‘But you cultivate your own garden?’
‘My avant-garden,’ said Treece.
‘And how do you determine what’s scrupulous?’
‘The same way as you do,’ said Treece. ‘I try to examine what lies before me in all its complexity and to bring to bear on it all the moral resources at my disposal. That is what life is, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘But there are three obvious objections to that, aren’t there?’ said Emma cruelly. ‘One is that your process inhibits action; that is you weigh intellectually, instead of being a moral being and acting and letting your morality come out in your action. And then one can scrupulously rob or murder or commit perversion. And it offers nothing for other people.’
‘I am a teacher,’ said Treece, ‘and I talk about life, as I told you. And, moreover, I think there are certain moral passions common to all men.’
‘The trouble with me is I just enjoy more and more things,’ said Emma. ‘First I just liked milk; then I learned to like tea and coffee; and then cocoa and lemonade; and then port and sherry; and then gin and whisky. Soon I shall like everything.’
‘You must hurry up,’ said Treece.
‘What I begin to suspect about life is that anything in it is pleasure if you can only simply adjust, in some ways, to the terms of what’s offered. If anyone has a pure and honest self, that stays meticulously clean on the sidelines, I have; but it’s a fight to remain like that.’
‘Well, this has been interesting,’ said Treece. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve enjoyed this. There’s something about teashops,’ Treece added. ‘I can take teashops in the same way that people take tranquillizers.’
‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed it too,’ said Emma. ‘You must let me repay this invitation. Why don’t you have tea next Monday with me at the flat.’
‘Splendid,’ said Treece. He half-rose and gave an expansive gesture with his hand, which overturned the teapot, pouring its contents neatly into Emma’s lap. ‘Damnation,’ said Emma, getting up suddenly. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said Treece. He kneeled down in front of her and tried to eliminate the large stain with a discarded teacake. Emma pushed his hand away with an angry gesture. A waitress came with a cloth. Emma looked at his face and said: ‘It will wash out.’ ‘I’ll buy you another dress,’ said Treece. ‘Certainly not,’ said Emma. Treece got out his diary and made a note: ‘That’s one suit and one dress today,’ he said plaintively. ‘Sometimes I wish I could just go away and start again in another town.’
Emma asked for her coat and he brought it. ‘It doesn’t show under the coat; that’s one consolation,’ he said. ‘I don’t need consoling,’ said Emma. ‘Must you make a crisis out of it?’ The waitress brought their change and they left. Outside the evening was cold and wet, and Treece was terrified that he had given her pneumonia; it was a poor way to start a friendship. Tea dripped steadily from the hem of her dress to the pavement; sadly he rubbed it in with his foot. ‘You ought to take that dress off,’ he said. ‘Here?’ said Emma sharply. ‘No, not here,’ said Treece. ‘I’m going home to change,’ said Emma; she was annoyed with his officiousness, for all she wanted was for him to look after her, neither humbly nor apologetically, but sensibly; it wasn’t a crisis for him; he should be thinking of her. ‘Has it gone right through?’ he asked. ‘Yes, it has,’ said Emma. ‘And can I still come to tea next Monday?’ he asked as she turned to go. ‘I suppose so,’ said Emma.
4
I
DR VIOLA MASEFIELD’S flat was not a place where you simply lived; you proved something. It was a showpiece of the unendurably modern – when you saw the modern like that, it looked so dated that you couldn’t believe it. When you went there, you always discussed things as they discuss things in Vogue: What does one do with dustbins to make them look interesting? What goes with shishkebab? How often do you water succulents? How high up do you put your bosom this month? Which is the best make of motor scooter? What do you do with a mobile when it isn’t? What is the best way of renovating old skis? Reading articles called ‘Are you an understanding wife? – test yourself’ and ‘Have a goat’s-milk bath this week’, Viola felt at home in the world. She seemed to have boyfriends because they could make bookcases, or transplant cacti, or cook wiener schnitzel; at least there was always one there doing it, whenever you went, and they really were boyfriends, like the ones in the women’s magazines. Meantime, Tanya would be standing by, with a quiet, a knowing smile on her European face. There is such a thing as a European face, which seems to say, ‘I have lived where you never could have survived’; Tanya had one. She was a lecturer in Slavonic languages at the University, and owned the house; she had taken Viola under her wing. Herself of Russian stock, she had come to England before, during, after the war – it was impossible to say – after knowing God knows what horrors and savagery. What she had learned could not be effaced from her; she could look at Machiavelli or La Rouchefoucauld and find them innocent. To treat her as a person, to offer her civilized manners, took on with her almost the quality of an insult: only young people and innocent countries could afford to play about like this. The proximity of Viola’s English, fresh-cheeked innocence and Tanya’s experience was a mystery. It was commonly rumoured that Tanya was Lesbian, but Viola denied it, said there was nothing, that Tanya liked her to have men friends, and one was left not knowing whether Viola was less innocent or Tanya more innocent than each seemed.
