6
I
IT WAS the last tutorial of the Michaelmas term, and Professor Treece sat at his desk, his back to the window, while the dull December light shone on to the pile of examination scripts upon his desk, on to the faces of his three students. Two of them were, he knew, pondering on the quality of their amorous performance for the Christmas Ball, which was to be held in the Town Hall that night, an end-of-term festivity before everyone left for home on the morrow. The third student, Louis Bates, lacked the general excitement. Wedged there tightly in his chair, he looked a pathetic figure, and Treece felt a sense of guilt as he looked at him. The performance of that do-it-yourself intellectual in terminal examinations had been shocking; there were good reasons for sending him down, and the attack had been strongly renewed by the anti-Bates faction at a faculty meeting, where Carfax, careful not to make the same mistake twice, had claimed that Bates had deliberately and while of sound mind abrogated his responsibilities as a student and should be asked to leave. Invited to contribute essays on literary subjects to his tutors for evaluation, he had refused; the fact was, simply, that. Treece had, it must be said, been tempted; Bates didn’t now seem to fit so well into the category which Treece had designated for him, that of the working-class intellectual rising in the world through his own efforts, aided by the tutelage of liberal-minded teachers. Yet in a sense he was this. For it wasn’t necessary that he should be pleasing, or grateful, or even liberal like his teacher. One doesn’t have to stamp the new generation with one’s own concerns and attributes. One has simply to give it the means to emerge in its own shape.
What made Treece so uncomfortable was that he was talking at this moment about Shelley. He remembered the nasty little mistake that Oxford had made in expelling him. He read out to his tutorial group Shelley’s indictment of Oxford: ‘Oxonian society was insipid to me, uncongenial with my habits of thinking. I could not descend to common life; the sublime interest of poetry, lofty and exalted achievements, the proselytism of the world, the equalization of its inhabitants, were to be the soul of my soul.’ Treece read, and watched Louis’s eyes light up. To think that Louis might be put in a position to say the same about their own University was too, too much. Shelley had been an oddity, just like Bates; and at school and university they had called him what Carfax, what they all, had called Bates – mad. Treece knew now that this word should never have been used of Bates. It was strange how unseriously serious men could use serious words. Shelley used to send out offensive atheistic letters to divines, over a false name; to blow up fences with gunpowder; to ask mothers carrying babes in arms, ‘Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?’ All right, thought Treece, so he was interested in dianetics? Shelley, it was said, had his tutor ‘in great perplexity’; and Treece had to admit that when they wrote up Bates they could use the same phrase of him.
He looked over at this erratic, easily despised, and pitiable figure, unstable, yes, but honest, pure, and concerned for human values, sitting there in his chair, scratching the end of his nose with a long, nobbly forefinger. He made a lousy symbol, if it was a symbol you wanted, Treece told himself; but then people always did make poor symbols, even in his view. Treece had to recognize an uneasiness here; Louis was brilliant, did not crave the cheaper kinds of success, had worked hard for what he had, which was little enough. Yet what mystified Treece, who really only needed to look at his own case for illumination, was that someone could be so clever at his subject and so unclever at living. Louis’s brilliance was a narrow strip of cultivated ground; the ordinary experience of the world, however, was, to him, untilled ground, something that he had just not bothered to go to work on. And because of this, Treece further perceived, there was – you had in all honesty to recognize this, as Emma already had recognized it – something faintly ridiculous about Louis. Other people knew thus; it was, indeed, all they did know about him. Louis’s manners were as strange as Eborebelosa’s; he came out of as foreign a culture. Treece could not help but think of a story which Walter Oliver had told him about Bates, and the story was this:
