Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

Treece paled, but regained his composure. Students swept round them as they stood still in the middle of the corridor. ‘Oh,’ said Treece. ‘There’s something I wanted to ask you.’ He began to fiddle with his clothes, right there in the middle of the corridor, in a most alarming way; is he going to do it here, in public, to compromise me? Emma wondered. But it was nothing like that at all; Treece’s black motorcycling coat was covered with great zips, which he kept undoing, thrusting his hand inside, in order to produce, after a great deal of struggle, simply a diary. ‘I wonder if I could trespass on your time and good nature again,’ said Treece. ‘I’m giving a little tea next Friday for the first-year honours people, at four, and I wondered if you could come along.’

  Both of them realized, simultaneously, that this was how it had all started last time; after playing with the thought for a moment, both politely ignored it. ‘I’d be pleased to,’ said Emma. ‘Nothing formal, you understand,’ said Treece, looking down gratefully at her through his goggles. ‘It would be pleasant and I thought too that you could act as a sort of bridge between them and me.’

  ‘I suppose I could,’ said Emma, pocketing any expectations of the evening; no-man’s-lands were notoriously difficult to populate. ‘Well, I must be on my way,’ said Treece, doing up his zippers; and with one more nod and a smile apiece, both went their ways to their respective problems.

  Treece went out to his bicycle, in the middle of the back wheel of which sat a squat black engine. He climbed aboard and drove off, his L-plates fluttering in the October wind, the engine puttering down there in the wheel behind him. ‘Mind,’ cried a nervous old man as he whistled past. A drizzling rain was splashing coldly on his face and misting his goggles. Treece scarcely noticed, for he was still within the warmth of the little encounter. Emma Fielding was a sensitive and mature woman, careful of the feelings of others, and what he was wont to call ‘a very worthwhile person’: if anyone had asked for a reference, that was what he would have said. Sensitive, intelligent, scrupulous, liberal-minded (and pretty, too – one had better not forget that), she was just the sort of person to marry Eborbelosa. Why, then, had she rejected him? Perhaps he was being unfair – and then he saw that he was, of course. Why had he been feeling so offended? As if it was he who had been rejected? Because it was he who had been rejected; this had been the thought nagging at the back of his mind. His motives were far from pure; it was his protest on behalf of the international spirit, his cry for foreign races, that he felt had been turned down. All that Emma was doing was conceiving the matter in simple human terms; she was all that he thought she was; she had simply wanted to do as little harm as possible. Like so many liberals, he had conceived of actions in terms of ideas, when there was nothing in the action but pure action. As soon as he observed the treacherous nature of the moral stance he had taken, he was bathed in apology. Of course she didn’t have to marry Eborebelosa, not if she didn’t want to.

  Treece found the driving test office and went in to look for the examiner. He was a tired-looking little man with a suspicious face, and he was clutching a clipboard. ‘Heyup,’ he said. ‘You’re early.’ ‘I know this is just a gesture; I know you don’t pass anyone first time,’ said Treece to him, politely. ‘Where’s your vehicle?’ asked the examiner. Treece took him outside and showed him the bicycle. ‘Right,’ said the examiner. ‘I want you to go down the hill and then round the block back here, giving the appropriate signals as you go.’ Treece let in the clutch and drove off. He turned the corner at the bottom of the hill and ran over a policeman’s foot. The policeman stopped him and told him that the next time he saw him riding like that he’d have him at the police station so fast his feet wouldn’t touch the ground. Treece looked back; the examiner seemed to be out of sight. As he got into the heavy traffic of the Market Square his nerve started to go. Then, suddenly, the clutch cable snapped. Treece tried to get started again, nervously, for he was at the central point of five intersecting roads, and traffic was piling up around him. It was no use. There was only one thing to do, and Treece did it; he lifted the bicycle up and carried it to the kerb. He looked around for the examiner, who had said he would be in the crowd. ‘Are you taking my driving test?’ he kept asking little men in the press. Then, to the right, he saw the clipboard. He went up to the examiner and told him what had happened. ‘Did I pass?’ he asked.

