Eating People Is Wrong

IT WAS the last tutorial of the Michaelmas term, and Professor Treece sat at his desk, his back to the window, while the dull December light shone on to the pile of examination scripts upon his desk, on to the faces of his three students. Two of them were, he knew, pondering on the quality of their amorous performance for the Christmas Ball, which was to be held in the Town Hall that night, an end-of-term festivity before everyone left for home on the morrow. The third student, Louis Bates, lacked the general excitement. Wedged there tightly in his chair, he looked a pathetic figure, and Treece felt a sense of guilt as he looked at him. The performance of that do-it-yourself intellectual in terminal examinations had been shocking; there were good reasons for sending him down, and the attack had been strongly renewed by the anti-Bates faction at a faculty meeting, where Carfax, careful not to make the same mistake twice, had claimed that Bates had deliberately and while of sound mind abrogated his responsibilities as a student and should be asked to leave. Invited to contribute essays on literary subjects to his tutors for evaluation, he had refused; the fact was, simply, that. Treece had, it must be said, been tempted; Bates didn’t now seem to fit so well into the category which Treece had designated for him, that of the working-class intellectual rising in the world through his own efforts, aided by the tutelage of liberal-minded teachers. Yet in a sense he was this. For it wasn’t necessary that he should be pleasing, or grateful, or even liberal like his teacher. One doesn’t have to stamp the new generation with one’s own concerns and attributes. One has simply to give it the means to emerge in its own shape.

What made Treece so uncomfortable was that he was talking at this moment about Shelley. He remembered the nasty little mistake that Oxford had made in expelling him. He read out to his tutorial group Shelley’s indictment of Oxford: ‘Oxonian society was insipid to me, uncongenial with my habits of thinking. I could not descend to common life; the sublime interest of poetry, lofty and exalted achievements, the proselytism of the world, the equalization of its inhabitants, were to be the soul of my soul.’ Treece read, and watched Louis’s eyes light up. To think that Louis might be put in a position to say the same about their own University was too, too much. Shelley had been an oddity, just like Bates; and at school and university they had called him what Carfax, what they all, had called Bates – mad. Treece knew now that this word should never have been used of Bates. It was strange how unseriously serious men could use serious words. Shelley used to send out offensive atheistic letters to divines, over a false name; to blow up fences with gunpowder; to ask mothers carrying babes in arms, ‘Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?’ All right, thought Treece, so he was interested in dianetics? Shelley, it was said, had his tutor ‘in great perplexity’; and Treece had to admit that when they wrote up Bates they could use the same phrase of him.

He looked over at this erratic, easily despised, and pitiable figure, unstable, yes, but honest, pure, and concerned for human values, sitting there in his chair, scratching the end of his nose with a long, nobbly forefinger. He made a lousy symbol, if it was a symbol you wanted, Treece told himself; but then people always did make poor symbols, even in his view. Treece had to recognize an uneasiness here; Louis was brilliant, did not crave the cheaper kinds of success, had worked hard for what he had, which was little enough. Yet what mystified Treece, who really only needed to look at his own case for illumination, was that someone could be so clever at his subject and so unclever at living. Louis’s brilliance was a narrow strip of cultivated ground; the ordinary experience of the world, however, was, to him, untilled ground, something that he had just not bothered to go to work on. And because of this, Treece further perceived, there was – you had in all honesty to recognize this, as Emma already had recognized it – something faintly ridiculous about Louis. Other people knew thus; it was, indeed, all they did know about him. Louis’s manners were as strange as Eborebelosa’s; he came out of as foreign a culture. Treece could not help but think of a story which Walter Oliver had told him about Bates, and the story was this:

In the early days of his attendance at the University, Louis had sent to Oliver, as Editor of the student literary magazine, a sheaf of poems for him to consider for publication. A few days later, Louis received a note from Oliver, saying, ‘I think we’re on to something,’ and asking Louis to go and see him in his lodgings. When Louis arrived, Oliver, who was sitting on the bed clad in a pair of Y-front undershorts, stringing a cello and eating cheese, greeted him with great warmth, offering him cheese and making him sit down. He produced the poems (which had, Louis noticed, been heavily overdrawn with sketches of girls) and, ‘You know, dumbo, you’ve got something here,’ said Oliver, in a voice that seemed to Louis to mingle distrust and pride – distrust, doubtless, at what Louis had got and pride at his having been able to spot it, whatever it was. Once you got Oliver’s patronage, you did not get rid of it easily. A few days later Oliver returned the call, to tell Louis that he had decided to publish his poems. Louis was clearly loath to let him in; he disliked having visitors. The room was redolent with the rich, plummy smell of sweat-filled socks; it smelled, said Oliver, when he told this story, as he so often did, like the women’s changing room at Holloway Prison. Oliver had thrown open the window, and Louis protested, saying that he was medically excused from having the window open in the winter, or taking baths, because of his weak chest. ‘Look, amigo,’ said Oliver, who had little time for this sort of thing, ‘these poems are good, but you smell like a goat. I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll publish these poems if you’ll have a bath.’ ‘Do you want to kill me?’ cried Louis. ‘It’s for the sake of art,’ said Oliver implacably. Louis, though he had not let Oliver in until his privates were covered over with water, had at least taken the bath, there and then; and the poem had been published in the University literary magazine, to universal apathy.

