Stepping Westward

WHEN PEOPLE asked Bernard Froelich why he had gone into the academic life, he usually answered, ‘Oh, for the prestige, the power.’ It was a joke, but a half-true one. He had always been an ambitious man. When he went to the east coast college where he had done his undergraduate and graduate work, a college with many intellectual but few social attainments and a student body composed of enterprising socially mobile Jewish boys like himself, he had seen himself ending up in one of the more prestigious professions; he should have been a doctor or a rabbi. Something – probably success – had diverted him into university teaching; something – probably ignorance – had brought him out west to do it. Once in Party, he had found himself happy in the west; at the same time, his glances went eastward frequently, and it was for this reason, in part, that he had grown into Anglophilia. He had a generic liking for the English; he liked them because they came not out of the woods but out of a culture. However, there was only so much room in the spirit for Anglophilia to take up; and Froelich had larger causes. He had, therefore, a wealth of ends in view when, that spring day, sitting next to Selena May Sugar at the meeting to appoint the next Creative Writing Fellow, he had proposed the name of James Walker. There had been the thought of the service he could do for the book he was writing. There was the desire to bring into the English Department a concealed bomb or catalyst, a disintegrator and changer who would explode in faculty meetings and in the classrooms and somehow dislodge the world of dullness and fog that Bourbon swirled around in, and so bring prestige to himself and his cause. There was, too, the desire to bring into Party’s frontier plainness a soul-mate, a portion of the loveliness he had left behind back east, a man who could also recall to him the good days in London, could recall the Earl’s Court flat and the one-bar gas fire and the walks down Petticoat Lane and the nightly struggles to buy potatoes after six in the evening.

And then, also, there was a reverse impulse – an impulse to do something to that same England. For, sitting there on their island, the English had seemed to him a settled race, a race that had taken the things of the mind for granted and lived easily with them, a race that had acquired forms for living and had assumed that concert halls and bookshops and libraries and writers were permanent and eternal – a race, in short, that hadn’t faced the future. And Froelich had wanted to put that kind of view to the test, to see what would happen to it in a place where things of the mind could only be appendages. The faculty of the English Department at Benedict Arnold looked impressive in their classrooms as they discoursed on Dickens and Dostoevsky and Blake, clad in their tweed suits, smoking their pipes, thinking up their articles for PMLA. For part of the time, at least, they might have been at Harvard or Oxford. But what a veneer it all was! On weekends they put on Levi’s and went up to their cabins in the canyon to clear snow, fish in creeks, and saw logs for their stoves. They became deeply ambiguous men, who looked at the world with two faces, the man and the mask. Froelich’s image for the type was Dr Bourbon, who could be seen, still in his Rhodes Scholar’s tweeds, shooting at bottles in his backyard with a six-gun after a day of classes. It was the thought that the English wore their disguises all the time, had no sense of independent self, so to speak, that helped to motivate Froelich. He wanted to confront an Englishman with confusion, and see what part of the equation would change.

The disappointment he had felt on Walker’s arrival, the sense he had then had of the moral and emotional tiredness of the man, had waned a little in the following weeks. It seemed to him that it would be Walker, and not Party, who would change. It was a despairing notion, because he had hoped for the other thing, hoped to see Bourbon’s head drop in shame and the department realize that it had to turn its face toward the east from which he himself came. He had watched Walker carefully, over those weeks, as he threshed and flailed, watched his every assurance and his every embarrassment. He felt that he had offered this man a whole new world and he wondered what he would make of it. He, Froelich, had brought him to Party, given him joys and tortures and problems. He had given him work, dinner, and was prepared to do more; Walker was, he decided, of the same spirit as Froelich, and whatever he wanted – Froelich’s home, his work, his wife – he could have. He felt the kinship between them grow daily. When Walker had grasped at the loyalty oath question, he had felt that the intellectual world of liberalism was awake in Party at last. And when Walker, perplexed, had come to him before his lecture, Froelich had glowed, counting the threads he had tied. He had tried to follow and to lead; to show the way and let the way be found. Walker’s very English brand of liberalism, a faith of unbelief, struck Froelich as a cultural artefact. Its most committed assumption seemed to be that you shouldn’t do anything to anybody because people, and the world, like to be the way they are. Froelich’s own liberalism was more militant, as, in America, it had to be; the English had not had to fight for it for a very long time, and they didn’t recognize, even now, that the odds were against them, that every freedom, every cultural moment, had to be won by political energy. Walker, left without a sense of society or of historical change, could speak only out of himself. He was striving for no future; he held only on to a past that was familiar enough in his own land but sounded like the voice of a ghost out here on the plains. He had a function to play in relation to Walker’s sublime subjectivism; he was objectivity, history, leading him on.

Now, he sat in the third row of the audience in the Fogle Auditorium, and watched Walker, a little figure behind the microphones, wriggling with embarrassment, beside the American flag, at the English perspectives he had to put. His English socks poked out beneath the too-short trouser cuffs of his American seersucker suit. The ghost spoke, and sounded more like Hamlet. It was not the kind of statement that Froelich would have wished for, had he been a totally political man. But he was not. What he felt, as Walker’s halting words at last turned to the loyalty oath, was a sense of personal triumph. What had happened was that he had given Walker what he had come here for, a moment of truth and test, an historic moment of growth. Visibly the man had changed and grown, won himself and destroyed himself. Walker’s statement was almost incidental, really: he had taken up a cause that he knew little about, one he had not much right to, one that others could have handled better. But the real point, for Froelich, was his own personal achievement in doing all this; he had linked Walker so inexorably to himself that their spirits now had to sing in tune. The words spoken had Froelich in them. They cut Walker off from Bourbon (who was contorting himself excruciatingly in the row ahead); they cut him off from President Coolidge (who was looking down urgently at the pressmen as if to stun them into deafness). They might well cut him off from his fellowship because the state legislature was not going to like this one little bit. But there was another fellowship that they didn’t cut him off from, the right-minded fellowship, the warmth and the goodness, of Froelich himself. Here was the lesson given.

As the audience, or what was left of them after the walkout, applauded politely, Froelich got up from his seat and caught up with the man from the Dimity Gazette, who was making for the exit door to reach the telephone.

‘The most remarkable speech I ever heard on this campus,’ said Froelich confidently.

‘Well, I don’t know, but it’s coast-to-coast stuff if you ask me,’ said Froelich. This work done, he followed the man out of the exit doors and found his way back through Fogle into the wings. Walker and President Coolidge stood nodding at each other in the semi-darkness of the wings; ropes hung around them, and Walker was clutching his blue file under his arm.

‘Yes, well, now, Walk, that was very interesting,’ President Coolidge was saying, ‘but I think it was probably a betrayal of hospitality. That’s dangerous ground you were treading through, there, Walk. I was sweating inside my shorts, I don’t mind telling you.’

‘Yes, well, I’m not blaming you, Walk, because I don’t think you saw what was coming, but I think we’re going to have to do some real talking to the regents to make them like this if it slaps the front pages tomorrow. Maybe we can get you on television to disclaim it; there’s ways round, we’re not beaten yet. But I don’t know, I’ll tell you. I’ve seen men put back in the breadline for this kind of thing.’

‘Well, that loyalty oath’s a real bone of contention in this section of the country. I’ll tell you, Walk, in the days when it was a really live issue we ran this one up the flagpole and shot at it from all directions, and I mean it, it was a real bomb from start to finish. The previous president got the golden handshake over it.’

‘Oh, it was a bomb, Walk. This is why I came to this campus. I came here determined to reconcile all the factions. The faculty were all resigning because the loyalty oath existed or else because it wasn’t tough enough. I did a real Potsdam agreement with it. I got all the reds on campus, and I got all the rightists on campus, and I put them round a table, and I said, “Boys, we can blow ourselves to pieces over this one, or we can stay quiet and play it by ear and wait until the shouting’s all through.” I prognosticated what would happen. I told those men, I said, “Look, friends, this is the poop. Two years ago everyone was worrying about fluoridating the water. Two years from now they’ll be worrying about cancer-causing deodorants or civil rights. This is a phase and we’re going to weather this phase and I’m going to tell you here and now how to weather this phase.” And by God, Walk, we weathered it.’

In the darkness Froelich trod on something, perhaps a discarded pretzel, and Coolidge said, ‘Hey, there’s someone back there. Who’s that?’

‘Oh, hello,’ said Coolidge, the look of despair on his face wiped off as rapidly as a smear in a television commercial, ‘I remember the face but the name’s slipped. I’m Coolidge.’

‘You know, Walk,’ said Coolidge, thoroughly his old disconcerted self, ‘I hate to forget a name. We’ve got a big faculty here, but I try to remember all my men. You were out there, Dr Froelich? How do you think they all took it?’

‘I thought very well,’ said Froelich, ‘except for the people who walked out. They didn’t like it, but we don’t worry about them, do we?’

‘Well, you know, Dr Froelich, I think we do,’ said Coolidge. ‘We mind what everybody thinks. We have civic responsibilities in this U, and we got to be responsible to those responsibilities.’

There was then the sound of someone bumbling through ropes and over the scattered props in the semi-darkness, and the big bulk of Harris Bourbon appeared. Worry was designed across his features. ‘How’d it all go, Har?’ asked Coolidge.

‘Well,’ said Bourbon, taking out his pipe and playing with the threads of tobacco that overhung its bowl, ‘it was a nice talk, but the citizens didn’t understand.’

‘Goddam that, I ought to have acted,’ said Coolidge, ‘but I’ll act now. I’ll call up some editors I know. We’ll have our rebuttal out before they have their story. Don’t worry, Walk, we’ll get this straight if I can.’

Walker stood and looked confused; his moral growth was evidently not yet complete. Froelich felt for a moment that he ought to trip Coolidge or grab his coat, anything to delay the man on his mission of concealment, but he was gone. ‘I felt I could have done so much better,’ said Walker to them both.

‘Waal, Mis’ Walker, all I kin say is thank goodness you didn’t,’ said Bourbon.

‘Waal, maybe you don’t, Mis’ Walker, but this isn’t just a university matter, you know. You’re moving in the realms of state and national policy when you touch this loyalty oath business on a public occasion. It’s one thing to raise it in the department meetin’s or in the U, and another to raise it here.’

‘You didn’t,’ said Froelich, ‘but maybe the world will make it into something.’

