‘I hope it goes well for her,’ murmured the man in the armchair next to Treece’s, looking up from the Women’s Sunday Mirror. He was a sociologist whom Treece remembered as a post-graduate student; then he had been a slim, dark-haired, very English young man who played football for a university team and wanted an MG sports car. Now all that had changed; he wore green, German double-breasted raincoats (all his clothes were double-breasted; indeed, said Viola Masefield once, I think he must be double-breasted), carried large briefcases made of wide-grained red leather, and cultivated a Central European accent; most of the best sociologists were, as he said, from Mittel-Europa.
‘I’m catching up on the ephemera,’ said the sociologist, whose name was Jenkins (he hated it, because it didn’t end in ‘heim’), noticing that Treece was looking curiously at his reading matter.
‘You’re lucky,’ said Treece. ‘It must be nice to be a sociologist and be able to read anything.’
‘It’s terrible,’ said Jenkins with feeling. ‘There are times when I begin to think that vot we need is a benevolent fascism. I have a television set,’ he went on, leaning forward confidingly. ‘I think I am perhaps the only man in this University with a television set, and I sit there all night and watch it. You know, this is the great culture-leveller; all over England people watch this stuff and go away and take the same image of the world, and themselves, and standards of value along with them. Oh, and it’s terrible. All those people . . . I hope they know what it is they’re doing. I wish I didn’t have to watch it. I wish I could get away.’
‘How was America?’ said Treece. Jenkins had just returned from a year at the University of Chicago, or Colorado, or California (faculties of sociology in America drift about like flocks of birds; you wake up one morning and find the ones you are interested in have risen from their perches and have settled again, en masse, at the other side of the continent), where he had been, financed by a Rockefeller Scholarship, in order to find something out about a new discipline called Group Dynamics.
‘I suppose you’re glad to be back,’ said Treece.
‘I don’t quite know,’ said Jenkins. ‘It’s like coming back home, looking for England, and finding America again. Is it I that have changed, or is it England? I suppose it’s me; I always thought England was so much more reactionary than it is. It seems so proletarian. All the shops are chain-stores, all the local societies are ironed out; soon it won’t be necessary for us to go to America. It will all be here.’ Jenkins looked round furtively, as if he were saying something that shouldn’t get back. ‘Sometimes I feel like a traitor to sociology. Sometimes I want things as they were. We are making the world nice, you know,’ said Jenkins, ‘for all people except ourselves. Once, I can’t help remembering, we used to think people like us were important. Now we’re just a little group of disordered citizens with no social role in the society we live in.’
‘You’re the first sociologist that I’ve met who ever felt guilty about it,’ said Treece.
‘Quite,’ said Jenkins. ‘I begin to wonder myself – just who are we working for? What is a university for? I mean, should we be advancing and developing the processes of middle-class business morality? Surely we ought to be protesting against them. All this social engineering . . . I’m not sure it’s as good as I want it to be. Let me tell you about Group Dynamics; that’s what I’m trying to get them to start up here, you know.’
‘What is it?’ said Treece.
‘It’s a study of the social abrasions that are in-built into every group situation. You know how you feel uncomfortable at parties if you’ve forgotten to fasten your flies? Well, that’s Group Dynamics. It’s a new field. At Chicago we were doing experiments to show that the physical constitution of rooms had a big effect on the people who used them. We were doing some experiments with conferences for the Pentagon. You know how at conferences it’s usual to use two tables set in a T shape? Well, we were able to prove that certain seats at the table were actually dead seats and that because of various factors – not being able to see the chairman’s face in order to observe his reaction, and so on – the people sitting in them were virtually excluded from useful participation in the conference. A similar problem arose with the entry of people into the room; we found that some had to come in first and others last . . . well, we knew that, of course; but we found that this tended to dramatize latent status problems. That is, people uncertain about their status in relation to others present were made aware of the quandary when it came to the problem of whether to enter the room first, or in the middle, or last. So, you see, we were able to make some useful recommendations; but the feeling that’s left is that if only social engineering can get around to enough things, life will be a bowl of cherries.’