Treece looked at Bates and thought of this tale, which Oliver had put into wide circulation. Bates was seedy, frowsy; he wore ugly and ungainly clothes; he spoke with long sheep-like North-Country a’s (and had, thought Treece, who loved this sort of joke, a long, sheep-like North-Country arse); he did, to some extent, smell. The perception of this ridiculousness came to Treece as a kind of insight. He was immediately aware of the need to protect Louis from odious people who thought like himself. It was not, therefore, abruptly, but with a sympathetic mien, that Treece addressed Louis thus at the end of the tutorial:

‘I have your examination papers here, Bates, and they were not, to be honest, very satisfactory.’

Louis had been sat sullenly waiting for this. ‘I didn’t think they would be,’ he said.

‘Now you understand there’s nothing personal in this if I say I’m disappointed. We like you as a person . . .’ this touch was a bit overwarm, Treece knew, but how could this be done otherwise? ‘. . . but academically your work has been falling off, and if it continues like this I’m afraid I can’t hold out any hope that you’ll get even a poor degree.’ Bates looked very chastened. ‘Now, what’s wrong? Do you feel you can do better than this? Is this a fair sample of your work?’

‘You know it’s not,’ said Louis. The remark sounded like an impertinence, but then so many of Louis’s remarks did.

‘Then what went wrong?’ demanded Treece sharply. ‘Are you short of money? Are you unhappy in your lodgings?’

‘It’s her, you know,’ said Louis. The two other students present exchanged a look and giggled audibly. ‘You know I’m in love. I told you.’

‘That has nothing to do with me,’ said Treece, brusque because Louis should have had more sense than to embarrass him; that surely was not too much to expect. ‘The simple question is: do you intend to improve, or am I to recommend that you be asked to make way for someone who will work?’

‘I’ve had enough of her,’ said Louis. ‘If that’s love I prefer not to be in it. Everything will be all right next term.’ He sat unmoved while Cocoran dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.

‘Don’t be childish, Cocoran,’ said Treece. ‘I don’t know that you have anything to delight in; your marks weren’t much better. I suppose we have that luxurious blonde to thank for that?’

‘Well, I’m not going to keep either of you here simply so that your sex life can bear fruit. I should probably be doing the fair sex a good turn if I brought both your stays here to an end.’

‘You don’t need to worry about them any more,’ said Louis. ‘I shall start work again tonight.’

I want to apologize to you for the way I treated you the other night. I was so rude and I don’t know what possessed me. Please don’t misunderstand me, Louis; I still think, equally firmly, that we’re completely unsuited to each other, and that to take things any further would be a mistake, but I am ashamed of the way in which I tried to tell you this.

Emma Fielding

Louis had returned home hideously chastened, and full of determination to get down to some good hard work. Everything, he felt, had gone wrong, and he had only succeeded in getting himself detested in all the departments where he hoped to have himself acclaimed. To offer to pull the ears off the Head of the Department was no way to get a first; and he had likewise proved a failure in the world of human love. He had treated himself suicidally, he felt. Admittedly what had happened was in part an indictment of the University itself, and those who attended it; it offered neither the liberality nor the respect for wild genius that he had expected to find there. His function here was negative – he might as well have taken his degree by correspondence course. He decided to detach himself; after all, life could not be simply spending oneself in events, or who would praise the celibate, the ascetic, and the saint? Emma and the Emma values were a scented delusion.

But tonight she would be at the Christmas Ball. Who with? Oliver? Treece? She would be telling people about him, and how glad she was to be rid of him. She’d be having a wonderful time, and here he was moping in his bedroom. And, after all, the note was in part a retraction. She was sorry. He would go and let her tell him so.

