‘Darling, I was going to ask you what happened to it,’ said a man in a bow tie. ‘You could have fought back. Or did they give you an anaesthetic?’
‘You should have seen what he did to my dog,’ said the lady. She turned again to Treece. ‘I suppose you know lots of writers,’ she said.
‘I know some,’ said Treece, ‘but I think I prefer people.’ This remark was not intended as a sally; Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, who didn’t; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.
The lady in the flowerpot hat greeted this with a little giggle; then she said, ‘Do you know any of the London crowd?’ This was said so wistfully, with such an air of hope, that Treece was sorry to disappoint her. But really, he had to admit, he didn’t.
‘It’s so difficult if you don’t live in London,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat. ‘I don’t like London, but I must say I often wish I lived there. It’s so hard to get published if you aren’t in the swim, and can’t butter up the right people. I mean, I have published, but it’s twice as hard as it would be if you lived in London. People don’t ask you for things.’
‘I think it’s much easier now for people from the provinces to publish than it ever was,’ said Treece. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Well, no, I don’t think that,’ said the woman. ‘People seem to think that it was hard, once, for provincial writers to get published, but I don’t think it was any harder then. I think you need to be in London more now than you did in those days . . .’
Treece had the wit to perceive that this topic was a matter of something more than passing interest to his companion, that they had touched on the soul of something; and it was not difficult to see what it was, for Treece knew reasonably well the sort of surburban milieu in which the woman circulated; and he also knew some of her work, which was poetry of a sound and intense kind. There exists a vast subculture of literature in England, of writers working on a part-time basis and circulating their work in closed circles, such as this very literary society; their work is good, but little known, and is lacking simply in the intensity and originality of that of the committed artist. ‘Here’s the tweeny,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat; and tea was brought.
‘Where’s Mrs Rogers?’ said Treece as he spied around the circle present and noticed the sad omission.
‘She has to go home and get tea ready for her boys,’ said the man in the bow tie. ‘She’s a dear woman. Have you seen any of her stuff?’
‘She writes as though she’s just come in out of the dew,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat. ‘I once went to her house and she said, “Have you seen our goblin?” and, do you know, I wasn’t in the least surprised. It’s the one place where you wouldn’t be. The goblin turned out to be a make of vacuum cleaner, but, you know, if it had been a real one I should have accepted it just as simply.’
There were times when Treece felt more at home in the pellucid air of the provinces than anywhere he had been in his life before; the conversation lapped on in little wavelets and the stout businessmen passed and repassed outside the door and the buses screeched outside the windows. One felt cosy. England expanded and became a continent, and all that lay outside was infinitely remote; England contracted and became an islet, and all that lay inside was sound and secure. ‘Sugar?’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat. ‘Yes?’ asked Treece; he thought she was being fond, but she was simply pouring out his tea. He didn’t take sugar, but the mistake was too complicated to explain. ‘How many lumps?’ ‘One, please,’ said Treece lazily; he had stretched out his legs and was now practically lying down. ‘Nonsense, you can’t taste one; I’ve given you three,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat. She handed him the cup. ‘You know, you’re as lean as a rake,’ she said. ‘You need fattening up. Doesn’t your wife feed you?’ ‘I’m not married,’ said Treece. ‘I think that’s disgusting,’ said the lady in the flowerpot brightly. ‘Don’t you?’ She turned to everyone else: ‘He says he’s not married.’ ‘Well, it’s not a matter of principle,’ said Treece. ‘I’ve wanted to marry, a great many times; I always seem to be asking women to marry me. After all, there are things a wife can do that not even the best of housekeepers can manage. But they won’t marry me.’
‘What nonsense,’ said the lady in the flowerpot. ‘Let’s see, who do we know?’ ‘Why won’t they marry you?’ asked someone else. ‘Well, I can see their point,’ said Treece. ‘I must be about the least desirable bachelor I’ve ever come across. I just don’t seem to have the attributes women like in a man – a car, a television set, you know.’ ‘We’ll find somebody,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat.
The Secretary of the Society was a stout little man named Schenk, who sold carpets. ‘It’s six o’clock,’ he now said. ‘They’re open.’ ‘Who are?’ asked the lady in the flowerpot. ‘The bar is,’ said Mr Schenk, who was an organizing genius; for instance, the Society always had a poetry weekend, at some country house devoted to conferences, and Schenk not only managed to get hold of the most distinguished speakers, but, simply in order to give the thing more tone, he used also to persuade the AA to cover three or four counties with large yellow marker signs saying poetry conference. The group rose and made their way into the bar, which was quaint and old-fashioned; there were post-horns on the wall, and yards of ale. Businessmen chatted about wool and cotton, and county young men, in blazers and cavalry twill trousers, teased sweet girls with plummy accents and short hair. The countryside around was hunting country. They sat down in Windsor chairs and ordered. Treece now found himself next to Butterfield, the man who ran the Department of Adult Education. Butterfield, who had got the job because at the interview he claimed that he had once taught an all-in wrestler to love Shakespeare (he was, Butterfield explained afterwards, a very literate all-in wrestler), always described himself as ‘a pleb’; it was his ambition to retire and keep a pub somewhere. Academic life at once charmed and bored him; he liked, as he said, to be in the vicinity of a university, but not too firmly anchored to it. He used to go over to Cheltenham most weekends; he was having an affair with a very slick and sophisticated woman who had a hairdresser’s shop. The woman had now decided that she wanted to marry Butterfield, and he was having rather a bad time; he had told the woman, falsely, that he was already married, and she now wanted to meet his wife so that they could decide between them who was to have him. ‘She’s here,’ said Butterfield. ‘She’s rampaged all over the town, looking for my wife. If you should come across her, don’t tell her I’m single. That would be the finish.’ Butterfield, who, rumour had it, had fathered two children by his hairdresser, didn’t look any too worried; he was splendidly aware of his ability to cope with the most extreme situations. ‘I’m a bit of a rat, aren’t I?’ said Butterfield. ‘Still, they say the strongest human instinct is self-preservation, and once they get the noose round your neck, you can never get it off.’
