Journey Into the Past

by Kingsley Amis

  Welch sat down at his misleadingly littered desk. ‘Oh . . . uh . . . Dixon.’

  ‘Yes, Professor?’

  ‘I’ve . . . about this article of yours.’

  With all his incoherences, Welch was always straightforward when reproofs were to be delivered, so that this remark was comparatively encouraging. Dixon said guardedly: ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I was having a chat the other day with an old friend of mine from South Wales. The Professor at the University College of Abertawe, he is now. Athro Haines; I expect you know his book on medieval Cwmrhydyceirw.’

  Dixon said ‘Oh yes’ in a different tone, but still guardedly. He wanted to indicate eager and devout recognition that should not at the same time imply first-hand knowledge of the work in question, in case Welch should demand an epitome of its argument.

  ‘Of course, their problems down there are very different from . . . from . . . The Pass classes in particular. He was telling me . . . It seems that in the first year everybody, doesn’t matter whether they’re going to go on with History or not, they all have to get through a certain amount of . . .’

  Dixon switched off most of his attention, just keeping enough of it going to enable him to nod at proper intervals. He felt relieved; nothing really bad was going to happen, whatever might prove to be the bridge over the fast-widening gap between his article and this Haines character. A resolve began to form in his mind, frightening him before he could properly identify it. Now that he was alone with Welch, he’d have a show-down with him, force him to reveal what had been decided about his future, or, if nothing was definite yet, when it would be definite and what issue was going to make it definite. He was tired of being blackmailed, by the hope of improving his chances, into grubbing about in the public library for material that ‘might come in handy’ for Welch’s book on local history, into ‘just glancing through’ (i.e. correcting) the proofs of a long article Welch was having printed in a local journal of antiquities, into holding himself in readiness to attend a folk-dancing conference (thank God he hadn’t had to go after all), into attending that terrible arty week-end last month, into agreeing to lecture on Merrie England—especially that. And it was getting very late in the term: less than a month to go. Somehow he must mortar or bayonet Welch out of his prepared positions of reticence, irrelevance, and the long-lived, wondering frown.

  Welch suddenly made him switch everything on again by saying: ‘Apparently this Caton fellow was in for the chair at Abertawe at the same time as Haines, three or four years ago it must be now. Well, naturally Haines couldn’t tell me much, but he gave me the impression that Caton might well have got the chair instead of him, only there was something rather shady about him, you see. Don’t let this out, will you, Dixon? but there was something like a forged testimonial or something of the sort, I gathered. Something rather shady, anyway. Now, of course, this journal of his may be quite above-board and so on, I’m not saying it isn’t; it may be quite . . . above-board. But I thought I ought to let you know about this, Dixon, so that you can take any action you think . . . you think you . . . you think fit, you . . .’

  ‘Well, thank you very much, Professor, it’s very good of you to warn me. Perhaps I’d better write to him again and ask . . .’

  ‘You haven’t had a reply to your letter asking for something definite about when he’s publishing your thing?’

  ‘No, not a word.’

  ‘Well then, you must certainly write to him again, Dixon, and say you must have a definite date of publication. Say you’ve had an inquiry from another journal about what you’re writing. Say you must know definitely within a week.’ Such fluency, like the keen glance which accompanied it, Welch seemed to reserve specially for telling people what to do.

  ‘I’ll certainly do that, yes.’

  ‘Do it today, will you, Dixon?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘After all, it’s important to you, isn’t it?’

  This was the cue he’d been hoping for. ‘Yes, sir. Actually I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.’

  Welch’s shaggy eyebrows descended a little. ‘About what?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you appreciate, Professor, that I’ve been worrying rather about my position here, in the last few months.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Welch said cheerfully, his eyebrows restored.

  ‘I’ve been wondering just how I stand, you know.’

  ‘How you stand?’

  ‘Yes, I . . . I mean, I’m afraid I got off on the wrong foot here rather, when I first came. I did some rather silly things. Well, now that my first year’s nearly over, naturally I can’t help feeling a bit anxious.’

  ‘Yes, I know a lot of young chaps find some difficulty in settling down to their first job. It’s only to be expected, after a war, after all. I don’t know if you’ve ever met young Faulkner, at Nottingham he is now; he got a job here in nineteen hundred’, here he paused, ‘and forty-five. Well, he’d had rather a rough time in the war, what with one thing and another; he’d been out East for a time, you know, in the Fleet Air Arm he was, and then they switched him back to the Mediterranean. I remember him telling me how difficult he found it to adapt his way of thinking, when he had to settle down here and . . .’

  Stop himself from dashing his fist into your face, Dixon thought. He waited for a time, then, when Welch produced another of his pauses, said: ‘Yes, and of course it’s doubly difficult when one doesn’t feel very secure in one’s—I’d work much better, I know, if I could feel settled about . . .’

  And, of course, one does tend to lose the habit of concentration as one grows older. It’s amazing how distractions one wouldn’t have noticed in one’s early days become absolutely shattering when one . . . grows older. I remember when they were putting up the new chemistry labs here, well, I say new, you could hardly call them new now, I suppose. At the time I’m speaking of, some years before the war, they were laying the foundations about Easter time it must have been, and the concrete-mixer or whatever it was . . .’