‘Waal, I guess there’s nothin’ we kin do ’cept go home,’ said Bourbon. ‘Can I give you a ride back, Mis’ Walker?’

‘It was very good,’ said Bourbon. ‘Nice talk. Just that the folks didn’t really get the level you was talkin’ at.’

The following morning, Froelich was out on the porch, in his Black Watch tartan dressing gown, almost as soon as the delivery boy had hurled the packed-up copy of the Dimity Gazette from his motor scooter in the general direction of the house. He retrieved it from the branches of the pine tree into which it had lodged and took it indoors. On the front page was a photograph of an old lady who was hitting a middle-aged man, with some energy, with her purse; inset was a photograph of Walker speaking on the podium, his hair ruffled, his paunch looking particularly vast. British Author Lashes Loyalty Oath, said the headline; and the story began: ‘In front of a protesting audience and a red-faced president in BAU’s Fogle Auditorium last night, British angry-young-man author James Walker angrily lashed his hosts for asking him to sign the obligatory state loyalty oath . . .’ Froelich began cracking open his breakfast eggs with some glee.

‘It looks like your friend James Walker’s in a mite of trouble,’ he shouted to Patrice, who still lay in bed clad in the lower half of a pair of pyjamas and reading Moby Dick.

‘I guess we all know who got him into it,’ said Patrice. Froelich finished breakfast and drove down to the English Building in his car, which had been returned to him from the repair shop just two days before. When he reached the door of his office he found waiting outside it a very large student with a crew-cut, his long arms holding his notebook neatly lodged in front of his crotch. His name was Jabolonski and he was present at BAU largely because the football coach had been drawing heavily on the college patriotism of his tutors; Jabolonski, academically a cretin, was one of their best players. Walker, who had been taking him for composition, had had several difficulties with him, the chief one being that he had taken it into his head that the course consisted of one class only, the first.

‘Duh,’ said Jabolonski, ‘I was lookin’ for my teacher, this man Walker. The president of the fraternity I’m pledging said I gotta withdraw from his course.’

‘Oh, duh, I dunno, he says we all got to withdraw ’cause of sumpn he said. I dunno, I’m all confused, shoot, what’s it all about, why are we here, what have I gotta take these courses for anyways?’

‘What time if I come back later will you be expectin’ him to come in?’ asked Jabolonski.

‘Well, duh, okay, I’ll come back when he’s in and see if he is,’ said Jabolonski.

Froelich went inside and sat down at his desk, awaiting the moment of Walker’s arrival. A few minutes later the door opened, but it was Luther Stewart and William Van Hart; they had a cabin in the canyon and rode in on motorcycles, together.

‘No,’ said Stewart. ‘Maybe he’s been kidnapped by the Party Friendly Mortuary.’

‘Okay, the sharp-edged mind of Froelich says what did he say, but I’m a Chicago Aristotelian and I say how did he say it?’ said William Van Hart.

There was a knock on the door. ‘Come in,’ said Froelich. The door opened and one of Froelich’s freshman students, a tall, confident, handsome girl with ringlets falling down to her shoulders, and named Willa Anne Papp, came in. ‘Can I see you for a moment, Dr Froelich?’ she said.

Miss Papp sat down and said, ‘You’ve got a big problem here, Mr Froelich. It’s me.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Froelich, ‘and what’s your trouble? Pains in the abdomen? Titillation of the middle ear?’

‘No, it’s about these grades I been getting. You keep giving me Fs and I know I’m more capable.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Papp, handing over a theme paper on Shakespeare and the Sonnet, which began: ‘Petrarch had one foot in the Middle Ages while with the other he became the father of the Renaissance,’ and which had been heavily marked by him in red pencil. Miss Papp leaned her ringlets close to him and said, ‘I don’t understand why you marked this bit here.’

‘Well, let’s take a look and see,’ said Froelich. ‘You say, “This poem is almost, but not quite, unique,” and I recommended you to turn up a page in the Handbook for Writers. That’s what HW means. Did you turn up the page?’

‘I didn’t know what HW meant,’ said Miss Papp. ‘I think you ought to tell us those things.’

‘Well, if you turn up the page in Handbook you’ll find it says you can’t have comparatives of “unique”.’

‘How about if I call you sometime, Miss Papp, and we talk about those grades some more.’

Miss Papp rose, and Froelich noticed that Walker had come in. ‘Oh, hello, James,’ he said, ‘how’s things?’

‘Hellish,’ said Walker, sitting down, ‘I’ve been getting phone calls.’

‘Yes. There’s a woman who keeps calling me and thinking of new four-letter words.’

‘She’ll soon run out of permutations,’ said Froelich. ‘Take it easy. Any favourable calls?’

‘One or two college kids called to say it was the best speech they’d ever heard.’

‘I liked it,’ said Miss Papp. ‘I thought it was almost but not quite sensational.’

‘Well, that’s Mr Walker,’ said Froelich. ‘He has one head cocked in the general direction of the nineteenth century while with the other becoming the father of the modern world of today.’

‘Well, I just want you to know that a lot of the kids liked it,’ said Miss Papp. ‘’Bye now.’

When Miss Papp had gone, Walker looked at his shoes and said, ‘I wonder whether I ought to issue some kind of modification, saying that it was a general point and not a specific attack on the university.’

‘No,’ said Froelich. ‘You’ve done your bit, as they say. Oh, I forgot to tell you. Mr Jabolonski was looking for you.’

‘I told him. And yeah, there was something else – his fraternity president has put him up to withdrawing from your class in protest.’

Just before Walker set off across campus to meet his composition group, Bourbon came in. He stood haltingly in the doorway and warned Walker to beware of trouble; two of the students in the course had come to him to ask for Walker to be fired, on two grounds: because he was a fellow traveller, and because nobody could understand his accent anyway. ‘He doesn’t even talk the English language properly,’ one of the students had said. Three other freshmen, all pledging the same fraternity, had come in to ask to be assigned to a different instructor. He gave their names; one of them was Jabolonski.

‘They want to be absent from the classes of a different instructor in future,’ said Luther Stewart.

‘Waal, Mis’ Walker,’ said Bourbon, looking at his booted feet, ‘I felt I had to accede to their wishes, particularly as one or two sections is running a bit lightweight. But it don’t mean anything.’

Walker said nothing, but put on his belted raincoat and set off for his trek across campus. Froelich, whose composition class was in a closer building, was back in his room to see Walker’s reappearance. He was evidently in a mood of increased dejection. It emerged that one of the students had asked him if England was a communist country, and when he turned round to write on the blackboard, halfway through the class, he had found that someone had chalked on it, ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you came from?’ Walker had marked the grammar of this, finally giving it an F for the repeated preposition, but his heart had not been in it.

‘One of the great mottoes of American democracy, and you give it an F,’ said Luther Stewart.

Walker, swirling his chair round on its centre stalk, said, ‘How will I know when something means something? When I get hit on the head with a stick?’

‘Look, I think the best thing for your comfort and protection would be if you came over and stayed at my place a few days. No one need know where you are. You can just hole up until this thing works itself out. It’s just starting, now. Soon it’s really going to move.’

There was yet another knock on the door, and Froelich went to open it. In the corridor stood two male campus nonconformists, both wearing sunglasses, beards, and sweaters and Levi’s. ‘We’re looking for Mr Walker,’ they said, ‘is he around?’

‘Come on in, then,’ said Froelich, ‘there he is.’ The two men went and stood before Walker, whose head was drooping further, and he gave each of them a limp hand to shake.

‘Hi, James, real glad to know you,’ said one of them. ‘We just wanted to apologize for this sick society we have here, and thank you, for, you know, being a saint.’

‘That’s right,’ said the other. ‘There’s a party tonight we’d like you to come to. A real scene. There’ll be a like turned on crowd there, and they’re all wanting to meet you. A whole lot of girls, real sweet chicks. And we’ll be smoking, too.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said Walker, ‘but I don’t feel up to a party at the moment.’

Froelich felt a sincere desire to jolly Walker back into emotional health. ‘You should have gone there, man,’ he said. ‘I tell you, all the real people round this place are looking for victims like you. You don’t come so easy; you fill a real need. You stand for truth suffering against ignorance for a whole bunch of folk on this campus.’

‘Yes, you’re a hero, I mean it. Why, there are whole crowds of nice girls, like my sexy Miss Papp, you know, who are really breathing hard to lay someone who’s been wronged. They’ve been going around for years looking for a sufferer like you, a man misused by society. All you have to do now is to take it while it’s going. What a feeling, hey, Jay? What a feeling!’

Even the pleasures of being a victim seemed to be lost on Walker, however; his face made no move, no spark came to his eye.

‘That’s a very exclusive circle those kids were breaking by letting you in,’ said Froelich. ‘You ought to feel honoured.’

‘Well, look, why don’t we go by International House and pick up your things and take you back home? You could rest up this afternoon.’

‘Well, thank you,’ said Walker. ‘That’s probably a very good idea.’ He got up and they went out to the car.

As they drove, Walker sat in silence, and Froelich thought back to the day when he had picked him up at the railroad depot and had brought him into town for the first time. Then, too, Walker had been surly, as if afraid of what he might expect; it was a characteristic thing with him, evidently. The future disturbed him. He was never a man for impassioned fire, it was clear; and he didn’t know how to hold or hunt a cause when there was one going. In a sense, Froelich was disappointed; he hoped he could count on Walker more to work his way through the next few busy weeks. On the other hand, though, the ball was now in his hands, and he was a man, he knew, capable of carrying it. He knew all the next moves; and perhaps it was even better if Walker was, as he seemed to be, anaesthetized. All was going brightly.

He said, conversationally, as they drove past the hordes of students making their way to the cafeterias, ‘You know what’s going to happen next? Someone big is going to ask for you to be fired.’

‘Yes, that’s fine. That’s the trap. Then we really go into action. They really get themselves in trouble.’

‘How?’ asked Walker. ‘I should have thought I’d be the one in trouble.’

‘They get in trouble because we get all the liberal opinion in the country moving. The atmosphere’s on our side. McCarthyism is a dirty word. Fire a Britisher for saying what the writer has been saying aloud for two hundred years all over the west and you really go too far. You’ll be safe, Jay, that’s for sure. You’ll just be a big cause for a while. Joan of Arc.’