Treece said: ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking this, but what were the recommendations you made?’
‘The recommendations?’ asked Jenkins. ‘Well, actually what we recommended was that conferences should use a circular table, and a circular room, and a separate door in the wall for each participant. I don’t know whether the Pentagon are actually using this yet, but I fancy they will.’
‘I see,’ said Treece. ‘I see.’ He turned and looked round the room, with a mystified and oddly tired eye; if all the chairs had been filled with horses, instead of with lecturers and professors taking coffee in their matitudinal quiet, it would have seemed no odder to him than the conversation from which he had just emerged, as from some long black tunnel. Are there then, he asked with a mind that seemed over the last few minutes to have grown quaintly old-fashioned, in the cast of some babarian confronted with Athens at its heyday, are there then people who do that and call it thought?
III
On the previous evening, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, a stout, well-meaning man, full of bonhomie, was walking homewards through the darkness, wondering what else one had to do in order to get a knighthood, when a pane of glass shattered in the wall beside him. The Vice-Chancellor looked up, surprised, nervous, and in the broken window a frightened black face appeared. ‘How do you do, sir,’ said the face. ‘I am in prison in the toilet.’ ‘Who are you?’ said the Vice-Chancellor. ‘Eborebelosa,’ said the black face. ‘Are you a student here?’ ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Eborebelosa.
It was late at night; the Vice-Chancellor had, as he used to put it, been working late at the office (he was by training a businessman, and he always claimed that academics were woolly-minded and ‘had no business methods’; he had hundreds; he had nothing but). There was no one else on the premises. The Vice-Chancellor got out his keys and went back into the darkened building. He went to the men’s toilet; the porter, as his duties bade him, had locked the door. Unused to a quandary of this sort, the Vice-Chancellor did not know where to lay his hands on a suitable key (he afterwards discovered that a master key which he had in his pocket fitted this, as every other door in the University) and he set to work with a paper clip. In a few moments the door was open. Inside, Mr Eborebelosa was in one of the cubicles, seated on the bowl, his white eyes rolling with fright. ‘Who is to blame for this?’ ‘Society,’ said Mr Eborebelosa. ‘Whose student are you?’ asked the Vice-Chancellor, trying another tack. ‘Professor Treece,’ said Mr Eborebelosa. ‘Then go and see him tomorrow,’ said the Vice-Chancellor. The automatic flush worked, with a great rush of waters, on the urinals, and Mr Eborebelosa gave a little sob. Trapped there in the dark, among these regular regurgitations of water, he had clearly undergone a terrifying experience.
As Treece was leaving the Senior Common Room after his tête-à-tête with Jenkins, the Vice-Chancellor appeared in the doorway (with the Vice-Chancellor all doorways looked too small; he was tall as well as fat and, for him, doorways were a challenge) and told Treece this whole story . . . or almost all of it, for however could he admit to anyone that it was possible to open the locked doors of the University with a paper clip? Moreover, that morning he had talked to the porter and had discovered that Eborebelosa spent his days closeted
in the toilets; no sooner had the cleaners turned him out of one cubicle than he bobbed up in another; no sooner had he been put out of one door than he popped in by another. The toilets were checked before they were locked; but who could foresee wilful self-incarceration? ‘Talk to him,’ said the Vice-Chancellor. ‘Find out whether he’s refusing to face up to the reality of the world, or whether he’s got a weak bladder.’
