On the Heroism of Mortals

by Allan Cameron

  Lord Hexham was already in the car park when Chomley caught up with him, a little out of breath and suddenly a little embarrassed in his lordship’s presence. “Lord Hexham, James,” he puffed, “you must excuse me, but I didn’t want to let you go without having a word. So good of you to come.”

  Hexham, who was already stooping to get into his car, straightened up and examined the speaker he’d been listening to for an hour, as though he didn’t know him.

  “So very good of you to come. Really,” stammered the ex-prize-fighter.

  “Chomley,” Hexham smiled, now the hierarchy of their relationship had been established, “good speech.”

  “Really?” asked Chomley brightly. “So good of you to say so. You know how much I value your opinion. I couldn’t believe it when I saw you. I just had to speak to you.” He didn’t appear to have finished, but he had run out of words.

  “Chomley, what can I do for you?” said the other.

  “Well, why don’t we go for a meal?”

  “Hasn’t the rector organised something for you?”

  “Oh yes, there is an official dinner,” Chomley said grandly. “But I’d prefer to have lunch with you. I know a really good restaurant.”

  If Hexham was flattered, he showed no sign of it. “Well, I don’t see why not.”

  “Oh James, that’s very good of you. I know you’re such a busy man.”

  “Yes, so it’ll have to be a short one.”

  “Of course.”

  As soon as the two men had sat down in the restaurant and ordered their meal, Chomley was keen to start. He was like a student at his viva, only he was asking the questions to impress rather than answering them. “So what do think of this business about building another university chapel? You’d think there were enough of them already.”

  Hexham looked uninterested and sipped his wine. “Just nonsense,” he said eventually.

  “And how about these people who say that there’s no conflict between science and religion?”

  “Do they?”

  “Yes, you know. Science tells us who we are and religion tells us what we’re for. That kind of rubbish.”

  “Exactly. Rubbish. Why should we be for anything? We’re the products of evolution – or in other words, the products of our own desires. At this very moment, I’m for a damn good meal.”

  Chomley laughed too much, while Hexham ignored him and sipped his wine like a man who has just delivered the final word on a subject.

  “A damn good meal” – well, that sums up very well what life is for in the cruder forms of materialist philosophy. The trouble with the scientific approach is that it’s right about the material world, but dumb when it comes to the areas it cannot deal with, particularly the riddle of consciousness, the “ghost in the machine”: intellectual conversations between Hexham and Chomley never get past guffawing and caricature.

  There was silence for a bit and then Hexham said, “Got any children, Chomley?”

  “No, I’m not married,” came the reply. Chomley had a curiously dated sexual morality for a modern man – almost that of a fifties vicar.

  “Come come, Chomley, think about your genes.”

  Chomley was not enjoying the conversation: “Never met the right woman, I suppose.”

  “Children, not all they’re cracked up to be,” said the lord. “The instinct might be good for the species, but they’re a pain in the arse when it comes to bringing them up.”

  “James, I’m sure you don’t mean that.” Chomley, on the other hand, knew very well that Hexham had an only son of twenty-two who had just graduated at Oxford with a first-class degree in modern languages – French, Russian and Arabic.

  “My son,” Lord Hexham said, while fighting with a slice of beef that would not yield, “is such a fool. He could have taken his Arabic studies further for his Ph.D. It’s a growth industry, I told him – anti-terrorism studies and all that. You’ll get the ear of the powerful. You’ll get rich. Do you know what he said?”

  “It’s terrible that youth won’t listen. We were the same, I suppose,” Dick glowed at his own modesty and self-knowledge. “What did he say?”

  “He said he liked the idea of Arabic – but only to investigate the works of some thirteenth-century Sufi poet nobody has ever heard of; unfortunately his great love was Pushkin and he was determined to do a Ph.D. on some of his minor works.”