Walker glumly packed his luggage as Froelich watched. Once the phone on the wall rang. Froelich picked it up and listened. ‘Could you say those words again, madam?’ he said finally, ‘I’m doing a survey of vernacular obscenity and there’s some material there I don’t think I have on file.’ He listened a moment. ‘She hung up,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put this phone off the hook. No use waking all the foreign students in the building. I see what you mean, though, Jay; that was real fierce.’

‘Oh, people live naked in this country. If you get steamed up you let everyone know. She seems to think that you’ve got at her family, and her womanhood, and her Americanness; they’re all bound up. It’s fear of the future.’

‘Okay, well, stay off the phone, then. This all?’ They took the bags down and drove through Party to Froelich’s house. ‘Watch the sprinklers, Jay,’ said Froelich, as they got out of the car. Indoors, Patrice stood in the living room. ‘Hello, James,’ she said, looking pleased, and coming forward and kissing him. ‘I’m sorry I missed last night. I hear all over you were great.’

‘He wasn’t great,’ said Froelich. ‘He doesn’t even know what he said.’

‘You heard what you wanted to hear because you find him attractive. But please don’t confuse sex with standards, baby.’

‘Well, you always have been confused about that,’ said Froelich, putting down Walker’s luggage, ‘but now’s the time to mature this beautiful friendship. Jamie’s staying with us a few days.’

‘He’s been getting these obscene phone calls at International House. The town’s really out against him. And we don’t want him to be scared off and start saying the wrong thing.’

‘Well, we don’t have to worry too much about him just for a while, because now we’re concerned with something bigger, which is called politics.’

‘Oh, Jesus, Bernie,’ said Patrice, ‘be careful you don’t take this thing too far.’

‘You think I don’t know how to handle it? Look, let’s have a drink. You two sit over there and I’ll fix something. I like to hear you necking while I’m in the kitchen.’

Walker’s face seemed to clear a little at the prospect, and Froelich’s glow of joy began to return. ‘Watch him, he’s a bum,’ he heard Patrice say to Walker as he reached in the icebox for the cubes. ‘You’re both being very kind,’ Walker replied. He slid the serving-hatch open slightly, and saw that Walker and Patrice were kissing. Mutual self-congratulation! The victim and the saver of victims! The sad man who by his sadness wins all the votes for bearing the burden of the world! How we need him, and what he does for us! Froelich spied through the crack and felt an intense kind of pleasure. Here was a duet in which two spirits, one English, one American, sang in tune at last. They were Walker’s, and Froelich’s. They were united souls, of an ambience, sharing a single cause and having a taste for one woman. The comradely glow spread outwards into a sense of hope for the future. Never had Froelich felt so close to literature, to his book and the world of letters to which it contributed. And all we do now is wait, he thought, wait for the world to take up Walker and define him, wait for the sides to pick themselves, wait for causes and affections to work their way onward, wait for Walker’s role of positive genius to become historical. Who would have thought, on that day of the creative writing fellowship meeting, that those calculated words about a man Froelich didn’t even know would bring him here, sit him on this divan to kiss his wife, while around him history was being made and all America was defining attitudes towards him? Watching the kisses go on through the hatch, he felt an achieved man. Singing quietly, in his fieldhand’s voice, ‘There a man goin’ roun’ takin’ names,’ he poured a little martini, a lot of gin, into the shaker and mixed the contents slowly and deliberately, seeing no need whatever to hurry.

On the morning after his lecture Walker, waking in his room in International House, had felt as if the world had come clear to him; a gay, good glow spread through his body and told him he had done well. He recognized the feeling; it was a return to the ethical jubilation of his earlier days as student and liberal bohemian, when causes were just and righteousness was assured. The intervening years seemed to have slipped away – those years of moral flabbiness, when marriage and a sense of the sheer complexities of living had brought him into ethical confusion, had brought him to suspect that others might be right as well as he. His beliefs had slowed; the discovery that truth seemed to reside more widely than, as a young man, he had cared to think, the realization that his self-righteousness was no more than a mode of piety, and that anyone could be pious, had quietened him down over a long and fallow spell. Why then, now, had truth taken him by the scruff of the neck, shaken him hard, made him do the great good thing? He didn’t know, but the glow of honest innocence was a prized possession, the more prized because it was a renewal of something he had known before. He got out of bed in joy. Outside his window a strange foreign bird sang. It was a bright day in late fall, with a slanting sun; the land looked freshened up and sparky after the rain of the night before; and his spirit went gaily along with it all, in tune. He felt healthy; his pallid skin seemed to him to have browned, his unco-ordinated body to have tightened, the loose muscles in his stomach to have grown hard. The sense of personal renewal was just what he had come here for, and all these intimations were goodness.

He ought to have known that it couldn’t last, that it never lasted. A moment later the phone rang, and he was in a world of recriminations. Ethical joy was never pure; he had not pleased everyone by pleasing himself. The moral fog came down again; the rocket went up; Froelich hove alongside. Into Froelich’s car his luggage went, and, sulky and shocked again, with the world whirling by out of control, he let himself be led forward. From that point onward, the confusion worsened. The strange marriage of causes that linked him with Bernard Froelich was just like the marriage with Elaine; here, too, were ties that he didn’t remember knitting, but were evidently felt from the other end; here, too, was the sense he was committed to something of which he wasn’t the single master. And the end in view was much less clear, the implications of the relationship much more perplexing. He slept uneasily on the Froelich divan, wondering why he had been chosen. And if Froelich beckoned onward, intellectually and morally, then Patrice beckoned in other ways. Walker, wanting to understand and to be understood, knew of only one real place to go for that; it was a female place, and he felt that that, too, was waiting, was almost part of the bargain. Why? Froelich’s bland tolerance, and his very insistence that Walker and Patrice be affectionate, Walker thought he understood. After all, he had been a bohemian himself; he still was confused in that general area, and Froelich, he knew, was a man beyond outmoded ethicalities, a bohemian and a playboy himself. Everyone knew, including presumably Patrice, that he dated his students and took them for meals at Lucky’s Place; after that his car could be seen phutt-phutting painfully out of town, bearing its burden of two, leaving behind a student moral debate about whether it was right to hope, by advances in the world of affection, to gain elevation in the world of grades also.

And so Walker, who was only a provincial bohemian, and knew it, found himself amiable but floundering in the world of the cosmopolitan variant. In an odd way, he yearned for the old simplicities, yearned to be back in marriage with Elaine. Those feelings, simple bourgeois matrimonial affections, returned to his mind and senses and were newly focused. He felt that it was this fear of going too far that had taken him away from Julie Snowflake, back to Miss Marrow, on the boat coming over. But here there was no Miss Marrow; and the bland little notes she sent him from time to time no longer impressed in quite the same way. She had regressed into Englishness; America, said her letters, was quaint and odd and funny. But he had gone on; had taken it to himself. Sitting at the Froelich breakfast table in the morning, while the Froelichs needled each other across the popup toaster and the eggs Hawaiian, Walker realized that Patrice mediated the relationship between him and Froelich. That was tacit all round. And Walker knew too that he was fascinated with Froelich. Froelich’s assurance, his pure sense of direction, his sheer energetic manipulation of his acquaintance, impressed Walker as he had not expected to be impressed in the States. It was a sheerly intellectual admiration, an admiration of finesse of mind and of a positive intellectual will. At first Froelich had been to him simply a bore; his moral importunities had been too pressing, too intense, too violent . . . the obsession of a biographer for his victim. Now he saw that Froelich’s role was more creative; he was a reforming spirit; intellectually dissatisfied with his subject, he was taking him onward to something better. Perhaps it was that he had already written his chapter and now had to make Walker live up to it; better to change the man than to retype fifty pages. Even if that was so, well, Walker had come all this way to be open to change. Change was his one commitment, his one demand of the world. He believed in search; he always had; if someone could lead and guide, then let him.

So the days went by and Walker waited for things to fall into shape again. And one thing you could say . . . the world now seemed interested in him. Froelich, bringing Walker’s mail home from the department, came with challenge and praise and blame from all quarters. One letter Walker particularly cherished; it said: ‘I read about what you did in the NY Times and I think it was just really great. Forget those things I said, yes? You’re a knight of infinity; you made it. Here’s a kiss I had around someplace. Julie.’ On the third day of his stay at the Froelichs’, the Party Bugle appeared, bearing a hostile account of Walker’s lecture (Walker Offends Laws of Hospitality) and a versified advertisement which read:

We gave foreign aid

See how it’s repaid

So why do we listen?

Walker . . . go back to Britain.

But loyal Americans will want the aid of Party’s Friendly Mortuary, for a friendly all-in interment at a difficult time.

‘You’re being talked about everywhere,’ said Bob Naughty, coming round with Eudora that night. He sat on the divan and took his shoes off.

‘Don’t flatter him,’ said Froelich. ‘We have to keep him under sedation, or he gets egotistical. He thinks all this brouhaha is about him.’

‘We really came round to talk to you about Eudora,’ said Bob Naughty. ‘She’s been unfaithful to me and I want your advice, Bernie.’

‘The point is,’ said Eudora, ‘he thinks it’s a violation of our marriage because it was someone he didn’t like.’

‘A used-car salesman, for Christ’s sake,’ said Bob Naughty. ‘He probably rides with the Klan. Hell, I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.’

‘He’s a really nice kid,’ said Eudora. ‘He’s all snarled up about the ethics of his profession. I think I can bring him through into sanity.’

‘Bob, you’re projecting,’ said Eudora. ‘You’re just jealous and you’re trying to objectify it by getting at his profession. In any case, you know what your attitude is? It’s goddam prejudice in reverse. You’re discriminating against conservatives.’

When they had gone, Walker said to Patrice, ‘It sounds an interesting ethical point.’

Patrice said, ‘Well, the problem is Eudora’s a whore and they’ve tried to rationalize it. They’ll talk about it all night. Look, let’s take the car and go to Lookout Mountain. There’s a German bar up there and we can get beer. I don’t think I want to go all through this one again.’

They drove in the falling darkness across the plain, the mountains pushed up in front of them. Then the night came down and all that was left of the mountains was a sprinkle of lights and the swaying beams of car headlamps. The old car began to climb the sharp-angled bends among the pines. There was a forest smell.

