Eating People Is Wrong

COMING BACK to University for the new term was, to Emma, for the first time an enjoyable experience. It was Emma’s theory that the only time one ever acted – that is, acted so fully and positively that one’s character was altered or developed – was in moments of diminished responsibility, or under special duress: in liquor, when one was tired, or ill, or at war, indeed at any time when one was rid of that murderous, inhibiting, civilized pause that always came before the fact of action. Looking back on that night of the Christmas Ball, when Stuart saw her home, and then stayed, she would have said that she was drunk; but it wasn’t true. There was simply a willing suspension of disbelief in things, a lifting of control. She couldn’t go on as she had been doing; that was clear enough; there was no real solution. Something had to come from outside. The great pleasure came from not withholding any more; it is sometimes harder to withhold love than to give it; but it is only by this kind of violence to oneself that one does come to the final acceptance. There is a point at which one sits back and sees what happens. The answer to the prevailing question – can one lead a good life in this world, without retiring too much outside it? – had come haphazardly, but it had come; being rich, private, and apart from things, in an ideal state of innocence – all this sensation of herself was gone from Emma. And from here on she began to form a character for herself, she began to bathe herself in the world. This was Mrs Bishop’s own thought, of course; her concern with sin was not that it should not exist, but that people should know it for sin, and being upper middle class and civilized and believing Emma to be much the same, but apostate, she had no qualms when she began to suspect that an affair had grown up between Emma and her professor. In fact she was rather pleased, because there was so clearly nothing vulgar about it. For Emma too the rewards seemed greater than what was lost, for there was at last a sense of identity. She had never before felt pretty; ‘I may not be as pretty as Mona Lisa, but I bet I can spit farther than she could,’ she once protested wryly; now she felt as pretty. Her mother’s contention – ‘No one will ever marry you, my girl, you can’t do anything’ – no longer hurt her, and now, when her mother asked her on her arrival home, ‘When are you going to settle down and do something?’ she thought to herself for the first time that she had settled down and done it. ‘You’re a splendid woman, Emma; other women always want praising and flattering and amusing; but you’re content.’ A splendid woman, a good woman.

But the life one leads cuts out all the lives one might have led; one is never a virgin twice; events engrave themselves. Life is a unity to the soul. We meet events halfway; they are part of us, and we part of them; and nothing is incidental. Ahead comes the point where all events exist at once, and no new ones are in sight, the point on the edge of death, which is a reckoning point. It is the motion towards this that one tries to halt by crying, ‘Do you love me? Respect me? Will you always remember me?’

These were the sentiments that filled Emma’s mind when she returned for the beginning of term. If she did not see him again, this would be enough; but she hoped that she would. He had not written to her; there had been an ordinary, noncommittal Christmas card. But as soon as she arrived and was carrying her suitcase upstairs, Mrs Bishop came out of her room with a smile, and said that Treece had telephoned, and had asked her to call him back. That evening he came and stayed. They were in a poor state for receiving visitors when there came a knock on the door and ‘Miss Fielding!’ cried Mrs Bishop’s voice. Emma hastily buttoned up her blouse and pushed some underclothing under a chair. ‘Miss Fielding!’ ‘Oh, come in,’ said Emma. ‘I just wanted a word with the Professor,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘Professor, I bought your book today and I want you to sign it. I feel you should. There ought to be some of these about in the world when you’ve gone, you know.’ She proffered the Housman book. ‘I’m not very proud of it,’ said Treece. ‘Oh, really,’ said Mrs Bishop, noticing with interest that Miss Fielding had removed, or had had removed, her brassière. ‘You must be. To have published a book. It must be so pleasant to be so fecund.’ He signed it and away she went; they returned to the bedroom.

This in a sense set the seal of Mrs Bishop’s approbation, and he began to come to the flat quite regularly through the cold weeks of February and March. The curious gap of five weeks after their first night together had excited his curiosity about her, and he began the new term with the sense of missing her deeply. Indeed, their first meeting after the vacation had been almost a disappointment, for she was simply a person, with freckles on her face, a few hairs on her top lip, and disappointing too was the satisfaction she was able to give him. As he lay on the bed, later, listening to the running flush of water that preceded her return, his attention was drawn to himself, and to his commitment; he feared that he was allowing himself to be possessed. It seemed to him that he had not been the prime mover in the affair; she gave ground only when she wished, with him following, having no choice, possessing nothing and simply being possessed. And then, with the scrupulous fairness with which he ordered everything, he thought of those long five weeks when he found himself looking for her in places that she could not possibly be, in restaurants and cinemas and trains, sometimes thinking that he had seen her, or sometimes noticing some action that reminded him, in some other person, different except for a smile or a haircut, of her. He knew that he always expected too much and would never be satisfied in this human world; the simple truth was that he would never do better, and his dissatisfaction was painful to him, for it was there in all things and so disorientated him in the world that he wondered if it were psychotic.

Whenever he came, he always began by walking slowly round the room, inspecting its contents, reading the titles of books, as if he had never seen them before, or was trying to reconstruct some experience. She always felt uneasy at this: ‘Sit down and talk to me!’ she would say, and he would sit down in the armchair near the gasfire, and in conversation they would do the same thing, walking around each other, starting again. Only then, when he had smoked several cigarettes and they had talked for a while in a distant, untrusting way, would she come and sit on the floor beside him and take his hand, saying, ‘Well, how are you?’ Then, laying her head upon his lap, she’d throw her arms around him, crying, ‘Oh, oh, why don’t you trust me more?’ ‘What is it, dearest?’ Treece would say; she did not answer. He never quite knew, and he was somehow reassured by these dull cries, this unspoken hint of her need for him; it stirred him each time. He’d put his arm round her shoulder and tilt her head up to kiss her. Then her hand would come round his waist, pull up his jacket and shirt, and run over the warm flesh at the small of his back. Meanwhile, he sat stiffly, while she lay twisted on the floor close to him, her hands running over him. Status-wise, it seemed like sacrilege, but what was so peculiar about Stuart was that he had no status, or could not accept the terms of the one he had. If his helplessness was attractive, for she perceived him to be helpless, it was also not good enough; you couldn’t go on like this, you had to reclaim some pieces of the world for yourself. Why didn’t he learn to cook properly? – at least, that was one way of subduing the objects of the world about him, and objects were an image of the soul. In his view, man had simply no territory to walk on and call his own; there was nothing reclaimed from the jungle.