At the Town Hall the Christmas Ball was well under way. Upstairs, perhaps, in the darkened room, affairs of high civic importance were being wrangled by councillors and aldermen, late at their duties; down below in the ballroom, let out by the night for a not intolerable sum, all was abandon. Big brass ashtrays like spittoons stood about the floor in large numbers. An air of rather frowsy jollity depended from the paper streamers. It cost Louis sixpence to put his coat in the cloak-room, a sum he did not willingly disemburse; he wished he had not worn it, though the night was cool, it being early December. As people had to get drunk before eleven o’clock, when the bar closed (or else smuggle in their own liquor), they had set to work early. Emma was not to be seen in the press. Louis, with some wit, looked into the bar, and observed there an august party: the stout Vice-Chancellor, full of bonhomie, a scattering of professors, Dr Masefield, Merrick, and, at the end of the row, Treece. They were having their photograph taken, a distinguished group. ‘Grin, gentlemen, grin,’ ordered the Vice-Chancellor. ‘No need to look miserable. The next round’s my privilege.’ Treece, affecting a nervous smile, was clearly ill at ease. ‘Further forward, you, please,’ said the photographer. Treece moved forward. ‘Now back; no, back, I said, a bit more.’ Treece tripped over his feet and looked ungainly. ‘Smiles all round,’ said the photographer, and there was a great, explosive flash. Amused by this little comedy, Louis withdrew and walked along the outer fringe of the dance floor towards the stage. He suddenly saw Emma, sitting in a blue basket chair, her feet thrust out, drinking lemonade through a straw and talking with a girl named Anne Grant, a creature with a very short haircut and a sharp, pixie-like face. ‘If he’s as bad as that, why does he show himself to people?’ Anne was saying.

‘Who?’ asked Louis, coming up. Emma turned round, and flushed, and said that she thought Louis did not like dances; and Louis flushed, and said that he didn’t, and asked her to dance, simply in order to separate her from Anne Grant. ‘I don’t dance very well,’ he said when they got on to the floor. ‘I can only go straight; I don’t know how to do the corners.’

‘Well, we can stop and come back when we get to the end of the High Street,’ said Emma.

‘That’s in threes, isn’t it?’ asked Louis, dancing on his own for a moment, to get the beat, ‘Right, come on, quick. No, we’ve missed it. Try again . . . now!’ And off they went into the throng, dancing straight across the room, banging up against the wall, stopping, starting again. Louis pulled Emma closely to him until he was practically inside her dress. ‘So this is dancing,’ he said. ‘I like it.’ They moved up under the dais, beneath the band. ‘I’m sorry about the other night,’ said Louis. ‘So am I,’ said Emma, saying what he hoped she would say. ‘I’ve regretted it very much, as I told you in that note.’ ‘Thank you for that,’ said Louis. ‘I know I seemed cruel; I haven’t been able to forget it. But I was right, wasn’t I, now honestly?’ ‘Why were you?’ asked Louis. ‘It’s so hard for a woman, Louis,’ said Emma. ‘I like men and want them as my friends, but they always want to make love or something. I don’t want to hurt them, but I don’t want to hurt myself. Love is something other. I doubt if I’m capable of it. Sometimes I want to try it, but I suppose I’m too afraid.’ They hit up suddenly against the wall, turned round, set off again.

‘I’m a mess,’ said Emma. ‘You’re better away from me. I’m just terrified of the whole business, I suppose.’

‘You’re like a child of eighteen,’ said Louis. ‘You have to come to terms with the world. You can’t go on like some young virgin who can ignore all men until at last her prince comes and the air trembles, and trumpets sound, and you know this must be love. It’s not like that. People like you ought to live in a different world; you’re a menace to the rest of us, when we run up against you, because we count for nothing with you. We’re so plebeian about love, aren’t we?’

‘I suppose you’re trying to find out whether I’m a virgin,’ said Emma. ‘Well, I don’t go talking about my sex life to all and sundry.’

‘I am not all and sundry. I’m me,’ cried Louis exasperated. ‘What does one have to do to get to know you, to come into your world? Have a blood-test? I don’t mind. Just set me an examination and I’ll take it.’

‘There isn’t any examination,’ said Emma. ‘You have to take me as I am. I don’t want to do anything unless I’m really in love, and I’m not with you, and that’s it.’

‘In any case,’ said Louis cunningly, ‘I don’t think you are a virgin. I think you just think like one. When you get to my age, you don’t meet virgins any more.’

‘What about you?’ demanded Louis. ‘You adopt this terrible feminine hauteur, so that it’s simply impossible to get near to you, and you won’t respond emotionally to anything or anyone. I know I’m as bad, but it’s you we’re trying to sort out. If you don’t touch up against people, you are nothing; you never define yourself, you never exist.’

‘It’s a terrible thing to be,’ said Louis. ‘But the trouble is, I am too.’

They hit up against another couple. All about them, in the wide, darkened area of the dance hall, couples were disclosing their Christmas plans to interested playmates: this one was off delivering letters for the Post Office; that one skiing down wet snowslopes in Austria. He would go off home, that awful place; and Emma would be gone, for five cruel weeks, an insurmountable interval in which people are forgotten, personal impacts elided from the memory, to her family’s metropolitan urbanities. Resentment arose. All the time, around him, intellectuals moaned of the breakdown of working-class culture, that vigorous healthy life, bellies close to the soil, that they believed themselves cruelly severed from; as for Louis, he was in the damn thing, and all he wanted was to get out. If one married on one’s level, one was tied. But an intelligent and sophisticated wife (an Emma) could give every entry that was needed by a man of talents into finer society, could tell him what clothes to buy, what to do about one’s dandruff, what courses to order in restaurants, how one wine tasted differently from another, what ties to wear with what suit.

