his presence. She needed help, she needed somebody, and Emma, proposing himself, was suddenly clear as the only possible person. What followed was a part of her decision to abandon hope, though this did not prevent her from almost dying of fright when she heard Tom enter and thought it was John Robert.
Emma’s despair and consequent recklessness was of dual origin. He was upset and annoyed by Tom’s failure to appear in London and his failure to write or telephone. Of course, since he had returned to London on Sunday, he knew nothing about the Gazette article and the later dramas. He did not think that Tom was ill; at any rate, if illness was its cause, Tom would surely by now have explained his absence. The silence must be hostile, it must express an alienation which was entirely unjust. Emma could have telephoned Travancore Avenue, but felt too stiff and proud to do so. Besides, a messy telephone call would leave him even more disturbed. He reflected often upon the night which they had spent together and wondered whether a retrospective disgust at that episode was what was rendering his friend absent and silent. Emma had by now firmly classified that night as, as he had put it, a hapax legomenon; nothing like that would ever happen again. And yet he could not help thinking about it and experiencing, in relation to Tom, that mysterious and terrible and well-known yearning of one human body for another, a condition which got worse as the week continued without sign or sight.
The other matter was the question of singing. Emma had not had the courage to say anything to Mr Hanway. He had decided to write to him a letter, but had not written. At last he rang up to cancel his next lesson, but still without giving any hint of the dreadful decision he was in process of taking. For it was, now he was so close up against it, a dreadful decision. He began to realize how deeply important his gift was to him, how connected with his confidence against the world. Mr Hanway was important, the guarantor of the well-being, the purity and continuity of his talent. He had sometimes thought of his voice as a burdensome secret, but it was also a valuable life-giving secret, so long as the question of giving it up, for so long vaguely present, did not seriously arise. Of course it was clear to Emma that it was his destiny to be a historian, that that admitted of no doubt was made plain by the merest flicker of the unreal hypothesis: give up history. He was to be, with all his intellect and all his nerves and his desires and all his energy and all his soul, a scholar, a polymath. He would, as a good historian must, know everything. Herein he could see and understand and emulate excellence. Such a dedicated life must preclude serious singing; and of unserious singing he had been irrevocably trained to be incapable. So … never to sing again? Never?
Emma had intended to come to Ennistone to look for Tom, to walk in upon him indignantly, but the image of Pearl, which had certainly not been absent from his mind, began, upon the railway journey, to grow stronger. It was some time since Emma had kissed a girl, and he did not view lightly the matter of having kissed Pearl on the previous Saturday evening when rather drunk. In fact the event was remarkable. On the other hand he did not know what to make of it either. As the train approached Ennistone, the whole idea of coming to look for Tom began to seem rather stupid and dangerous. At the station, on the spur of the moment, he rang the Slipper House number which he found in the book under McCaffrey.