He was always passive, not easy to excite, and she began to feel that she was artless. She was afraid that he was tired of her, or self-conscious and ashamed, and she blamed herself; she wanted to do what he liked and when he liked. At the same time she knew she was up against something harder and more difficult than this, up against some quality in himself which he only half perceived. Afterwards when he went he seemed to hurry away, as if he carried some positive burden of guilt. ‘What is it?’ she asked. He never really knew; in part it was disappointment, part a desire to escape, part a sense of human mortality. Perhaps too (he began to suspect) he was overtired, or ill, or out of stamina, for the whole world seemed colourless, and not simply times like these.

There were other things that pained Emma. One was that their relationship had simply no cultural life; it existed only in her room and not in the world outside. It had no social quality or face except there, it had no places, no public images. Viola Masefield had begun to invite her to parties, and she had met Tanya, whom she liked; sometimes Treece was at these parties, sometimes not, but there was never anything to show that they were anything other than teacher and student. Viola thought that she was the girlfriend of Louis Bates; indeed, she began to observe in Viola a kind of possessive curiosity about the matter.

‘Don’t you think it’s time you let this Louis Bates business drop?’ demanded Viola one evening.

‘Well, you’re only wasting your time and his. You can’t marry him, can you?’

‘Oh really, Emma,’ said Viola. ‘You aren’t fascinated by his charm, are you?’

‘Well, then, surely it’s that he’s too wrapped up in himself. He just doesn’t understand people; therefore he offers them nothing. Emma, you’re stupid about this, you know. You have this saint complex. You always want to help lame dogs over stiles. You should keep away from people like that. They drag you down. You have to stay away from people who can’t give you anything, or otherwise you destroy your own potential. It sounds cruel, but it’s a truth of existence that everyone accepts.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Viola firmly. ‘Think about it. Surely, vitality of personal relationships is all; it’s all there is. Life is catalysed by knowing interesting people. That’s where the vivid moments come from. And there just isn’t time for bores and fools.’

‘Louis is a fool. I don’t just mean that he does silly things. There’s something entire and complete about his foolishness. He renders things absurd by doing them. He renders you absurd by your interest in him.’

‘But isn’t it just because we can’t take his seriousness seriously? There’s surely nothing wrong in being serious.’

‘That just isn’t the issue, though,’ said Viola. ‘I have nothing against seriousness, or naïveté, or adolescent romanticism, all of which things Bates has. He thinks he’s a latterday Rimbaud, his soul an open sore, and all he wants is a nice, soulful woman to kiss the wound and make it well. For Christ’s sake, what year is it? He carries his soul around in a paper bag as if he’d just bought it at Marks and Spencer’s; but you can’t live like that now. A lot of water has flowed under Robert Bridges since then. I once made the mistake of talking in front of him about William Blake and his wife, reading Paradise Lost naked at the bottom of their garden: and, my God, you could see he was thinking: when can we go and do it?’

‘But I mean, what about Rimbaud and Blake – do you call them fools as well?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Viola. ‘It’s a question of modes of the mind that are fitting. Theirs was an age of the heroic, and ours is an ironic mode. Rare spirits just aren’t our cup of tea, in spite of D. H. Lawrence. Louis is one of these people who want to live so intensely. They want an orgasm every time it rains. Well, really, how would you like to make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic nodality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?’

‘I think you know him a lot better than I thought you did,’ said Emma, ‘but even so, he has nobody. We all think like that. We make a victim of him. You may find this stupid but I respect him.’

‘Yes, so do I, in a perverse sort of way,’ said Viola. ‘I’m full of good things to say about him, though you wouldn’t believe it; he’s sensitive, intelligent, intense, rare . . . but once you’ve said all this, you have to add one more thing, always, and that is to say, he’s a fool.’

‘Well, he needs a friend,’ said Emma. ‘I just don’t want the sexual bit, though; if it weren’t for that, I could be his friend.’

‘You can’t just be friends with a man and stop at that,’ said Viola. ‘There are other emotions involved, always. Friendship between men and women is the stage before courtship; either you go on or you let it drop. When people get to know you they feel deeply about you.’

‘Perhaps people are simply lacking in imagination nowadays,’ said Viola. ‘I don’t know; I think it’s a very good way of getting to know people.’

‘You see, I need men friends, because men are so much more intelligent than women, with ideas I mean, and I respect that. I liked Mr Eborebelosa; he was gentle and warm. I even like Louis Bates. So . . . why is one able to hurt people one likes, so callously?’

‘It’s one of the privileges of being a woman,’ said Viola. ‘One of the very few.’ ‘But I don’t want it, I don’t want that kind of power over people,’ said Emma. ‘It makes me feel like some Belle Dame Sans Merci, who takes love without giving it.’

‘Well, you don’t have to listen to me,’ said Viola. ‘You’re an intelligent woman. And I have no special dispensation on insights.’