Treece knew Eborebelosa; he had been sent over from West Africa to be educated and groomed at the expense, he explained to Treece on the first day, of a terrorist society devoted to driving out the British. He was to study English language, sociology, economics, and chemistry, paying particular attention to the making of gunpowder and time-fuses. Since he retailed this information so openly, Treece found himself set with him in one of those hazy relationships of cultural quandary, where nothing said and nothing done seems believable because the specific cultural context for the form of behaviour, the way of speech, is lacking. Treece knew that he and Pontius Pilate were brothers under the skin; if he had lived in Jerusalem and met the Son of God he would have said, with monumental fairness, with no wish to be illiberal or to suggest that the foreigner was in any way inferior to ourselves: ‘Well, perhaps he is and perhaps he isn’t, but you really can’t expect me to tell; perhaps they’re all like this; I just don’t know the cultural background.’ He was quite prepared to help Mr Eborebelosa be a terrorist, if that really was his fulfilment, and people out there seriously felt they had to be terrorists; but surely, in any case, reason would prevail and he’d work in a post office or a government building, creating rather than destroying.
Treece returned to his office, which in the earlier dispensation had been one of the padded cells; it was splendidly warm in winter. It was not, alas, a homely room; the Lippo Lippi reproduction and the bundle of dirty laundry that Treece had forgotten to take home could do little to mitigate the essential starkness of the place. Presently there was a little knock at the door and, since no one responded to Treece’s hail of ‘Come in’, he went himself to open it. Mr Eborebelosa stood there, with his eyes turned up to heaven. Treece led him to a chair and sat him down.
‘Now, look, Mr Eborebelosa. Please understand, all we want to do is to help you.’ He looked up; this evoked no response. ‘But you’ll have to tell me what is the matter, won’t you, if I’m to do that?’ Treece was uneasily aware that his tone was that of a man who had been reading from Dr Spock’s book on baby care. At times like this he didn’t like himself; there must be better personae, but he never found one.
‘Now, tell me, why do you hide in the lavatories?’ he went on. ‘Well, it’s silly, isn’t it? You can’t go on hiding in lavatories all your life, can you? How many public lavatories are there in your country?’ Eborebelosa was not roused even by this sally. ‘Probably not many. You’ll be hard put to it, won’t you? Or is it just because you’re in England that you hide in public lavatories?’ Eborebelosa shifted uncomfortably; and Treece suspected, with unease, that he was expecting the familiar argument about his coming over here and exploiting the advantages of the Welfare State. Treece, further, was beginning to wonder whether something unsavoury and morbid did not lie at the bottom of it all; perhaps he liked the smell, or something. ‘Are you afraid of something? If so, you must tell me, and we’ll put it right. Are you unhappy?’
Eborebelosa nodded his head in quick movements.
‘Why?’ went on Treece. ‘What’s troubling you?’
‘I am despised by all,’ he said suddenly in a deep clipped voice. People laughed at him, he said, because he was black and the other Negroes in the University did not like him because he was the son of a chief. He asked them for presents and they wouldn’t bring him any.
‘People don’t laugh at people because they’re black,’ said Treece.
Mr Eborebelosa looked strangely at him and said nothing. ‘We’re all pleased’, Treece added uncomfortably, ‘that you’ve honoured our country by coming here.’ ‘I was unable to attend the university of the United States,’ said Eborebelosa frankly. He went on to explain that the son of a chief was what he was, and if people didn’t recognize him as that, then he was nothing. He said he had an inferiority complex. What you have, my lad, thought Treece, is a superiority complex; for Treece began to suspect that the trouble with his visitor was that he was all demand.
‘I am turned out of my house because I am a Negro,’ said Mr Eborebelosa, at last beginning to feel that here was a place where his complaints had some validity. He was visibly expanding. ‘You have a house?’ asked Treece. ‘The house the University has given me,’ said Eborebelosa. ‘Those are lodgings,’ said Treece. ‘That is not your house. What did you do there? Did you tell the landlady it was your house?’ ‘Yes,’ said Mr Eborebelosa. ‘What else did you do? Did you damage anything?’ ‘I have dogs to sleep in my bedroom. People also.’ ‘Women?’ asked Treece. ‘Some women; some men,’ said Eborebelosa.
‘You must be more thoughtful,’ said Treece. ‘We have great difficulty in finding landladies who are willing to accept Negro students as it is.’
