Journey Into the Past

by Kingsley Amis

  Those questions . . . Although he wasn’t allowed to smoke another cigarette until five o’clock, Dixon lit one now as he remembered the first series, propounded six months or more ago; about the beginning of last December it had been, seven or eight weeks after he took up his appointment. ‘Do you like coming to see me?’ was the first he could recall, and it had been easy as well as truthful to answer ‘Yes’. Then there’d been ones like ‘Do you think we get on well together?’ and ‘Am I the only girl you know in this place?’ and once, when he’d asked her out for the third consecutive evening, ‘Are we going to go on seeing so much of each other?’ His first qualms had dated from then, but before that and for some time after he’d thought how much simpler this kind of honesty and straightforwardness made the awful business of getting on with women. And the same had seemed true of the confessions: ‘I do enjoy being with you’, ‘I don’t get on with men as a rule’, ‘Don’t laugh at me if I say I think the Board did a better job than they knew when they appointed you’. He hadn’t wanted to laugh then, nor did he want to now. What would she be wearing this evening? He could just about bring himself to praise anything but the green Paisley frock in combination with the low-heeled, quasi-velvet shoes.

  Where was Welch? The old man was well known for an incurable evader. Dixon flung himself up the staircase, past the memorial plaques, and along the deserted corridors, but the familiar low-ceilinged room was empty. He clattered down the back stairs, an escape-route he often used himself, and into the Staff Cloakroom. Welch was in there, stooped secretively over a wash-basin. ‘Ah, just caught you,’ Dixon said convivially. ‘Thought you’d gone without me. Professor,’ he added, nearly too late.

  The other raised his narrow face, distorted with wonder. ‘Gone?’ he asked. ‘You’re . . .’

  ‘You’re taking me home for tea,’ Dixon enunciated. ‘We arranged it on Monday, at coffee-time, in the Common Room.’ He caught sight of his own face in the wall-mirror and was surprised to see that it wore an expression of eager friendliness.

  Welch had been flicking water from his hands, a movement he now arrested. He looked like an African savage being shown a simple conjuring trick. He said: ‘Coffee-time?’

  ‘Yes, on Monday,’ Dixon answered him, putting his hands into his pockets and bunching the fists.

  ‘Oh,’ Welch said, and looked at Dixon for the first time. ‘Oh. Did we say this afternoon?’ He turned aside to a streaked roller-towel and began a slow drying of his hands, watching Dixon alertly.

  ‘That’s right, Professor. Hope it’s still convenient.’

  ‘Oh, it’s convenient enough,’ Welch said in an unnaturally quiet voice.

  ‘Good,’ Dixon said, ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ and took his dirty old raincoat from a hook in the wall.

  Welch’s manner was still a little veiled, but he was obviously recovering quickly, and managed quite soon to pick up his ‘bag’ and put his fawn fishing-hat on his head. ‘We’ll go down in my car,’ he offered.

  ‘That’ll be nice.’

  Outside the building they turned along a gravel drive and went up to the car where it was parked with a few others. Dixon stared about him while Welch looked thoroughly for his keys. An ill-kept lawn ran down in front of them to a row of amputated railings, beyond which was College Road and the town cemetery, a conjunction responsible for some popular local jokes. Lecturers were fond of lauding to their students the comparative receptivity to facts of ‘the Honours class over the road’, while the parallel between the occupations of graveyard attendant and custodian of learning was one which often suggested itself to others besides the students.

  As Dixon watched, a bus passed slowly up the hill in the mild May sunshine, bound for the small town where the Welches lived. Dixon betted himself it would be there before them. A roaring voice began to sing behind one of the windows above his head; it sounded like, and presumably might even be, Barclay, the Professor of Music.