‘. . . I always feel that reading does much more good to others than it does to me,’ Treece found a stout elderly lady saying to him good-naturedly, as she sipped a gin and orange.
The children’s novelist now leaned over. ‘Do you read much children’s literature, Professor?’ he asked. ‘I don’t,’ said Treece. ‘I think you’re ignoring, if you don’t mind my saying so, a very fruitful field for study,’ said the novelist. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Treece, ‘but the trouble with me is that I have a sophisticated mind. Was it Chesterton who said he didn’t like children because they smelled of bread and butter? I dislike them because they aren’t grown up.’
‘But aren’t you charmed by their innocence?’ asked the lady in the flowerpot hat.
‘But innocence is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?’ said Treece, ‘and in any case innocent is the last thing that children are. I think they’re cruel and savage. If I had any children, I’d lock them up in a cage until they could prove that they were moral creatures. That’s because the only in
teresting thing about man, to me, is that he’s a moral animal; and children aren’t.’
‘I can see now why you aren’t married,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat. ‘Of course, you’d soon change your mind if you had any children.’
‘Besides, children are like old people; they’re culturally disconnected,’ said Treece.
‘You think that children should be seen and not heard then?’ asked the novelist.
‘I don’t approve either category,’ said Treece. He was growing expansive, more and more so as the day wore on; he thought the bit about not being married was funny enough, funny but true, but that all this was funnier still. However, no one seemed very amused. He realized that he was in a mood of almost manic elation and irresponsibility, and that he would have to pay for it all with a countervailing depression. ‘Of course,’ he said, concluding the topic, ‘what you don’t realize is, I’m a bastard.’
The lady in the flowerpot hat had sweet little ears, and Treece was just taking a really good look at them when Butterfield turned around to him, and said, ‘Mr Schenk asked me to have a word with you about the poetry conference. He wanted to know if you’d be prepared to speak at it again this year. He wanted you to talk on poetic drama.’
‘Very well,’ said Treece, looking at the ears. ‘I’m quite prepared to do it.’
‘He also wondered if you knew of any . . . well, the phrase he used was “Big Name”, who’d come down and speak to them.’
‘Had he anyone in mind?’ asked Treece, swinging his leg idly.
‘Well, he wanted Eliot, or perhaps a Sitwell.’
‘We shall have to see,’ said Treece.
Meanwhile, Mr Schenk had been trying to talk everyone into going to see the nude show at the variety theatre; he said that anyone who was interested in society or in our contemporary estimate of the worth of man should go. ‘Yes, let’s, just for fun,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat; you knew this was her phrase. One or two of the ladies said they had to go and feed people. ‘You must come,’ said Schenk. ‘We want to watch the expression on your faces.’ Butterfield was equally keen. ‘It’s not that I have a sociological interest,’ he said. ‘I just like nude shows.’ ‘This is fun,’ said the woman in the flowerpot, as they drank down their glasses and off they all went. ‘If only Mrs Rogers could have been here,’ said Treece. They went in cavalcade through the streets to the theatre and in the interval Treece kissed the woman in the flowerpot hat on each pretty ear, just for fun. He found he was liking the provinces more and more; it was something less than London, but it was also itself.