In the early days of his attendance at the University, Louis had sent to Oliver, as Editor of the student literary magazine, a sheaf of poems for him to consider for publication. A few days later, Louis received a note from Oliver, saying, ‘I think we’re on to something,’ and asking Louis to go and see him in his lodgings. When Louis arrived, Oliver, who was sitting on the bed clad in a pair of Y-front undershorts, stringing a cello and eating cheese, greeted him with great warmth, offering him cheese and making him sit down. He produced the poems (which had, Louis noticed, been heavily overdrawn with sketches of girls) and, ‘You know, dumbo, you’ve got something here,’ said Oliver, in a voice that seemed to Louis to mingle distrust and pride – distrust, doubtless, at what Louis had got and pride at his having been able to spot it, whatever it was. Once you got Oliver’s patronage, you did not get rid of it easily. A few days later Oliver returned the call, to tell Louis that he had decided to publish his poems. Louis was clearly loath to let him in; he disliked having visitors. The room was redolent with the rich, plummy smell of sweat-filled socks; it smelled, said Oliver, when he told this story, as he so often did, like the women’s changing room at Holloway Prison. Oliver had thrown open the window, and Louis protested, saying that he was medically excused from having the window open in the winter, or taking baths, because of his weak chest. ‘Look, amigo,’ said Oliver, who had little time for this sort of thing, ‘these poems are good, but you smell like a goat. I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll publish these poems if you’ll have a bath.’ ‘Do you want to kill me?’ cried Louis. ‘It’s for the sake of art,’ said Oliver implacably. Louis, though he had not let Oliver in until his privates were covered over with water, had at least taken the bath, there and then; and the poem had been published in the University literary magazine, to universal apathy.
Treece looked at Bates and thought of this tale, which Oliver had put into wide circulation. Bates was seedy, frowsy; he wore ugly and ungainly clothes; he spoke with long sheep-like North-Country a’s (and had, thought Treece, who loved this sort of joke, a long, sheep-like North-Country arse); he did, to some extent, smell. The perception of this ridiculousness came to Treece as a kind of insight. He was immediately aware of the need to protect Louis from odious people who thought like himself. It was not, therefore, abruptly, but with a sympathetic mien, that Treece addressed Louis thus at the end of the tutorial:
‘I have your examination papers here, Bates, and they were not, to be honest, very satisfactory.’
Louis had been sat sullenly waiting for this. ‘I didn’t think they would be,’ he said.
‘Now you understand there’s nothing personal in this if I say I’m disappointed. We like you as a person . . .’ this touch was a bit overwarm, Treece knew, but how could this be done otherwise? ‘. . . but academically your work has been falling off, and if it continues like this I’m afraid I can’t hold out any hope that you’ll get even a poor degree.’ Bates looked very chastened. ‘Now, what’s wrong? Do you feel you can do better than this? Is this a fair sample of your work?’
‘You know it’s not,’ said Louis. The remark sounded like an impertinence, but then so many of Louis’s remarks did.
‘Then what went wrong?’ demanded Treece sharply. ‘Are you short of money? Are you unhappy in your lodgings?’
‘It’s her, you know,’ said Louis. The two other students present exchanged a look and giggled audibly. ‘You know I’m in love. I told you.’
‘That has nothing to do with me,’ said Treece, brusque because Louis should have had more sense than to embarrass him; that surely was not too much to expect. ‘The simple question is: do you intend to improve, or am I to recommend that you be asked to make way for someone who will work?’
‘I’ve had enough of her,’ said Louis. ‘If that’s love I prefer not to be in it. Everything will be all right next term.’ He sat unmoved while Cocoran disso
lved into uncontrollable laughter.
‘Don’t be childish, Cocoran,’ said Treece. ‘I don’t know that you have anything to delight in; your marks weren’t much better. I suppose we have that luxurious blonde to thank for that?’
‘I suppose so, sir,’ said Cocoran.
‘Well, I’m not going to keep either of you here simply so that your sex life can bear fruit. I should probably be doing the fair sex a good turn if I brought both your stays here to an end.’
‘You don’t need to worry about them any more,’ said Louis. ‘I shall start work again tonight.’
II
The note said:
I want to apologize to you for the way I treated you the other night. I was so rude and I don’t know what possessed me. Please don’t misunderstand me, Louis; I still think, equally firmly, that we’re completely unsuited to each other, and that to take things any further would be a mistake, but I am ashamed of the way in which I tried to tell you this.
