Error of Judgment

by Roy Lewis

  ‘And in the polytechnics, people like you.’

  She hesitated, looking at him soberly for a moment, and then she nodded.

  ‘I think so.’

  West sighed and shifted his bulk into a more comfortable position.

  ‘To some extent you’re right. If academic authority had been kinder to younger staff, I’m sure the outbreaks of student violence during the last two years would not have been so strong. But you know, I tend to look at it all with a jaundiced eye. I’ve seen it all before. The situation is no different now from twenty, forty, a hundred years ago. The lessons of revolutionary tyrannies throughout history tend to be brushed aside. Our student radicals don’t remember Stalinism, the Hungarian Revolt, they may not even remember the Bay of Pigs and Dominica. But our radicals do see communists as victims, never as executioners. And they look to Che Guevara because he means improvisation, excitement, permanent revolution, the automatic destruction of an incipient organization.’ He smiled, and glanced apologetically at Joan Lambert, listening quietly. ‘Still, I’m sure you don’t really want to spend your time sitting here listening to the views of a man of fifty-eight; at my time of life one doesn’t see or feel the same burning desires for revolution as anything other than a vast expanse of hot air. You’ll want to get to your meeting.’

  Joan glanced at her watch and nodded.

  ‘I shall have to fly, in fact; my husband’s got the car this evening and he’s at the college with an evening class; this means I have to take the bus. They’re holding the meeting at Deercliffe Hall. So I’d better be on my way; it’ll take an age to get across town.’

  ‘I’m pleased you called, Mrs Lambert.’

  ‘I’m only sorry it had to be such a flying visit. But I’m glad you’re looking so well; I look forward to seeing you back at work but not too soon, eh? Goodbye for now, Mr West.’

  On a sudden impulse she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. When she walked out of the ward she glanced back and waved and she saw that he was touching his cheek with his fingers. She had never seen anyone looking so sad.

  She had to run for the bus; she caught sight of it as she came out of the hospital gates and the bus stop was some sixty or seventy yards up the street. The conductor was a young man, however, and was only too pleased to hold the bus until she arrived, breathlessly. He took the opportunity to hold her arm, helping her aboard. She wasn’t in the least surprised that when he released her his hand brushed firmly against her breast.

  She sat down, fighting to regain her breath. It was a heavy evening, with storm clouds piling up, darkening the sky, and as they passed under the railway bridge the interior of the bus was quite dim. She caught her reflection in the window; her fair hair curled across her forehead, somewhat windblown. She also saw the reflection of the man across the gangway, staring at her, noting the line of her neck, the swell of her breast. In a moment he’d get to her legs and she tucked them back under the seat. They were her least attractive asset anyway, and she was woman enough to resent his leering but ensure that he saw only her better points.

  There had been a time when Bill, her husband, had laughed about her legs. There had been a time when Bill had laughed. He didn’t these days; not when she was around. Just where was it, the old feeling of fun and excitement that they’d felt in each other’s company? Had it become eroded during the three years they’d been man and wife, by the fact of their working together in the same establishment? Or was it simply that it had been part of the general corrosion of their marriage, where they saw less and less of each other, took fewer opportunities to be together, expanded their own personal interests and ignored the mutual pleasures they’d once enjoyed.

  Even the basic mutual pleasure.

  Perhaps it had been her fault. But she didn’t think so. The honeymoon had been a disaster and Bill had been clumsy, brutal almost in his insistence. Even so, that was no excuse. In two years she should have been able to uncurl, defrost her emotions, enjoy sexual relations as she understood they should be enjoyed. It was a laugh, really; a sociologist, an observer of social mores, a commentator upon taboos, and desires, and motivations, and social institutions, she was all of these and yet the one basic institution to which she belonged was crumbling and the one basic desire she should enjoy was repulsive to her. Marriage and sex, disasters both.

  Time to get off the bus.

  In every sense, she thought grimly to herself as she walked down the street towards Deercliffe Hall. Students trickled in through the wide doors ahead of her and she dawdled for a few minutes on the steps; she didn’t want to take up a too prominent position in the hall, otherwise her presence might become too obvious, and wrongful inferences drawn. She also wanted to choose her own spot at the back of the hall, where she could see everything that was going on — and avoid being too near any of her own students, who had made enough leering promises in the classroom to cause her to proceed with caution outside it. It was the penalty she paid for being five feet three inches tall and built upon lines which, she candidly admitted to herself, could easily become of a type described as overblown by the time she was thirty if she didn’t take care of her figure. She intended taking care of her figure. And she intended to take care of her chastity.

  Joan Lambert might look the roll-in-the-hay type but she wasn’t. And that was that.

  Someone was already speaking on the platform by the time she entered the hall as unobtrusively as possible. She found a chair for herself near the back, on the left-hand side, and sat down. There were about two hundred students present; it was a good turnout and she was somewhat surprised: militancy must be in the air, for this comprised a tenth of the student population. The young man on the platform was red of face and hair. He was punching a fist in the air to emphasize the points he was making. She recognized him, a young man called Rhodes, a member of the student committee, and a character who saw himself as an emergent revolutionary.