‘Oh, no,’ said Emma. ‘I’m not telling you. You’re quite capable of just arriving . . .’

‘Who me?’ cried Louis, aghast, though the comment was true enough. ‘Well, I hope you’ll think about me.’

‘Because I love you,’ said Louis. For a moment Emma strove with herself to face this fact and respond to it, but she couldn’t; all there was was pity, and a scrap of distaste.

All at once they were among the band; Louis, lost in amorous transports, had failed to watch where they were going and now the musicians were scattering as the pair of them flailed mercilessly around, knocking over music stands. ‘Oh,’ said Emma, detaching herself and hurrying to the side. Louis stood firm in the middle of the disaster, apologizing sweetly. By the time he had pushed his way through to the side there was nothing to be seen of Emma. He went and looked into the bar. She was not there, but, leaning against a doorpost, talking to a pretty girl in a very short dress, with her mouth touched up with black lipstick, was Walter Oliver.

‘Come and watch me do a seduction,’ said Oliver. ‘This girl has put herself in severe moral danger, and I’m it. Come on, amigo. Tell her what a fine fellow I am.’

‘Good God! Not like that,’ said Oliver. ‘I want her virtue, not her vote. Try some of that old moonlight on the water stuff, or a bit of crap about Ceres and the essential fertility of the world. Come on, man, boost me.’

‘I think he’s horrible,’ said the girl, turning her black-painted pout to Louis.

‘Luckily for you, I am,’ said Oliver. ‘OK, amigo, slope off now and I’ll get on with my idyll.’

Treece came by at this moment, on his way back from the dance floor; his tie had come untied and he looked dismally unhappy. He had been doing the Gay Gordons with Viola. Viola was a little tight, and had refused to walk up and down at the bit where you walk up and down; she just wanted to spin round all the time. Finally, she had fallen down and had had to be taken to the sidelines to recover. Treece had never really wanted to come to the ball in the first place. It was the Vice-Chancellor, who spent the weeks before these student occasions in indefatigable effort, gathering up members of the faculty to go along in order, as he liked to express it, ‘to put up a bit of a show’, who had tempted him here. The Vice-Chancellor, like all vice-chancellors, had clear ideas of what a university should look like, and taste like; vice-chancellors all share in common a Platonic ideal for a university. For one thing, it should be big. People should be coming to look at it all the time. There should be a special place for parking Rolls-Royces. There should be big sports grounds, a science building designed by Basil Spence, and more and more students coming every year. There should be new faculties – of Business Administration, of Aeronautical Engineering, of Sanitation, of Social Dancing. Vice-chancellors want big universities and a great many faculties; professors want small universities and only the liberal arts and pure sciences. Vice-chancellors always seem to win. Seeing Treece now, he left the local dignitaries whom he was buttering up at the bar, took Treece familiarly by the arm, and said jovially: ‘I think the little lady here has set her heart on you, my boy,’ pointing to Viola, who was approaching. ‘Oh, Viola, nice dress; didn’t get that out here in the provinces, I’ll be bound. Changed your hair, too? Like it, Viola, like it.’

‘Thank you kindly,’ said Viola in a quaint voice. She turned to Treece and murmured, ‘Christ, can’t we get out of here?’

‘Come and meet the Lord-Lieutenant of the County,’ said the Vice-Chancellor. ‘Very interested in boys’ dubs. Think he thinks this is one.’

They went over and met the Lord-Lieutenant, who asked Treece if he rowed. They met the Lord Mayor, who asked Treece if he was active in politics. Town and gown rarely met, and when they did both were embarrassed. Treece now asked the Lord Mayor if he rowed, and whether he had time to read very much. Finally, conscious of having done good, they retired, Viola and Treece, to the bar for a quick drink. It was really the first time he had spoken to Viola since her party. ‘Stuart, you’re getting fat, you know,’ said Viola. He speculated about this strange remark for a moment and then recognized it for what it was, the comment of an eccentric old spinster. He looked at Viola in surprise, and noticed, for the first time, the little lines around her eyes.

They took their drinks and sat down. ‘You and me last night!’ said Viola, raising her glass.

For a moment nothing was said. Then Viola said: ‘Take that squishy-looking cigarette out of your mouth, Stuart, and talk to me properly. Don’t you want to talk to me?’

‘Have you?’ said Treece. He wondered what she’d do for herself, and suddenly felt sorry for her future. She had had her hair cut in a new way that made her ears stick out – it was called the gamin look – and it made women look like little boys. He found her appearance affected and annoying, and he didn’t like to see her drunk.

‘Poor old Stuart,’ said Viola; ‘you get such a frightened look when you think you’re committed to something; but don’t worry, you aren’t. I just take a friendly interest in you, though.’