Emma Fielding
Louis had returned home hideously chastened, and full of determination to get down to some good hard work. Everything, he felt, had gone wrong, and he had only succeeded in getting himself detested in all the departments where he hoped to have himself acclaimed. To offer to pull the ears off the Head of the Department was no way to get a first; and he had likewise proved a failure in the world of human love. He had treated himself suicidally, he felt. Admittedly what had happened was in part an indictment of the University itself, and those who attended it; it offered neither the liberality nor the respect for wild genius that he had expected to find there. His function here was negative – he might as well have taken his degree by correspondence course. He decided to detach himself; after all, life could not be simply spending oneself in events, or who would praise the celibate, the ascetic, and the saint? Emma and the Emma values were a scented delusion.
But tonight she would be at the Christmas Ball. Who with? Oliver? Treece? She would be telling people about him, and how glad she was to be rid of him. She’d be having a wonderful time, and here he was moping in his bedroom. And, after all, the note was in part a retraction. She was sorry. He would go and let her tell him so.
At the Town Hall the Christmas Ball was well under way. Upstairs, perhaps, in the darkened room, affairs of high civic importance were being wrangled by councillors and aldermen, late at their duties; down below in the ballroom, let out by the night for a not intolerable sum, all was abandon. Big brass ashtrays like spittoons stood about the floor in large numbers. An air of rather frowsy jollity depended from the paper streamers. It cost Louis sixpence to put his coat in the cloak-room, a sum he did not willingly disemburse; he wished he had not worn it, though the night was cool, it being early December. As people had to get drunk before eleven o’clock, when the bar closed (or else smuggle in their own liquor), they had set to work early. Emma was not to be seen in the press. Louis, with some wit, looked into the bar, and observed there an august party: the stout Vice-Chancellor, full of bonhomie, a scattering of professors, Dr Masefield, Merrick, and, at the end of the row, Treece. They were having their photograph taken, a distinguished group. ‘Grin, gentlemen, grin,’ ordered the Vice-Chancellor. ‘No need to look miserable. The next round’s my privilege.’ Treece, affecting a nervous smile, was clearly ill at ease. ‘Further forward, you, please,’ said the photographer. Treece moved forward. ‘Now back; no, back, I said, a bit more.’ Treece tripped over his feet and looked ungainly. ‘Smiles all round,’ said the photographer, and there was a great, explosive flash. Amused by this little comedy, Louis withdrew and walked along the outer fringe of the dance floor towards the stage. He suddenly saw Emma, sitting in a blue basket chair, her feet thrust out, drinking lemonade through a straw and talking with a girl named Anne Grant, a creature with a very short haircut and a sharp, pixie-like face. ‘If he’s as bad as that, why does he show himself to people?’ Anne was saying.
‘Who?’ asked Louis, coming up. Emma turned round, and flushed, and said that she thought Louis did not like dances; and Louis flushed, and said that he didn’t, and asked her to dance, simply in order to separate her from Anne Grant. ‘I don’t dance very well,’ he said when they got on to the floor. ‘I can only go straight; I don’t know how to do the corners.’
‘Well, we can stop and come back when we get to the end of the High Street,’ said Emma.
‘What’s this one?’ said Louis.
‘A waltz,’ said Emma.
‘That’s in threes, isn’t it?’ asked Louis, dancing on his own for a moment, to get the beat, ‘Right, come on, quick. No, we’ve missed it. Try again . . . now!’ And off they went into the throng, dancing straight across the room, banging up against the wall, stopping, starting again. Louis pulled Emma closely to him until he was practically inside her dress. ‘So this is dancing,’ he said. ‘I like it.’ They moved up under the dais, beneath the band. ‘I’m sorry about the other night,’ said Louis. ‘So am I,’ said Emma, saying what he hoped she would say. ‘I’ve regretted it very much, as I told you in that note.’ ‘Thank you for that,’ said Louis. ‘I know I seemed cruel; I haven’t been able to forget it. But I was right, wasn’t I, now honestly?’ ‘Why were you?’ asked Louis. ‘It’s so hard for a woman, Louis,’ said Emma. ‘I like men and want them as my friends, but they always want to make love or something. I don’t want to hurt them, but I don’t want to hurt myself. Love is something other. I doubt if I’m capable of it. Sometimes I want to try it, but I suppose I’m too afraid.’ They hit up suddenly against the wall, turned round, set off again.