  ‘Attempts to give workers a voice in administration are just subtle techniques by which tyranny hides its face and lulls its victims into a sense of euphoria in unhappiness. Technology cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put; the technological society is a system of domination which operates in the concept and construction of techniques. Technology cannot, therefore, be neutral.’

  Joan smiled. Old hat; Neufeld had said it before him. But then, what hadn’t been said before? She let her attention wander and stared about her. There was the usual motley collection of outlandish clothing, the usual unwashed females with wild, frizzed-out hair. She wondered what they felt they achieved by it: perhaps radical appearances were the new conformity for radical viewpoints. A question of drawing attention.

  Rhodes had relinquished the microphone.

  A succession of other, less fluent speakers followed, each shouting their own particular brand of anarchy. It was all so conventional, all so flattening. Joan began to wish that she hadn’t come. There had been little else to do, on the other hand; she’d already ironed Bill’s shirt for tomorrow, and he had a clean pair of socks on today. Her lessons were prepared and though she could have spent a little time on her notes for the lecture on the Family she supposed there had been little harm . . .

  Her attention was directed back towards the platform. Something was happening in the hall. The young man behind the microphone was still talking, still struggling to retain the attention of his audience but it was a lost cause. Ripples ran through the front rows, murmurs of excitement and heads began to turn. A few voices rose, and some feet thumped on the floor. The few, straggling feet became a thunder that spread throughout the hall and became rhythmic, swelling violently to a crescendo and backed by a punctuation of hand clapping, urgent, insistent, demanding. At first she couldn’t catch the chanting slogan, couldn’t pick up the words.

  Word.

  Just one word, one word repeated, over and over. A magic word, a word of compulsion, and excitement. A word, a name.

  ‘SAD-RUDD-IN!! SAD-RUDD-IN!’r />
  The mindless, primitive sound rolled around the hall, echoed in confused eddies from the walls, pounded in the eardrums and it was like a drug in its effect. Joan felt the physical excitement of the name, became aware of something happening to her legs and her stomach and her chest and she sat up straight, craning to see the platform, and the name changed to a roar, a sweeping sound, animal in its intonation.

  He was there, standing up. One clenched fist was raised. Sadruddin.

  She had seen him before, on a number of occasions, but she’d never spoken to him. She had seen the way girls looked at him at the college; she had seen the little entourage which followed him, dogging his footsteps. He was Sadruddin, the firebrand, the student leader, the spokesman for the radical mass, the left-wingers, and the progressives.

  For her his emergence upon the platform was a sociological revelation. She had watched student disturbances, and student debates; she had observed their formlessness, the swirling incongruity of their ideas, their slogan-chanting, their opposition to freedom of speech, the incompatibility of splinter groups aiming for the same goal. She had seen logic shouted down, common sense derided; she had seen the death of debate and the phoenix of mass violence arising from its immolation.

  Always, hero-worship had been out.

  The individuals had existed but they had always fought through spattering abuse, the expulsion of hecklers, the hurling of verbal stones. It had always been a case of the strongest conquering; the group with the greatest support won through by virtue of that support. But it wasn’t that way here. Sadruddin was alone. There were no splinter groups. There was no heckling, no verbal abuse, no chanting of slogans.

  They listened. They all listened. And they roared on those occasions when they were invited to roar. They applauded when called upon to applaud. They bayed like dogs when the quarry was pointed out.

  ‘We all know marching doesn’t achieve anything. We all know the sit-in gets us nowhere. People still get burned with napalm and germ warfare still flourishes because of the insensitivity of tiny administrative minds. But throw paint over a politician, get the action condemned by the Student Union, that receives attention from everyone and the columns of coverage in the newspapers, the hours the broadcasting authorities devote to discuss the phenomenon of student violence, all show us the way to power!’

  He was saying little that was new; his words were words that had been used everywhere, for years. But the way he said them held his audiences captive and more: it sent nervous ripples of enthusiasm shuddering through the serried ranks of students. It electrified the atmosphere. He stood there, slight, dark, his teeth flashing white against his skin and she recognized the animal attraction he exuded in his deep, stabbing voice.

  ‘The student body is an elite — the role of this elite is quite different from that of the revolutionary vanguard in traditional communism. Its role is to agitate and provoke the system until it reveals its true repressive and totalitarian nature. It will do this, eventually, by unleashing the police. Here, at this college, it came near to it yesterday. But the time for us was not ripe. When it is, when we provoke to the proper degree, then will these forces be unleashed against us and that very action will awaken more and more people, who will see that they are being hoodwinked and manipulated. Only in this way will there at last arise a spontaneous revolution.’

  He was propounding a traditional philosophical justification for the deliberate provocation of the police and yet his audience was accepting his propositions with delight, with howling applause as though he delivered wisdom from heaven. Groups rose to their feet shaking their hands above their heads, calling to their new apostle.