And this was the extra dimension of her affair with Stuart, for a guilt about Bates, about Eborebelosa, pervaded all they did. Both knew it. The image of Louis, standing helpless under Viola’s onslaught at the ball, truly at a loss for once and speechless under its violence, was the last sight she had of him for some time. He was, Stuart told her, working very hard, and doing well. All there was beside was a queer, pathetic letter that she could not answer:

Dearest Miss Fielding – I am writing this note as you obviously don’t want to see me. Of course there is no reason why you should. I am not suggesting you are cruel, because you probably don’t realize what sort of person I am, and the effect this has on me. Women do not like a man who is direct with them, I know, but often they blind themselves by romantic ideals to what is important. However. When we parted last term, I went off with a tear in my eye, unable to stop thinking of you. I tried to do some Beowulf, all through Christmas, but it was not any use. My tears were not because you had hurt me, but because I had meant all I said and could not really do without you, and I would have to. It is a stupid phrase of course because one can do without, but there seems no pleasure in going on, for you see when one has thought all one’s life that there is no one of one’s sort, and then there is and that person does not find one her sort as well, that is awful. What is love? Who knows? But whatever it is I have got it. Let us say that one likes some people more than others, perhaps because of some generosity in their view of man, some sensation that in them life is well lived, and one likes the aspects of oneself they bring out. Let us call all this, and the associated comfort and pleasure, love. For this is what I feel.

Will you ever soften? Will you ever let me take you out for a little visit to the cinema, or perhaps you would come up to my room and I will entertain you there. There is not much in the way of cocoa, cakes, etc., but we can talk there and not be disturbed. I would like to talk to you, seriously.

Your friend,

Louis Bates.

It was silly, of course, yet there, amid the stupidities, were such generous compliments and warm appraisals. ‘Some generosity in their view of man, some sensation that in them life is well lived’ – what greater human testimonial could there be in the world than that? If he only knew how awful she was. Yet she had done enough to prove it, to him more than anyone. And a sense of an enormous betrayal came over her as she thought of this phrase, which was her aim and yet showed up, at its cruellest point, her failure. She didn’t show the letter to Stuart but somehow he was still there, between them, and they both knew it. On him their guilts focused, and with him their civilized pretensions – one hoped it was not true, one feared that it was – fell down.

Who was it that always tore pages out of Essays in Criticism? Professor Treece, penetrating into the Senior Common Room for tea, had found the new copy, mutilated as usual. He picked it up and shook it, scarcely able to believe his eyes; the world, he felt, was tumbling to pieces about him; people – people he knew, people he took coffee with, even – were chipping steadily away at its hard, round moral core. Consider the circumstances: the Senior Common Room, entered only by persons of faculty rank; a serious intellectual review, of interest only to highly educated specialists. He was surrounded, it was clear enough, by intellectual crooks and vagabonds, people cultivated enough to teach in a university and read this, yet boorish enough to tear it up before anyone else had read it. That was the thing; the wooden horse was inside their gates; the enemies were within the town he had thought so well protected. Who was it? Any of these somnolent figures, sipping lethargically on their tea, could be the one. The soft, refined, civilized atmosphere of the Common Room suddenly curdled; he looked again at the copy of ‘Bateson’s little effort’, as he was wont to call it, as if he could not believe the mutilation there. Moral decline drifted everywhere around him in the air, like the stench of drains. One could only – the fact had to be faced – suspect a conspiracy, an overall challenge to the moral universe. There was no other way to perceive it.

‘Conspiracy!’ This was the first thought that had come into Treece’s mind when he learned that the University literary society had invited Carey Willoughby, the novelist and critic and . . . well, there was so much; he did everything . . . to lecture to it. Treece had been sitting in his room at the University that morning, under the most normal of circumstances, spraying his bookshelves with insecticide, when there had been a knock at the door and the head of Louis Bates had appeared round the jamb. Treece asked him to sit down, and he advanced into the room and did so genteelly. There was a pleased smile on his face. ‘I wondered whether you had a spare bedroom,’ he said.

‘Mr Willoughby, the novelist, you know, is coming to lecture to us, and he said that you were a friend of his and would probably put him up.’

‘Then it’s his word against mine, isn’t it?’ said Treece rather angrily.

‘You see, frankly, we can’t afford to pay his hotel bill,’ said Bates, ‘because we’ve got so many other speakers coming this season. There’s Eliot coming, and Harold Nicolson, and I don’t suppose he’ll be satisfied with steak and chips and a bottle of Bass.’ Louis Bates was now Chairman of the student literary society, and he was really making a rather good job of it. He had been proposed by Oliver, and since he was Oliver’s candidate he had gone unopposed, for Oliver had no small influence. Apart from one or two unfortunate incidents – a refusal to present a bunch of chrysanthemums to a lady novelist who attacked Shelley, and a fondness for dismissing the rest of his Committee and running things solo – Bates’ régime was passing off very impressively. As Treece had grudgingly to admit to himself, Bates had been clever in obtaining Willoughby, who was fashionable and was on television more often than not.

‘Well, three, actually,’ said Bates. ‘Mr Schenk and Mr Butterfield have got him as a speaker at the Poetry Weekend.’

Treece’s qualms were fully justified. As he had told Bates, he did not know Willoughby personally, though he had heard a great deal about him through the inter-university grapevine; but the process clearly operated in reverse, for the whole point was, to be blunt, that Willoughby, who obviously employed a large body of spies engaged in collecting stories and anecdotes for him to put in his books, had written up a long tale about Treece. He was in there.

After Bates had gone, Treece had gone storming down to see Viola Masefield, who was Treece’s consultant on the younger generation. ‘Do you know this man Carey Willoughby is coming here?’ he demanded.

