The History Man

by Malcolm Bradbury

  'Of this?' asks Howard, pressing her. 'No,' says Barbara, 'parties. The swinging Kirk scene.'

  'You couldn't,' says Howard. 'Maybe I'm getting old,' says Barbara, 'all I see in my mind are dirty glasses.'

  'I'll make it interesting for you,' says Howard. 'Oh, sure,' says Barbara, 'you're a great magician of the feelings, aren't you, Howard?'

  'I try,' says Howard. 'Howard Kirk,' says Barbara, 'what we have instead of faith.'

  The days go by, and the telephones ring, and then it is the morning of Monday 2 October, when things are really starting again: the first day of term, the day of the party. The Kirks rise up, early and together. They pull on their clothes; they tidy the bed; they go downstairs. The kitchen is done out in pine. The rain washes down the window; the room is in wet half-light. In the kitchen Anne Petty stands by the stove in a candlewick dressing-gown, cooking an egg. 'What gets you up so early?' she says. 'We're going shopping,' says Barbara, 'for the party.' Howard goes to the toaster, and presses bread into it; Barbara takes a carton of eggs from the refrigerator. Howard pushes down the button on the toaster; Barbara cracks eggs and drops them into the frying-pan. The children come in, and sit down at the places Anne has already laid for them. 'Cornflakes, yuk,' says Martin. 'Oh, Jesus,' says Barbara, looking in the sink, 'I didn't know we dirtied all those plates last night. How did we do that?'

  'We ate,' says Howard, who sits down at the table, inspecting the outrages of the day in the morning's Guardian. Anne Petty looks up; she says, 'You want me to wash them up, Mrs Kirk?'

  'Oh, would you really, Anne?' says Barbara, 'there's so much to do today.'

  'Oh, yes, Mrs Kirk,' says Anne Petty. 'Eggs, again,' says Martin, as Barbara serves them, 'why do you always give us the same every day?'

  'Because I'm busy,' says Barbara, 'and put your plates in the sink when you're through. Howard and I are going shopping.'

  'But who's going to take us to school?' asks Celia. 'Oh, hell,' says Barbara, 'now what can we do about that?'

  'Would you like me to take them to school?' asks Anne Petty, looking up. 'It would be marvellous,' says Barbara, 'but I hate to ask you. You're not here to do jobs. You're here because we like having you here.'

  'Oh, I know that, Mrs Kirk,' says Anne, 'but I really do like helping you. I mean, you're both such busy people. I don't know how you do so much.'

  'It takes a certain genius,' says Howard. 'I do hope you're staying on with us for a bit,' says Barbara. 'We'd love to have you, and I want to make one of my little shopping trips to London next weekend. So I'll need someone for the children.'

  'Oh, I don't know,' says Anne Petty, looking embarrassed, 'next weekend?'

  'She means no,' says Howard, looking up from the Guardian, 'the statement's equivocal, but the subtext says: "Lay off, you're exploiting me."'

  Anne Petty looks at him; she says, 'Oh, Dr Kirk, Kirks don't exploit anybody. Not the Kirks. It's just that I really don't see how I can.'

  'Oh, everybody exploits somebody,' says Howard, 'in this social order, it's part of the human lot. But some know it, some don't. When Barbara gets anxious, she starts handing out tasks to people. You're right to resist.'

  'I hand out tasks,' says Barbara, 'because I have them to do.'

  'Please, look,' says Anne Petty, 'no one's exploiting anyone. Really. I'd love to stay, but my friends are coming back to the flat, and I've paid part-rent.' Barbara says: 'Oh, you're right, Howard. Everyone exploits someone. Notably you me.'

  'What did I do?' asks Howard, innocently. 'Oh, God,' says Barbara, 'how his heart bleeds for victims. And he finds them all over. The only ones he can't see are the people he victimizes himself.'

  'I'm sorry, Mrs Kirk, I really am,' says Anne Petty. 'You mustn't blame Anne,' says Howard, 'she has her own scene.'

  'I'm not blaming Anne,' says Barbara, 'I'm blaming you. You're trying to stop my trip to London. You don't want me to have a weekend in London.'

  'You'll have your weekend,' says Howard, 'Leave it to me. I'll fix it. Someone will look after the kids.'

  'Who?' asks Celia, 'Anyone nice?'

