Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Is there anything I can be doing?’ he suggested. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t,’ said Treece, nervous of Louis’s desire to please. He made hastily for the door and Louis planned an even more desperate move. ‘Do you think I could have a bath?’ he cried.

  But Treece had gone. He had withdrawn to the kitchen and, up to his elbows in pastry (Mrs Watson had taught him how to make cakes), was wondering what Louis was doing and what would have happened to the room when he got back. In fact, Louis passed through all the stages of privation in a strange house – he examined the ornaments on the mantel, looked at the pictures on the walls, noticed the books in the bookcase and read the spicier pages of the medical directory, peered at his teeth in the mirror, made sure his fly buttons were fastened – and he was cutting his hair at the back with a pair of scissors found in an open drawer of the bureau when Treece returned, nearly an hour later, to start the fire. ‘I ought to have done this before I came,’ said Louis Bates.

  II

  And now the other guests began to arrive, chilled by the frost, noses watering, to find Louis, ensconced before the fire, his hair cut at one side, acknowledging his introduction to his colleagues, whom he knew well, but to whom Treece introduced him none the less, with a gracious ‘How do you do?’ The group accumulated, sitting in a quiet half-circle about the barren room, discussing the weather and how the house must be filled with sun during the summer. ‘What a lovely fire!’ exclaimed a very young-seeming girl. As people began to point out to one another, it was an odd house; Treece looked as though he had been billeted here; he probably slept on straw. ‘I wonder whether it looks any different when it’s empty,’ whispered someone.

  A drawing by Picasso of a dove of peace was pinned roughly up over the mantlepiece. ‘I say,’ said a knowing girl, coming into the room, ‘isn’t that a Peter Scott?’ A girl who was always having her bottom pinched had it pinched in one corner; she let out a cry and Treece looked round nervously. ‘Wind,’ said the girl unsteadily. It was a usual enough group of people, for those who were in it, and everyone knew how everyone else could be expected to behave. Louis Bates, from his chair, was wondering how many women in the room were virgins, and he determined to ask before the night was out. Treece, coming again into the room, heard someone say: ‘. . . I suppose he remembers the war.’

  The evening promptly started, when it did start, on an unfortunate note when Professor Treece, steering the tea trolley into the room, took the corner too wide and drove it hard against the doorpost. People jumped up and exclaimed in fright. ‘It’s all right,’ cried someone heroically; cakes and sandwiches hailed about the room; cups flew into the air and smashed hard on to the floor. ‘All’s well,’ cried Treece so genially that it seemed as if he had done it on purpose. Students gathered round and salvaged the debris, wiping buns clean on skirts and trousers. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ said Treece. ‘Let it stop until Monday.’

  ‘Didn’t I see you at the theatre last Saturday night?’ said a student with a beard in a very sly manner. Treece noticed some of the female students looking at him curiously. He remembered the nudes. He said something noncommittal. The doorbell rang.

  It was Emma Fielding, breathless from her bicycle ride. Treece greeted her warmly. ‘Come inside, Miss Fielding; how nice,’ he cried, taking her coat as though his life up to that time had been empty without it. He ushered her into the hall, where a Utrillo reproduction hung precariously. ‘Isn’t Utrillo delightful?’ said Emma pleasantly. ‘It’s exciting, isn’t it?’ said Treece; he had, Emma noticed, a fondness for using oddly exaggerated words to define things, as if the ordinary commerce of language was just not quite enough for him. ‘But,’ he added, ‘I sometimes wonder if Utrillo is appropriate to a hall.’

  It was just a simple conversation gambit of mine, thought Emma, but if he really wants to make something out of it – well, let him; it’s his party. He probably wanted to make it appear as if he had thought about the way the place was decorated.

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ said Emma.

  ‘He always goes well with the smell of a river, or the sea, doesn’t he?’

  Grasping at a straw, Emma said, ‘But the whiteness of your hall brings out his blues so splendidly.’ Things were getting rather strained; even Treece was beginning to realize that this was the phoneyest kind of conversation you could get.