‘I suppose he’s rather a bright man, but he seems to me unnecessarily malicious. I read his novels.’

‘I thought you didn’t read modern novels,’ said Viola. ‘You should; I’m glad to see we’re converting you.’

‘You are not converting me,’ cried Treece furiously. ‘All the modern novel seems to have discovered since Lawrence is that there are some people in England who change their shirts every day. I knew that already. I don’t need to read modern novels.’

‘Why?’ cried Treece. ‘I read this one because someone said I was in it. And I am. Do you realize that the story about the professor who left the script of one of his articles among some student essays, and another tutor gave it C minus, is about me? Someone must have told this man. Even down to the bit about, “This is good lower second stuff.” It was B minus actually. That makes it worse.’

‘Oh Stuart, don’t fuss so,’ said Viola maternally. ‘You play right into Carey’s hands if you let him know that you think he’s betrayed you. He’d like you to think that.’

‘He’d what?’ shouted Treece. ‘You know, I just don’t understand you people. I don’t understand how he thinks. I don’t understand how you think. I believe you told him that story.’

‘He’s staying at my house,’ cried Treece. ‘I suppose he’s only coming because he’s short of ideas. Why else should he come to a place like this?’

Treece blushed and fired his parting shot: ‘Have you seen his title?’ he cried. ‘What’s that supposed to be? “Contemporary Poetics: Adumbration and Exegesis.” Why doesn’t he just call it “Modern Verse”?’

Treece left and went up to the Common Room, feeling that if he had learned anything about the younger generation, it was not what he wanted to know. Viola had betrayed him, and Willoughby had done his best; and now someone had been at work on Essays in Criticism and stabbed him in the back there too. The ordinary laws of sound human contact were slipping; and the people who were selling out were those within the citadel – one’s own friends, people one invited to one’s home, people who did not destroy aimlessly but with a philosophy of life that comprehended destruction. To Treece, the existence of people, of liberal intellectuals, like himself was infinitely precarious, infinitely unsure, and infinitely precious. The kind of intellectual purity he stood for was a tender blossom that had little or no chance in the bitter winds of the world. Sometimes you could do no more than thank God that there were people such as he was, thought Treece in no spirit of self-congratulation; he simply meant it. But those who live by the liberalism shall perish by the liberalism. Their own lack of intransigence, their inevitable effeteness, betrayed them. Already liberal intellects like his own found themselves on the periphery. The end was coming, as people like him had less and less of a social function, and were driven out into an effete and separate world of their own, to the far edge of alienation. It was on communication that they depended, and the channels were being closed from the other side; and in the tearing up of Essays in Criticism Treece saw the end of the liberal tradition.

He looked about him, and observed that his neighbour in the next armchair was the sociologist Jenkins. He could, he reflected, have lighted on no better person to explain the changing scene to him; Jenkins was supremely au fait with the contemporary world. It was said that Jenkins was so conscious of being in the fifties that, if you asked him what day it was, he would answer: ‘Oh, it’s the nineteen-fifties.’ He was working, he had told Treece a few days before, on discontent, because there was a big market in discontent things just now.

‘It’s a mad, crazy world we live in,’ he observed to him. Jenkins nodded sagely. ‘It’s a bear-garden,’ he said.

‘I suppose one is old,’ said Treece, ‘when one’s surprised at the manifestations of disorder. One comes to the point when one doesn’t want anything else to change, however hard one has fought for change in one’s youth.’

‘Ah,’ said Jenkins, shaking a roguish finger in a very Continental way, ‘you want to have your cake and eat it. Why not, of course? It’s an absurd proverb. I always have my cake and eat it. It’s the only wise thing to do.’ He ate several creamy pastries with great rapidity. ‘You expect too much,’ he said finally, sucking his fingers.

‘I always did,’ said Treece sadly, sinking lower in his chair. Whenever Treece talked to sociologists, and he made a habit of doing so, since he liked having himself explained to himself, from all facets, he always felt in touch with the world of the inevitable, with the great sweeping processes of history. And whenever sociologists talked to Treece (and they made a habit of doing that, because he listened; the sort of people Jenkins respected most were those of whom he could say: ‘So I put a logical argument to him and in the end he actually admitted he was wrong. “You’re right, Jenkins,” he had to confess. “You’ve convinced me.”’) they felt in touch with those strange, unorganized minds that thought they were independent, and could do as they liked, and knew not they were creatures of circumstance.

‘And this education we’re giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that’s what makes it so painful. We’re showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves. That’s what hard-bitten Tories like yourself find so hard to bear.’

‘Ah, but what sort?’ asked Jenkins. ‘The socialist millennium has come at last, and how you hate it. You wish you could send it back and ask for another. The working man has really let you down. You thought he wanted a sturdy, working-class culture, weaving baskets and singing folk-songs. And all he wants is The Lone Ranger.’

‘I suppose I’m becoming the most fantastic old reactionary,’ said Treece, aghast at himself. He did, indeed, believe in privilege. Just as he often liked charming people better than good ones, pretty women better than plain ones, he preferred the intelligent to the fools and wanted them to triumph. And this in turn led him to believe in a kind of inverted privilege; he let himself be charmed by the pathos of the undeserving. There was no answer to the fact that the privileged had the assurance, the persuasive manner, the true gift of tongues; and so one righted the balance by being more than fair to the underprivileged, the Eborebelosas, the Louis Bates.

‘Not really,’ said Jenkins. ‘Indeed, you’re too tolerant. We allow anything, any change, everything except perhaps bad writing. One develops scruples and respect for others to the point at which action for us becomes impossible. And hence standards become obscured. It’s a state of chassis,’ he said, stuffing some papers into his briefcase. ‘A state of chassis.’ He stood up, a dapper little man, looking like a commercial traveller trying to sell his intellectual wares. ‘Do you dance?’ he asked.