  'Someone Howard likes,' says Barbara. 'Doesn't Howard like Anne?' asks Martin. 'Of course I do,' says Howard. 'Get your coat on. I'm going to fetch the van.'

  'It's just I have to move back to the flat with these friends,' says Anne Petty, as Howard walks across the kitchen. 'Of course you do,' says Howard, in the doorway. 'Bring them to the party.' Howard goes out into the hall, and puts on a long leather coat from the peg, and a neat blue denim cap. The conversation continues behind him in the kitchen. He walks down the hall, opens the front door, and steps out. He stands in the wet light. The terrace is puddled, the rain pours down, the city is loud. He pulls the door to behind him, on the domestic social annex, which shrills behind him; he walks out onto the urban stage, the busy movingness of city life, the place where, as every good sociologist knows, the cake of custom crumbles, traditional role-ascriptions break, the bonds of kinship weaken, where the public life that determines the private one is led.

  He walks along the terrace, with its cracked pavement stones, its scatter of broken glass; the rain soaks his hair, and begins to stipple the leather of his coat. The terrace curves around him; once an exact and elegant half-circle, the curious dentistry of demolition has attacked it, pulling out house after house from the curve as they have become empty. Most of those that still stand are unoccupied, with broken roofs and vacant, part-boarded windows, plastered with posters for political parties, pop groups, transcendental meditators, or rather surreptitiously occupied, for they are visited by a strange, secret, drifting population of transients. But, though there are few residents, the terrace has been metered for parking; the Kirks have to keep their minivan some streets away, in a square up the hill. A police car heehaws on the urban motorway being sliced through the demolition; buses grind below him, on the promenade. An air-force jet flies in off the sea, its line of flight an upward curve that brings it into sudden visibility over the jagged tops of the houses across the terrace from the Kirks' tall, thin house. He turns the corner; he walks up the hill. The long latticed metal of a construction crane swings into his eyeline, dangling a concrete beam. Up the hill he goes, past the remnants of the old order, the scraps of traditional Watermouth falling beneath the claims of the modern city. There are small shops-a newsagent with a window display of The Naked Ape, a greengrocer with a few crates of vegetables standing outside under a leaky canvas awning, a family butcher with a notice saying 'We keep our meat on ice in hot weather'. There are small back-to-back houses, whose doors open directly onto the street; the bulldozers soon will reach them. Higher on the hill grow the new concrete towers. Before he reaches them Howard turns to the left, into a square of small houses, mostly flats and private hotels. His old blue minivan stands in a line of cars beside the kerb, under a sodium streetlamp. He unlocks the driver's door; he gets in; he turns the ignition twice to fire the engine. He drives the van back and forth, to clear the space. Then he drives out of the square, down through the busy traffic of the hill, and back into the terrace.

  On the pavement, outside their tall terrace house, set in its broken curve, Barbara is already standing, waiting for him to come. She wears a white, pinch-waist, full-length raincoat; she carries two red canvas bags, Swiss, from Habitat. He leans over to open the passenger door; she reaches into the van to put the bags into the back. 'You must be feeling very good,' she says, getting into the seat beside Howard, 'everything's starting for you, so you're feeling very good.' Howard lets out the clutch; he turns the van, back and forth, in the terrace. 'I'm fine,' says Howard, driving to the end of the terrace, turning up the hill. 'Shouldn't I be?' Barbara pulls on her seatbelt; she says, 'I can tell when you're feeling good because you always want to make me feel bad.' Howard follows the arrows and the directional marks, the lefts, the rights, the no entries, that lead him up the hill and towards the new shopping precinct. 'I don't want you to feel bad,' says Howard. There is a turn to the left
, barred by a red arm; it is the entrance to the high multi-storey car park on the edge of the precinct. 'Well, I do feel bad,' says Barbara. Howard makes the turn; he stops the van in front of the arm; he takes a ticket from the automatic machine. 'You know what you need?' he says; the arm rises, and Howard drives forward. 'Yes,' says Barbara, 'I know exactly what I need. A weekend in London.' Howard drives up the ramp into the blank concrete of the place, through the flickers of light and dark, following the wet tyre-tracks. Howard says, 'You need a party.' The van spirals upward through the high, blank building. 'I don't need a party,' says Barbara, 'it's just another sodding domestic chore I have to clear up after.' Driving through the concrete and the metal, Howard sees, on the fifth floor, a space for the van to park; he drives into it. The garage is dark and grey; he pulls on the handbrake. 'You just had a very dull summer,' says Howard, 'now everything's happening again. Come on, let's go and shop.'

