Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘It wasn’t all that funny,’ said Emma. Louis looked up from his meringues – he had eaten five already – and saw her eyes, serious and intense, clouded with an abstracted and myopic look. But really, she thought, it was rather funny, Treece standing there, as if comprehension had drained from his fingerends, heaving wildly upwards on the crossbar. She laughed and Louis, pleased, laughed too.

  ‘It is funny, isn’t it?’ he said. Her ears, he noticed, were perfectly formed, small, neat, powerful ears.

  ‘Do you know what we could do? We could go on the river,’ said Emma. There were freckles on her cheek, warm, friendly, fragrant freckles.

  ‘Is there time before the play?’ asked Louis. Her face was lightly tanned, a vital, pregnant colour.

  ‘Oh, two hours, more,’ said Emma. She was not, then, exactly beautiful, but sweetly formed, and with faint defects, the freckles, the myopic eyes, which brought her nearer to him, so that contact seemed less impossible as one realized that one’s own dental troubles, one’s own impurities of the blood-stream, were shared by her too. But not to start that again. Ah, thought Louis, but there is nothing in the world a woman loves more than to sit with a man at a table for two and pour out his tea for him, while over the shining silverware they talk intimately and with a mutual fond respect; it is for them, felt Louis, one of the things of love. On this highly-charged reflection he picked up his bill and rose. Emma was a minx. She tortured him and made him perpetually miserable. A terribly refined relationship existed between them. This was the sort of thing that happened to persons of this sort, sensitives, who fought the world and always, in the end, let it win, because there was a lot more taste to defeat than to victory. Louis had been fighting reality for twenty-five years; now, by God, he thought he’d beaten it.

  Emma slipped some money into his hand, and he paid the bill importantly. They went down towards the river, and Louis held Emma’s arm, and carried her basket, and explained in her ear how he was adapting Andalusian guitar music for the flageolet, simply a matter, he said, of converting what is essentially a twang into a reedy sound, and how he wished he had his flageolet today so that they could have gone gaily downstream playing Handel’s Royal Water Music. At the boathouse, the attendant said that the river was too full for punting, and so Louis chose a canoe, a mistake on his part, he realized at once, for if punts are amorous, canoes are chaste, and all he would get for his hour was a view of Emma’s back. ‘Can you swim?’ asked the boatman. ‘What now, in my clothes?’ asked Louis. ‘If you fall in,’ said the boatman. ‘N . . .’ said Louis and then felt a warning kick on his ankle from Emma. ‘Yes,’ he said. Louis clambered down into the canoe and then reached up to hand her into the craft, her body, standing above him, dress flat across her thighs at a level with his face, affording a sensation worth all Shakespeare’s problem plays put together. The boatman handed down the paddles to them and with jerky strokes the boat rode gently out into the centre of the river. Ahead the full, still water slid greenly over the weir. ‘Go the other way, Louis,’ said Emma. ‘There are swans up there,’ said Louis nervously.

  He turned the boat round and they moved back towards the theatre and under the bridge, where the swans gathered round them. ‘You know what to do if they attack us, don’t you,’ said Louis heroically. ‘Lie down flat.’ As this might be mistaken, he added, ‘Inside the boat.’

  But they reached the backwaters of the river without mishap. Louis’s paddle dipped and drove them forward in a series of uneven lunges; Emma’s hand dangled over the gunwale into the chilly water, and she watched it stream away with flashes of silver from between her fingers. A few cows stood mournfully up to their knees in the river, and a water-rat swam from bank to bank, advancing in scarcely perceptible movement, with only its snout and bright eyes visible above the stream. ‘Look!’ said Emma. But Louis neither heard nor saw. He was exerting all his energies to pushing the boat onward, for they had only an hour and he wanted to get as far as possible in the time. Moreover, he was frustrated. He had his chance and could not use it, didn’t know how to use it.