‘I wondered if you danced. I have to go and do some field work at the Palais.’

‘Not Versailles,’ said Jenkins. ‘The Palais de Danse. Have you been down there to the rock-and-roll sessions? I go down almost every night.’

‘I must be the only person in town who has never been to the Palais,’ said Treece reflectively. ‘On Saturday nights I seemed to have stayed at home doing my homework until I was about twenty-four. I never seem to have had a culture at all, like Richard Hoggart and all the others. I just stayed at home and worked. And when my father used to draw on the cultural stockpile of the working classes, I just wasn’t there. I was up in my bedroom, working.’

‘Well, then, come along with me,’ said Jenkins. ‘See how the other half lives. More than half, actually. Have a little sociological beano. As you said – with sociology one can do anything and call it work.’ He fingered the buttons on his button-down shirt. He was the only man in the University with buttons on his shirt – it was the full extent of his Americanization.

Treece reflected for a moment; it seemed fully justifiable on academic grounds. ‘Very well,’ he said.

‘Good man,’ said Jenkins. ‘I’ll see you in the snug of the Falcon at seven. Wear something comfortable.’ He opened a small tin, taken from his pocket, and put a throat pastille in his mouth. ‘Pastille?’ he asked politely.

‘Sometimes I think I talk too much,’ he said. ‘It’s compulsive, of course, this pressing urge to interpret one’s surroundings publicly. Sometimes I wish I were a little kitten, starry-eyed and sweetly mystified by the oddities of this world. You know what I mean? Don’t tell Kahnweiler this’ (Kahnweiler was the head of the Department of Psychology). ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ And he disappeared through the door.

‘I feel so tired,’ said Treece. ‘So terribly, terribly, terribly tired.’

‘Terribly interesting. Terribly, terribly, terribly interesting,’ said Treece. ‘But really, don’t you think, isn’t that enough discontent for one night. I don’t think I could drink another drop.’

They had spent a long, long evening looking for discontent. They went first to the Palais. The Palais proved to be terribly respectable. Tea and soda-fountains. No Negroes. The men had all shined up their shoes, and the girls stood at the side holding on to their handbags as if they were, somehow, a physical representation of the virtue they looked determined not to relinquish. They had then gone to a low wine lodge, a great Victorian hall with a central counter, sawdust on the floor, large mirrors of etched glass, a small trio (small, that is, in stature) playing teashop music (‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’), led by an old, old woman with pink hair. The people all seemed misshapen and ugly, sad victims of the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Prostitutes, old and haggard, plied their trade. Treece had been impressed by this one, but Jenkins had not. He had seen most of these people before. ‘They’re nearly all sociologists,’ he said.

They had next gone on to a homosexual bar, the men’s bar in a large hotel, where the barman held your hand as he gave you change, and kept trying on a pair of earrings while he was waiting to give service. Treece liked this one, too.

They had then tried an upper-class cocktail lounge where girls in fur coats sat and drank whisky and ginger. This one Treece didn’t like, so they had gone out and on to another place that was full of old people talking about illness. They had only half a pint this time. After that, if Treece remembered rightly, they had gone on to one or two public houses, of different sorts, until at last time had been called. Jenkins had grown increasingly more depressed as the evening wore on, and he explained that what upset him so much was the sort of people that sociologists had to be objective about. He detested so many of them. He also detested, he explained, most of his fellow sociologists, who were still living spiritually at the LSE of Harold Laski, and sneered at him whenever he wore a suit or drank wine out of the right glasses. He was also concerned about a tattooing survey that the department had undertaken. ‘It’s quite a large-scale project; we have a psychologist who’s working on the reasons that people have for getting themselves tattooed, and then a statistical sociologist who’s working out incidence among class and age groups, and incidence of tattooing among the population as a whole. Then we have an aesthetician, who’s considering the tattoo as a form of popular art . . . like the street ballad. The thing is that I committed myself rather rashly to the suggestion that, as a very high proportion of people in hospital seem to be tattooed, there may be some correlation between tattooing and certain forms of illness. I wanted to have a doctor in the survey. It was then observed that a large percentage of the people in hospital are working class, and that tattooing incidence is highest among that class. I could have cried.’

Treece was feeling distraught, because he had, this evening, done something very naughty: he had had an appointment with Emma, to spend the evening with her, and he had deliberately failed to go. He really did not quite know why; but the opportunity to come out with Jenkins had been seized on quite wilfully; and now he thought of her, waiting, and felt himself a rogue and a cheat. ‘I’m a mess,’ he said, as they walked down the street among the little knots of people from newly closed public houses. ‘I’m a terrible, terrible mess. The world is too much with us.’

‘You mustn’t be maudlin,’ said Jenkins, reasonably (considering his own condition).

‘I suffer from this shameful and useless boredom, this complete exhaustion of personality. How can I explain it to you? I do bad things. I lack the energy to carry through any process I conceive. And when I look at all the people in the modern world, and at the way things are moving . . . then I trust nothing. I simply have no trust or repose anywhere. All is change for the worse.’

‘Well, that’s the lot of people like us. We abstract ourselves from the sphere of national effectiveness. We’re too busy taking notes to do anything. It’s a national as well as a personal trait now. And the fault lies precisely in the things we value most. You aren’t likely to become a Catholic or a communist, and nor am I . . .’

‘Quite,’ said Jenkins. ‘God, no; and Lenin, no. You prefer a good honest Western doubt – with all the personal ineffectiveness and depression that that entails. You presumably think that your position is actually superior . . .’