  A man with dark, shining hair swept back; a man whose white shirt, carelessly rolled back from his wrists, was open to the waist and stained with sweat, whose faded blue slacks clung to his thighs and calves, outlining them against the black cloth of the dais, whose rope sandals stamped against the boards with the vehemence of his words.

  He was holding out his arms for silence, and it fell, suddenly and completely. There was an inexplicable tension in the room as Sadruddin stood there, and slowly drew from the pocket of his jeans a folded sheet of paper. His voice was low now, and his audience strained to catch his words.

  ‘But all this is overshadowed by a new danger — and the evidence is here in my hand. Here — here I have proof that the administration of Burton has become so enmeshed with the power politics of the consumer capitalist society that it is actively twisting the purpose of the polytechnic and threatening its integrity. as an academic institution. The academic body itself is exhibiting a mere accommodation to the system — either that, or it is paralysed by fear of loss of employment.’

  He waved the paper and a dangerous rumbling came from his audience, as he demanded action of them.

  ‘They will say there is an organized conspiracy behind us, throughout the world, but they are blind. Do they not see we are simply all affected by the same issues? War in Vietnam, racial discrimination, consensus politics, an overstrained educational system; all these, and now, here, the attempted manipulation of academic administration and the prostitution of academic integrity by the forces of big business.’

  Magnetism; a sheer animal magnetism and it stamped the hall into fervour, an unquestioning, roaring fervour that was almost frightening. She had seen old pre-war films of similar situations, on a larger scale, but film could not convey the physical side of it all, the sheer twisting of the stomach, the quivering of the thighs.

  Her thighs were quivering too, as she stared at Sadruddin.

  And suddenly it was over. The noise became fragmented, hands were raised and counted, a roar came for a vote, men swarmed to the platform, a few shrieks from over-excited females caused laughter and more shouting, and then students were jostling their way out of the entrance. Joan Lambert left her chair and stood against the wall. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She stood there quietly and waited, and the crowd thinned. No one took any notice of her. Until the last small group came up, the platform group, eight men and one woman talking and laughing. Joan Lambert stepped back into the shadow of a pillar but one pair of eyes saw her, dark, predatory eyes.

  Then they had gone, and she was alone in Deercliffe Hall with the fetid air and the litter of paper and in a few minutes the caretakers would be around, sweeping up, putting out the lights. She walked slowly towards the door.

  He was standing just outside, at the top of the steps. He was alone. ‘Mrs Lambert?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘You know my name.’

  ‘You know mine.’

  ‘I could hardly fail to do so, the way it’s been shouted tonight.’

  ‘I suspect you knew it before. As I’ve known yours. I’ve seen you at the college; I asked your name.’

  Her legs were quivering and her stomach muscles jumped spasmodically. She lowered her head, as though to hide her eyes from him. He put out a hand.

  ‘This way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have to travel across town. The buses will be full this evening, all the students returning home. They might even be somewhat boisterous. I’m offering you a lift.’

  He smiled as he said it and he took her hand. She could not be sure that she didn’t offer it. They were walking down the steps. She tried to overcome her nervousness by laughing at it.

  ‘You have a car? That’s a bourgeois possession for a radical like you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Everyone must accept the modern world, take it for what it is, reject some of its values — but the horseless carriage, now, that’s a necessity.’

  It was an old car, and the passenger seat sagged. She laughed again but her thighs were still quivering.

  They drove across town and she was aware of the sheen of his dark arm under the lights of the street lamps, the curve of his muscled thigh as it almost touched hers. She tried to use words and thoughts to overcome her shaking body.

  ‘I can’t say that y
our ideas on the platform were world-shattering in their originality.’

  ‘Truth is as old as the sun.’

  ‘And to advocate violence — what’s that got to do with the democratization of academic committees at Burton?’

  ‘A quick end to discussion. That’s all. I believe there is a natural right of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extra-legal means if the legal ones have proved inadequate. If we use violence we do not start a new chain of violence; we simply try to break one already established.’

  ‘Marcuse already said that in his Repressive Tolerance. ‘

  ‘Does reiteration make it any less the truth?’

  She made no reply. They had been driving west and had left the street lights behind. He had moved away from the town and the road was narrowing. This was not the way to her home, but she made no reference to this. Instead, she asked him about the paper he had waved to the meeting.

  ‘It’s a letter, written to the rector, by someone in the employ of Sir Humphrey Elliot.’

  ‘The engineering magnate?’

  ‘Right. He’s reporting to the rector on various matters arising in a speech I gave last month.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why should a businessman employ—’

  ‘A spy?’ Sadruddin sneered. ‘You know Dr Peters has planned his polytechnic to be a “forward-looking institution” with close ties with industry and commerce, employing advanced methods of business management. Look at the Chairs that Sir Humphrey has endowed. No doubt he wants to ensure that his money is well spent.’

  ‘That’s what you meant in your speech about business interests destroying academic integrity?’

  ‘Yes. And since you people won’t act, it’s up to the students to defend the intellectual integrity of the college.’