  A faint mist hung in the air as the evening came up, and it beaded on the tender twigs of the trees and occasionally plopped in a depressed way on Louis’s balding pate and he canoed wildly on, morose with passion. Cowardice was nibbling at his ankles; he wanted to forget the whole thing. He wished he was a man of action; he wished he could do things. I suppose, he thought, Hamlet was just like me. Of course, in a way, Hamlet was a man of action – look how he was always killing people. Not that Louis wanted to do this; he simply felt uncertain about what he wanted to do. Consider marriage, which was not, he felt, the happy end of an affair, but the sad beginning of a sentence; wasn’t love better as a condition, a sweaty Turkish bath of feeling, than a chain of events that end in bathos. No divine applause seemed to greet his excursions into the field of passion; in fact he knew by now that what the fates promised him in this direction was only disrepute; he had had this one out with them before. Why hold these emotional stocktakings, he warned himself; why not just continue with commerce and leave well alone? He shouldn’t have acted, he knew he shouldn’t; but he did. He tapped Emma on the shoulder.

  ‘I like you more than you like me,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’ said Emma.

  ‘I’ve missed you, very much,’ he said. The remark was a dangerous one; it corrupted her responses, as he saw. But he went on, more and more, worse and worse. It was like sinking into a bog; you kept going on a bit further, thinking you could still get out, but of course you simply couldn’t. He pointed out, judiciously, that it is the human function to express itself in contacts with others. He added that he did not find it easy to get on good terms with women, but he had from the very first found himself at ease with Emma. He quoted Nietzsche, but as Emma did not speak German she missed out on this bit. He said that man and woman were separate entities, and that the man was Pride, and the woman Virtue; it was the Woman’s function to submit her Virtue to the Pride of the Man. He debated this motion from both sides for a while. He contended that love was comfort, the supreme malt extract, the perfect hot water bottle. He simply asked Emma to submit her Virtue to his Pride. If she did not, she would hamper his sexual development, do him psychological harm, corrupt his future sex life.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Emma. But Louis’s voice went insistently on; she could not see his face, but simply hear this rational, pained voice. She could not turn round. They sat like passengers in a bus, both facing the same way, while Louis went on with his Nietzsche. ‘I need you, Emma,’ he cried, standing up in wild excitement. ‘“Du gicht zu Weibe? Vergess deine . . .?”’ he added, falling into the river. Emma turned in terror. ‘Louis, Louis,’ she cried. He had quite disappeared from sight beneath the waters. Presently his head appeared; wisps of his hair draggled down his face; something of his excitement still remained. He cried out – was it more German? – and his head went under again. It seemed that he had not realized what had happened to him. ‘You’re in the river,’ cried Emma, wondering whether he could hear her down there. She was weeping with fright. He came up again. ‘Kick off your things,’ she cried, throwing one of the canoe cushions at him; it just missed his head and straightaway sank, never to be seen again. Then his head was above water again, and this, thought poor, frightened Emma, scrupulously keeping count, this was the radical time, the last chance. She thrust a paddle at him and he grabbed the end, almost pulling her into the water. Gradually she worked the canoe so that it was beside him and he grabbed the prow. The rest was easy; she paddled backwards to the bank and leapt out, careless of the mud, to drag him out of the river. There seemed such a lot of him to pull out. But at last he was on the bank, and alive, and kicking, for ‘Loosen my clothes!’ he cried exotically. There were few left to loosen, and she did what she could. He sat up, and looked at her, and began, all at once, to cry. ‘You mustn’t,’ said Emma, for this was the worst thing of the lot. ‘I’m such a fool,’ sobbed Louis, ‘such a fool
.’ It was a proper payment for his hubris, he knew. And as she watched him she felt more desperately upset about him than she ever believed she could; he was, that was the truth, but it was so wrong that he should himself know. Presently he stopped crying and borrowed Emma’s handkerchief and wiped his face and blew the river out of his nose. ‘I think,’ he said, trying to be brave, ‘you’d better give me artificial respiration.’ Water gushed out of his lungs.

  Luckily he had taken off his overcoat in order to paddle, and this was still in the canoe, quite dry. Emma wrapped him in this and paddled him shivering back to Stratford. Here Treece proved a tower of strength, and hurried him to the hospital, where they kept him, though he insisted he didn’t want to miss the play. It was his big day, and he really didn’t want to miss it. And Emma, at the theatre, watching poor Malvolio, so serious and resplendent in his virtue, duped and outwitted, thought of Louis and tried not to feel angry that his fate had got so aggravatingly mixed up with hers.