‘I think it’s terribly terribly superior,’ said Treece. ‘I can see the attractions of either of those disciplines; they’re very obvious. But I think anguished and independent and critical doubt is really more fruitful for the soul.’

‘This isn’t a pub: it’s an espresso bar. It catches all the trade after the pubs close. Once this city used to close down after ten-thirty. Now the espresso bars have added another dimension to provincial time.’

They passed down a side street, and then a side street off a side street, until they were in the factory quarter. Huge buildings stood up silently on either side. ‘What are these places?’ asked Treece.

Treece thought he said whorehouses, and looked at them with interest. They didn’t look like his idea of a cathouse at all. However, it was probably different once you got inside. Suddenly they pulled up short and mounted a dingy wooden stairway, which gave access to a room that appeared to be in complete darkness. ‘Are you sure it’s a brothel?’ asked Treece. ‘It’s an espresso bar,’ said Jenkins. Treece’s eyes, now growing used to the semi-darkness, began to register the scene, and he observed that, sitting at low, oddly shaped – one might say accidentally shaped – tables, were people. They seemed to be an indiscriminate collection. There were people from the University, in great knitted red sweaters. There were also a number of what Jenkins called ‘teds’. All were young. There were girls in duffel coats with black eyelids, protesting, just for the evening. There were exhausted-looking youths in reefer jackets, carrying double basses, with their hair planed down to a thin, grass-like covering on top. They were all sipping frothy coffee in glass cups no bigger than eye-baths. The waitresses were slinky and delectable. Outside, in a little courtyard on the roof, in the rain, a small group of musicians were playing on homemade guitars. Jenkins explained that if Treece was interested in the breakdown of class boundaries the guitarist in the group was actually the Earl of . . . (he named a prominent scion of the English nobility) and the group was called the Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense Skiffle Group. ‘It would be,’ said Treece.

A pervasive atmosphere of chic filled the place. Exotic greenery slouched about the walls, decked with a casual guitar, as if Segovia had only just that moment left; the furniture was ever so very contemporary, for people with no leg below the knee-joint and a short sharp spike for a bottom. The décor mingled styles indiscriminately, and Treece felt in a cultural fog. There was a Spanish mural, an Indian statue, Caribbean vegetation, an Italian coffee machine, American music. A notice on the wall said: ‘Calling all toreadors.’ There was a sort of overall grotto effect; Jenkins claimed that when it opened the proprietor, a Pole named Stanislaus, had, in an excess of enthusiasm, planned to have it flooded to a depth of one foot, and issue people with waders, but had reluctantly abandoned the idea when he realized that you couldn’t do that on the second floor. But if the décor and comparative licence carried one into another world (if only, Treece thought, there had been windows, so that one could make sure the real world was still there) the clientele was very English. ‘It’s like being on the Continong, except you can get a decent cup of tea,’ said Jenkins. ‘The English heaven.’ Within the room, amours and intellectual discussion equally ran their fervent courses. In the corners couples embraced and fondled, stopping just short of actual fulfilment; at a centre table someone was declaring, ‘Well, you can’t make value-judgements about value-judgements, can you?’

‘What mystifies me,’ said Jenkins in a whisper, ‘is where they dug all these people up from. They weren’t about before this place started; and you never see them in the streets. They must come in through the drains.’

‘They’re very new to me,’ said Treece, a naïve Dante being shown through Hell by this strangest of Vergils. ‘Is it always like this?’ The skiffle group were now at work on a number, pertinently called, ‘I was a Big Man Yesterday, but Oh You Ought to See Me Now’.

‘Listen, they’re playing our tune,’ said Jenkins. He went on in an excited sociologist’s whisper, ‘A year ago, two years ago, this seemed like just an ordinary, dull provincial city, with housewives shopping at Dolcis and having coffee in the Kardomah, and going home to their suburb to count the change. You know. But now . . . now it seems full of all sorts of bohemians, political insurgents, masochists, lesbians, men who think they’re Jesus Christ, men who sleep on the radiators in the Public Library. And do you know what’s done it? Italian coffee.’

Behind them the coffee machine kept giving out large, sighing hisses, like a railway engine discharging. It was a plaintive sound. ‘It works without steam,’ said Jenkins. ‘Oh, if only I did.’

‘Why is this special?’ demanded Treece. ‘Why is it necessary to correct the universal misconception that it works with steam?’

The espresso machine, all gilt and fancy lights, with a huge gold eagle on the top, was about the size and shape of a coffin; it was being operated – one might even say played – by a Sikh dressed in his native garb. ‘Cappuccino?’ asked a husky, alluring female voice, high above them. Treece looked up and perceived a very tall and extremely handsome girl, wearing a low-cut sweater and a tiny little apron like a fig-leaf, giving them a well-dentifriced smile. ‘Cappuccino?’ she asked again. Treece felt highly flattered that this should have happened to him. He didn’t intend to let the language barrier be an obstacle to this. ‘Non capisco,’ he said (he’d handled this sort of problem before) ‘Lo scrivere.’ ‘She wants to know if you want black or white coffee,’ said Jenkins. ‘Tell her white,’ said Treece, beaming and nodding at the girl. ‘Two whites,’ said Jenkins. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the girl. ‘She spoke English all the time,’ said Treece indignantly. She arrived back a moment later, bearing the coffee in tiny perspex cups. ‘Two shillings, please,’ she said. ‘It’s terribly expensive, isn’t it?’ Treece said when she had gone. ‘Do they sprinkle gold dust on it?’ ‘You aren’t paying for the coffee,’ said Jenkins. ‘You’re paying for the atmosphere, the sniff you got at her Chanel Number Five. You pay to look down the fronts of their dresses. They always have such nice waitresses.’