  3

  I

  IT HAD BECOME the custom for the professors in the departments of the Faculty of Arts and elsewhere to give those little teas, to one of which Professor Treece had invited Emma Fielding, in the interests of good conversation and invigorating contact between (as they said in the provinces) staff and students. Professor Treece had fallen in line, rather recalcitrantly, with the established custom; established customs were, after all, things one did fall in line with. He was, however, very nervous of these occasions. Treece’s predecessor had been in the habit of having night-long house parties, circulating around a keg of beer which was placed in the middle of the room, and everyone (even the professor whose home, on one such occasion, had caught fire) agreed that those had been great occasions and had much advanced the quality of university life; but in those days the department was smaller, everyone knew everyone’s first name, and students gladly cooperated in carrying home drunken faculty members to lay them on the doorstep at dawn. Treece now felt about his predecessor much as he felt about what Adam did to Eve: he could have forgiven him, if it hadn’t been for the precedent he’d set.

  Treece’s real problem was that, while the other professors were equipped with wives, he was not; and wives, in particular circumstances like these, turned out to be a positive advantage, for wives poured out tea and sustained a level of polite conversation. Treece’s own ventures in this spirit had always taken on a strange tone and had not remained unvisited by disaster of one kind or another. On the last occasion, for instance, the year before, Treece had been inveigled into disclosing an interest in bell-ringing, and had actually been persuaded into giving a performance of ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ on a peal of handbells which he did not feel he had yet lived down.

  It was a cold November day when Louis Bates, in his long overcoat and his mittens arrived at the door of Treece’s house an hour early. The pavements glittered with frost, a yellow haze hung in the air, and the gardens of nearby houses were an expanse of naked, hard brown soil. Treece was one of those persons who go though life endeavouring not to accumulate possessions, because possessions are ties, and Treece wanted to be tied to nothing, because possessions define character, and Treece did not want his character defined. Treece had moved all his possessions into his unfurnished house and it still looked like an unfurnished house, waiting to be rented, in a none too distinguished part of town. He had a housekeeper, who came in from time to time, when the spirit moved her; she talked and worked, and then she talked and rested, and then she just talked. Dust blew about the landings in great puff balls, but Treece was grateful to her for coming in, because he had learned what Mrs Watson thought about birth control; and he learned that if you bought blancmange you only had to add milk to it, and it was very filling; and he learned that if you bought nylon shirts, you could wash them out yourself at night and hang them over the bath, and they would be ready for wear next morning; and he learned that you can get quite good biscuits at Woolworths; and sometimes he felt that, if Mrs Watson won the pools, and he lost his job, he could have made Mrs Watson a very good housekeeper. When Louis Bates rang the bell, Mrs Watson was having the afternoon off, helping someone to have a baby, and Treece went to the door himself, expecting to find the laundryman. He was straightaway presented with a major social quandary: could one fairly ask the too-early guest to wander about the cold winter streets and return in an hour, when the sandwiches would be made and the preparations completed, the old pair of working trousers and the frilly apron replaced by a suit – or must one invite him in and perhaps even entertain him? Louis, on the other hand, had no such social doubts, and politely and fir
mly indicated what he considered appropriate:

  ‘I’m afraid I’m a little early,’ he said, ‘but that’s because I didn’t want to be late. I have no sense of time.’

  ‘I think we said four o’clock, didn’t we?’ asked Treece, opening the door no wider. ‘It’s now not quite three.’

  ‘I know,’ said Louis, and at this point it dawned on Treece that Louis actually intended to stay, for some abstruse purpose.

  ‘None of your colleagues has arrived yet,’ Treece said.

  The remark did not perturb Louis at all. ‘Après moi, le déluge,’ he said.

  Treece saw that he had no alternative and gave way, and Louis stepped confidently into the hall, unbuttoning his coat and looking with interest about him at the decoration. ‘I thought we might have a little chat about how I was getting on, you know,’ said Louis.