III
Of all the problems that nibbled at Treece’s mind and brought him to anxiety, there were none sharper than his worries over status. The catechism began simply: what, in this day and age, was the status of a professor in English society, and what rewards and what esteem may he expect? Secondly, and to add another dimension, what was the status of a professor in the humanities, in England, in this day and age? Third, what, then, was the status of a professor in the humanities at a small university in the provinces, in England, in the present age? It could not be denied that all the forms of social stratification, once solid, were liquefying in the torrid heat engendered by reforming zealots like himself. Treece had to admit that, if it became a choice between being respected too much and not at all, he would, in spite of his liberal pretensions, rest easier in spirit under the former régime. And, to sum the matter up, what emerged for Treece was that to be a professor, of the humanities, at a provincial university, in England, in the nineteen-fifties, was a fate whose rewards were all internal, for in the matter of social status he was small enough beer. A man who had a fondness for human manners, the local manners of circles and groups that are formed by a traditional accretion of associations, he sought to follow the given manners for himself, to live within them in no spirit of cheap emulation, but with the zest of one who believes that manners are an access to morals, and that manners pursued with passion never atrophy. Such was the passion with which Treece queried whether it was proper for him to possess, as he did, a motorized bicycle; and a somewhat seedy late Victorian house; and an account with the Post Office Savings Bank, because it was always useful to be able to go and draw out a few pounds, anywhere; and a National Health Service doctor, because you paid once to be ill, anyway, and Treece was never ill enough, in the course, it seemed, of any given year, to make those weekly payments a fair bargain in his case; and pyjamas bought at Marks and Spencers, because they seemed just as good as more distinguished garb, though perhaps less well-cut around the crotch; and paperback books, because you could possess more (though you had to go, always, to the library to provide references for scholarly articles from the hardbound editions). On the other side of the coin, however, to point up that, even in the fluidity of the contemporary English social scene, not all is lost, Treece wore an establishment shirt, made to measure for him, usually in blue or grey fine stripe, with three loose collars; a suit, also made to measure for him, from a small local tailor, with pockets at the back of the trousers, and the side, and the front (this for the wallet), and a buttonhole for the passage of a pocket watch; and braces, because one did, though belts were pleasanter. Treece’s answer to the problem of what is à propos for the person that, in terms of social status, he supposed himself to be, was that if most of what he had was à propos, and a little was flagrantly not à propos, then society would grant his recognition of the fact that here was a problem, and that, for the future, it was an open problem. A partial immersion in professorship was really the most the world could hope for from Treece, and it accepted that.
Treece was no aesthete, no exotic; his driving forces were self-discipline and moral scruple, or so he was disposed to think. He had no time for the pleasurable, only the necessary. For instance, he spent most of his time in his office, having painful encounters with students, who wanted him to read stories they had written about sensitive youths, pining for a new world, or inquired at what sort of shop one could buy books, or wanted to know whether he collected dinner money – although he would much rather have hidden behind the door or in a book cupboard. People always thought he had been to Oxford or Cambridge, that he was that sort of man. But he had gained his wisdom at the University of London, which is a very different thing; he had gone to university not to make good contacts, or to train his palate, or refine his accent, but rather to get a good degree. He had had to give up punting, which he enjoyed, because to punt one had to punt from one end or the other, and one end was the Oxford, the other the Cambridge, end. So much of the world was like that too. The same sort of people wondered too about his regiment, which they supposed would be the Guards. In fact, during the war Treece had been a member of the London Fire Service, putting out fires with Stephen Spender. People supposed, likewise, that his family would be a sound one, his father an artist, or a bibliophile, his mother at home on a horse. In fact his father had had a wallpaper shop, and when, once, he had told his father that it was wrong that people’s relationships should be those of buyers and sellers, his father had gazed at him blankly. What else could they be? Treece was never ashamed that his background was of this sort; but he was surprised by it; it was not what he would, if he had met himself as a stranger, have expected.
Of Treece’s formative years, which were the nineteen-thirties, of those busy days when to be a liberal was to be something, and people other than liberals knew what liberals were, of this period Treece had one sharp and pointed memory, that cast itself up like a damp patch on the wall of an otherwise sturdy house, a memory of a time when late one night – indeed, at the two o’clock of one early morning – he had gone from the room he rented in Charlotte Street because he had had a row with the woman he was living with. On the night in question, Treece, then a research student with holes in his underpants and not a change of socks to call his own, was determined to leave Fay, in part because she did not like his poetry, but also because he knew that she did not trust him, since, w
ith the cunning of females who know what faculties are of most or least worth in their prey, she had observed that he was a person without a firm, a solid centre; he was easily blown or altered. On this topic they had exchanged acrimonious words, and Treece had hurried forth into the dark street, pausing only to dress and snatch up his thesis, which reposed, well-nigh completed, at the side of the bed. Coming along the Soho street, wearing a leather jacket and a most determined visage, Treece had met a friend of his, a speedway rider of strong and engrossing character. He was a communist and, unlike Treece, took an active part in the political life. The two withdrew to an all-night café and Treece, pressed to account for his presence abroad, told him of the row with Fay; he said he was fed up with her and didn’t wish to go back. The speedway rider observed that severed links were the order of the day; he had finished his job and was going away, probably abroad; and he asked Treece to come with him. I have no money, said Treece; whereat, from all over his leather jacket, the speedway motorcyclist produced wads of pound notes, all his savings, which he had withdrawn. But as they talked, through the night, Treece began to think about Fay again, and how warm it was in bed. Finally, uncertainly, he went back to Fay, receiving a poor welcome; she had hoped, she said, that he meant it. Some time later Treece learned that his friend had in fact been on his way to Spain, where he had fought; and later still he heard that he had died heroically holding a solitary machine-gun position which had finally been wiped out accidentally by planes on his own side. When Treece heard all this, he felt that, if only the man had said that it was to Spain that he was going, he would surely have gone; afterwards he wondered whether he would; from time to time he certainly wished that he had.
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