  A minute later Dixon was sitting listening to a sound like the ringing of a cracked door-bell as Welch pulled at the starter. This died away into a treble humming that seemed to involve every component of the car. Welch tried again; this time the effect was of beer-bottles jerkily belaboured. Before Dixon could do more than close his eyes he was pressed firmly back against the seat, and his cigarette, still burning, was cuffed out of his hand into some interstice of the floor. With a tearing of gravel under the wheels the car burst from a standstill towards the grass verge, which Welch ran over briefly before turning down the drive. They moved towards the road at walking pace, the engine maintaining a loud lowing sound which caused a late group of students, most of them wearing the yellow and green College scarf, to stare after them from the small covered-in space beside the lodge where sports notices were posted.

  They climbed College Road, holding to the middle of the highway. The unavailing hoots of a lorry behind them made Dixon look furtively at Welch, whose face, he saw with passion, held an expression of calm assurance, like an old quartermaster’s in rough weather. Dixon shut his eyes again. He was hoping that when Welch had made the second of the two maladroit gear-changes which lay ahead of him, the conversation would turn in some other direction than the academic. He even thought he’d rather hear some more about music or the doings of Welch’s sons, the effeminate writing Michel and the bearded pacifist painting Bertrand whom Margaret had described to him. But whatever the subject for discussion might be, Dixon knew that before the journey ended he’d find his face becoming creased and flabby, like an old bag, with the strain of making it smile and show interest and speak its few permitted words, of steering it between a collapse into helpless fatigue and a tautening with anarchic fury.

  ‘Oh .. . uh .. . Dixon.’

  Dixon opened his eyes, doing everything possible with the side of his face away from Welch, everything which might help to relieve his feelings in advance. ‘Yes, Professor?’

  ‘I was wondering about that article of yours.’

  ‘Oh yes. I don’t . . .’

  ‘Have you heard from Partington yet?’

  ‘Well yes, actually I sent it to him first of all, if you remember, and he said the pressure of other stuff was . . .’

  ‘What?’

  Dixon had lowered his voice below the medium shout required by the noise of the car, in an attempt to half-conceal from Welch Welch’s own lapse of memory, and so protect himself. Now he had to bawl out: ‘I told you he said he couldn’t find room for it.’

  ‘Oh, couldn’t he? Couldn’t he? Well, of course they do get a lot of the most . . . a most terrific volume of stuff sent to them, you know. Still, I suppose if anything really took their eye, then they . . . they . . . Have you sent it off to anyone else?’

  ‘Yes, that Caton chap who advertised in the T.L.S. a couple of months ago. Starting up a new historical review with an international bias, or something. I thought I’d get in straight away. After all, a new journal can’t very well be bunged up as far ahead as all the ones I’ve . . .’

  ‘Ah yes, a new journal might be worth trying. There was one advertised in the Times Literary Supplement a little while ago. Paton or some such name the editor fellow was called. You might have a go at him, now that it doesn’t seem as if any of the more established reviews have got room for your . . . effort. Let’s see now; what’s the exact title you’ve given it?’

  Dixon looked out of the window at the fields wheeling past, bright green after a wet April. It wasn’t the double-exposure effect of the last half-minute’s talk that had dumbfounded him, for such incidents formed the staple material of Welch colloquies; it was the prospect of reciting the title of the article he’d written. It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own usefulness and significance. ‘In considering this strangel
y neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool. ‘Let’s see,’ he echoed Welch in a pretended effort of memory: ‘oh yes; The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485. After all, that’s what it’s . . .’

  Unable to finish his sentence, he looked to his left again to find a man’s face staring into his own from about nine inches away. The face, which filled with alarm as he gazed, belonged to the driver of a van which Welch had elected to pass on a sharp bend between two stone walls. A huge bus now swung into view from further round the bend. Welch slowed slightly, thus ensuring that they would still be next to the van when the bus reached them, and said with decision: ‘Well, that ought to do it nicely, I should say.’ Before Dixon could roll himself into a ball or even take off his glasses, the van had braked and disappeared, the bus-driver, his mouth opening and shutting vigorously, had somehow squirmed his vehicle against the far wall, and, with an echoing rattle, the car darted forward on to the straight. Dixon, though on the whole glad at this escape, felt at the same time that the conversation would have been appropriately rounded off by Welch’s death. He felt this more keenly when Welch went on: ‘If I were you, Dixon, I should take all the steps I possibly could to get this article accepted in the next month or so. I mean, I haven’t the specialized knowledge to judge . . .’ His voice quickened: ‘I can’t tell, can I? what it’s worth. It’s no use anybody coming to me and asking ,“What’s young Dixon’s stuff like?” unless I can give them an expert opinion of what it’s worth, is it now? But an acceptance by a learned journal would . . . would . . . You, well you don’t know what it’s worth yourself, how can you?’