‘Well, I know, but you mean a lot to me, Viola,’ said Treece, ‘and I wasn’t just mucking about that time.’

‘However,’ said Viola, ‘it’s stupid to talk about situations of this sort, because when you’ve mulled over them they always seem less satisfactory than they are. Everything has proved that, if you’re careful, actions don’t have consequences. If you changed my life because of meeting me it would wound me. I’d rather change my life to please you, because at least you would have to take the responsibility, and I’ve got nothing to lose. But what can you make of people who don’t make actions of their thoughts? They’re nothing; they’re impotent, they’re invisible. We’re invisible, Stuart; we try to live our lives as though they don’t count, as though they go unnoticed.’

‘Of course, it doesn’t worry me,’ said Viola, ‘but you have to know it, don’t you?’ She looked pointedly into her empty glass.

‘Please,’ said Viola. ‘Oh, I want to ask you something. Did you send the ghoul down?’

‘And then you say you’re my friend. I knew you wouldn’t. I forecast this to myself.’

‘It simply wasn’t necessary,’ said Treece. ‘He’s going to start work again.’

‘I see,’ said Viola. ‘He’s over there by the door now, smelling girl’s ears when they go past. You know, you can’t go on like this. You’re a mess, Stuart. Oh, don’t look like that. I don’t mean any harm, but nothing’s getting anywhere. This department has settled down into staid middle age. So have you. So will I, if I don’t squeal a little occasionally. You’ll come up to my bedroom every Bank Holiday Monday and the students will persuade you to ring your handbells every departmental tea party and you’ll charm all the little girls straight from school for ever and ever, amen. And there we are. What are you doing for Christmas?’

‘Oh yes; you told me,’ said Viola. ‘Look, Stuart, I’m feeling randy. Come outside and give me a kiss. See me home. You know what all this has been about.’

‘Viola, you’re a little tight, and we’ve got to stay here and be sociable.’

‘Just because I fell down and bruised my butt doesn’t mean I’m tight, my pet,’ said Viola. ‘I’m going to have another drink.’

‘I’ll join you,’ said Merrick. ‘Hello, Viola. Nice dress, and a new haircut! You do us proud. Fascinating glimpses of lovely white buz. I see in Vogue that the last cry is to have the hair done en bouffon.’

At the bar, Treece, congenitally a person who was always served last, found himself in the centre of a violent contest for attention, for it was now closing time. Beside him was Oliver, the sort of person, it was apparent, who was always served first. ‘Observing all the local idylls?’ asked Oliver. ‘All this lotus-eating. Came for a bit of lotus-eating myself, actually. Did you see that girl I was with? The one in blue? Never saw her before tonight in my life. Bet I get there, though. Here, serve this man next, barman. He’s a professor. Make way for the prof, please. Make way for the prof. New rule: professors served first.’

‘By the way,’ said Oliver. ‘Don’t forget next term, I’m going to show you the local vie littéraire, the British beats.’

‘Are they interesting?’ asked Treece, picking up one of the drinks from the tray and drinking it. Treece found himself speculating about his relations with Oliver (of course Treece found himself speculating about his relations with anyone, for the mysteries of human contact were, to him, so profound, that he wondered how he ever did it, how he went out and had relations at all). The way in which he was affected by Oliver was in the splendid freedom of Oliver’s existence; the barriers, the bolts and bars, that one discerned on every side, were invisible to Oliver. He was not awed by professors or barmen or moral codes or any of the things that limited, for Treece, free access to the world. He patted him on the shoulder in a very amiable sort of way, and drank the last drink off the tray. He then went back to the table and Merrick said: ‘Viola went off outside with someone from French. Have a tiggy?’

‘Thank you,’ said Treece, rather relieved about losing Viola. It was a Turkish tiggy. What had happened with Viola that evening seemed to Treece rather disastrous, and it was this curiosity of his strained relationship with Viola that was to act as a solvent in a situation that was to develop later in the evening.

‘Do you like this tie?’ asked Merrick. Treece looked him up and down. Merrick always looked as though he had just that moment dismounted from a horse: his clothes were always cavalrytwill-y, trousers with sixteen-inch cuffs, the standard wear (at this time) of the Guardsmen/Stockbroker/Underwriter smart set, though already the teddy boys were being imitative and spoiling things. You could always tell that Merrick went off to Cambridge or London for his clothes – ‘even for his socks and pants’, Viola once avowed. Whenever Treece talked to Merrick, he was reminded of that Poet Laureate who confessed that his idea of Heaven was to sit in a garden and to receive constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land. Merrick was so Establishment that it just was not true; he was one of the Old Boy system who had somehow just not known quite enough Old Boys to get a Cambridge fellowship, or into the Diplomatic, and so he had missed the gunboat and was left, continually mystified, among people that no one really mixed with at all.