Viola had only one popular gramophone record, Trenet singing ‘Les Enfants S’Ennuyent Le Dimanche’, and at tonight’s party she had played it six times already. She played it at parties as a joke (though it was really Tanya’s joke) and now she, and everyone present, was ready to break it. The party was having its peculiar difficulties. The ale-cup, as she kept telling people, tasted like wee-wee. Viola was a simple yet intelligent woman, and she had friends who were simple and friends who were intelligent; she was always introducing the ones to the others and discovering that they didn’t like each other; she herself couldn’t tell which were which. The Nicholsons, the people who had Tanya’s bottom flat, were freethinking and open-minded; they both invariably wore pink shirts. They made dandelion wine and loved to give it to people; they took the New Statesman and felt that it was getting very conservative nowadays; they went to the cinema on Sunday evenings, not because they liked the cinema (they hated it; it was too mechanical), but because they felt that someone ought to go to preserve the right of Sunday cinema-going for those who did not realize the powerful forces at work against it; they walked two or three times a year along disused footpaths to preserve them as a right of way for those who did not realize, etc.; they made their own shoes; they prayed, as someone once cleverly said of them, to To Whom it May Concern. If William Morris had still been alive, he would have had all his time cut out trying to keep them out of his house; they would have been more William Morris than William Morris; he would have died of shame in the realization that he had not been enough himself. They baked their own bread and wove their own curtains, and it tasted as though they wove their own bread and looked as though they baked their own curtains. Their friends brought them home-produced honey (they introduced Viola to these friends and Viola said, ‘You made it? You have your own bee?’), and whatever they ate, they ate because it was good for them. Viola, who had dietetic interests, followed their cuisine with fascination; they practically lived on wheat germ. Now, at the party, the Nicholsons were going about, trying to like everyone, as they always did, and were finding it terribly hard. Tanya they looked on with a specially kindly eye, because she must have suffered; and Tanya, who had, and was as hard as nails about it, hated their inquisitive guts, as she put it – her English was not quite perfect, but it was idiomatic. They also looked benevolently on a morose, barrel-chested artist named Herman, and the woman he was living with. What made them stand out of the ordinary run was that this woman, who was thirty-five at least, ten years older than Herman, went out on the streets in order to earn enough to keep th
em both alive. ‘He doesn’t respect her for it, in fact he despises her, but that’s because he despises anyone who earns money, and he treats her badly. But she loves him and she won’t leave him; so she sells herself. I think she’s a saint,’ Viola was saying. Unfortunately she chose to say this to one of her other sort of friends, an elderly librarian named Miss Enid, who was known to all present as quite an exponent of the harp; and she, as anyone but Viola would have expected she would, set to to dispute this. ‘Viola dear, if she walks the street, how can you call her that?’ ‘But she’s giving herself because of something she believes in, his work, and because she loves him,’ said Viola. ‘She’s spending herself.’
‘But why, Viola dear, do you call that saintly? I know I’m an old-fashioned thing; but you know a lot of saints got their promotion, so to speak, because of their chastity. You talk as if she’s doing something very moral; I can’t see how she is even by your standards.’
‘“Even by your standards” isn’t very kind,’ said Viola, ‘but it is moral, in the sense that she’s living life worthily.’