‘Oh, Bernie’s interested in everybody. He’s a father figure for all the confused men on campus. Students come by all the time with their problems. He picks them out; he sees a crisis a mile ahead. Sometimes I really get tired with it all.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I mean, he does get a real fulfilment. He’s a psychopomp, that’s what he calls himself. You know that word? I think he gets it from Jung. A soul-saver, or something. A man who leads the spirit onward. I love him, he’s all very marvellous, but it wears me down too. He’s so self-centred and so . . . male-oriented, do you know what I mean? I don’t mean he’s homosexual, so much, but he gets most of his pleasure from a sort of comradely doing things for people. And often for people in the abstract. He thinks of people as a group of one.’

Patrice drove the car off the road into a viewpoint where they could look down over the plain. The lights of Party shone in the distance, on the flat; then, in clusters, were the lights of other towns nearer, in parallel, beyond the one place he knew. It reminded him of the bigness of America and the number of its communities, a thing that, in Party, it had been easy to forget.

‘That’s what they crossed to get here,’ said Patrice. ‘That’s why it’s a special country.’

‘You know, Jamie, you don’t have to go where Bernie goes. Because if he thinks you will, he’ll take you.’

‘You know what would be clever? For us not to make love now, because that’s what he wants.’

‘That’s hard,’ said Walker. Patrice looked outward and said, ‘I know. I’d want to. But not for him.’

‘Lots of reasons. You’re a writer. And an English writer. And a man he admires and envies. It’d be better than just getting you down on paper.’

‘Well, you’re the one who would know. You’d have to judge it for yourself. Just so that you aren’t reaching out for him, serving the situation he made . . .’ Walker sat silent. ‘Look,’ said Patrice, ‘I’ll drive into the Hofbrau parking lot and we’ll have that drink.’

‘The trouble is I don’t yet know the answer,’ said Walker. The car drove a hundred yards and pulled off the road again, beside a large, Swiss-roofed wooden lodge.

‘Look into your beer and think about it,’ said Patrice. They went inside. The Hofbrau had pine walls and elk and deer heads fixed in them over the tables. ‘Hey, it’s the fireman’s dance,’ said Patrice. ‘They’re buying a firetruck and this is for funds.’ A small band was playing folk-music and there were dancers in the middle of the floor. ‘Can you dance country-style?’ asked Patrice.

‘Just look at these heads on the wall,’ said Patrice, ‘and beware. Don’t be one, right?’ The dancers, local people, were whooping and sweating. Walker paid the admission and they went on to the floor.

‘Always did,’ said Walker. In a few moments the dance had exhausted him, and they went and sat down. A waiter in a white apron came by and they ordered drinks.

‘Well, she’s a sort of big girl. She dominates me and until just recently I liked it. Then . . . well, as Hemingway might say, I didn’t like her any more. Except that’s not true. I liked her, I loved her, but I wanted to get free of all that. She doesn’t understand what I mean, so I’m having trouble convincing her that we ought to get divorced. We keep exchanging letters. I say “freedom” and she says “home, wife, child”. I don’t know who’ll win. I suppose it depends if I decide to stay here.’

‘Well, Bernie thought of that, but he didn’t think it would get that big. He doesn’t want it to get big. Just big enough to clear a space for a bit more academic freedom. It’s like you. When the world says “oath” Bernie has to say “freedom”.’

‘Oh, not what it means for Bernard. Just really being among this air and in these mountains and having time to think and nothing insisting that it be thought about.’

‘A pioneer with loyalty oath problems. I suppose that was my mistake. I came to be detached and I’m far from that now. Even with you.’

‘I see,’ said Patrice, looking into her glass. ‘What’s that mean? That you don’t feel free of him down there?’

‘That I don’t feel free of anything down there. It’s not just Bernie. It’s just this thing of being staked around, fenced in, so that I don’t see any pure pleasures. The world breaks in every time. I’d like to think that the pure affections were the answer. But what kind of answer is that? I don’t have any means of wiping the slate clean. Which is what we’re both asking, isn’t it?’

‘Ah, yes, I would too. Personal relations, as they used to say. But what’s personal about relations? It always seems to end up as the cohabitation of losers. Two victims sharing groins.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s a beautiful remark in its way,’ said Patrice. ‘How about a more modest association of those parts, then? What I mean is, let’s dance.’

‘The simple life,’ said Patrice. ‘I suppose those pioneers did this all the time. I know we all like to think so. Half the faculty have cabins up here to hunt for that old innocence. Think they find it?’

‘Maybe that’s your trouble. You just don’t believe in innocence. You carry complexity around like a stone round your neck. Nothing is allowed to be easy.’

‘Is it for anybody? Admitting that I’m particularly graceless in this respect.’

‘Hell, you’re graceless. I’ll never forget you walking away from that cop. I thought you’d break up into sections. And that’s what Bob Naughty said about you at the lecture. “I thought his head was going to come away from his body and they’d start an argument.” That’s what he said.’

Outside, when they went to the car, it was cool. A mountain torrent roared down beside the inn. ‘Like an ad for menthol cigarettes,’ said Patrice. They got in the car, looked at one another, and pushed their faces against each other to kiss. ‘Oh, nice,’ said Patrice, turning the ignition. She put the car into gear and they moved jerkily back. ‘You know what?’ said Patrice. ‘I’ve got a flat. We have to change the tyre.’ They got out again. ‘Can you do it?’ said Patrice.

‘Well, get the tools out of the trunk and let’s look. First you have to pry off the hub-cap.’ Walker did that all right, but when it came to turning the nuts he couldn’t manage.

‘Jesus,’ said Patrice, ‘you nearly killed me. Look, you just go and stand over there and look at the scenery. I’ll fix this.’

‘I know I’ll get dirty, Jamie, but I want to do this by myself, okay?’ Walker went and stood looking dejectedly at the stream, seeing, not feeling, how beautiful it was, his genial spirits failing.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Walker, ‘I’ve never had anything to do with cars.’

‘Primitive man,’ said Patrice. ‘Oh, you were some help. How does your tribe survive?’

‘God, I need a shower,’ said Patrice, driving fast but competently down the mountain road. On the flat country, she said, ‘Look back, see if you can see where they were.’

Patrice reached over and ruffled his hair. ‘You really muddle your way through, don’t you?’ she said. ‘That’s what they always said to you in England: “Oh, you know, we muddled through.” They should tattoo that on your chest.’

When they reached the house, there was no one home. ‘Heigh-ho, nobody home. Meat and drink and money I have none . . .’ sang Patrice, and then said, ‘Fix yourself a drink. I’m going to take that shower.’ Walker fixed his drink by pouring some whisky into a glass. The shower stopped, and a minute later Patrice came out in Froelich’s Black Watch dressing gown. ‘Still no one here? I guess they went out driving in Bob’s car. It’s too cute not to be a plan.’

‘I guess so, yes,’ said Patrice, a bit unsteadily. ‘So. It’s what they call a moment of truth, in the business.’

‘Yes,’ said Patrice. ‘You know, I wish you didn’t annoy me so much. I was really mad at you about that flat. And now I want to straighten the balance. It always happens that way in the States. Whenever you see two Americans having a quarrel, you know they’re getting all set to go to bed with one another. It’s what Bernie calls Verbal Fornication. It’s a relationship. Hostility is so much more friendly than total indifference. I guess we always explore our emotions first so that we can feel justified we aren’t being casual. Do you think we’re casual?’

‘Well, one of the things I notice about this country is that everything seems to be conducted in a perfumed haze of sexuality. You’re so much more aware of that emotion, that pull. Any American conversation seems to be about ten feet nearer the bed than any English one.’

‘I guess that’s true, in my experience,’ said Patrice. ‘And why? Why do we believe in it so much?’

‘It’s one of the things that are left. After all, with sex you really do get close to people, and people count, don’t they? It, well, extends the logic of conversation.’

‘Yes,’ said Patrice, running her hand through her hair. ‘Well, tell me, Jamie, are we going to extend our logic or not.’

With the kind of accidental subtlety that pursued all these encounters for Walker, the telephone rang. Patrice picked it up and listened. ‘That was Bernie,’ she said. ‘He’s spending the night at the Naughtys’. He’s had too much to drink.’

‘I thought it was something else, I thought he’d be coming home,’ said Walker.

‘Okay,’ said Patrice, ‘there’s your bed and through here’s mine. I’ll leave the door open if you want to tell me anything.’ She went into the bedroom.

Walker breathed hard and thought, thought of Miss Marrow on the ship, and about the style of his reluctance, and about his taste for the moral act, the act that asserted freedom from chance and irrationality and history. Then he went over and tapped on the door-frame of the bedroom. ‘Yes, I do have something to tell you,’ he said.

‘Well, I’d like to stay here with you,’ said Walker. He went unsteadily across the room to where she stood by the mirror; she turned to him and he kissed her. He felt down with his hand for the knot of the dressing gown and undid it; then felt beyond for the warmth inside. ‘Oh, God, Jamie,’ said Patrice. ‘But I’ll tell you, you’re being a fool.’

At the bed she said, ‘Move Bernie’s pyjamas. He’s probably hiding in them.’

At about three in the morning, Walker heard a noise. He gently moved from under Patrice’s arm, which was across him, and tiptoed out into the living room. On the divan made up for Walker lay Bernard Froelich, breathing hard, his clothes tousled. His head turned and he seemed to look at Walker. ‘Hi hi,’ he murmured in a thick voice, but when Walker looked closer he saw he was fast asleep.

On the following Tuesday, Walker drove into the university with Froelich to meet his classes. On campus, many of the trees were now bare, the campanile stood out stark, and the convertibles now had their roofs up. ‘Only two weeks now to the Christmas vacation,’ said Froelich. ‘If anything’s going to happen, it’ll have to happen soon.’

When Walker went into the English Office to get his mail, the secretary looked up and said: ‘Dr Bourbon wants to see you, James. Will you go in?’

Walker knocked on Bourbon’s door. ‘Come right on in,’ cried Bourbon. He was sitting behind his desk, smoking his pipe, and when he saw Walker he let his body slide down in his chair behind his papers. ‘Ah, Mis’ Walker, mind if we have a little talk?’ he cried.

‘Waal now, I just wanted to keep you pooped on the situation caused by your furore. There’s a few things bin happenin’. One of them is that the state legislature has sent President Coolidge a memo saying that he should either require you to sign the oath or fire you.’

‘So President Coolidge sent back a memo saying that if you don’t sign he’ll refuse to renew your contract at the end of this year, that’s this academic year.’