‘It’s a mistress tie,’ said Merrick. ‘Why is it that one’s mistresses always give one ties?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Treece, who didn’t. Merrick was, in his romantic way, a sort of professional co-respondent; he was in bed so often that the wonder was that he didn’t have bed sores. From behind, someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was Oliver. ‘Do you happen to have any contraceptives on you?’ he asked confidentially.

Merrick promptly opened up his wallet and went carefully through it. ‘Should be able to oblige, old boy,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Oliver. ‘Always wanted to do it outside, you know, ever since I read Sons and Lovers.’

‘No, sorry, old boy. I’m out,’ said Merrick. ‘I didn’t think I’d be coming tonight.’

Treece took out his wallet and looked in it; if he hadn’t been drunk he would have been shocked, and if he hadn’t been drunk he wouldn’t have tried to pretend he had any, when he most certainly hadn’t.

‘Never mind. I say, absolutely ducky pianist, isn’t he? Have you seen the local jazz band? You should. All trad stuff, of course, and straight off the records. But then there is no English culture left, is there?’

Viola now came back into the bar with the fat little lecturer from French. ‘How about a round on the Ford Foundation?’ she cried to the man from French, who had a grant from that institution. ‘The bar’s closed,’ said Treece. ‘Nonsense,’ said Viola. ‘Don’t you be so easily put off.’

‘Soon they’ll be having all these research foundations in England too,’ said Treece, ‘as part of the conspicuous consumption of industry. It seems the next stage in the democratic process. You’ve got the Nuffield Foundation; next it will be the Marks and Spencer’s Foundation, the Chappie Dog Food Foundation, the C. and A. Modes Foundation . . .’

‘The Strodex Foundation Foundation,’ said Viola; she was really very drunk. They were all really very drunk. Looking around, Treece felt upset nearly to tears by the sort of wanness of the milieu, by the Violas and the Merricks, by everything.

He wondered if he was going to be ill. The sensation of being in the world, in this spot, suffused about him in a dull wash, and all at once he thought of a sentence out of Thomas Mann, and he thought of himself reading the sentence, as he did when he talked on D. H. Lawrence, to bored students in a lecture-room. The sentence was this: ‘In an age that offers no satisfying answer to the eternal question of “Why? To what end?”, a man who is capable of achievement over and above the expected and average modicum must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality.’ Perhaps there were some people like that; but here there were, really, no heroes and no vital men, and one simply filled in time.

This was no thought to be bringing to realization amid the entertainments of an evening like this, Treece told himself. ‘I feel sick,’ said a girl behind him. ‘Try and hold it till we get outside,’ said her escort. At the bar the lecturer in French was in the middle of a fracas with the barman, who was washing up the dirty glasses. At this moment Treece noticed Emma Fielding coming into the bar, and he felt relieved of his disgust. He went over to her; she looked over her shoulder. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘Are you having a good time?’

‘Well, I don’t really like these hops very much, but I’m certainly having a time. One sees life.’

‘I thought you’d gone looking for him, or the other one,’ said a loud whisper from Emma’s other side. It was Louis Bates.

‘Good evening, Miss Fielding,’ said Viola, returning to the group. ‘I like your dress. Good evening, Mr Bates,’ she added, observing this unwelcome figure in the group. ‘Mr Bates, Mr Bates, what does that word remind me of?’

‘Don’t be naughty,’ said Treece in Viola’s ear; he had an instinct for these things, and knew that Viola was determined to be very brilliant at Louis’s expense. This opening sally had already gone down very well, and Viola was ready for more.

‘You know, Miss Fielding, I’ve often thought: you would be pretty if you stood up straight. Your eyes are lovely. You really don’t make the most of yourself. You don’t rate yourself high enough. You go about with quite the wrong sort of people. You’re a mature woman; you need a more adult society; you’d flourish in it.’

‘You must come to one of my parties,’ said Viola. ‘They’re rather fun. Even Stuart likes them, and that is something of a commendation, isn’t it, Stuart darling?’

‘I worked this afternoon,’ whispered a dull voice in Treece’s ear. ‘Oh, you might as well enjoy tonight, Bates,’ said Treece generously. ‘I don’t want you to think . . .’ murmured Louis.

‘I didn’t know you two were so intimate,’ said Viola, interrupting. ‘Tell me, how’s the flageolet, Mr Bates? Mr Bates once told me that he has a flageolet, and goes down by the canal and plays Benjamin Britten-y tunes beginning with “Heigh-ho”. Wasn’t that what you told me?’

‘Or am I confusing you with Ivy Compton-Burnett?’ asked Viola. ‘Tell me, Mr Bates, how is your chest? Don’t show it to me; just tell me.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Viola. ‘Mr Bates hasn’t been well since I’ve known him. Were your parents old when they had you?’