  ‘I think we might try and preserve this as a social occasion,’ said Treece; then he had some doubts about this remark, which he feared might give Louis a false impression of his progress, and he added, ‘Though I don’t think Dr Carfax, who’ll be here tonight, incidentally, would mind if I told you that he was remarking only the other day what a bright lad you were in all the work you’d done for him.’

  Louis disclosed embarrassed delight and promptly became entangled in his coat. ‘Yes, I thought I’d done a few good things for him,’ he said. ‘Let me take that for you,’ said Treece, rescuing Louis from his remarkably long overcoat, which he had somehow contrived to wind about him like a shroud. He took the coat into the closet. It was really the first time he had been confronted by Louis Bates; and confrontation was exactly what it was, for the full impact of Louis Bates, person, was for good or ill stamped upon his mind at this moment. He was still annoyed with Louis for his too early arrival (even if Louis was a genius, which he hadn’t yet conceded, he didn’t expect him to take eccentricity to the point of downright inconvenience; and supposing he wasn’t?), and he was suddenly reminded of something that had been said in the Senior Common Room over coffee on that occasion earlier in the week when Adrian Carfax had remarked, ‘Bates is a bright lad.’ Everyone who knew Louis appeared to agree with this except Dr Viola Masefield, who had Louis for tutorials, and who had remarked, ‘But what about him as a person?’ Treece had been inclined to be amused by this example of the faculty which women seemed to have for reducing abstract issues into personal terms, in the manner of one of his girl students who had once said she held a low critical opinion of Donne’s poetry because she ‘didn’t think she would like him as a person, really’. ‘I suspect’, Treece had remarked, ‘that his personal qualities are underestimated here by his fellow students, largely because they aren’t used to his kind.’ Treece wondered as he said this whether he really believed it; it had not occurred to him before, and he was a little surprised to find himself coming so strongly out in Louis’s support. ‘He’s brighter than the others and much more widely read,’ said Viola, ‘but there’s nothing special about that.’ ‘Well,’ said Carfax, laughing, ‘that remark wouldn’t be an unjust epitaph for anyone in this room’ – and he gestured at the solemn conclave of professors and lecturers, each sipping coffee from behind a copy of the Manchester Guardian or the British Journal of Sociology – ‘and it would certainly bear the stamp of the age.’ ‘Spengler would like that,’ said someone. Viola Masefield became somewhat heated at this point, and began to flick the ash of her cigarette about violently; it wasn’t funny: ‘But he seems to think that it entitles him to special attention, and I don’t see why it should.’ Again someone laughed, but Carfax, as if suddenly recognizing the truth of the observation, and its special aptness, said, ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true’ – and he went on to tell how, the previous day, while in the middle of a lecture on Chaucer, he had been seized by a fit of coughing, and in the pause before he recovered his place there had come from the back row of the lecture room the sound of Louis’s voice, low, insistent, concerned, saying, ‘You ought to take more care of yourself; it might turn to something. I always take rose-hip syrup.’ After they had laughed at this story, Viola said, ‘Yes, that’s just the sort of thing he would do.’ ‘Oh, come now, Viola,’ Treece had said, for the remark sounded malicious; ‘his keenness seems as good a reason as any for giving him the attention he wants. Intelligence is a good thing to discriminate on behalf of, surely.’ ‘I don’t mind giving it,’ Viola said firmly, ‘but I don’t think he should expect it. He sees himself as quite naturally privileged.’ ‘But why not? Where can he, if not here? He comes from a background where intelligence isn’t an advantage, but a curse; he’s fought to get here, where he thinks it’s respected; and then we’re as bad as everyone else.’ Treece had been left uneasy by the whole matter. He was always somewhat awed by that tendency of people, of women in particular, to come to immediate personal judgements on acquaintances, to like or dislike them intensely from the moment of encounter. Love at first sight, with its emphasis on the physical aspect of personality, its concern for appearance, was something that Treece did not believe in for other people. They might do it but they were wrong. He objected strongly to other people’s idylls; if they weren’t going to live properly, if they were going to make a joke of the whole human business, well, he had no time for them; he expected a thoughtful apprehension of all men by all men. It worried him that he very rarely got it. He himself was perfectly responsive to all influences, and took experience as it came, registering it, analysing it, but not coming to immediate decisive judgements on it; after all, experience was what it was, and it came out of the void. You didn’t make up your mind about it like that. Thus while he had a favourable or an unfavourable impression of people, Treece never supposed that the fact that he did not get on with them, or that they did not appear to like him, was to be traced to anything but a deficiency in himself; his soul was not, alas, wide enough to encompass the whole world, but at least he wished that it was. With Treece you felt that the world was his fault; by existing himself, he made it, and he wanted to apologize for it, as he was sure God would want to if he were here.

