‘It’s a mad, crazy world we live in,’ he observed to him. Jenkins nodded sagely. ‘It’s a bear-garden,’ he said.
‘I suppose one is old,’ said Treece, ‘when one’s surprised at the manifestations of disorder. One comes to the point when one doesn’t want anything else to change, however hard one has fought for change in one’s youth.’
‘Ah,’ said Jenkins, shaking a roguish finger in a very Continental way, ‘you want to have your cake and eat it. Why not, of course? It’s an absurd proverb. I always have my cake and eat it. It’s the only wise thing to do.’ He ate several creamy pastries with great rapidity. ‘You expect too much,’ he said finally, sucking his fingers.
‘I always did,’ said Treece sadly, sinking lower in his chair. Whenever Treece talked to sociologists, and he made a habit of doing so, since he liked having himself explained to himself, from all facets, he always felt in touch with the world of the inevitable, with the great sweeping processes of history. And whenever sociologists talked to Treece (and they made a habit of doing that, because he listened; the sort of people Jenkins respected most were those of whom he could say: ‘So I put a logical argument to him and in the end he actually admitted he was wrong. “You’re right, Jenkins,” he had to confess. “You’ve convinced me.”’) they felt in touch with those strange, unorganized minds that thought they were independent, and could do as they liked, and knew not they were creatures of circumstance.
‘And this education we’re giving them is the tool of destruction, of course; that’s what makes it so painful. We’re showing them how to accomplish the ritual murder of ourselves. That’s what hard-bitten Tories like yourself find so hard to bear.’
‘Tories?’ cried Treece. ‘I’m a sort of Labour man.’
‘Ah, but what sort?’ asked Jenkins. ‘The socialist millennium has come at last, and how you hate it. You wish you could send it back and ask for another. The working man has really let you down. You thought he wanted a sturdy, working-class culture, weaving baskets and singing folk-songs. And all he wants is The Lone Ranger.’
‘I suppose I’m becoming the most fantastic old reactionary,’ said Treece, aghast at himself. He did, indeed, believe in privilege. Just as he often liked charming people better than good ones, pretty women better than plain ones, he preferred the intelligent to the fools and wanted them to triumph. And this in turn led him to believe in a kind of inverted privilege; he let himself be charmed by the pathos of the undeserving. There was no answer to the fact that the privileged had the assurance, the persuasive manner, the true gift of tongues; and so one righted the balance by being more than fair to the underprivileged, the Eborebelosas, the Louis Bates.
‘Not really,’ said Jenkins. ‘Indeed, you’re too tolerant. We allow anything, any change, everything except perhaps bad writing. One develops scruples and respect for others to the point at which action for us becomes impossible. And hence standards become obscured. It’s a state of chassis,’ he said, stuffing some papers into his briefcase. ‘A state of chassis.’ He stood up, a dapper little man, looking like a commercial traveller trying to sell his intellectual wares. ‘Do you dance?’ he asked.
‘Pardon?’ asked Treece.
‘I wondered if you danced. I have to go and do some field work at the Palais.’
‘Quel palais?’ demanded Treece, amazed.
‘Not Versailles,’ said Jenkins. ‘The Palais de Danse. Have you been down there to the rock-and-roll sessions? I go down almost every night.’
‘How interesting,’ said Treece politely.
‘Yes,’ said Jenkins. ‘I’m getting quite good at it now.’
‘I must be the only person in town who has never been to the Palais,’ said Treece reflectively. ‘On Saturday nights I seemed to have stayed at home doing my homework until I was about twenty-four. I never seem to have had a culture at all, like Richard Hoggart and all the others. I just stayed at home and worked. And when my father used to draw on the cultural stockpile of the working classes, I just wasn’t there. I was up in my bedroom, working.’
‘Well, then, come along with me,’ said Jenkins. ‘See how the other half lives. More than half, actually. Have a little sociological beano. As you said – with sociology one can do anything and call it work.’ He fingered the buttons on his button-down shirt. He was the only man in the University with buttons on his shirt – it was the full extent of his Americanization.
Treece reflected for a moment; it seemed fully justifiable on academic grounds. ‘Very well,’ he said.
‘Good man,’ said Jenkins. ‘I’ll see you in the snug of the Falcon at seven. Wear something comfortable.’ He opened a small tin, taken from his pocket, and put a throat pastille in his mouth. ‘Pastille?’ he asked politely.
‘No, thank you,’ said Treece.
‘Sometimes I think I talk too much,’ he said. ‘It’s compulsive, of course, this pressing urge to interpret one’s surroundings publicly. Sometimes I wish I were a little kitten, starry-eyed and sweetly mystified by the oddities of this world. You know what I mean? Don’t tell Kahnweiler this’ (Kahnweiler was the head of the Department of Psychology). ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ And he disappeared through the door.
III
‘I feel so tired,’ said Treece. ‘So terribly, terribly, terribly tired.’
‘Didn’t you find it interesting?’
‘Terribly interesting. Terribly, terribly, terribly interesting,’ said Treece. ‘But really, don’t you think, isn’t that enough discontent for one night. I don’t think I could drink another drop.’
They had spent a long, long evening looking for discontent. They went first to the Palais. The Palais proved to be terribly respectable. Tea and soda-fountains. No Negroes. The men had all shined up their shoes, and the girls stood at the side holding on to their handbags as if they were, somehow, a physical representation of the virtue they looked determined not to relinquish. They had then gone to a low wine lodge, a great Victorian hall with a central counter, sawdust on the floor, large mirrors of etched glass, a small trio (small, that is, in stature) playing teashop music (‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’), led by an old, old woman with pink hair. The people all seemed misshapen and ugly, sad victims of the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Prostitutes, old and haggard, plied their trade. Treece had been impressed by this one, but Jenkins had not. He had seen most of these people before. ‘They’re nearly all sociologists,’ he said.