‘Well, that’s President Coolidge; he out-thinks people every time. So, we don’t know what’s goin’ to happen about that, but I’ll let you know what happens when it happens. Okay, well, the other thing is that the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors, that’s a kind of, you know, union, is discussin’ the matter noontime Friday in the Faculty Club. Figured you might want to be there. Are you a member? No? Waal, you have any friend you could send along?’

‘Waal, it’s a sticky wicket, Mis’ Walker, and you know I wish it hadn’t never happened. But looks like the U’s tryin’ to look after you, and I hope you’re feelin’ mighty grateful. But this could get worse. We’re under fire from without and within. Without means the press, the townspeople, the state legislature. Within, waal, that’s all these here students who have protested to me, and some of the faculty. Number of the faculty have protested to the President ’bout your indiscretion.’

‘Well, frankly, that didn’t surprise me none. Jochum is an old campaigner for loyalty. But I’ll tell you what did surprise me, and I guess you ought to know this. Pee-tition came round this department yesterday and I did hear, didn’t come to me a-tall but I did hear, that it was taken round by Mr Van Hart.’

‘That’s right. Waal, Mis’ Walker, I’m independent in all this, and I’m in a mighty difficult position, appointin’ you and lettin’ you not sign and all. But what all this means is that you’re in a mighty difficult position too. Pressure comes on too hard I may have to fire you, and that’s the truth, Mis’ Walker. We don’t fire easy here, but you don’t have tenure with us. I think we’re goin’ to be able to keep you for the rest of the year, and I don’t mind sayin’ I’ll support that. Spite of the trouble we’ve always had with writers. The U hasn’t forgotten Elvis Flea.’

‘That was the Creative Writin’ Fellow two years back. Said he was a poet. His trouble was seducin’. Story is he humped the faculty wives in alphabetical order. They got him in jail somewhere west of here, didn’t surprise no one. There’s a lot of people on this campus don’t ever want to see a writer here again. So . . . go careful, Mis’ Walker.’

Walker was so confused about these things as he went back to his office that he bumped hard into the water cooler and sent the paper-cups flying. ‘Go careful!’ The only person in the room was Froelich, making up a list of grades.

‘It’s not good for you to know everything,’ said Froelich. ‘You might get scared.’

‘Which you can’t go to anyway. And even if you could I wouldn’t want you there, boy.’

‘Harris said it was Bill Van Hart who brought the petition round the department.’

‘I can’t answer,’ said Froelich, scrawling F on a theme. ‘I plead the Fifth Amendment.’

Walker picked up his teaching plan and the Freshman Reader and set out across campus, into the cold air. An aroma of treachery seemed to fill the world in which he had been moving so unsuspectingly. Even the trees and the paths seemed no longer reliable, and the faces of the students he passed seemed very foreign indeed. Though he was unsure of his alliances and his connections, and hadn’t thought about them very much, missing all that sensitivity to the political which those trained in institutions possess, Walker had felt that there were certain stabilities – human ones: that Jochum was his friend, that Froelich was, that the teaching staff of the department was on the whole behind him. He knew now that his appointment had been disputed; but he assumed that the human appeal of his existence had put an end to that. And he also assumed that the human took precedence over the political; this he took to be an essential rule of life. But now the wind seemed overnight to have overturned all these connections and assumptions. The sensation of being a foreigner and of having done things a foreigner shouldn’t do affected him deeply, because the easiness of American life had brought him to feel that foreignness wasn’t an issue. So he stood at his desk and looked at his students, wondering what he should teach them, perplexed by the cast of their minds. For some reason Jabolonski was back. ‘I thought you transferred to another instructor,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well, I did, but it all seemed kind of crazy to me, so, well, shoot, I come back to you.’

One of the girls, with long fair hair and white bobby-socks, a Scandinavian type, said, ‘Are you really a red, Mr Walker?’

‘No,’ said Walker. ‘Did you read the assignment?’ The assignment was Swift’s Modest Proposal, one of the few works of any pretension in the Freshman Reader. ‘What did you think of it?’

‘I disagreed with it,’ said the Scandinavian girl. ‘I don’t think even under any circumstances people should eat children. I mean, I guess there’s another point of view, but I don’t think I’d agree with it.’

‘That’s a very humane view, Miss Lindstrom,’ said Walker, ‘but why don’t you think people should eat children?’

Miss Lindstrom looked at Walker with bright blue eyes. ‘Are you really in favour of eating children, Mr Walker? Are you really?’

‘Well, I guess he must have been,’ said Miss Lindstrom. ‘He wouldn’t have said he was if he wasn’t, would he?’

‘What about that?’ Walker looked round the class. He began to feel a little uneasy, for a number of the class looked distinctly hostile; he was now bearing not only his burden, but Swift’s as well. His gaze went round the room and he noticed, huddled in the back row, holding a large cleaner’s bag, a large man wearing a raincoat and a trilby hat. The hat didn’t entirely conceal the red hair of Hamish Wagner. Walker knew that one of Wagner’s tasks was to sit in on the composition classes and check on the competence of the teachers. The graduate students were the usually selected victims, and they had interesting stories of the considerable lengths to which Wagner went in concealment, donning janitor’s coveralls, appearing in Bermuda shorts and a freshman’s beanie, and the like. What disturbed Walker was that it should be this class, and this particular time, that Wagner should have picked on him; in any case, he had the impression that it was only the graduate students who were supposed to be checked on in this way. Walker dropped his gaze and noticed that, at the front of the classroom, Jabolonski was sitting straining, with outstretched hand. At Walker’s glance he said, ‘I think the guy was kidding.’

Miss Lindstrom looked at Mr Jabolonski. ‘Why would he be kidding?’ she asked. ‘What would he kid about a thing like that for?’

‘Well, duh, I dunno, but maybe he was tryin’ to get sumpn done about all dat famine and all.’

Mr Jabolonski ducked his head and scratched it with a large hand; after a moment he said, ‘Duh, I dunno, lyin’?’

‘It’s irony,’ said Miss Hackle, an independent and bright girl in a dirndl. ‘It’s an oblique procedure which suggests the opposite of what’s said.’

‘In this case, yes,’ said Walker, feeling more at ease now. ‘And why would he want to use it, do you think, Miss Hackle?’

‘Well, to shock people into what Mr Jabolonski over there said just now,’ said Miss Hackle.

Miss Lindstrom shook her head in confusion. ‘You mean he didn’t want people to eat children at all?’ Students all around her began saying ‘Yes’ and ‘That’s right’ and her face grew flushed. ‘Well, I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘Supposing someone had taken him seriously and they had. He’d be responsible, then, wouldn’t he? Anyway, I don’t understand why these writers have to be so smart. Why can’t they say what they think right out, ’stead of going around confusing people?’

Miss Hackle said, ‘I guess he thought nobody would do it. I guess he thought people couldn’t do anything so terrible.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Walker. ‘He didn’t think so very much of human nature.’

‘You see,’ said Miss Lindstrom, ‘I guess he did mean it. And I think it’s terrible, Mr Walker, I really do.’ At this a gallant, anarchistic student who wore a Mohican haircut, his head scraped bare except for a thin band of hair across his skull, and who had in previous classes expressed a high regard for Walker, was roused to sudden protest.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘we ought to look at this one again. Maybe there is a real case for cannibalism, but we haven’t thought it through properly yet. I mean, a lot of races have practised this thing; are we right to condemn it unheard?’

‘That’s because you’re prejudiced against it from the start,’ said the student with the Mohican haircut.

Walker flushed red and looked uneasily at Hamish Wagner, but he had gone right out of sight behind his dry-cleaner’s bag. ‘Swift wasn’t in favour of cannibalism,’ he said. ‘He took up a complex intellectual position which I’m now going to explain to you.’ He talked for a while and when he had finished he saw Mr Jabolonski’s hand waving in the air. Mr Jabolonski’s question was why literary guys had to be so confusing. ‘Why do they have to make everything so difficult? Why don’t they just accept things the way they are?’

‘What was it John Stuart Mill said?’ asked Walker: ‘ “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” ’

‘Well, I can’t stand these guys who question everything,’ said Mr Jabolonski.

‘That’s right,’ said Jabolonski. ‘I’d be crazy if I didn’t. I didn’t come to university to improve my mind, Mr Walker. I come here to, duh, train me for a job. That’s what you guys don’t realize. You’re always wantin’ to change my values. You want us to think like you do, irony and all that crap. And what happens? You just get yourselves into trouble is what happens.’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Lindstrom. ‘And I don’t think it’s right for you to call people who don’t agree with you pigs.’

‘I didn’t mean . . .’ said Walker. But Miss Hackle and the student with the Mohican haircut were deeply roused.

‘He’s right,’ said Miss Hackle. ‘People who refuse to think about themselves are just animals.’ The class dissolved into bedlam. When the bell trilled on the hour, students went out of the classroom raging at one another, and Walker tucked his books under his arm in exhaustion and embarrassment. Hamish Wagner had contrived to leave the room in the middle of a press of disputants, and he foresaw his report: subversive teaching, abuse of the students, expression of an untenable opinion. He hurried out of the building and noticed Wagner striding along the path ahead of him, his cleaner’s bag over his shoulder, on his way back to the English Building. Worry made him chase after him. ‘Hello, Hamish,’ he called.

‘I saw you in class,’ said Walker, ‘I’m afraid it was a bit confused. I think probably they’re a little upset because of the fuss about my lecture.’

‘Yeah, well, I thought it was a nice class,’ said Hamish. ‘I have a few criticisms. Maybe you don’t want to hear them, but I have been teaching a good few years now, and with increasing experience and study has come wisdom . . .’

‘Well, good, that’s how it should be,’ said Hamish. ‘No, I thought there were some weaknesses in presentation. I’d mark you high for teaching content, but I’d put you low on a few other things. Like standing and sitting. I like to see a teacher who moves around a lot, keeps the class interested. You sat on the corner of the desk without moving except to go to the blackboard once and write down sustenance. And that’s another thing, blackboard use. I like to see a full use of visual aids in a class: blackboard, mimeographed materials, use of opaque projector. You know, those secretaries in the office will mimeograph any teaching aids you want any time you want them. You just have to give reasonable notice.’

‘Of course you were right,’ said Hamish. ‘They are pigs. In the sense defined in that passage.’

‘Oh, not all of them,’ said Walker. ‘Some of them understand what it’s all about – Miss Hackle and the boy with the funny haircut.’