‘You can always tell,’ said Viola. ‘Well, let that be a lesson to us . . .’ This was a reference to one of Treece’s own jokes, which he had shared with Viola; and the reference involved him and made him feel very guilty. Viola had said too much, and he tried to tempt her away.

‘Stuart is afraid, Mr Bates, that I find you too attractive,’ said Viola. ‘He is really very protective towards you. You must be grateful to him.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought you were a dancing man,’ continued Viola. Louis by now had realized that he hadn’t a chance of coming out of this alive; you knew he had said his prayers and left his flageolet to his next of kin. Nor was there any stopping Viola. (She turned to Treece and murmured: ‘Have you ever seen this man’s birth certificate? I swear one of his parents was a rhinoceros.’) The hunt was on, and every one knew it. ‘Grey suit and everything,’ went on Viola. ‘It might be worth investing in a new tie, though?’ ‘I haven’t much money, you know,’ said Louis with a touch of defiance. Viola had known he would say this, even down to the defiance, and she went on: ‘Well, perhaps we could have a whip-round for a tie for him, Stuart?’ Stuart, on whom the fact that this was as much at his expense as Louis’s was not lost – and this precluded his intervention – said: ‘You mustn’t say that, Viola.’

‘You see how concerned he is for your feelings?’ said Viola. ‘Much more concerned than you are, I’m sure; he imagines that you’re ultra-sensitive. I keep telling him, I keep saying, “Mr Bates isn’t sensitive at all, you do him an injustice.” You’ve been through the mill, as they say, haven’t you? Didn’t you once teach in a convent, or something?’

‘It was at a girls’ school, yes,’ said Louis. ‘I did have to work to get here, you see. Lawrence used to work in a factory that made artificial limbs, you know; I worked in a school. For the same sort of reasons, I believe.’

‘You feel an esprit de corps with Lawrence, then?’ said Viola. ‘Do I mean esprit de corps?’

‘Well, put Lawrence and Mr Bates together, and it seems like a body of men. I saw you in town the other day, Mr Bates, but I don’t think you saw me.’

‘Yes; you were waiting for a bus. You fell backwards over a wall into someone’s garden. I felt quite concerned for you. You weren’t hurt?’

‘No, let’s ask Bates to do it for us,’ said Viola. ‘You’ll do that, won’t you? Wait a minute. You haven’t any money; you’ll need some pennies. Here we are. One, two, three . . . it is threepence, isn’t it?’

Everyone dispersed to collect their coats. Treece and Emma both had one like thought in their minds: it was not to go home with the person who seemed intent on taking them. Treece knew that he could not face Viola in this mood, and to stay the night with her in this spirit would be, for him, masochism. He therefore detained Emma and said: ‘Do you have someone to see you home, Miss Fielding?’ Emma, likewise, felt an immense relief at this offer, and took advantage of it at once; she could not face the thought of having to fight off Louis at her door.

‘I’m sorry, Viola, but I’m already seeing someone home. Miss Fielding has no one with her, so I said I’d see her safely back.’

Louis reappeared and conducted a short, whispered conversation with Emma, to one side; he emerged from it looking furious.

‘You’d better be,’ said Viola. ‘You realize you’ve cut out your protégé Mr Bates?’

Treece went into the foyer to wait for Emma. She came down the stairs and he went to meet her. They took a final look into the hall and saw Viola exchanging some last gibes with Bates, while the Ford Foundation lecturer looked on proprietorially. ‘This tune they’re playing is the one Carey Willoughby’s novel is named after,’ said Emma.

‘It’s called “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. It’s a very appropriate title.’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘For his novel. It’s about this young man, who is an outsider, excluded from the ordinary life of the world because he isn’t in the class system, and in the business world, and doesn’t share the common values . . .’

‘Please,’ said Treece. ‘I’d rather not hear about it. Modern novels depress me so much.’

‘What’s this tune about, then?’ asked Treece. ‘Is that a modern tune too?’

‘Oh, no. I don’t think these things filter down into popular culture that quickly,’ said Emma. ‘And it’s quite an old tune. It’s a sort of duet, you see. He’s asking her to stay the night, because it’s cold outside. She’s saying she must go. I think it ends with his proposing, so that she can stay inside in the warmth for good.’ She laughed with a long husky ripple of laughter. Laughter always affected Treece, strangely, because it betrayed a kind of possession of the world that he lacked. Looking now at the bright line of her teeth and the intimate cavern of her mouth, he found himself encompassed by a warmth and delight. This impression went with what she was saying, and suddenly the licence of the evening conveyed itself to him and he felt a real growth of affection. He looked at her and said, ‘Shall I get a taxi?’

Something of his point conveyed itself to Emma; she paused, as if surprised, and then responded, a little uncertainly, as if she felt she had detected something that might not be there.

‘No, look, if it isn’t cold outside, shall we walk? It isn’t far. Actually, you don’t have to take me at all; I simply had to get away from Louis Bates. And I owe you an apology for dragging you off to that terrible party the other night; you can’t have enjoyed it a bit.’