  Dixon wondered if Welch could hear him grinding his teeth. If he did, he gave no sign of it. Like a boxer still incredibly on his feet after ten rounds of punishment, Dixon got in with: ‘I could feel quite happy about everything, if only my big worry were out of the way.’

  Welch’s head lifted slowly, like the muzzle of some obsolete howitzer. The wondering frown quickly began to form. ‘I don’t quite see . . .’

  ‘My probation,’ Dixon said loudly.

  The frown cleared. ‘Oh. That. You’re on two years’ probation here, Dixon, not one year. It’s all there in your contract, you know. Two years.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but that just means that I can’t be taken on to the permanent staff until two years are up. It doesn’t mean that I can’t be . . . asked to leave at the end of the first year.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Welch said warmly; ‘no.’ He left it open whether he was reinforcing Dixon’s negative or dissenting from it.

  ‘I can be asked to leave at the end of the first year, can’t I, Professor?’ Dixon said quickly, pressing himself against the back of his chair.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Welch said, coldly this time, as if he were being asked to make some concession which, though theoretically due, no decent man would claim.

  ‘Well I’m just wondering what’s happening about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve no doubt you are,’ Welch said in the same tone.

  Dixon waited, planning faces. He looked round the small, cosy room with its fitted carpet, its rows of superseded books, its filing cabinets full of antique examination papers and of dossiers relating to past generations of students, its view from closed windows on to the sunlit wall of the Physics Laboratory. Behind Welch’s head hung the departmental timetable, drawn up by Welch himself in five different-coloured inks corresponding to the five teaching members of the Department. The sight of this seemed to undam Dixon’s mind; for the first time since arriving at the College he thought he felt real, over-mast
ering, orgiastic boredom, and its companion, real hatred. If Welch didn’t speak in the next five seconds, he’d do something which would get himself flung out without possible question—not the things he’d often dreamed of when sitting next door pretending to work. He no longer wanted, for example, to inscribe on the departmental timetable a short account, well tricked-out with obscenities, of his views on the Professor of History, the Department of History, medieval history, history, and Margaret and hang it out of the window for the information of passing students and lecturers, nor did he, on the whole, now intend to tie Welch up in his chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a bottle until he disclosed why, without being French himself, he’d given his sons French names, nor . . . No, he’d just say, quite quietly and very slowly and distinctly, to give Welch a good chance of catching his general drift: Look here, you old cockchafer, what makes you think you can run a history department, even at a place like this, eh, you old cockchafer? I know what you’d be good at, you old cockchafer . . .

  ‘Well, these things aren’t as easy as you might imagine, you know,’ Welch said suddenly. ‘This is a very difficult matter, Dixon, you see. There’s a great deal, a lot of things you’ve got to keep in mind.’

  ‘I see that, of course, Professor. I just wanted to ask when the decision will be taken, that’s all. If I’m to go, it’s only fair I should be told soon.’ He felt his head trembling slightly with rage as he said this.

  Welch’s glance, which had flicked two or three times at Dixon’s face, now dropped to a half-curled-up letter on the desk. He muttered: ‘Yes . . . well . . . I . . .’

  Dixon said in a still louder voice: ‘Because I shall have to start looking for another job, you see. And most of the schools will have made their appointments for September before they break up in July. So I shall want to know in good time.’

  An expression of unhappiness was beginning to settle on Welch’s small-eyed face. Dixon was at first pleased to see this evidence that Welch’s mind could still be reached from the outside; next he felt a momentary compunction at the spectacle of one man disliking to reveal something that would cause pain to another; finally panic engulfed him. What was Welch’s reluctance concealing? He, Dixon, was done for. If so, he would at any rate be able to deliver the cockchafer speech, though he wished his audience were larger.

  ‘Let you know as soon as anything’s decided,’ Welch said with incredible speed. ‘Nothing is yet.’

  Left with nothing to say, Dixon realized how wild a notion the cockchafer speech had been. He’d never be able to tell Welch what he wanted to tell him, any more than he’d ever be able to do the same with Margaret. All the time he’d thought he was bringing the matter of his probation to a head he’d merely been a winkle on the pin of Welch’s evasion-technique; verbal this time instead of the more familiar physical form, but a technique adapted to meet stronger pressure than he himself could hope to bring to bear on it.

  Now, as Dixon had been half expecting all along, Welch produced his handkerchief. It was clear that he was about to blow his nose. This was usually horrible, if only because it drew unwilling attention to Welch’s nose itself, a large, open-pored tetrahedron. But when the familiar miraculously-sustained blares beat against the walls and windows, Dixon hardly minded at all; the noise had the effect of changing his mood. Any statement that could be battered out of Welch was invariably trustworthy, so that Dixon was back where he started. But how lovely to be back where he started, instead of out in front where he didn’t want to be. How wrong people always were when they said: ‘It’s better to know the worst than go on not knowing either way.’ No; they had it exactly the wrong way round. Tell me the truth, doctor, I’d sooner know. But only if the truth is what I want to hear.