‘Yeah, that’s true,’ said Wagner. ‘They’re not pigs; they’re nuts. Well . . . all very interesting.’

Watching Hamish Wagner retire into his office, Walker realized that the encounter had strengthened him rather; he was capable of fighting back. And so instead of returning to the office where he belonged he went into the English Department telephone booth and made a call. ‘Is that Dr Jochum?’ he asked.

‘Who is this here, please?’ said Jochum’s voice, shouting into the telephone.

‘Ah, my friend, I have been vondering about you. But first I have a rebuke to make. I am disappointed in your lecture.’

‘Ah, I thought you were not calling just to get acquainted, as we say in America.’

‘Did I inspire that protest? Yes, but it was not a protest about your lecture. It was a protest that the President had not publicly affirmed that academic freedom and the loyalty oath are compatible.’

‘Oh, vell, it is quite simple, surely. I know you vill not agree, because you are a liberal and you do not understand conspiracy. Do you not think there is more academic freedom here than there is in Russia or Hungary or Estonia?’

‘Then what happens when, within the context of academic freedom, men use that freedom to advance the view that it is intellectually necessary to create a society in which that freedom is taken away?’

‘But in the long term truth will prevail. Is it doing? It didn’t prevail where I came from. There are no guarantees. You see, you are an optimist and live on hope. I am a pessimist and live on experience. I told you all this before. You are my friend; I am not attacking you. But I have had a harder life than yours; I learned my lesson. Now it is necessary to say what I have learned. Of course, I hope it vill cause no trouble for you . . .’

‘Vell, it is a silly business, it will soon be forgotten. Then we shall meet again, I hope.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Walker. ‘But we’ll meet. After all, that’s what academic freedom is about.’

‘Ah, vell, good fortune and a good Noel,’ said Jochum. ‘Soon the snow vill fall and you vill see another Party. It is so lovely here.’

‘I guess it’s going to snow,’ said Patrice Froelich. ‘That means a white Christmas, great. Funny how it always snows around the beginning of the Christmas vacation.’

‘Yeah, we arrange it so the students going west can get trapped in the passes,’ said Froelich. ‘It leaves us with some places vacant for next semester.’ Walker sat on the divan reading the first chapter of Cindy Handlin’s novel, The Eye of My I, which she had submitted to the graduate creative writing class: it began ‘Who is any of us?’, and Walker didn’t understand it. It was the last day of classes before the vacation began, and Walker was to return to his room in International House the following day. For over a week there had been no news of the Trouble, no reports in the press, no letters in his mail. The AAUP meeting had taken place a week ago, but about it no one, not Froelich, not Bourbon, had spoken a word. Froelich, when pressed, just said, ‘It went fine,’ and since there had been no demand that he leave, not even an insistence that he sign that cursed blank form on his desk, he had not thought about the matter again. He thought that, if asked, he was prepared to sign it; all the benefits of his stand had been reaped, none of them by him. Unless, perhaps, there was a tiny glow of pride and principle? If so, the zest of that had gone; he felt himself back where he was before, cold winter Walker, with nothing achieved to speak of except a new veneration in the creative writing class, where he was freely spoken of as a ‘genius’. It struck him as odd, yet not inconsistent, that this praise came, not because he wrote like a writer, but because he had spoken like one. And that, at least, was something achieved. if he could hold on to it. Perhaps he had grown, then, but how did he know?

Patrice went into the kitchen to make tea; they had instituted this English ceremony daily since Walker had been their guest. It never tasted quite the same, and the expatriate ritual gave more of a thrill to the Froelichs than it did to Walker, but it was a good winter institution and Walker recalled Jochum’s comments about the way it slowed the pace of life. That didn’t seem a bad thing, after the last weeks.

‘But not so much fun. I’ll give you a clue. It’s an old friend from way back.’

‘How nice,’ said Walker, and then, since he was in America, ‘How marvellous.’

‘Just fine, really fine. And can’t wait to see you. Who is this Froelich you’re staying with?’

‘I have a car. I just rattle around all over now. I’m staying at my brother’s apartment. Boy, what a creep that kid is. Still, it lets me see this town. I think I like it. It looks like fun. Is it fun?’

‘I’ll just check,’ said Walker. He put his hand over the telephone and said to the Froelichs, ‘Am I doing anything tonight?’

‘We’re all going over to Dean French’s for a buffet supper. Who is this?’

‘Julie?’ said Walker into the telephone. ‘Write down this address.’ He gave it. ‘Have you got that?’ he went on. ‘Well, can you stop by at seven and I’ll take you to a party?’

‘Great,’ said Julie, ‘I always love gate-crashing faculty parties. On seven. I’ll bring you a bouquet.’

There was something in Walker that made him want to believe that Froelich’s hints were right, that Julie Snowflake had come out here just to see him; and at seven o’clock he stood in excitement at the window, looking up and down the street. ‘Oh, just look at him,’ said Patrice. As the campanile chimed out seven, a black Volkswagen turned the corner and pulled up in front of the house. Julie got out, wearing a cashmere coat and a blue straw hat. Walker grabbed his coat and went out on the porch. ‘Hi there, Mr Walker,’ Julie called from beside the car. ‘Just walk slowly down the path. I want to check your coordination.’ Walker went slowly down the path, reached her and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Yes, I guess you’ve improved slightly. Boy, it’s cold here, let’s get in.’ They did. Julie turned the ignition. ‘You know the way to this place?’ she asked.

‘No, we have to follow the Froelichs. They’re coming right now. That’s their car.’

‘That’s a car? I thought it was an ancient monument. Well, okay, let’s hope they make it. Well, hey, Mr Walker, together again!’

‘We’ll celebrate. Reach in the glove compartment. There’s a box of panatella cigars. Have one. Light one for me too.’

‘I smoke anything,’ said Julie. ‘Hey, you were all written up in the press. It really changed my image of you. I thought it was virtually heroic, what you did. And out here too. I suppose they almost lynched you.’

‘No, but you can aspire,’ said Julie. ‘Hey, we’re here. Just look at that.’

Dean French’s house was a modern A frame, composed almost entirely of glass. There was, apparently, only one room in the house, right in the centre, into which you couldn’t directly see from outside, and this one you could watch people going into. ‘I guess that’s the can there in the middle,’ said Julie, ‘if people who live this way use anything like that.’ The downstairs rooms were full of folk, and Julie said: ‘This is quite a party. I’m going to feel a real ringer. At Hillesley the faculty parties are quite different. I went to a couple. They serve tea and then somebody plays, you know, the lute?’

‘Come on in, you two,’ said Patrice Froelich, putting her head into the car. ‘We’re abolishing small groups.’

‘I always thought Jamie liked the young ones best,’ said Patrice. Walker looked down in embarrassment and scratched his nose. ‘Come on out of there, Jamie,’ said Patrice. ‘Let’s get you where you’re safe.’ Inside, Dean French, a very big man who wore a monocle and a velvet smoking jacket, welcomed them. Dean French, a bachelor, had the reputation of setting the social pace in Party; his main role in life was introducing everyone to everyone else, and when people couldn’t recall where they had met someone before, they always said: ‘We were introduced at one of Dean French’s parties.’ He had an expensive and very public house, and even during the day, if you drove past, you could see people sitting around in the living rooms, drinking martinis, people perhaps left over from last night’s party or arrived early for that night’s.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ said Walker. ‘I’ve brought along an old friend of mine.’

‘No, I love that kind of thing,’ said Dean French, taking Julie’s hand and squeezing it. ‘And how did you get mixed up with this ivy-covered ruin from limey-land?’

‘Be careful of people you meet that way,’ said Dean French. ‘Stay here and talk to me. In any case he’s too foreign to appreciate you.’

‘Hey,’ said Julie, ‘I just love your abstract.’ A large red painting, evidently of the interior of a womb, covered one whole wall. ‘I have this great admiration for modern art, because it’s so confused. It doesn’t understand life and tells you so. I’m just like that.’

‘Let me show you around the house,’ said Dean French, ‘and then we’ll go out back and I’ll show you the pool. Did Dr Froelich tell you we were going to swim?’

‘Not tonight,’ said Dean French, ‘unless you specially want to. I’m no party-pooper. But we keep this whole range of swimwear that’ll fit any guest we have.’

Miss Snowflake twisted her body, put her head on one side, poked out her bottom, and withdrew one hand into her sleeve. ‘You got anything to fit me since my accident?’ she asked.

‘I think we’ll get by,’ said Dean French. ‘I’ll take you on the tour, honey.’

‘Let’s get some drinks,’ said Froelich, leading Walker over to the bar, which was being kept by Hamish Wagner.

‘He’s got it up tonight,’ said Froelich. ‘Give him Scotch.’ They got their drinks and strolled away.

‘Hello, sir,’ said a graduate student in the department, coming up to Walker, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you – but first I ought to say how much I enjoy your novels – are you writing about us?’

‘Well, don’t ask Mr Walker silly questions like that. He doesn’t have to answer that kind of thing.’

‘I’m looking after him, and he doesn’t. So blow. I love this man and I want to talk to him.’

‘Tell me something,’ said Froelich. ‘Right, now, what have you learned since you came here?’

‘Well, I’ve learned how to hold my trousers up without braces, and how to work a coin-operated washing machine, and . . .’

‘Well, all right, I’ve learned that, well, the things I believed in aren’t as secure as I thought. I’ve learned that literature is a bit more precarious in the future than I expected, that the new world of technology is one I don’t understand at all, that democracy is not what I thought it was, and that there’s more than one way of being a writer.’

‘Yes,’ said Froelich, ‘that’s a good answer you gave me. You’re a clever man, Jamie. So – what are you going to do?’

‘Whether you’re going to stay here or to go, whether you’re going to go back to your large domestic wife or marry that kid you brought here tonight.’

‘I haven’t thought about it, since I don’t suppose for a minute she’d want to marry me.’

‘Hi there,’ said Julie Snowflake, squeezing through the crowd, ‘I got a kind of a hint you wanted to speak to me, Dr Froelich.’

‘Right,’ said Froelich. ‘You see this man I’m talking to, this excellent man? Well, his name’s Walker and I’m his friend.’

‘So am I,’ said Julie. ‘He’s a very well-endowed guy, don’t you think?’

‘Well, I want to ask you a question about him. I want you to tell me briefly just what your sentiments are towards him.’