  Sounds of something not unlike riot now came from behind the door of the drawing room, and this recalled Treece to his responsibilities. ‘Look, Miss Fielding,’ he said rapidly. ‘I’d be glad if you could act informally as a kind of hostess. My housekeeper’s gone home, and things aren’t going very well. I upset a tea-trolley and there’s a man called Bates in there who’s been very difficult. Everyone seems terrified of him and I’m afraid he’s going to get up and start cutting his own hair.’ Gently, gently, Emma wanted to say; you poor, poor thing. Under which king, Bezonian? was clearly the gist of his little speech; are you with them, or with me?

  ‘Yes, of course I will,’ said Emma.

  Treece beamed and pulled the creases out of the arms of his suit. ‘This is one of the occasions when bachelorhood proves a disadvantage,’ he said gratefully and took her arm so affectionately that she presumed he had thought of another. Was he going to haul her off upstairs, leaving first-year honours to riot among the cakes below while he satisfied his passion? Was it worth the loss of a master’s degree to resist? Did she want to go, anyway? Questions flurried in Emma’s head and it was with the greatest surprise that she found herself not in bed, but in the drawing room, being introduced to people she already knew. Earlier arrivals now sat silently about the fringe of the room, appraising the wallpaper and looking around for a dog to pat. The man who was causing all the trouble was evident enough; he was a tall, ghoulish man, who could be seen bobbing up and down, smiling a great wet smile, interrupting people’s conversation and repeatedly proffering his chair to people who would not have dared to take it from him. Treece introduced her to Bates, and he gave her a very studious looking over, finally reaching down for her hand, shaking it firmly for several moments, and at last replacing it back at her side, where it had come from. ‘Where would you like to sit?’ he asked. ‘I’ll sit on the floor,’ said Emma. Bates now felt compelled to make the supreme sacrifice: ‘Have my chair,’ he cried. Emma refused, and relief and offence mingled in his face.

  Treece went to the door to let in Adrian Carfax and Ian Merrick, and riot broke out again. Emma felt like a spy. Someone was twanging the elastic in the brassière of a girl with a very full figure, who obviously liked it.

  ‘Men are such prancing, leering goats,’ said a prim young girl, very stiffly, to no one in particular.

  ‘I broke my teeth on one of those cakes,’ said a girl with a lisp. ‘Do you think I could thue?’

  ‘I wonder why the prof doesn’t marry?’ said a girl in spectacles.

  ‘If only’, said the man with the beard; his name was Hopgood, ‘to get this place dusted.’

  ‘No, I mean seriously, Larry, why?’

  ‘Why don’t you sleep?’ a man was meanwhile asking a girl with a fringe. ‘What do you worry about?’

  ‘I just don’t know,’ said the girl. ‘For one thing, I worry about being worried.’

  ‘Just look at you now; you’re all tense,’ said the young man. ‘Relax a minute, relax. Forget about things. There, isn’t that better?’

  ‘No,’ said the girl.

  ‘You don’t want to sleep, that’s what it is,’ said the man. ‘You think there’s something about not sleeping. You think it makes you more sensitive.’

  ‘How silly you are,’ said the girl spitefully.

  ‘Perhaps we could be reading poems aloud,’ said Bates.

  ‘Well, now, everyone’s here, I think,’ said Treece coming back into the room. He consulted a list which he took from his pocket. ‘Yes; that’s right. So shall we sit down and talk communally?’ Treece had planned out a norm for the evening, to which he insisted it conform, s
o everyone took his place in a half-circle about the fire, and talked communally, while Treece, conscious of his role as host, tried assiduously to mix everyone’s taste, now being highbrow, now lowbrow, now being piano, now fortissimo, all the time advancing prepared topics – the cinema, the cost of toothpaste, the fun of making one’s own lampshades. He was editing the occasion; perhaps it’s going to be on television, said someone.

  ‘What a lovely fire,’ said the girl who had said it once before.

  ‘Do you like fires, Miss Winterbottom?’ asked someone politely. The student with the beard was furtively hooting with laughter. Conversation in the half-circle of guests, who were all now clasping large paper serviettes, was fitful. The sandwiches and cakes, which had clearly been made by a none-too-competent confectioner some days before, were passed round. ‘Do eat some more cakes,’ cried Treece heartily. ‘You seem eager to get rid of them,’ remarked Carfax pleasantly; as soon as he had bitten into one of the confections he realized the error of his comment, which would, he knew only too well, be retailed around the whole department next day.