  III

  A few days later Stuart Treece sat on a wooden bench in the out-patients’ department of the local hospital and waited for his name to be called. He tried to read, but could not. A notice pointed the way to the out patients’ toilet and he went to it. He felt extremely dizzy and extremely weak. He had been sent here by his doctor, to whom he had gone the previous morning. Over the last two weeks he had had two oral haemorrhages and had lost a great deal of blood. It was clearly an ulcer of sorts, or so his doctor thought. Treece stood in the toilet and wondered what was to become of himself. He had expected a culmination of some sort to the weakness and depression he had felt for the last few months, and here it was. The hospital made him uneasy. Since he had refused to go to a specialist by private arrangement, he was among a large crowd of people and he had to take his turn. Then over the loudspeakers he heard his name pronounced, syllable by syllable – Ter-rece – all of it. He followed the directions and found himself in the hands of a small, fluffy-looking nurse. She made him get on the scales. ‘Ten pounds four ounces,’ she said. ‘My God,’ said Treece. ‘I’m sorry,’ said the nurse. ‘Ten stone four pounds. I’ve just come off the maternity ward.’ The nurse then took him into a little cubicle and asked him to pass water into a bottle. ‘But I’ve just been,’ said Treece. ‘Oh, really,’ cried the nurse. ‘Haven’t you got the sense you were born with!’ Treece wondered if he were going to be able to stand this. The nurse tried again: ‘Can’t you do a bit?’ ‘Not one little drop,’ said Treece firmly. ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t know.’ ‘Honestly, patients!’ said the nurse. She now took him to another cubicle, and told him to strip and put on a very fancy bathrobe, in yellow and red stripes, that hung behind the door. He waited for a while. Nobody came. He peered out of the window. People on stretchers were being wheeled past, and Treece found this disturbing and left the window hastily. He sat down and started to read. Still no one came. He put his book down and began to pull hairs off his legs. Then the door opened and a young doctor came in. He made Treece lie on the bed and then asked him what the matter was.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t tell you in the appropriate terminology,’ said Treece.

  The doctor looked queerly at Treece. ‘Just tell me,’ he said. ‘I suppose what it amounts to is that when I walk across the room I feel as though I’ve climbed something,’ said Treece. ‘And then I have these periods of completely ungovernable depression in which I scarcely dare go out of the house for fear that God will come down and hit me. I mean, it’s completely manic. I feel as though people I don’t know will come up to me in the street and kick me in the groin.’

  ‘You have a pain like a kick in the groin?’

  ‘No, no pain,’ said Treece. ‘I’m talking now about a psychotic state . . .’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ said the doctor. ‘You sit there and think whether you have anything wrong with you that I can cure and if so, save it up for me when I get back. I haven’t all day, you know.’

  Treece lay on the bed and waited for a long time, but no one came and he went to sleep. Then the doctor was there again, waking him up. ‘This isn’t a holiday camp,’ he said. Treece looked at him and decided to forget about the depression bit and tell him about the haemorrhages. The doctor examined him and then he was taken to see two other doctors and the three of them got together and decided that Treece would have to stop in. ‘I have an evening class tonight,’ said Treece protestingly. ‘You must be crazy,’ said the doctor. ‘You walk in here and talk about God and you ought to be lying flat on your back and not moving.’ ‘Well, how did I know that?’ said Treece.

  ‘Don’t stand up,’ said the doctor. ‘Someone will come and fetch you and take you to a ward. We want you to rest. We’re going to give you some blood and it may be necessary for you to have an operation. We hope not.’