‘But can people really afford a shilling for a cup of coffee?’ asked Treece.

‘Well, look,’ said Jenkins, and gestured around. It was true that the place was so packed that, had the people been animals, it would have been banned by the RSPCA. ‘It’s the new idle rich, you see, the young.’

‘I see,’ said Treece. ‘Are you supposed to lift the cup from down there with your feet?’

‘The waitresses are aristos. They only go out with top people, the mews cottage boys. You have to own a horse to get off with them. It’s a special kind of girl, you see. They bat their long, silky legs at you, but if their sex dropped off and you handed it back to them they wouldn’t know what it was. You get my point. They’ve never really looked down in all their lives; they know someone’s going to open all the doors, move all the stones out of their path, get the car waiting. This too makes the angry young men even angrier. They hate to see the sort of rats that get girls like this. They want them themselves. But if they get saddled with one, all hell breaks loose.’ Jenkins thought all this very funny and laughed loudly. He sang: ‘So I took her into bed and I covered up her head, just to shield her from the doggy, doggy few.’

It was a long time since Treece had been so conscious of the English class system. He had supposed it had been quite subverted by the new post-war system of rewards; but it certainly didn’t confuse Jenkins. ‘Don’t you ever feel doubtful of your categories?’ he asked Jenkins suspiciously.

‘Well, I’m speaking ex cathedra, of course,’ said Jenkins, wiping milky froth from his lips, ‘and I wouldn’t want you to quote me, but it does bear some relation to reality, don’t you think?’

‘Middle-class youth reacting against the cultural barrenness of the suburbs. Coming to the town to seek a cultural centre . . .’

Across the room Treece suddenly noticed Walter Oliver, sitting in the midst of a rather strange and tattered group of apparent bohemians. ‘That’s the Gang,’ said Jenkins. ‘All pseudo-writers, pseudo-painters, pseudo-philosophers, who take over all the paraphernalia of bohemianism, but rarely actually produce anything. What I admire is their dedication. They really mean to do something. But those who do always seem to break away.’

‘Well, you’re one,’ said Jenkins. ‘You know how steamers come into port, and are unloaded, and then sail off again. This is one of the ways that these people live. They unload you and you sail off. Be careful.’

‘Ah, you finally came,’ said Oliver when they had crossed to the other table. ‘Good evening, Herr Jenkins.’ He looked back at Treece and said: ‘If you’ve got some cigarettes, I’ve got some matches.’ Treece produced a packet of cigarettes and Oliver took it and handed it round the group. ‘That’s what’s known as buying in,’ said Oliver.

‘I’m stuck,’ said Oliver. ‘I’d just finished the dedication and then I didn’t seem to know what to say next.’

‘Oh no, I’m finished, written out,’ said Oliver urbanely. ‘I’m so finished it just isn’t true. I’m one of the derrière garde. It’s a new twist. Hey, I thought of something interesting the other day. Do you realize that the title The Holy Bible is probably out of copyright?’

‘Well, you could probably use it again for something else,’ said Oliver. He belched. Oliver had spitting friends, belching friends, and farting friends; that is, he rated people by how natural he was prepared to be in their presence. It was very hard to get to be one of Oliver’s farting friends. He didn’t take easily to people. He had no time for people who seemed to him to be fribbles. He demanded the strictest standards of conduct. He had really warmed to Treece and Jenkins.

‘It’s . . . well-typed,’ said Oliver. ‘And it’s got me in it.’ ‘You recommend it, then?’ asked Treece. ‘It’s one of these knee-stroking novels,’ said Oliver. ‘What are they?’ asked Treece. ‘Oh you know, all pale young working-class men, reading Shelley to one another and saying, “Art thou pale for weariness?” and girls who softly stroke their own knees and say, “You know, you’re a very strange person.”’

At Treece’s other side sat a man who wore on his upper half only a dirty vest, buttoned up to the neck. He now put on sunglasses. ‘Can’t bear the light,’ he said in Treece’s ear. ‘Have to stay in all day and sleep. Then they come and fetch me and bring me out at night. Want to buy a cello?’

‘I’d come round and play it for you then,’ said the man. ‘You buy it and I’ll come every night and play it. Where do you live?’

The man reached out and took up a cello case and, opening it, he twanged the instrument. ‘Just listen at that tone,’ he said proudly. ‘Terrible, i’n’ it?’ ‘Put it away,’ said another man. ‘Bloody thing, who’d be stupid enough to buy a thing like that?’

‘This fella here,’ said the man with the cello gesturing towards Treece. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘You lay off him,’ said Oliver roughly. ‘He’s my friend.’ He turned to Treece and said: ‘Don’t you buy anything off them, anything, no matter how good it looks.’

‘Good,’ said the man, who, Treece, saw more clearly, was only about twenty-three or twenty-four. ‘Will you read some poems of mine? You won’t understand them, but you might be able to get them published. Here, buy me a cup of coffee, will you?’ He called over the waitress. ‘Two cups of froth, please, Rita?’

‘He has,’ said the man, and, turning to Treece again, he asked politely: ‘Read much?’

‘You see this belt,’ said Walter Oliver on the other side of him, opening his jacket and taking off a leather belt. ‘It was made by the Prince of Wales’s bootmaker. Of course, the day we’re all waiting for is the one when the Prince of Wales claims his boots are made by Walter Oliver’s belt-maker.’

‘Is there a Prince of Wales?’ demanded Jenkins. Nobody knew. ‘That’s an interesting index of our sense of democratic responsibility,’ said Jenkins brightly. People were now beginning to wonder whether Treece and Jenkins were not completely insufferable.