  Thus Treece had not given any assent to Viola’s opinion (in any case, as she sat there, with flushed face, she seemed to know that her arguments were bad ones; if only she had found the right words, and then everyone would have seen what it was she was putting her finger on) because he considered that it was based on purely personal reasons – which was true. The personal reason was that Louis had announced widely to unimpressed colleagues that he was madly in love with Dr Viola Masefield, and in tutorials he would sit, wet lips shining, eyes firmly fixed on the low necklines of Viola’s dresses. Viola had to stop wearing sweaters and low necklines, a matter of pain to her, because she still had a husband to catch. Moreover, Louis would call on her at all times for her help, this ever since the second day of term, on the slightest of pretexts, observing her every movement – the way she stretched up for books off the shelves; the sight of her legs as she emerged from behind her desk – ‘with eyes popping out’, as Dr Viola put it in complaining to her dear friend, Tanya. On one occasion he had actually telephoned her, late at night, at Tanya’s house, where she had a flat (bringing her downstairs three flights in her nightdress to the telephone), to ask whether she objected to a mixed metaphor in an essay on the historical background to Restoration drama which he was writing for her – so long as he knew it was mixed.

  But naturally privileged! The phrase stuck, and although Treece went on to say then, as he had to, ‘I feel compelled to pooh-pooh this, Viola, you know,’ it formulated something recognizable in Louis’s behaviour. Treece now realized that his impression of Bates had in fact been coloured by Viola’s, and by Louis’s behaviour now, which seemed to bear out what she said. Treece realized with shame just how hard he had been on Viola’s viewpoint up until now, when he was actually sharing the experiences that formed it; how easy it is to say that others are glib! Damn, thought Treece, as he reflected just how unprepared he was to deal with a guest; Louis had caught hi
m with his smalltalk unprepared, his sandwiches unmade, his fire unstoked. One doesn’t allow social solecisms, because manners are made for easy living; they are a species of kindness; it is not the Emily Post in one that is affronted, but the moral core. Why had Bates done it? Perhaps, Treece thought, as he padded back in his old slippers to the hall, it was a self-centred insensitivity to the responses of the world about him; or perhaps it was a sense of inferiority which manifested itself in poses of excessive assurance. Oh, I can say this, Treece thought, I can be liberal-spirited about the whole thing; but it doesn’t make me like it. Out in the hall Louis stood, looking ungainly and forlorn, slapping the pockets of his rather shabby suit and pulling down his shirtsleeves at the wrist. Treece shunted him into the drawing room, which had been filled for the occasion with a miscellany of chairs brought from all parts of the house, from other houses, from (it seemed), the scrapyard.

  ‘You must excuse me if I leave you here, but I haven’t finished getting things ready yet, and I have to change,’ said Treece. Louis appeared at first hurt, and then baffled, by this news. He was well aware that if he was left alone in an empty room he would quickly be nibbled at by misfortune; he would pull over a bookcase while trying to take out a book, or be discovered by an unwarned housekeeper and accused of burglary. He knew himself and he knew his gods; he knew the rotation of his misfortunes. ‘This is a nice room,’ he said quick-wittedly.

  Treece looked around, surprised; it had not changed, it was as it was, and that was patently the last thing that could be said of it. If he was the sort of person who liked nice rooms, he was damned if this was the sort of room he would be living in. ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Treece. This bewildered Louis, who wondered why, if it was not, Treece had got mixed up with it. He had not yet associated the philosophy of Live as I say, not as I do with Treece. However, he hastily tried another tack.