  A nurse came and a porter with a trolley and he was unloaded from the bed and on to the wagon. He went along a maze of corridors, his vision taking in only the ceilings. The hospital was old and had Victorian windows and dark corners and a mass of dirty ironwork everywhere. It was an unpleasant building. He was put in a lift and then pushed out again and he found himself in a large open ward. A lot of men lay aimlessly in bed. Most of them were old and seedy. A youth with big teeth sat by his bed in a dressing-gown and played weakly on a guitar. Treece was lifted off the trolley and on to a bed near the door. Two nurses came and put screens around him and got him into striped pyjamas that were much too big for him. Then after a while a sturdy and efficient staff nurse appeared with a trolley and a small bundle wrapped in cotton-wool, and took out a syringe and some small bottles. She then stuck the syringe in his arm at the elbow and extracted a large quantity of blood. ‘I thought they were going to give me some back,’ said Treece. ‘Haven’t you made a mistake?’

  ‘If you can run this hospital any better than we can . . .’ said the nurse. She went away, and Treece reflected that he was really not the type to be in hospital, it was obvious. In two hours he had got himself universally detested. He saw another nurse and signalled her. ‘What have I got and how long will I be here and can you get a message out for me?’ he asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ asked the nurse, and went away again.

  The staff nurse went by again. ‘Please,’ said Treece, trying a different tack. ‘May I talk to you for a minute?’

  ‘This isn’t a tea-party,’ said the nurse.

  Treece lay still for a few hours. Someone brought him some hot milk, and later a meal. He moped. He worried about his evening class. He worried about the lectures he was missing. He did not think that anyone knew where he was. There were about thirty people in the ward, in beds ranged on each side down the wall. They stared at him with unbridled curiosity. Someone came round and asked him if he wanted to bet on the races that afternoon. There was a loudspeaker blaring forth the Light Programme. They kept playing ‘I was a Big Man Yesterday’, a tune that Treece particularly disliked.

  ‘Eighoop, youth,’ said the man in the next bed. ‘Eighoop.’

  ‘Who?’ said Treece. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘What are’t tha in for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Treece. ‘They didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I thowt tha looked ill when tha was browt in,’ said the man. ‘I’ve been left for dead twice.’

  ‘I see,’ said Treece.

  At Treece’s other side was an old man who now cried: ‘Mester, grab a hold of this.’ He took a urine bottle out from under the covers and passed it to Treece. ‘I can’t reach the floor.’

  ‘Where shall I put it?’ asked Treece.

  ‘Down there on t’ground,’ said the old man. Treece leaned out and two nurses sprang up from nowhere and pushed him back again. ‘I thought you were on complete rest,’ said the strong-willed staff nurse.

  In the evening, before supper, the young doctor whom Treece had seen first came round. ‘Don’t open your mouth,’ whispered the man in the next bed, ‘or he’ll make tha have all thy teeth out.
’ When the doctor arrived at Treece, he said to the sister, who accompanied him: ‘I never saw anything like it in all my puff; he marched in here and started talking about God and wouldn’t admit he was ill at all.’ The sister laughed. ‘May I have a word with you?’ asked Treece.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Could you simply tell me what’s wrong with me, and let someone know where I am?’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I can’t simply tell you what’s wrong with you, and if I did you probably wouldn’t understand, but what it amounts to is that you appear to have some sort of ulceration in the stomach or the duodenum and might have another haemorrhage at any time. We’re going to give you some tests and X-rays and get a specialist to look at you. If you tell the sister whom you want informed, she’ll see to it. Has he had a blood test?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the sister.

  ‘I think we’ll give him some blood then, as soon as possible.’

  Something about the manner of both doctors and nurses puzzled Treece, but after a while he began to discern what it was. It became more and more apparent to him that apart from himself all the persons in the ward were working class, and not expectant of deference. Moreover, they were given to asking just such questions as Treece had asked, as anyone would ask, but they were not able to understand the answers. The need to convert all that was said into fairly simple terms had created a special kind of relationship, such as that which exists between parents and children, or the sane and the insane, a talking down on one side and a deference on the other. In the world of illness all were lost except those who worked here. This situation, which was not unacceptable to his fellow patients, Treece found unbearable. He was a man who needed to know, and knowledge was what was denied; he could not cope when facts were concealed from him and where the issues could not be rationalized. He lay in bed and was miserable.