  The car park is a low, cavernous place, devoid of people, a place for machines only; out through the unwindowed parapet, you can see the town spread out below. The Kirks get out of the van; they walk together, over the oily, roughened floor, to the blank metal door of the lift shaft. Barbara says: 'Your excitement fails to infect me.' Howard presses the button; the lift grinds in the shaft. The doors open; the Kirks get in. There are aerosoled scribbles on the lift walls: 'Agro', 'Boot boys', ' Gary is King'. They stand together and the lift descends. It stops and the Kirks walk out. A long tiled corridor leads towards the precinct; there is human excrement against the walls of the brightlit passage. They come out among the high buildings, into a formal square. The precinct has straight angles; it has won an architectural award. There are long glass facades, the fronts of supermarkets, delicatessens, boutiques, the familiar multiple stores, displaying the economy of abundance; there is a symmetry of tins and toilet rolls in the windows of Sainsbury's; spotlights and shade permute the colour range of sweaters and shirts, dresses and skirts, in the Life Again Boutique. In the open space in the middle are multicoloured paving stones; amid the stones, in some complex yet deducible code, are tiny new trees, fresh-planted, propped by wooden supports. A waterless fountain contains much litter. The Kirks divide their tasks, half to you, half for me. Barbara walks towards the automatic glass doors of Sainsbury's, which slide open mechanically as she approaches them, and close again as she passes inside; Howard goes on down the precinct, to the wine supermarket, which is called Your Wine Seller, and has very special offers at very special prices. He walks inside, under the bright spotlights; he stands under the anti-theft mirrors, and inspects the bottles of wine that have been tossed carelessly together in the wire bins. He goes to the small counter at the back of the store.

  The assistant looks at him; he is young, with a beard, and wears a maroon jacket with a yellow Smile badge on the lapel; this leaves his face free to be very surly. Howard sees with gratification the indignation of the employed and oppressed, the token resistance. He gives his order, for five dozen litre bottles of cheap red wine; he waits while the man goes into the storeroom, and wheels out, on a wire trolley, a stack of big cardboard cases. He asks for the loan of twelve dozen glasses; 'We don't lend them,' says the assistant. Howard delivers himself to the task of persuasion; he emanates concern, he invites the man to the party; he gets the glasses. The assistant stacks the boxes of glasses on another trolley. Howard takes the first trolley, and wheels it, across the open space of the precinct, over the coloured paving stones, past the empty fountain, through the tiled passage, to the lift; he ascends in the lift, and unpacks the cases into the back of the minivan. He returns with the empty trolley; he takes the second trolley of glasses up into the car park, and then back to the store. When he reaches the van again, Barbara has still not returned. He stands by the van, car keys hanging from one finger, in the empty, cavernous place, devoid of people, amid the shuttered concrete planes, the rough surfaces, the angular lines of air and space, light and darkness. He stares out, over the unwindowed parapet, at the topography of the town. There are torn spaces below, where the motorway and the new housing projects are being constructed; beyond are the rising shells of hotels, office blocks, flats. There are two Watermouths; the unreal holiday town around the harbour and the Norman castle, with luxury flats and expensive bars, gift shops and pinkwashed Georgian homes; and a real town of urban blight and renewal, social tensions, discrimination, landlord and tenant battles, where the Kirks live. To one side, he can see the blocks of luxury flats, complete but half-empty, with convenience kitchens and wall-to-wall carpeting and balconies pointed at the horizon; to the other side, on the hill, stand the towers of the high-rise council flats, superficially similar, stacked, like a social workers' handbook, with separated wives, unmarried mothers, latchkey children. It is a topography of the mind; and his mind makes an intellectual contrast out of it, an image of conflict and opposition. He stares down on the town; the keys dangle; he populates chaos, orders disorder, senses strain and change.

  A Boeing 747 flies in off the coast heading for Heathrow; the engine noise booms in the cavernous building, sounds off the metal of the cars. In the corner of the concrete place, the lift-doors scrape back; someone walks out onto the sounding floor. It is Barbara, walking towards him, in her long white coat; she carries the two red bags, full. Her body is faint colour moving over grey cement. He watches her move through the planes of light and dark. She comes up to the van, and opens the back; into the interior, on top of the boxes, she pushes the bags, holding French loaves and cheeses. 'Enough?' she says. 'Of course, if there's five thousand, you'll be able to increase the quantity.' Howard opens the driver's door, and gets in; he opens the other door so that Barbara can come in to the passenger seat. She sits down; she fastens the seatbelt. Her face is dark in the shadowy place. He starts the engine, backs out of the space. Barbara says: 'Do you remember Rosemary?' Howard drives down the spiral ramp, with its code of arrows and lights; he says, 'The one who lives in the commune?'