  ‘This is one of the occasions when one could do with being married,’ said Treece with a bright smile to one of the girls, the enthusiastic Miss Winterbottom. ‘Can I help?’ asked Miss Winterbottom. The man with the beard burst into fresh laughter. ‘I mean, like getting something from the kitchen,’ went on Miss Winterbottom, blushing to a full shade of red. ‘Next time you must let me lend you my wife,’ said Carfax amiably. All were amused, on the politest level. ‘Like the Eskimos do,’ muttered the man with the beard. ‘What’s that?’ asked Treece pleasantly; there were no secrets here. A girl in glasses with immense, brightly coloured rims kicked the man’s ankle to indicate that his remark lacked taste. This spurred him to further efforts and he embarked on a premeditated routine.

  ‘Is it true, Professor Treece, that you’re interested in handbell ringing?’ he asked with an assumed nonchalance that reminded the girl in glasses how sweet she found him.

  ‘It was an interest of mine, Hopgood; you’re perfectly right,’ said Treece, going a little red. ‘But there are richer pastimes.’ This was what Hopgood thought a typical ‘Treece’ remark and he smiled inside his beard and looked about him as if for approbation.

  ‘Aren’t bus fares terribly expensive?’ asked the girl in spectacles, smiling maternally at Treece.

  ‘Transport’, said Treece, seizing this kindly opening, ‘must be something of an item to those people who live in lodgings a long way out.’ Due consideration was given to this proposition; assent followed.

  ‘Like me,’ said Louis, as if to give the remark direction. ‘It’s rather hard, you know, for me to decide whether it’s cheaper to travel on buses or whether to walk and have my shoes repaired more often.’ Louis spoke so slowly and deliberately that his quandary took on the guise of a metaphysical problem set before learned arbiters. ‘I was hoping to buy some new pyjamas this winter, but I see I shall have to make do with the others.’

  All present appeared to sympathize silently with Louis’s dilemma, save for the hardy Hopgood, who was busy scraping out his fingernails with a penknife and looking for someone to exchange grins with. All at once Treece stood up and took a silver cigarette box, bearing his initials, from the mantelpiece, offering it about the room. Most people present confessed that they did not smoke, and Miss Winterbottom invoked a moral issue by stating that her parents would be ashamed of her had she accepted. ‘They fur the lungs,’ said Louis. ‘Nonsense,’ said Carfax genially. Only he and Emma Fielding took cigarettes. ‘I have my pipe,’ said Mr Lee, patting his pocket. ‘I have my beard,’ said Mr Hopgood in his turn. The point of this recondite jest was missed, or ignored, by everyone save Dr Carfax, who laughed affably.

  ‘It seems to me that the young people of today haven’t any wish to appear sophisticated,’ said Merrick, somewhat bitingly. ‘Undergrads aren’t what they were.’

  ‘This isn’t Cambridge, you know,’ Carfax told Merrick, who did know, knew it bitterly.

  ‘I just don’t think our families would like it,’ said Miss Winterbottom.

  ‘But don’t you ever feel the least desire to shock your parents, to break away from their values and begin to establish a code of your own? Surely part of the task of the young intellectual is to revalue traditions and values and assess their validity for his own generation.’

  ‘Oh no, Mr Merrick,’ said Miss Winterbottom. ‘Oh, we’re not intellectuals,’ said someone else. ‘I don’t know what my father would think if he heard you’d been telling us that sort of thing,’ said Miss Winterbottom further. Again Mr Hopgood laughed; he was sophisticated enough to be having a lovely time.

  ‘What Miss Winterbottom wishes to say,’ intoned the deep voice of Louis Bates, ‘and would tell you, I think, if she were more articulate, is that we aren’t young intellectuals. What have we to do with thinking? These are the fifties, not the twenties. We’re even sophisticated about being sophisticated. We’re out-and-out relativists; we can’t believe that anyone’s right; their rectitude turns to ashes in our hands. And what good is it being an intellectual? This is the time of the common man. You miss everything if you are an intellectual. All you can say, if you are one, is that if we had been invited to the party we should have made it a different kind of do. The pattern of things doesn’t come from us and we wish to be as little a part of it as possible. I think that’s what Miss Winter-bottom was trying to say, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Winterbottom.