  “No chance of anti-terrorism studies there,” Chomley smiled, “no peaceful career in the diplomatic service. What a waste of talent, eh? Bad luck, we all have to put up with a bit of that. He might come right later.”

  “Pushkin was part negro,” Lord Hexham said, as though this was relevant.

  Chomley, who was a little more politically correct, blushed and momentarily lost his smile. “The liberal establishment,” he started off on another tack, “are to blame; they have always oversold the arts and humanities, while belittling the scientific community. That’s why your son didn’t know where to take his linguistic talents.”

  Lord Hexham looked at him blankly, and he was not a man to be sidetracked by dull and specious arguments. “Of course, he’s a deviant anyway.”

  Chomley froze and wondered if anyone could overhear. “Deviant?” he whispered.

  “Yes, deviant,” Lord Hexham boomed. “Homosexual, queer… as bent as a nine-bob note… or whatever you want to call it.”

  Chomley was now very uncomfortable. “I didn’t know your son was gay.”

  “Gay? Gay? There’s nothing particularly gay about being a nancy-boy.”

  Chomley looked around in terror. This was a smart restaurant in Oxford, not a gentleman’s club. Hexham had never had a sense of place or decorum. Was there a gene for decorum? Even though his lordship was renowned for being outspoken, Chomley decided to take a stand. But he did so hesitantly, because he valued the lord’s friendship and the doors it could open – not to mention the fearsome aggression the man exuded quite naturally, as though his genes had been modified by those of a rhinoceros. “Nowadays, we don’t …”

  “Nowadays,” Hexham roared, “nowadays? I don’t care a damn about nowadays. Science hasn’t got anything to do with passing fads. Christ, man, you’re all theory and no practice. Aren’t you the one banging on about how we need to pass on our genes? That’s the motivation of all we do. Well, not much chance of that in the case of my gay son. And he didn’t get it from me, I can tell you that. My wife is – always was – a little androgynous, you know. Not her fault, and she always supported me in everything, so I don’t criticise her too much.”

  “Quite right,” said Chomley stupidly – suffering for his stupidity the moment it spilt out.

  “Of course,” his lordship continued unperturbed, the idea his conversation could cause offence never having occurred to him, “I do have a son who’ll continue the paternal line.” He paused to smile, revealing the importance this fact held within his mind.

  “Another son?”

  “Yes, yes,” Hexham seemed to awaken from a pleasant reverie, “wrong side of the blanket, you know.”

  Chomley didn’t. In part he was flattered that his lordship wanted to open up, and in part he was terrified by the insaneness of his fellow diner’s stream of consciousness. “Really,” he stammered.

  “Yes,” Hexham seemed to be speaking to no one in particular, “he lives on what can only be called a sink estate – with his mother, a hellish woman who has poisoned the boy against me. For Christ’s sake, I forked out enough money over the years – enough to buy a second home somewhere, but they just stay put and piss it against the wall. The money was supposed to keep her quiet, but then she turned up at our door two months ago, screaming and shouting.”

  “Life is quite complicated,” said Chomley in the manner of a child who has just been told that Father Christmas doesn’t exist.

  “Bloody right! At least my one is – can’t speak for anyone else.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear this, Jim,” Chomley adopted a quiet confident
ial tone and daringly shifted from “James” to the more familiar “Jim”.

  “I don’t want your pity, Chomley,” his lordship retorted irritably.

  Chomley was beginning to regret pursuing Hexham across the car park in order to buy him lunch, when a sumptuous lunch was offered him by the university authorities where he would have been the guest of honour. He might also have asked himself why he did it, and the answer is far from obvious: about as imponderable as the existence of God, for which the arguments against each of the opposing hypotheses are equally strong, and arguments for each of them equally weak. Actually not quite as imponderable as that, but still imponderable. Why would a man abandon comfort and praise to seek the company of a man who treats him with disdain? He certainly got no financial gain out of this transaction, quite the opposite. He had foregone good food someone else paid for to get good food for which he would have to pay all his royalties from a small Latin-American country. Was he in love with Hexham or at least sexually attracted to him? Now I know that many of us believe that ultimately all our actions are governed by sex, though not necessarily reproductive sex – enjoyable sex with the least chance of reproduction, whatever the biological drives. I don’t really know what Chomley’s sexual proclivities are.