  'She was in Sainsbury's,' says Barbara. The van tilts down the ramps; it makes the sharp turns. 'So you asked her to the party,' says Howard. 'I did,' says Barbara. 'I asked her to the party.' They are on ground level now; Howard turns the van towards the exit, the bright wet daylight. 'Do you remember that boy she was living with?' asks Barbara. 'He had a tattoo on the back of his hand.' Through angular blocks of air and space, light and darkness, they move to the light square. 'I don't think so,' says Howard. 'You do,' says Barbara. 'He came to one of our parties. Just before the summer.'

  'What about him?' asks Howard; the stubby red arm is down in front of him. 'He left a note for her on the table,' says Barbara. 'Then he went down the garden, to an old shed, and killed himself with a rope.' Howard reaches out of the window, and hands the ticket and a coin to the attendant, who sits opposite and above him, in a small glass box. 'I see,' says Howard, 'I see.' The attendant hands Howard change; the stubby arm rises in front of him. 'When?' asks Howard, moving the van forward. 'Two days ago,' says Barbara. 'Is she very upset?' asks Howard. 'She's thin and pale, and she cried,' says Barbara. Howard carefully eases the van out into the line of rush-hour traffic. 'Are you upset?' asks Howard. 'Yes,' says Barbara, 'it's upset me.'

  The traffic line jams. 'You hardly knew him,' says Howard, turning to look at her. 'It was the note,' says Barbara. Howard sits behind the wheel, stuck in the line, and looks at the moving collage. 'What did it say?' he asks. 'It just said, "This is silly."'

  'A taste for brevity,' says Howard, 'what was? The thing with Rosemary?'

  'Rosemary says not,' says Barbara, 'she says they were going great together.'

  'I can't really imagine going great with Rosemary,' says Howard. Barbara stares ahead, through the windscreen. She says: 'She says he found things absurd. He even found being happy absurd. It was life that was silly.'

  'Life's not silly,' says Howard, 'it may be chaotic, but it's not silly.' Barbara stares at Howard; she says, 'You'd like to quarrel with him? He's dead.' Howard inches the van
forward; he says, 'I'm not quarrelling with him. He had his own thing going.'

  'He thought life was silly,' says Barbara. 'Christ, Barbara,' says Howard, 'the fact that he killed himself doesn't make it into a universal truth.'

  'He wrote that,' says Barbara, 'then he killed himself.'

  'I know,' says Howard, 'that was his view. That was his existential choice. He couldn't make sense of things, so he found them silly.'

  'It's funny to be existential,' says Barbara, 'when you don't exist.'

  'It's the fact that we stop existing that makes us existential choosers,' says Howard, 'that's what the word means.'

  'Thanks,' says Barbara, 'thanks for the lesson.'

  'What's the matter?' asks Howard, 'are you getting yourself seduced by this absurdist thing? It's a cop out.'

  The traffic jam unstops. Howard lets out the clutch. Barbara stares ahead through the windscreen, down at the traffic movements on the hill. After a minute she says: 'Is that all?'

  'All what?' asks Howard, moving forward through the peculiar private track that will take him through the traffic lanes and take him back to the terrace house. 'All you have to say,' says Barbara, 'all you can think.'

  'What do you want me to think, that I'm not thinking?' asks Howard. 'Doesn't it worry you at all that so many of our friends feel that way now?' asks Barbara, 'do things like that now? That they seem tired and desperate? Is it our ages? Is it that the political excitement's gone? What's the matter?'

  'He wasn't a friend,' says Howard, 'we hardly knew him.'

  'He came to a party,' says Barbara. Howard, driving down the hill, turns and looks at her. 'Look,' he says, 'he came to a party. He was on drugs. He and Rosemary were getting into some crazy magical thing together, the kind of thing that hippies switch into when the trips turn sour. He never talked. We don't know what his problems were. We don't know what seemed absurd to him. We don't know where he and Rosemary were going.'