‘Boy,’ said Julie, ‘when you ask a question you really ask a question, don’t you?’

‘She does need to answer,’ said Froelich, ‘because I asked her a polite question and polite questions have to be answered.’

‘Well,’ said Julie, ‘if you really want to go through with this, I think he’s, like you say, an excellent man.’

‘Oh, because he’s in my term paper and because he said those things about the oath here and because he’s attractive, I don’t know.’

‘Yes, I think I do,’ said Julie. ‘But then I find a whole lot of people sexually attractive. It’s amazing. You expect there’ll be just one and then there are these dozens and dozens, just walking about.’

‘Hey, I don’t have to answer that kind of question, Dr Froelich. I make up my mind when it’s put direct to me by the man who’s proposing. I think that’s a reasonable enough approach to the problem.’

‘I could do, I guess, if all the things were right, which they aren’t. Mr Walker knows what I mean.’

‘Yes,’ said Julie. ‘I didn’t know whether he’d told you. He doesn’t tell everybody.’

‘Okay, fine, that’s all we want to know. Go back to Dean French. He’s leering at you.’

‘I don’t want her to go,’ said Walker. ‘I’ve hardly talked to her yet.’

‘She’ll come back,’ said Froelich. ‘So – what do you want to do, Jamie?’

Julie had gone back to Dean French, who put his arm round her. This reminded Walker of Dr Millingham, and the talk on the ship, and the heather Elaine had sent him, and of Elaine’s last letter in his breast pocket, telling him to remember to change his underpants.

Walker had become oriented towards Froelich’s advice, he didn’t know quite how, and he found it natural to say: ‘What am I going to do, then?’

‘Yes, because you’re afraid? And because if you stayed you’d turn into Mrs Bourbon or that madman Jochum? And because Julie is young and deluded about Englishmen and writers? And because everybody looks better when they’re away from home, and it embarrasses them?’

Walker felt uneasy about these words, for he began to suspect that Froelich was telling him he had been fired. But that seemed too simple, and he had long understood the complexity of Froelich’s motives. The most satisfactory explanation that occurred to him was that Froelich was telling him this out of concern and affection; he was trying to protect him from becoming the permanent expatriate that Walker had seen exemplified in a number of Anglo-Americans. He had suspected Walker’s feeling for Julie Snowflake and grown worried about it. If so, he had observed well. Julie’s coolness, calmness, freshness had all staked their claims in Walker. Evadne Heilman came by and handed Walker a plate of rare roast beef and salad. ‘You look ready for some food,’ she said, ‘I’m sure you’re losing weight around the middle.’

‘It’s this healthy life I lead,’ said Walker. ‘Marking fifty themes a night is real exercise.’

‘Out there?’ cried Walker. ‘It’s much too cold. The temperature’s probably below freezing. I’d drop dead.’

‘The pool heating’s been on all day,’ said Evadne. ‘Oh, we’re counting on you, buddy. For the honour of the English.’

Walker took his plate and went with it into the study. The house was packed with people, all in a state of high euphoria, and Walker had an image of Party as a vast nudist colony. In it people had no privacy and no defects were concealed. Sex and friendship hung in the cold air like summer pollen, and exposure, of self and of others, was the essential ethic of the place. The rooms were full of asserting, sensual souls. Near him a girl in a grey swimsuit was having her left buttock caressed by a man in a red blazer, a professor of French literature. ‘What an ass, baby, what an ass,’ he was saying.

‘You hate me, don’t you, doll, I can see the look in your eye,’ said a man on his other side; the woman he was with, fully dressed in a black cocktail dress with a low neckline and a neat corsage, said, ‘You’re so degenerate you ought to go right out and drown in that pool. Why don’t you? Go ahead, kid.’

‘Maybe I will,’ said the man. ‘Women always did make me self-destructive.’

Walker watched and listened and ate his beef, and presently Patrice Froelich came and sat down beside him. ‘Hi, honey,’ she said. ‘What happened to your friend?’

‘She’s with that fat-assed Dean French,’ said Patrice. ‘He’s really taken a shine to her. Still, she’s having a great time. She’s a marvellous kid.’

‘Ah, it’s that old yearning for innocence. Which we never find, remember?’

‘Well, she’s hardly innocent,’ said Walker. ‘I think it was Dr Jochum who was telling me the roles are reversed now. European innocence chases American experience.’

Walker saw this was dangerous ground, and said, ‘Well, something like that.’

‘Now what does that mean?’ said Patrice. ‘Remembering I’m just a little involved here.’

‘I mean intellectually; and in spirit. As Bernie was just telling me, I’ve learned a great deal over here.’

‘Bernie means from Bernie,’ said Patrice. ‘Still, we’re always glad to help.’ She put down her plate and said: ‘Come and take a look at the pool.’ They went through some glass doors and out on to the patio, in the middle of which was set Dean French’s enormous pool. It was a dark evening, and the only illumination came from four flambeaux, stuck into the turf, their flames burning brightly, and some pool lights which lit the green water from below; clouds of steam blew off from the pool’s surface into the darkness. ‘Feel how hot it is,’ said Patrice.

‘Wow,’ said Walker, dipping his hand into the water; it was as hot as a good bath.

‘I don’t know what he wants. I don’t think so. I think he probably wants me to go back home.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose at the end of the year. If they let me stay here.’

‘Yes,’ said Patrice. ‘I can see how going home would be the best thing, after you’ve pleased him so much. I mean, you’ll have done all you can for him then.’

‘Oh, the way things worked out last week, when he kept you quiet with me while he got the whole thing tidied up. That’s why he’s been so gay just lately.’

‘I expect he’ll tell you all about it, when he’s ready. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you now. I wonder why?’

‘I don’t know, it depends whether I can choose. In any case it’s my decision, not Bernie’s.’

‘I think it has. You know, it will be very hard to leave this place. I love it here. Just look how beautiful it is. See the mountains?’

‘Yes, it’s fine,’ said Patrice. ‘And we’d miss you, Jamie. I would. Even Bernie would. He really cares for you a lot.’

The glass door opened again; it was Julie Snowflake. ‘I’ll go inside,’ said Patrice, ‘you want to talk to her.’ Walker did.

‘Oh, I’m not the swimming type,’ said Walker. ‘In any case, I’ve just eaten.’

‘Look, Mr Walker, I thought I was teaching you poise and co-ordination. I want to see you right there in that pool, I mean that. No fooling.’

‘Right here in these cabins,’ said Julie. ‘There are suits in there. This is the men’s, right here. I’ll be next door. Let’s see who gets out there and into the water first. Okay?’

‘All right,’ said Walker, putting his drink down on the patio table. He really didn’t want to. The cold had already kept him shivering. Now he had to undress, get his hair wet, no doubt catch a cold. He was not as healthy as these citizens of an outdoor society. But he went into the men’s cabin and took off his jacket and shirt. The cold was hideous. He unbuttoned the ancient British flies on his trousers and dropped them round his feet, standing there in his underpants.

‘How are you doing?’ shouted Julie from the other side of the partition. ‘I’ve got my suit on.’ Walker took off his underpants and looked down at his shivering body, at his puny arms and graceless paunch, and hastily picked up and put on a pair of undershorts with green porpoises etched on them. ‘Come on,’ said Julie, banging on the door. Walker went outside. The winter night wind hit him hard and raised up goose-pimples. Julie, already standing by the pool in a rather slack red one-piece swimsuit, shouted, ‘Get in quick, Mr Walker, it’s cold.’ He watched as she poised her arms in the air, and then tossed her long lithe body into the water. ‘Oh, it’s great,’ she said, surfacing. ‘It’s the most splendid sensation, really.’ Walker, who couldn’t dive, hurried over to the pool and slid into it, scratching the backs of his legs on the concrete edge. The pool was painfully hot, but the bits of him sticking out of it, his head and neck and his hands, were, equally, painfully cold. His meal felt heavy in his stomach and his scratched buttocks hurt. ‘Isn’t it great?’ said Julie.

‘You don’t swim too well, do you, Mr Walker? Don’t you like getting your hair wet?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ said Walker, in cavalier fashion, though he did. Miss Snowflake’s expectations of him, always strong, seemed to have risen. His success in the American press had got him into an exciting position with her, but one that, with his pain in his legs and stomach, he doubted he could live up to. But her sweet young face, and her cool inquisitive concern, made him want to do nothing more than to try.

They swam to the deep end of the pool, Julie fast and gracefully, Walker slow and gracelessly. When they reached the end they held on to the edge and looked at each other. ‘Oh, Mr Walker, I’m very pleased to see you,’ said Julie.

‘Oh yes,’ said Julie. ‘This swimsuit’s practically falling off me and I’ve lost my tan. I’ll say I look pretty.’

‘Let it fall off,’ said Walker, breathing hard, and he pushed himself forward in the water and kissed her. This made him lose his grip on the side and he disappeared beneath the surface. When he spluttered up, Julie said, ‘I like you doing that, but I’m afraid you’ll drown. I was wondering. Have you ever made love in a swimming pool?’

‘I wonder how it is a lot of kids like doing it in showers, but I guess a swimming pool is something else again. I always think there’s something sexy about being in water, don’t you?’

‘We’d probably both drown,’ Julie went on. ‘At the height of our relationship. Might be fun.’

‘That’s right. You remember,’ said Julie. ‘Take a look at that stomach of yours. That’s not healthy fat. You should see mine.’

‘You should train,’ said Julie. Walker ran his hand up and inside the top of Julie’s swimsuit. ‘They’re too tiny,’ said Julie, ‘I wish they’d fill out more. Big but neat, that’s how I like them.’

‘Oh, that friend of yours,’ said Julie, wriggling away. ‘You know something? He may be a nice guy and all, but he’s a bully.’

‘Bernard? Yes, I suppose he is. He’s a kind man really, though. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.’

‘Okay, but he’s still a bully. He’s the kind of guy who’ll splash water on us.’

‘Look out,’ said Froelich, and he squirted a hose of cold water on them both from the other side of the pool.

‘Hey, Dr Froelich, Jesus,’ said Julie. ‘Don’t be a spoiler. Didn’t you just know he’d do that?’

‘Maybe we did,’ said Julie, ‘but not that way.’ The spray of cold water had added to Walker’s feelings of ill-health. His head was beginning to reel. ‘Hey, get us a drink,’ said Julie. ‘Bring us some martinis.’