  What do you mean, that’s not good enough? You feel you really ought to know? What is this modern obsession with knowing what people get up to in bed? Clearly you, dear reader, are one of those who believe that sex trumps everything else.

  Well I would tell you, if it sounded at all interesting, but, it seems, Chomley’s sexual drive is so weak that even the omniscient narrator cannot detect it. Suffice it to say that it does not appear to be the motivation that sent him rushing madly out of the lecture hall to collar his lordship. Did he do it because he wanted the man’s assistance to further his career? Surely not. His career is made, and there are many others perfectly willing to assist him further. Success breeds success, almost by itself, and does not require Chomley’s erratic behaviour to sustain it.

  We’re almost convinced that Chomley’s behaviour is not based on any motivation at all, and that makes him appear endearingly eccentric. We love an eccentric precisely because eccentrics undermine the kind of arguments put forward by people like Chomley. There remains however one final doubt: what if Chomley pursues Hexham, because Hexham disdains him and does so with a certain panache that Chomley cannot accept. Chomley is intelligent enough to see that there is no evidence that Hexham will change his ways, and that very probably Hexham treats absolutely everybody with the same disdain. There is nothing rational about Chomley’s behaviour, and the trigger may well reside in his unconscious, but I think we can now put our finger on it. For Chomley, Hexham is a challenge, and human beings love a challenge, which is odd because it almost always involves putting our lives and therefore our sexual organs at some small or great risk. Chomley’s behaviour towards Hexham is therefore further evidence against Chomley’s own arguments. Did I say that Hexham might well treat everyone with the same contempt?

  A tall man in a fashionable suit was walking briskly through the restaurant, and his handsome, youthful face was betrayed by some slight greying around the temples. He had a strong muscular build, but nothing excessive: the kind of build that can be inherited but not acquired by endless workouts in the gym. Some would define the look as patrician, but his father was a miner and his mother worked for the union. There was no aggression in his movement, and there was an attractive stillness about his personality.

  “Well, well,” said Lord Hexham, as the man was passing their table, “the liberal establishment disdains even to acknowledge our existence.”

  The man turned and smiled: “Oh Jimmy, I never saw you there. How are you doing? It’s a long time since I saw you last. Everything okay, I hope.”

  The man was about to go, but Hexham wouldn’t let him: “Come, come, Johnny, you said it was a long time. Chomley here has chosen a damn good wine; pull up a chair!” And then as an aside to Chomley, he added, “Perhaps you should order another bottle.”

  The man assessed the situation ruefully and quickly made his decision: his smile beamed and he grabbed a chair from another table and sat down almost in a single movement. “Delighted to,” he said. He put out his hand to Chomley and said, “I’m John Hestlethwaite, one of Jimmy’s old sparring partners.”

  Chomley was never good at judging these situations, but he found the intruder obnoxious for reasons that weren’t entirely clear. With all the gravitas he could summon up, he pronounced, “Dick Chomley, scientist and author.”

  “Of course, Egotism is Nature.”

  “Yes,” said Chomley proudly, even preeningly, the memory of the ovation he had recently received reviving in his brain, “did you read it?”

  “Oh yes, hugely entertaining, although I can’t share all your opinions.”

  “Well, of course, arts and humanities are a little resistant.”

  “Arts and humanities?” said Hexham. “The man’s a nuclear physicist. They say he’ll be a Nobel Prize winner. But he’s also a ghastly pinko-liberal, isn’t that right, Johnny?” And he clapped the man on the back for good measure.

  Chomley blushed.

  “So what have you boys been talking about?” Johnny said, a little condescendingly, while tapping his wedding ring against his glass of wine.