‘Aha,’ cried Eborebelosa. ‘You see, sir, you see. You do not accept us.’
‘But don’t you find us difficult to understand?’ asked Treece. ‘Well, we have the same difficulties in understanding you. It isn’t easy for landladies. I’ll have a talk with your landlady and put things right, if I can. But you must remember this. It is not your house. It belongs to her. You are her guest. You must not take people or animals into the house without asking her permission. We have different customs.’
‘There is more,’ said Eborebelosa. ‘English women do not like me. They despise me because I am circumcised. In my country I have four wives. I do not wish to lie alone. Perhaps there are women in this University of more progressive views . . .’
‘You must find that out for yourself,’ said Treece. ‘It’s not my job to help you. The point is this. Life here may be difficult, but you can’t go on retiring into lavatories indefinitely. You must come out into the real world and face these problems sensibly and maturely. These lavatories are just an adolescent escape-mechanism, like going to the pictures; they’re a dream world. You must come to terms with things, and not expect too much. In your country you may be an important person, but here you can only win respect in terms of the way you behave and the kind of person you are. I want you to remember that and . . .’ Treece gave a crinkly smile ‘. . . try and be nice to people.’
Mr Eborebelosa, his face registered, had come across this kind of advice before, and knew how to rate it. Try and be nice to people! What sort of a world was this? And how did one come to live in so dewy, so bright-eyed, a mood? And as for Professor Treece, who had tried to be nice to people, and was going to go on trying to be nice to people, even though all they were was people, and as such things tremendously difficult to be nice to – as for the good and liberal Treece, even he found himself cracking a little under the strain. The foreign students were always difficult to integrate into the group, and problems of communication loomed large; but, hoped Treece, these things would be better after the departmental reception for foreign students, which was to be held the following afternoon. It is well I am a liberal, and can love all men, thought Treece; for if I were not, I doubt if I could.
2
I
EMMA FIELDING put on a wool dress, splashed herself with perfume, and set off for the English Department reception for foreign students. She was a post-graduate student in the department, and was writing a thesis on the fish imagery in Shakespeare’s tragedies; there was quite a lot of fish in Shakespeare, and there was more to it, now it was being at last exposed, than you would have thought, or even Sigmund Freud would have thought. The reason for Emma’s attendance at the occasion was simple; Treece was, not surprisingly, nervous of the reception and wanted to have some reliable people there, and there was no one more reliable in the department than Emma. Treece had, therefore, telephoned Emma and asked ‘if we might tr
espass on your time and good nature’. If Emma did not have too much of the first, she had an abundance of the second; and so here she was. She was twenty-six, and therefore rather older than most of her fellow-students; older you had to say, and wiser. When you saw her, the word you thought of for her was ‘handsome’; she looked like the photographs you saw of Virginia Woolf, or those tall, brown-eyed fragile English beauties that fill autobiographies these days, the sort to whom it is not absurd to say, deferentially, ‘Do you want to go and lie down?’ for, it seems, even to be what they are is enough to make them look a little tired; life is so intense. Treece did not like beautiful women – he had suffered with them too much, in making the discovery that, in our world, to be beautiful is a way of life, which has its own customs and regulations – but he liked Emma; by not being quite beautiful she seemed to have gained everything.
The reception was being held in a large, dirty room with a splintery plank floor, decorated for the occasion with a large circle of wooden chairs and a large metal tea urn from which Dr Viola Masefield, likewise co-opted for the occasion, was dispensing tea to a variety of nervous students of all nationalities and colours. Treece was there, trying to get everyone to sit down; no one would. ‘Vot’, demanded an extremely stout German student, greeting Emma with a bow as she entered, ‘is your vaderland?’ ‘I’m English,’ said Emma. ‘Oho,’ said the German with great cheerfulness. ‘Then it is your task to entertain me. I am ready.’
Eating People is Wrong Page 3