‘He shouldn’t have asked me those questions,’ said Julie, when Froelich had gone inside.

‘Well, it’s real hard to answer when you’re put on the spot like that, but I guess I was pretty frank. Didn’t you think I played it cool?’

‘Oh, Mr Walker, you know how I tell the truth. I’m committed to truth, I told you that on the ship. It’s beautiful, you know? And I’ll tell you more truth still, Mr Walker. I came out here to see you. My brother, well, I can see him any time at home.’

‘It was seeing your picture in the paper. I was mad at you when you got off the ship. Because you didn’t tell me you were married. So I told the girl to tell you I was out when you called. I was right there by the phone.’

‘Well, that was imaginatively true, I was out as far as you were concerned. And then I started thinking a lot. I read your books again. I thought, This man is a conniver and he doesn’t know how to live even, but there’s real aspiration there. You can help him. And then you did that, came out against the oath. I admired it; I thought it was really fine. You know me, writers don’t snow me as a general rule, I’ve seen so many of them. But I did think well of that. Not just because of what you said; it’s said all the time. But because you said it, in spite of your difficulties. I knew it was hard for you. I thought it showed you’d really come on.’

‘But you did it. I once asked one of my teachers at Hillesley, this funny old lady who looked so wise, I asked: “Can you improve your character by trying?” She thought a bit and said: “No.” I didn’t want to believe her but I thought she might be right. But I understood that you don’t believe that. You gave me hope.’

Julie stretched her legs out in front of her and floated on the water. ‘Just checking I still had my suit on,’ she said. ‘You know, I was wondering. What do you plan to do over the Christmas vacation?’

‘Well, I thought I might put an invitation to you. You don’t have to accept, but it’s one of those brainstorm things that occurred to me. Why don’t you come out west with me?’

‘Yes, with me. I’m not going anywhere special, not meeting anybody. I’m just travelling around on my own really, taking in my country. And I could use a little company, especially if it’s yours, Mr Walker. To share the writer’s eye. I’m sure you could teach me what all these mountains and deserts mean, if you wanted to.’

‘Then shake,’ said Julie, ‘you’ve struck a bargain.’ Walker took one hand off the edge, slipping a little into the water, and they shook. ‘How long is your vacation?’ asked Julie.

‘Well, okay, two weeks. Good, so’s mine, only I have to get right back to the east coast. So I’ll drop you by here a couple of days before, if that sounds all right.’

‘You’re not just being polite about this? Because I didn’t know whether to make this invitation or not.’

Walker, trying hard not to think of Elaine, said: ‘I’m not being polite at all. When do you start?’

‘Here are your drinkies,’ said Froelich behind them; they took the glasses and began to drink. ‘Oh, what a sensation,’ said Julie. ‘It’s everything. What more do we want?’ At the other end a few people had come into the pool. Dean French swam toward them.

‘Okay, here goes,’ said Julie, letting go of the side and breast-stroking for the other end.

‘That’s a very fine girl,’ said Dean French, holding to the edge next to Walker. ‘Why is it that foreigners always manage to find out the best we’ve got?’

There was a shout from Julie at the far end: ‘Hey, it’s snowing,’ she cried. And it was; large soft flakes dropped silently out of the dark sky above them and melted into the water of the pool.

Dean French said, ‘That’s right, you know what we do when it snows? We get out of the hot pool and roll in the snow. Sauna. Only the flagellation is omitted. And we can lay that on too for anyone who wants it.’

‘You know, this place may not be anything very much academically, but it really does have its pleasures,’ said Dean French.

‘Yes, when it snows like this, it makes me wish I could spend my life here.’

‘I’m very glad to hear you say that,’ said Dean French. ‘Makes me glad we’re not going to fire you.’

‘Oh, you’re not?’ said Walker, deeply relieved. ‘That’s what I’ve been wanting to know.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that, maybe everyone was planning to keep you on the hook a little, but I’m too drunk to care.’

‘Well, I don’t know why I’m building you up so much, when you’re running around with the nicest girl I’ve seen in years, but okay. I’ll have to treat you to some history first.’

‘Well, it all goes back to the McCarthy period, when there were a lot of firings round here. A character called Leonov, who’s still at the U, but on leave this year, was behind that. So anyway, the local chapter of the AAUP rallied round, a bit late in the day, I have to admit, and they resolved democratically to support the principle that college teachers shouldn’t be forced to declare their political allegiance, by oath or any other means, and they shouldn’t be fired on solely political grounds. The AAUP here has taken that line ever since, and we’ve put a hell of a lot of pressure on the college admin at different times to withdraw the state oath. The last president, who was a lazy but very well-meaning guy, finally agreed to do that, but he was caught up between the faculty and the regents and the regents finally got at him and he resigned, quit.’

‘Then we got Coolidge. Of course, he tried to play it all ways but the point is he never fired anyone for disloyalty. You know that careful line he walks.’

‘So you see you came in at the end of quite a battle. Now what happened after your crazy speech, which incidentally was pretty innocuous stuff, was that the Leonov faction got moving again. Another of the émigré wing, a man called Jochum, presented a petition asking the college to affirm in favour of the oath.’

‘Oh, he’s a friend of Leonov’s, they have sad Russian pasts in common. Jochum wouldn’t hurt a fly, he’s carrying the can for Leonov. So our friend Bernie got up at the meeting and accused the petitioners of prejudicing the AAUP stand. Jochum tried to fight him, but the point is that the meeting supported Bernie. So then Bernie moved that the meeting counter-petition the university to come out in opposition to the oath. Now obviously it can’t do this, because of the state backing, but Bernie proposed it as a gesture, to repudiate the Jochum petition. So we approved it. Then there was a big scene. Coolidge saw Jochum and Bernie on Monday and condemned the first petition, so Bernie withdrew his. Then Jochum resigned and that’s it.’

‘He had no choice, he was really out on a limb,’ said Dean French. ‘He’ll find a post somewhere else.’

‘But more terrible for him than you,’ said Dean French, diving into the water and swimming toward Julie.

Walker hung in the water, clinging to the edge, his head sticking out of the water, decked out with snow. The storm of flakes blew down into the pool. The story he had just been told possessed him with horror. He had always had a taste for and a deep regard for the pathetic, the sad people of this world who through lack of energy or charm or tact, or through external misfortunes, failed at what they did. His friend Dr Jochum, like Miss Marrow, like perhaps Patrice, belonged to this body. Jochum, who had been expelled from his country, Jochum who had drifted without a nationality, Jochum who had been taken in here and there for a while and then dropped again, Jochum who had so often said to Walker ‘Beggars cannot be choosers’, had lost the grip on his security and happiness that he had only just recently found. His own part in this was obscure, but he had a part; through lack of insight, through political ignorance, through his blundering approach to life, he had deprived him of his hard-gained possessions. The causes involved were too mild to matter here. And what was most distressing was that his own part was so vague, so that he could not know where to start taking measurements. And then something darker occurred to him, as he looked up at the snow; it was, this is why I was brought here, this is what I was appointed to do, this is what I am all about. This was Froelich’s end in view; this was why his name had been proposed, why the letter had come to him in Nottingham, why he had given his speech, why he had slept with Patrice, why he had heard from Froelich nothing about the meeting. There were gaps in the story, unaccountable; it could not have been certain, after all, that he would behave as he did, that he would have been so docile throughout. In fury he dived away from the side and toward the other end: he wanted to leave Party, to take Julie Snowflake and go. He pulled as hard as he could through the water, and felt something unfortunate happening; his over-large shorts had slid down his legs and were pinioning his feet together. He began to sink. People stood round the side of the pool; his face looked up at them in horror. He heard Froelich, on the side, say: ‘The day he arrived in Party he didn’t even want to take his goddam neck-tie off.’ Then he went under.

The next thing was that someone was pulling him up to the surface; it was Bernard Froelich, who had walked into the pool fully dressed. Walker touched bottom with his feet and stood upright, choking, his stomach hurting. He looked down and saw his exposed privates and reached down to pull up his shorts. ‘Thanks,’ he said to Froelich.

‘We nearly lost you then, Jamie,’ said Froelich. ‘Come on, I think you’d better get out.’

‘It’s lucky he was in the shallow end,’ said Froelich. ‘He swallowed nearly half the pool.’

‘Bring him inside,’ said Dean French. ‘We’ll give him some brandy.’ Walker let himself be led, shivering, through the cold air into the house. His stomach now pained him a great deal, and the cold made him feel faint, but the biggest pain was the profound embarrassment of his indecent exposure. Froelich sat him down in a canvas chair and knocked the pat of snow from his head. Beyond the windows, in the pool lights, the snow whirled. Froelich stood over him, urgent, concerned, but beneath the honest emotion was something else, Walker knew. He could think of nothing more to say to him.

‘Drink this, Mr Walker,’ said Julie, still in her red swimsuit, holding a glass of brandy. She put her arm round his shoulders.

‘Look,’ said Walker, ‘I wanted to ask you. Let’s go, now. Let’s leave this place. I’ve had enough.’ He spoke in a low voice into her ear, to avoid Froelich’s overhearing.

‘You’ll have to be careful, Jamie,’ said Froelich. ‘You’re a precious possession. We don’t want you to die while you’re here.’

Walker took his clothes when Julie brought them and went into the bathroom. He coughed up some water into the bowl and then felt better. When he came out, Julie was dressed, and had her car keys in her hand. ‘I’m taking him back,’ she said.

‘I have to get mine too. Drop me at the Froelichs’ and I’ll be ready when you get back.’

‘Okay,’ said Julie. When he got back to the Froelichs’ empty house, Walker hurried round and packed his bags. It was about three-thirty, and it was just getting light. A bird was singing somewhere. Afraid that the Froelichs might come home, he climbed out of the window like an adulterer and hid himself and his bags in the bushes, which flipped snow over him. The bottom of the sky was pink and there was pinkness on the white of the mountains. The long plain was also touched with white, but the snowfall had stopped. One speeding car passed down the street. Then, presently, the black Volkswagen crept round the corner and stopped.

‘Put your suitcases on the back seat,’ said Julie. ‘I’ve used all the luggage space for my stuff.’ Walker put in the two cases and the typewriter and climbed in front. ‘We’re off,’ said Julie, ‘Westward ho. Pike’s Peak or bust.’ Walker watched as the car began to move and then, exhausted, he immediately fell asleep.

7