  “This and that. Pushkin,” said Chomley.

  “Pushkin?” said Johnny, sitting up with genuine surprise. “What interested you in him?”

  “He was part negro,” said Hexham.

  “And Lord Hexham’s son is going to do his Ph.D. on Pushkin, and Lord Hexham would prefer him to do something that would lead to a good job,” Chomley clarified.

  “Oh, I get it,” said Johnny, “Lord Hexham has been coming out with his racist theories. Come on, Jimmy, do you never give up? So what’s your latest: the blacks are responsible for your son’s academic choices? Must be a plot. So, yeah, Pushkin was one-quarter black and he founded a literature. I would have thought that would be something you’d want to keep quiet about, Jimmy, given your views on the matter. Well consider this: his African grandfather was a mathematical genius and Peter the Great’s adopted son. And there weren’t that many Africans living in Russia at the time.”

  “Statistically insignificant,” Hexham replied, his face darkening.

  “Well, we all know your idiotic views on miscegenation. I hate to tell you, Jimmy, but it works like this: if you’re a European and you worry about your children’s genetic health, then you should marry a Nigerian, and if you’re an African, you should marry a Swede or anybody else who is genetically distant from you. More generally of course, you should marry, if marry you must, anyone you want – someone you love, someone from your own community, of the same religion, whatever makes you and that other person comfortable.”

  “You’re not seriously suggesting people should still let their religion decide who they marry?” asked Chomley.

  “I didn’t use the word ‘should’. I don’t care a damn who people marry. It would be good for society if more marriages were happy, but no one can know what’ll work and what won’t. It’s a lottery, like most things in life. But I don’t see why a shared religion shouldn’t count, if it matters to the people in question. Some couples marry because they both like ballroom dancing or holidays in Italy or films by Laurel and Hardy. There are all tastes. I’m an atheist, but I have no desire to proselytise my atheism.”

  Chomley went silent.

  “You see what he’s like, Chomley,” said Hexham, “the swine drives me crazy with his pinko ideas. I think he just likes winding me up.”

  “Listen, guys, my guests are beginning to arrive; I’ve got to leave you, but it’s been great to have this little chat.” Johnny turned to Chomley and smiled his well-judged, attractive but inscrutable smile, “Fancy meeting the great Dick Chomley. A real pleasure, and good that you’re doing so well. I wanted to go to your lecture of course, but I had prior teaching commitmen
ts I simply couldn’t get out of.” He shook Chomley’s hand politely and Hexham’s with a degree of warmth. “Goodbye, you old bastard,” he said, “I’ll see you soon, no doubt.”

  “You can count on it,” Hexham replied, “and I might just give you that slap around the head. You’ve been looking for it for long enough.”

  You might think that the drivel Chomley and Hexham speak is harmless drivel, but it’s not. When two influential people meet in a bar or restaurant to talk drivel, it is always important drivel. A Spanish philosopher once said that what intellectuals say in one generation will become common parlance in three or four generations’ time. Nietzsche’s glorification of war led a few decades later to a terrible slogan: “War: the only way to clean up the world” and a decade or two after that the world wars started. The racist theories being unearthed by Neo-Darwinism could lead us down the same route that Gobineau’s did. The victims might be different, but the results the same. Perhaps for now we can fight them with patience, argument and good manners, as Johnny Hestlewhaite did, but these will not always work.

  When their eyes met after Johnny’s departure, both Chomley and Hexham felt a degree of embarrassment. It would have been interesting to see how their conversation would have developed from there, but quite suddenly they were aware that someone had sat down on Johnny’s chair. Chomley looked at the young man in his late teens and recognised his features. He then looked at Hexham and even he could read the conflicting emotions in his lordship’s expression: anger, pride and perhaps even love.

  “Chomley, let me introduce the son I was telling you about: he’s called Trevor. A chip off the old block, don’t you think?”