‘I’m a mess,’ said Emma. ‘You’re better away from me. I’m just terrified of the whole business, I suppose.’
‘You’re like a child of eighteen,’ said Louis. ‘You have to come to terms with the world. You can’t go on like some young virgin who can ignore all men until at last her prince comes and the air trembles, and trumpets sound, and you know this must be love. It’s not like that. People like you ought to live in a different world; you’re a menace to the rest of us, when we run up against you, because we count for nothing with you. We’re so plebeian about love, aren’t we?’
‘I suppose you’re trying to find out whether I’m a virgin,’ said Emma. ‘Well, I don’t go talking about my sex life to all and sundry.’
‘I am not all and sundry. I’m me,’ cried Louis exasperated. ‘What does one have to do to get to know you, to come into your world? Have a blood-test? I don’t mind. Just set me an examination and I’ll take it.’
‘There isn’t any examination,’ said Emma. ‘You have to take me as I am. I don’t want to do anything unless I’m really in love, and I’m not with you, and that’s it.’
‘In any case,’ said Louis cunningly, ‘I don’t think you are a virgin. I think you just think like one. When you get to my age, you don’t meet virgins any more.’
‘Really, you have a terrible cheek,’ said Emma.
‘What about you?’ demanded Louis. ‘You adopt this terrible feminine hauteur, so that it’s simply impossible to get near to you, and you won’t respond emotionally to anything or anyone. I know I’m as bad, but it’s you we’re trying to sort out. If you don’t touch up against people, you are nothing; you never define yourself, you never exist.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ said Emma.
‘It’s a terrible thing to be,’ said Louis. ‘But the trouble is, I am too.’
They hit up against another couple. All about them, in the wide, darkened area of the dance hall, couples were disclosing their Christmas plans to interested playmates: this one was off delivering letters for the Post Office; that one skiing down wet snowslopes in Austria. He would go off home, that awful place; and Emma would be gone, for five cruel weeks, an insurmountable interval in which people are forgotten, personal impacts elided from the memory, to her family’s metropolitan urbanities. Resentment arose. All the time, around him, intellectuals moaned of the breakdown of working-class culture, that vigorous h
ealthy life, bellies close to the soil, that they believed themselves cruelly severed from; as for Louis, he was in the damn thing, and all he wanted was to get out. If one married on one’s level, one was tied. But an intelligent and sophisticated wife (an Emma) could give every entry that was needed by a man of talents into finer society, could tell him what clothes to buy, what to do about one’s dandruff, what courses to order in restaurants, how one wine tasted differently from another, what ties to wear with what suit.
‘Are you going away for Christmas?’ he asked Emma.
‘I’m going home,’ said Emma. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Louis. ‘Where’s your home?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Emma. ‘I’m not telling you. You’re quite capable of just arriving . . .’
‘Who me?’ cried Louis, aghast, though the comment was true enough. ‘Well, I hope you’ll think about me.’
‘Why should I?’ said Emma.
‘Because I love you,’ said Louis. For a moment Emma strove with herself to face this fact and respond to it, but she couldn’t; all there was was pity, and a scrap of distaste.
All at once they were among the band; Louis, lost in amorous transports, had failed to watch where they were going and now the musicians were scattering as the pair of them flailed mercilessly around, knocking over music stands. ‘Oh,’ said Emma, detaching herself and hurrying to the side. Louis stood firm in the middle of the disaster, apologizing sweetly. By the time he had pushed his way through to the side there was nothing to be seen of Emma. He went and looked into the bar. She was not there, but, leaning against a doorpost, talking to a pretty girl in a very short dress, with her mouth touched up with black lipstick, was Walter Oliver.
Eating People is Wrong Page 16