  When he was sure that Welch had finished blowing his nose, Dixon got up and thanked him for their chat almost with sincerity, and the sight of Welch’s ‘bag’ and fishing-hat on a nearby chair, normally a certain infuriant, only made him hum his Welch tune as he went out. This tune featured in the ‘rondo’ of some boring piano concerto Welch had once insisted on playing him on his complicated exponential-horned gramophone. It had come after about four of the huge double-sided red-labelled records, and Dixon had fitted words to it. Going down the stairs towards the Common Room, where coffee would now be available, he articulated these words behind closed lips: ‘You ignorant clod, you stupid old sod, you havering slavering get . . .’ Here intervened a string of unmentionables, corresponding with an oom-pah sort of effect in the orchestra. ‘You wordy old turdy old scum, you griping old piping old bum . . .’ Dixon didn’t mind the obscurity of the reference, in ‘piping’, to Welch’s recorder; he knew what he meant.

  The examinations were now in progress, and Dixon had nothing to do that morning but turn up at the Assembly Hall at twelve-thirty to collect some scripts. They would contain answers to questions he’d set about the Middle Ages. As he approached the Common Room he thought briefly about the Middle Ages. Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they’d been in the Middle Age—Margaret’s way of referring to the Middle Ages? He grinned at this last thought, then stopped doing that on entering the Common Room and catching sight of her, pale and heavy-eyed, on her own near the empty fireplace.

  Their relations hadn’t altered materially during the ten days or so since the arty week-end. It had taken him the whole of an evening in the Oak Lounge and a great deal of expense and hypocrisy to get her to admit that she still had a grievance against him, and more of the same sort of commodity to persuade her to define, amplify, discuss, moderate, and finally abandon it. For some reason, periodically operative but impossible to name, the sight of her now filled him with affection and remorse. Rejecting coffee in favour of lemon squash, for it was a hot day, he got some from the overalled woman at the serving-table and went through the chatting groups over to Margaret.

  She was wearing her arty get-up, but had discarded the wooden beads in favour of a brooch consisting of a wooden letter M. A large envelope full of examination scripts was on the floor beside her chair. A falsetto explosion from the coffee-urn across the room made him start slightly; then he said: ‘Hallo, dear, how are you today?’

  ‘All right, thanks.’

  He smiled tentatively. ‘You don’t sound as though you mean that.’

  ‘Don’t I? I’m sorry. I’m perfectly all right really.’ She spoke with extraordinary sharpness. Her jaw-muscles looked tight, as if she was suffering from toothache.

  Glancing about him, he moved closer, bent forward, and said as gently as he could: ‘Now, Margaret, please don’t talk like that. It’s quite unnecessary. If you don’t feel too good, tell me about it and I’ll sympathize. If you feel all right, that’s fine. Either way we’ll have a cigarette on it. But for God’s sake don’t try to pick a fight with me. I don’t feel like one.’

  She moved abruptly on the chair-arm she was sitting on so that her back was to everybody in the room except Dixon, who saw that her eyes were filling with tears. As he hesitated, she gave a loud sob, still looking at him.

  ‘Margaret, you musn’t,’ he said in horror. ‘Don’t cry. I didn’t mean it.’

  She gave a furious downward wave of her hand. ‘You were quite right,’ she said shudderingly. ‘It was my fault. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Margaret . . .’

  ‘No, I’m the one in the wrong. I bit your head off. I didn’t want to, I didn’t mean to. Everything’s so bloody this morning.’

  ‘Well, tell me about it, then. Dry your eyes.’

  ‘You’re the only one th
at’s nice to me and then I treat you like that.’ However, she took off her glasses and started blotting her

  eyes.

  ‘Never mind about that. Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Everything and nothing.’

  ‘Did you have another bad night?’

  ‘Yes, darling, I did, and it’s made me terribly sorry for myself, as usual. I keep thinking to myself, Oh hell, what’s the use of anything, especially me?’

  ‘Have a cigarette.’

  ‘Oh thank you, James, it’s just what I want. Do I look all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Just a little tired, that’s all.’

  ‘I didn’t get off till gone four. I must go and see the doc and get him to give me something. I can’t go on like this.’

  ‘But didn’t he say you’d got to adjust yourself to doing without anything?’

  She looked up at him in something like triumph. ‘Yes, he did. But he didn’t say how I’m going to adjust myself to doing without sleep.’

  ‘Doesn’t anything seem to help?’

  ‘Oh, God, you know all about the baths and the hot milks and the, er, aspirins and the window shut and the window open . . .’

  They talked like this for a few minutes, while the other occupants of the room began to disperse to their various tasks. These, since it was the one time of the academic year when everybody was simultaneously not lecturing, must have been largely self-imposed. Dixon sweated quietly as the talk went on, trying to repel the persistent half-recollection or half-illusion of having casually told Margaret a couple of days previously that he’d ring her up at the Welches’ the next night—which was now last night. Some invitation or promise was obviously required, if only to smother the problem. At the first opportunity he said: ‘What about lunch today? Are you free?’