‘But I shouldn’t be dragging you into the mess I make of things. I do, you know. I’m the untidiest woman – emotionally, I mean – that I know. And then Louis threatening to pull your ears off.’ She laughed again, a furry, animal laugh, and Treece joined in. ‘It was funny, after all, and he didn’t mean it. It’s a bit of phatic communion that he’s picked up. All Louis’s conversation is phatic communion. In conversation he never says anything. He thinks that conversation is a very imperfect form of communication, you know. It’s true, isn’t it?’

‘He didn’t mean any harm. You won’t hold it against him, will you? I’ve been wanting to ask you this. He doesn’t mean any harm; that’s what makes it so hard; if only he did. If only you knew that he was out for trouble. But he isn’t. He almost seems as if he wants to be hurt, or blamed, or disliked. He invites it. And yet I feel so sorry for him; when Dr Masefield behaved as she did, and made him get their taxi, for instance.’

‘She was playing him off against me, because she thinks I permit him too much,’ said Treece.

‘Yes, and it was sexual as well, wasn’t it?’ asked Emma. ‘You don’t mind my saying that, but it was so obvious, to a woman at least. The trouble is that he is the sort of person, too, that you do play off. I’ve done it, without wanting to. Someone once said about him to me, “That young man is the sort of person everyone wants to use.” There are people like that, that you use but don’t want.’

‘It amuses me, you know, the way you seem to see women. You think of them as sort of loose-fitting men. I mean, you don’t realize that we’re made different because we are different, or the other way round.’

‘I was always grateful for that,’ said Treece. They were outside now, in the park: the Town Hall was very happily situated. Whenever there was a dance one had practically to queue up for the use of the benches. Every bush rustled and swayed.

A light wind was blowing, catching at the hem of Emma’s dress and coat; noise came in ebbs and bursts from the dance. The night was clear, bright, filled with stars. The sky was lit up from beneath, just above the rooftops, by the glow of the street-lamps, a translucent blue that shaded off into colours, darker and richer and then finally matured into a black flecked with little stars, burning deep and white and remote. The great bare trees arched over them; it was the beginning of winter, when everything began to be crisp and hard. They could see across the town; great patterns of light were set out in the blackness of the facing hillside, great whorls and curves described by the street-lamps and rows of houses. A furnace glowed red in the dip. Suddenly – it was midnight – whole series of the street-lamps would be extinguished, as the day’s life officially ended, and the intensity of the blackness increased. ‘It’s an immense sort of night, isn’t it?’ said Emma. ‘One sometimes has this feeling.’ ‘Are you cold?’ asked Treece solicitously. ‘No, not at all,’ said Emma. ‘Miss Fielding . . . may I kiss you?’ asked Treece. Emma considered for a moment: ‘Yes. I’d like you to,’ she said cogitatively. They stopped under a tree.

‘One shouldn’t do that with a student,’ said Treece after a moment. ‘I’m happy that you did,’ said Emma; ‘and it puts you in no sort of difficulties with me. You owe me no favours. I admire you because you’re so honest; it’s something I wish I was more, and you are.’

‘You know, if anything, it’s the reverse that’s true. I’m really an old puritan. To me you are a good woman. You’re not the sort of woman who needs constant entertaining, perpetual juggling tricks and sleight of hand. For you I don’t have to stand on my head. You look at everything with a clear and civilized eye, as if it were all in a contest and you were judging; and so few women can do that. Think what love would be from a person like that. You’re a fine and virtuous woman.’

‘No,’ cried Emma; there were tears in her eyes. ‘No, I’m not. Don’t say that. I’m not virtuous, not sexually or in any other way. Only children can be virtuous. It’s all right when you aren’t out in the big, wide world. But I’m not the sort of woman you think I am. There’s nothing about me, Professor Treece.’

‘No, no. One needs money, one’s allotment of friends and possessions, confidence and charm, before one can practise virtue. You need to be free of the world. You need an access to a richer culture. But there are no rich cultures left, are there? It’s a seedy world.’

‘I’m sorry to have upset you so much,’ said Treece. ‘Look, we’re here at your door. Can I see you tomorrow?’

‘Oh, yes; it’s the end of term. I’d forgotten,’ said Treece, and he looked disappointed, and deeply intense, as if he were trying to communicate some truth to her which words did not express; and Emma reacted suddenly. ‘You could come up, if you really and absolutely certainly wanted,’ she said.

Treece looked at her. ‘I really and absolutely certainly do want to. But are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Yes, very,’ said Emma, ‘but you must take your shoes off, because I’m not allowed to take anyone in after eleven.’

He took his shoes off. Emma unlocked the door; she was shivering. The truth of it was that it was really a very cold night, no matter how they denied it. But it was warm indoors. They went inside, out of the cold, and crept up the stairs.