‘I suppose sex has just ceased to be a moral issue,’ said the librarian.
‘No,’ said Viola, shocked. ‘Oh, no. It’s just a different morality. I think sex is full of moral problems; luckily, I like moral problems, and I think that’s the difference. People are prepared to have moral problems nowadays, instead of shying away from the places where they come up.’
‘I insist,’ said the librarian. ‘You aren’t moral about personal behaviour. Look at this situation. This woman, you see, could so easily do some other work and keep him. But if she worked in Woolworths you wouldn’t call her a saint would you? You’re just being terribly romantic.’
‘I’m not romantic,’ cried Viola indignantly, smarting under this insult. Dr Adrian Carfax happened at that moment to be passing by, and Viola seized his arm violently. ‘Adrian, I’m not romantic, am I?’ ‘How should I know that?’ asked Carfax, surprised. ‘I’m a married man.’ ‘I mean in spirit,’ said Viola. ‘Who was it who said at a public lecture that if the nineteenth century did not exist, it would not have been necessary to invent it?’ ‘I shouldn’t bring that up,’ said Carfax, who was a Swinburne man, one of the very few of them left.
‘You don’t understand me,’ said Miss Enid forgivingly.
‘Excuse me, Viola, but now you’re here, may I carry you off,’ said Carfax, giving Viola a significant look.
‘Wherever you like, dear,’ said Viola.
‘Just a minute,’ said Carfax. They withdrew to a cranny beside the fireplace and Carfax said: ‘Are we going to talk to Treece tonight about you know what?’
‘Yes; when he gets here,’ said Viola. ‘It gets worse.’
‘Faculty politics?’ inquired a passer-by perceptively.
‘Illicit passion,’ said Viola with a laugh. She turned back to Carfax. ‘But we mustn’t press him too hard. You know what Stuart’s like.’
‘He means well, you know, Viola,’ said Carfax, who prized loyalty. ‘Oh, I know,’ said Viola, ‘he couldn’t mean anything else if he tried. Don’t misunderstand me, Adrian; I like Stuart.’ Children sometimes say, I like you, and you feel honoured that, when they have so much to choose from, when they live in such a thoroughly amiable world, they should bother to pick you distinctly out, to like; Viola’s comment, Carfax felt, had a lot of this intonation; he wished that he could tempt her to say the same thing about him. How nice of her, in her headlong rush through life, that she should stop and like someone! Love, these days, is so firmly in that liking has quite gone out; and here was Viola doing it.
Time passed; beer was drunk; the evening wore on and finally Stuart arrived. He was covered in snow and had virtually to be carried to the fireplace and stripped of his outer clothing. ‘Oh, what a night,’ he said. ‘I’ve had such a rumpus at my evening class. Keats, Keats, Keats,’ he said spitefully. ‘I don’t care if I never see another keat again.’ He looked up at Viola; she looked charming, with her hair done in what Treece always called her lunatic fringe, and with a low-cut dress that ought to have been more tight-fitting; it would have made a baby cry. Some of the younger sporters in the room kept placing things she wanted to pick up low down and just out of reach; and Viola, delightfully herself, had no idea why. ‘Did you bring a book to read?’ asked Viola, when Treece had had time to thaw a little. This was a reference to the fact that, at parties, Treece had a habit of reading in a corner, with his back to the assembled company; there was a famous occasion when, at a faculty dinner, he got through A Farewell to Arms.
‘I have just the thing to warm you up,’ said Viola. ‘Vodka. You drink it all down at one go.’
‘Did you know that vodka is made from potatoes?’ said Treece when she brought it.
‘Oh damn,’ said Viola. ‘And I’ve been boiling mine.’
The drink warmed him and he smiled benevolently at Viola. Then he noticed that she had someone with her. It was Carfax. ‘We want to talk to you, Stuart,’ said Viola. ‘Oh,’ said Treece suspiciously; they looked as though they were going to steal his trousers.
‘It’s about Louis Bates,’ said Carfax.
‘He’s not here, is he?’ cried Treece.
‘No; of course not,’ said Viola.