‘I’m an anti-monarchist,’ said the man next to Treece showily. ‘Why?’ demanded Treece. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it’s such a waste of money.’ ‘If they substituted anything else, it would be equally expensive,’ said Treece. ‘Well, perhaps I’m a monarchist after all,’ said the man. ‘It doesn’t matter to me.’

‘I can forgive the monarchy everything except Annigoni,’ said a man who painted: you could tell he did; the paint was all over his clothes.

‘Of course, monarchy gives cachet to the class system and the nobility,’ said Jenkins.

‘America is,’ said Jenkins. ‘America is constantly in flux, and laid open to alteration. We really aren’t. Of course, in time we will be, because we’re only too likely to reproduce America’s experiences, thirty years later.’ Most of those present were communists, and they took this rather hard, hearing America praised. To some it was the first time it had happened. They responded violently and pointed out that at least England had the Welfare State. But, as Jenkins pointed out, they themselves were waifs from the Welfare State; they refused to have their names written down, and didn’t pay Health Insurance, and the Army somehow never got to know of their existence. ‘That’s the trouble with the Welfare State,’ said the man next to Treece. ‘They want everyone in. Of course, you can stay out if you’re clever. But one of the great injustices of our time is this: supposing you’re married, and you want to leave your wife, like I did, and disappear. Now you’d think in any sensibly run society a man could do that. But you try it and see what happens. It’s impossible to change your bloody name any more. If you get stuck and have to work, you need a bloody card from your last employer. The income tax is after you. That’s what started me off like this. I was quite willing to work then. I hadn’t discovered my genius. But my point is this: tramps are necessary. Avenues of escape are essential. So why doesn’t the Welfare State pay tramps to go on being tramps, instead of trying to find ’em work? What’s all this about work? People don’t realize how important tramps are. They challenge the assumption that you’ve got to be housed and propertied and well-dressed to live in the modern world. I could be like that if I wanted. I was the best pork-butcher in Ilkeston. I outclassed everybody. But I don’t choose. This is what I chose, the hard way. I read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and I realized I was something more than a butcher. I saw the light. Let me tell you my story. I think it’s without exception the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard . . .’

But Oliver interrupted. ‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said, ‘how working-class intellectuals thrive on Nietzsche? They all do. It’s the power complex. They’re all supermen. They all think they’re Jesus Christ risen again. They all want to change the world. Sometimes I just want to run away and keep bees. I get tired of the manifold voices of truth buzzing in my ears . . .’

‘There’s only one way to shut that fellow up,’ said the cellist, spiteful because of the interruption, ‘and that’s tell him he looks ill.’ He addressed himself to Oliver: ‘Do you feel all right?’ he asked him. ‘Your face has gone yellow.’

‘Much remains to be told,’ went on the cellist, turning back to Treece. ‘I realized, as I said, that I was a genius. It explains so much. Why did people despise me? Why was I so alone? Actually I wasn’t actually alone. I was living with this Negress, a huge creature she was, with breasts so high up she could rest her chin between them, but spiritually I was alone, and ununderstood. I read Henry Miller. I saw that I was a rebel. Of course, rebels are never loved. You’ve heard of Rimbaud, Baudelaire? I was of that ilk. However, as it happened, it isn’t love us rebels want; it’s money. There should be a levy for rebels and poets. Every time those people sit down in their cosy armchairs at the telly they should be made to drop a shilling in a box for rebels.’

Treece sat there, with his washed hair and thin fingers, and asked himself: What can you do? The coffee machine hissed savagely at him. He wanted to escape from the place. He felt like a useless butterfly. The ground began to open beneath his feet; he found himself dispossessed, as if he were alone in a big city, circulating among hostile formations of passers-by. He wanted to see Emma. Dejection seeped like sludge into his spirits as the cellist went on uttering his history into his ear. The crowds in the coffee bar seemed all at once to be the busy world about him, the people who were in on things, the people with jobs, the people with a sense of mission. Their lives were full of matter; they were in the class system; they were social functionaries. He alone did not feel a part of Jenkins’s schemes and overall patterns; he was an alien in the universe; while everyone else’s blazer and moustache were class symbols, it seemed to him that his hat was just a hat, his suit an ordinary unsocial suit and his tie an innocent, uncommitted tie. He felt alone, he felt as if he had no tenure in the world, as if every moment came to him, alone of men, unexpectedly. He felt that he wanted not just to be with Emma, but more: to be involved with her, to be in love with her, to be a social group of two. And he suddenly wished that Emma was here, to be turned to.

He decided to go. Jenkins seemed happy enough in this company, and so Treece went alone. He walked down to the market place to get a taxi. A crowd was gathered there, among the deserted stalls; a fight was going on. Several teddy boys had set upon a man who was on the ground at the centre of the milling group. The assailants jostled their way through the crowd and trotted off down a side street. A moment later, as if at a signal, two policemen appeared and scattered the crowd. ‘Always too late, aren’t you?’ cried a little man. ‘Always stay out of the way until it’s over. That’s the cops every time.’ ‘I’ll have you inside if you don’t watch it,’ said the policeman. He advanced towards Treece. The victim was being helped to his feet, and Treece saw, with a sudden shock of shame – as if his own shame for not intervening weren’t enough – that the face was black, and belonged to Mr Eborebelosa. His hands were cut with knife wounds and he had a pain in his shoulder. He saw Treece with surprise. The attack had been a motiveless one, by youths out nigger-hunting, and he couldn’t quite understand what had happened to him. Treece took him up to the hospital in a taxi and then, when his broken collarbone had been set, took him to his home. He said little. It seemed useless to apologize; yet he knew he could, had he dared, have intervened, and he did not know how to forgive himself. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Eborebelosa, back at his digs. ‘Thank you,’ said Treece.