  Dixon felt that, on the contrary, he had a good idea of what his article was worth from several points of view. From one of these, the thing’s worth could be expressed in one short hyphenated indecency; from another, it was worth the amount of frenzied fact-grubbing and fanatical boredom that had gone into it; from yet another, it was worthy of its aim, the removal of the ‘bad impression’ he’d so far made in the College and in his Department. But he said: ‘No, of course not, Professor.’

  ‘And you see, Faulkner, it’s rather important to you that it should turn out to be worth something, if you see what I mean.’

  Despite being wrongfully addressed (Faulkner had preceded him in his post), Dixon knew what Welch meant, and said so. How had he made his bad impression? The most likely thing, he always thought, was his having inflicted a superficial wound on the Professor of English in his first week. This man, a youngish ex-Fellow of a Cambridge college, had been standing on the front steps when Dixon, coming round the corner from the library, had kicked violently at a small round stone lying on the macadam. Before reaching the top of its trajectory it had struck the other just below the left kneecap at a distance of fifteen yards or more. Averting his head, Dixon had watched in terrified amazement; it had been useless to run, as the nearest cover was far beyond reach. At the moment of impact he’d turned and begun to walk down the drive, but knew well enough that he was the only visible entity capable of stone-propulsion. He looked back once and saw the Professor of English huddled up on one leg and looking at him. As always on such occasions, he’d wanted to apologize but had found, when it came to it, that he was too frightened to. He’d found the same when, two days later, he’d been passing behind the Registrar’s chair at the first Faculty meeting, had stumbled and had knocked the chair aside just as the other man was sitting down. A warning shout from the Registrar’s Clerk had averted complete disaster, but he could still remember the look on the face of that figure, stiffened in the shape of a letter S. Then there’d been that essay written for Welch by one of the Honours people, containing, in fact consisting of, abuse of a book on enclosures by, it transpired, one of Welch’s own ex-pupils. ‘I asked him who could possibly have filled his head with stuff like that, you see, and he said it was all out of one of your lectures, Dixon. Well, I told him as tactfully as I could . . .’ Much later Dixon had found out that the book in question had been written at Welch’s suggestion and, in part, under his advice. These facts had been there for all to read in the Acknowledgements, but Dixon, whose policy it was to read as little as possible of any given book, never bothered with these, and it had been Margaret who’d told him. That had been, as near as he could remember, on the morning before the evening when Margaret had tried to kill herself with sleeping-pills.

  When Welch said in a far-away half-shout, ‘Oh, by the way, Dixon,’ Dixon turned to him with real avidity. ‘Yes, Professor?’ How much better to have more of what Welch could provide than thoughts of what Margaret would provide—commodities which he would in any case soon be sampling in their real form.

  ‘I’ve been wondering if you’d care to come over next week-end for the . . . week-end. I think it should be quite good fun. We’re having a few people from London, you know, friends of ours and of my son Bertrand’s. Bertrand’s going to try and come himself, of course, but he doesn’t know yet if he can get away. I expect we shall put on one or two little shows, little bits of music and that. We’ll probably call on you to lend a hand with something.’

  The car buzzed on along a clear road. ‘Thank you very much, I should love to come,’ Dixon said, thinking he must get Margaret to do some intelligence work on the something he’d probably be called upon to lend a hand with.