  There followed a long pause, while everyone looked into his teacup and tried to think of something to say. Louis wondered if he could ask about the virgins now. ‘I like your curtains,’ offered Miss Winterbottom, ‘or have I said that?’ The pause was resumed, while everyone pretended to listen to the sound of cars passing along the main road outside. ‘How is the thesis going, Miss Fielding?’ said Dr Carfax at last.

  ‘I’m just reaching the stage where you feel that it will take you at least a hundred years to finish writing it.’

  ‘What’s your thesis on?’ said Miss Winterbottom politely.

  ‘It’s a study of the fish imagery in Shakespeare’s tragedies,’ said Emma with a smile. People began to warm again after the shock of Louis’s diatribe.

  Meanwhile, Louis had been gazing interestedly around the assembled company, wondering what they were thinking of him. Opposite him he noticed Emma Fielding. She offered, he noticed, a warmth of feature that was conspicuously lacking in the other students; her comments up to now had been pointed and intelligent, such as they were; and she was not affected noticeably by the common unease. The process by which she ate a cake, nibbling it with white, straight teeth, somehow held him fascinated; it was as if he had never seen anyone do it before. ‘Do you mind if I change places with someone?’ he said and, looking at the girl to the right of Emma, added, ‘You, for instance?’ The exchange was effected and Louis, to his great delight, found himself beside his quarry. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  A student who was doing very badly, and thought that Treece had taken a dislike to him, decided to make his mark. ‘I don’t believe Eliot’s poetry means anything at all. I think everyone’s taken in by it. I’ll bet he doesn’t know what it means himself.’

  ‘Well, Cocoran has taken only one term to see through our professional charlatanism,’ said Merrick, satirically. ‘Well,’ said Carfax more generously, ‘as one who has marked finals papers, I wouldn’t say that was completely false.’

  ‘What do you think of Eliot, then, Bates?’ asked Treece. Louis had been peering inquisitively at Emma’s white arms, and now he looked up questioningly. ‘I never read any,’ said Bates. Cocoran wished he had said that. ‘Through lack of time or inclination?’ asked Treece. ‘As a matter of principle,’ said Louis impressively. ‘Anyone who has any pretensions to writing poetry, however modest, is better away from him at present, in my view. I read him once, and as you know, his idiom is pervasive. I simply want to avoid it.’

 
‘You have literary aspirations?’ asked Treece pleasantly. ‘I’ve had a few poems illustrated in a tiny literary magazine,’ explained Louis. ‘They didn’t pay me much for them, of course.’ Actually they had not paid him anything, but at least he had published.

  ‘I’m always interested to come upon signs of literary activity among my people,’ said Treece. ‘Do any of you others do anything in that line?’ No one responded. ‘No,’ went on Treece, with a little sigh. ‘I suppose not. Of course when I was up at University, everyone seemed to have a novel or a sheaf of poems tucked away somewhere. It was that sort of time, of course – Auden at Oxford, Empson and Isherwood at Cambridge; there were so many enfants terribles that it was almost fashionable not to be writing anything. I suppose that kind of thing wasn’t so bad really. You don’t find it so much in the provincial universities, of course; people aren’t so concerned to make an impression, I suppose, and they come here to work and get a job, not have a good time or enrich their souls too much.’

  It was the little sigh, so evocative of vanished glories, that amused Hopgood, to whom the present had a stamina that no other time could ever have had; people, he felt, were sensible, knew where they were going, wanted to get there safe and sound. He said so.

  ‘Well,’ said Louis, in defiance of all, ‘I think I’m enriching my soul.’

  Merrick looked at him in amusement. ‘The trouble is, isn’t it, Stuart,’ he said, ‘that people like that very rarely come to very much in the end? Auden and Isherwood are the ones who did, but think of all those others.’

  ‘Oh, that’s almost inevitable, isn’t it?’ answered Treece. ‘There’s always a certain amount of wastage of this sort. The question really is, are universities the best places for geniuses to prosper? I’m not sure they are. I know they gain some kind of stimulus and training. But then they miss in experience – and so they either overreach themselves, or they write one of these satirical novels about university life that people keep writing. I hope no one’s writing one of those about us, is he?’