Treece realized that one of the symptoms of paranoia was the feeling that one was constantly pursued, and he tried to control himself; but, damn it all, he was constantly pursued, wasn’t he? ‘I’ve had enough trouble from that source for one evening,’ said Treece. ‘Must we talk about him?’
‘I don’t know whether you’ve had any work from him lately?’ asked Carfax. Treece hadn’t, of course, but he wasn’t going to tell Carfax that. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘What do you think of it?’ asked Carfax, swaying judiciously back and forth on the balls of his feet.
‘Why?’ demanded Treece.
‘Now please tell us,’ said Viola, ‘because it’s a matter of some importance.’
‘Well now,’ said Treece. ‘It was passable.’
‘Was it?’ demanded Carfax. ‘Well, that’s more than I can say for the work I’ve been getting.’ Carfax sat down and began to puff militarily at his pipe; Carfax had been an officer in the First World War and always stood very stiffly, talked jovially but with a somewhat officers-to-men attitude, and had a precise sense of discipline which, if violated by anyone, stirred in him violent indignations. He was in this mood now. Treece had once heard him, in an argument with a student about some critical point of view, say, in reply to the student’s tentative ‘Well, I think . . .’ ‘You’re not here to think’; and then he remembered that he was in a university, not the Army, and to think was just what the student was here for; he had apologized handsomely and genially. About Carfax not all has been told. He was also Uncle Adrian in the schools broadcasts put out by a commercial television station in the afternoons; his bluff avuncular figure, smoking a pipe, could be seen, once a week, talking heartily about Shakespeare and what folk were like in them days; his producer had urged on him a quaint West-Country accent for these occasions, and he was now known in the University as the poor man’s Bernard Miles.
‘I haven’t been able to persuade him to do any work for me at all,’ said Viola, ‘so I can’t even offer a judgement. But it seems to me that if he doesn’t intend to get anything out of this place then he’d better get out and make room for someone who does.’
Treece realized that Carfax and Viola had already met on this point, and reached agreement, and without disclosing the fact that he had himself, earlier that evening, been proposing to himself some action of this sort, he tempted Carfax and Viola to a firmer stand. ‘It’s true he’s guilty of a high degree of irreponsibility,’ he said.
‘He told me in the middle of one of my lectures that I ought to take rose-hip syrup,’ said Carfax, furnishing what seemed to him incontrovertible proof.
‘And the way he looks at me sometimes,’ said Viola with an embarrassed laugh.
‘Wh
at does he do?’ said Treece interestedly.
‘Nothing,’ said Viola. ‘He just looks.’
‘Well, I found him cutting his hair in my drawing room the other afternoon before the departmental tea party.’
‘Fantastic,’ said Viola.
‘Well, there’s only one way to talk of someone whose values are as remote from life and independent as his are, isn’t there?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Viola.
‘You mean he’s mad,’ said Treece.
‘He wouldn’t be the first person of that sort to be found in a university. I always thought my tutor was; he’d change over from one set of false teeth to another in the middle of a lecture.’
‘Well,’ said Viola. ‘Then we ought to get him out of here as soon as possible, to somewhere where he can be looked after.’
‘No,’ said Treece; ‘we can’t do that.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Carfax. ‘I thought you were agreeing with us?’
Treece turned to Viola. ‘What Carfax means, when he says Bates is mad, is that he’s psychotic, that he suffers from schizophrenia, and is subject to delusion about his status in the world. And I suppose it’s true that his character does lie within that pattern of derangement. But if he is like that, that puts our whole problem on another dimension.’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Carfax. Treece’s change in spirit was too much for a simple Army man; Treece’s own image of Louis had seldom changed, and in this new perspective Bates’s faults seemed eminently permissible; they were pathological lesions and excusable on that count. His virtues, on the other hand, became his own. ‘You can’t punish a man for his nonconformity, after all. We can punish him for his lack of quality or for his failure to obey the rules. But it isn’t that at all; he doesn’t lack quality, I feel convinced. He simply has qualities of a different kind. We have to keep him. Where else can a man of his kind go if not into a university?’
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