  Welch seemed quite cheered by this ready acceptance. ‘That’s fine,’ he said with apparent feeling. ‘Now there’s something on the academic side I’d like to discuss with you. I’ve been talking to the Principal about the College Open Week at the end of term. He wants the History Department to throw something into the pool, you see, and I’ve been wondering about you.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Surely there were others better qualified to be thrown into the pool?

  ‘Yes, I thought you might care to tackle the evening lecture the Department’s going to provide, if you could.’

  ‘Well, I would rather like to have a crack at a public lecture, if you think I’m capable of it,’ Dixon managed to say.

  ‘I thought something like “Merrie England” might do as a subject. Not too academic, and not too . . . not too . . . Do you think you could get something together along those sort of lines?’

  2

  ‘And then, just before I went under, I suddenly stopped caring. I’d been clutching the empty bottle like grim death, I remember, as if I were holding on to life, in a way. But quite soon I didn’t in the least mind going; I felt too tired, somehow. And yet if someone had shaken me and said, “Come on, you’re not going, you’re coming back,” I really believe I should have started trying to make the effort, trying to get back. But nobody did and so I just thought Oh well, here we go, it doesn’t matter all that much. Curious sensation.’ Margaret Peel, small, thin, and bespectacled, with bright make-up, glanced at Dixon with a half-smile. Around them was the grumble of half a dozen conversations.

  ‘It’s a good sign that you’re able to talk about it like this,’ he said. Since she made no reply, he went on: ‘What happened afterwards, or can’t you remember? Don’t tell me if you’d rather not, of course.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind telling you if it won’t bore you.’ Her smile broadened a little. ‘But didn’t Wilson tell you about how he found me?’

  ‘Wilson? Oh, the chap in the room underneath. Yes, he said about hearing your wireless booming away and coming up to complain. What made you leave it on like that?’ The feelings aroused in him by the first part of Margaret’s story had almost subsided now, and he was able to think more clearly.

  She looked away across the half-empty bar. ‘I don’t really know, James,’ she said. ‘I think I had some idea about wanting to have some sort of noise going on while I was . . . going off. It seemed so horribly quiet in that room.’ She gave a little shiv
er and said quickly: ‘Bit chilly in here, isn’t it?’

  ‘We’ll move if you like.’

  ‘No, it’s all right; just a bit of a draught with that chap coming in . . . Oh yes; afterwards. I think I grasped quite soon what was going on and where I was and all that. And what they were doing to me. I thought, Oh God, hours and hours of feeling ill and wretched, can I bear it? But of course I was passing out all the time, on and off; good thing, really, in the end. By the time I was fully, er, compos mentis again the worst was over, as far as feeling awful was concerned. I was terribly weak, naturally; well, you remember . . . But everybody was awfully sweet to me. I should have thought they’d got enough to deal with with people who were ill through no fault of their own. I remember being terrified they’d tell the police and get me carted off to a police hospital—are there such things, James?—but they were just angelic; they couldn’t have been nicer. And then you came to see me and the horrible part all began to seem unreal. But you looked so terrible . . .’ She leaned sideways on her bar-stool in laughter, her hands clasped round one knee, the quasi-velvet shoe falling away from her heel. ‘You looked as if you’d been watching some frightful gruesome operation, white as a sheet and all . . . hollow-eyed . . .’ She shook her head, still laughing quietly, and pulled her cardigan up over the shoulders of the green Paisley frock.

  ‘Did I really?’ Dixon asked her. He was relieved at this piece of news, to find that he’d looked as bad as he’d felt that morning; then he felt bad again now as he nerved himself to ask the last compulsory question. He half listened for a minute or so while Margaret described how good Mrs Welch had been to her in fetching her from the hospital and installing her at the Welches’ home to convalesce. She had undoubtedly been very kind to Margaret, even though at other times, when publicly disagreeing with her husband for example, she was the only living being capable of making Dixon sympathize with him. It was rather annoying to hear how kind she’d been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her. Finally, Dixon said in a low voice, having first drunk freely from his glass: ‘You needn’t say anything if you don’t want to, but . . . you are over this business now, aren’t you? You wouldn’t think of having another shot at it, I mean?’