They had next gone on to a homosexual bar, the men’s bar in a large hotel, where the barman held your hand as he gave you change, and kept trying on a pair of earrings while he was waiting to give service. Treece liked this one, too.
They had then tried an upper-class cocktail lounge where girls in fur coats sat and drank whisky and ginger. This one Treece didn’t like, so they had gone out and on to another place that was full of old people talking about illness. They had only half a pint this time. After that, if Treece remembered rightly, they had gone on to one or two public houses, of different sorts, until at last time had been called. Jenkins had grown increasingly more depressed as the evening wore on, and he explained that what upset him so much was the sort of people that sociologists had to be objective about. He detested so many of them. He also detested, he explained, most of his fellow sociologists, who were still living spiritually at the LSE of Harold Laski, and sneered at him whenever he wore a suit or drank wine out of the right glasses. He was also concerned about a tattooing survey that the department had undertaken. ‘It’s quite a large-scale project; we have a psychologist who’s working on the reasons that people have for getting themselves tattooed, and then a statistical sociologist who’s working out incidence among class and age groups, and incidence of tattooing among the population as a whole. Then we have an aesthetician, who’s considering the tattoo as a form of popular art . . . like the street ballad. The thing is that I committed myself rather rashly to the suggestion that, as a very high proportion of people in hospital seem to be tatt
ooed, there may be some correlation between tattooing and certain forms of illness. I wanted to have a doctor in the survey. It was then observed that a large percentage of the people in hospital are working class, and that tattooing incidence is highest among that class. I could have cried.’
Treece was feeling distraught, because he had, this evening, done something very naughty: he had had an appointment with Emma, to spend the evening with her, and he had deliberately failed to go. He really did not quite know why; but the opportunity to come out with Jenkins had been seized on quite wilfully; and now he thought of her, waiting, and felt himself a rogue and a cheat. ‘I’m a mess,’ he said, as they walked down the street among the little knots of people from newly closed public houses. ‘I’m a terrible, terrible mess. The world is too much with us.’
‘You mustn’t be maudlin,’ said Jenkins, reasonably (considering his own condition).
‘I suffer from this shameful and useless boredom, this complete exhaustion of personality. How can I explain it to you? I do bad things. I lack the energy to carry through any process I conceive. And when I look at all the people in the modern world, and at the way things are moving . . . then I trust nothing. I simply have no trust or repose anywhere. All is change for the worse.’
‘Well, that’s the lot of people like us. We abstract ourselves from the sphere of national effectiveness. We’re too busy taking notes to do anything. It’s a national as well as a personal trait now. And the fault lies precisely in the things we value most. You aren’t likely to become a Catholic or a communist, and nor am I . . .’
‘God, no,’ said Treece.
‘Quite,’ said Jenkins. ‘God, no; and Lenin, no. You prefer a good honest Western doubt – with all the personal ineffectiveness and depression that that entails. You presumably think that your position is actually superior . . .’
‘I think it’s terribly terribly superior,’ said Treece. ‘I can see the attractions of either of those disciplines; they’re very obvious. But I think anguished and independent and critical doubt is really more fruitful for the soul.’
‘Then you must expect to be depressed,’ said Jenkins.
‘I know,’ said Treece, ‘but I’ve always hoped not to be.’
‘I’m sorry if I appeared rude,’ said Jenkins.
‘Not at all,’ said Treece.
‘Let’s go to the Mandolin,’ said Jenkins.
‘I thought everything was closed.’
‘This isn’t a pub: it’s an espresso bar. It catches all the trade after the pubs close. Once this city used to close down after ten-thirty. Now the espresso bars have added another dimension to provincial time.’
They passed down a side street, and then a side street off a side street, until they were in the factory quarter. Huge buildings stood up silently on either side. ‘What are these places?’ asked Treece.
‘Warehouses,’ said Jenkins.
Treece thought he said whorehouses, and looked at them with interest. They didn’t look like his idea of a cathouse at all. However, it was probably different once you got inside. Suddenly they pulled up short and mounted a dingy wooden stairway, which gave access to a room that appeared to be in complete darkness. ‘Are you sure it’s a brothel?’ asked Treece. ‘It’s an espresso bar,’ said Jenkins. Treece’s eyes, now growing used to the semi-darkness, began to register the scene, and he observed that, sitting at low, oddly shaped – one might say accidentally shaped – tables, were people. They seemed to be an indiscriminate collection. There were people from the University, in great knitted red sweaters. There were also a number of what Jenkins called ‘teds’. All were young. There were girls in duffel coats with black eyelids, protesting, just for the evening. There were exhausted-looking youths in reefer jackets, carrying double basses, with their hair planed down to a thin, grass-like covering on top. They were all sipping frothy coffee in glass cups no bigger than eye-baths. The waitresses were slinky and delectable. Outside, in a little courtyard on the roof, in the rain, a small group of musicians were playing on homemade guitars. Jenkins explained that if Treece was interested in the breakdown of class boundaries the guitarist in the group was actually the Earl of . . . (he named a prominent scion of the English nobility) and the group was called the Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense Skiffle Group. ‘It would be,’ said Treece.
A pervasive atmosphere of chic filled the place. Exotic greenery slouched about the walls, decked with a casual guitar, as if Segovia had only just that moment left; the furniture was ever so very contemporary, for people with no leg below the knee-joint and a short sharp spike for a bottom. The décor mingled styles indiscriminately, and Treece felt in a cultural fog. There was a Spanish mural, an Indian statue, Caribbean vegetation, an Italian coffee machine, American music. A notice on the wall said: ‘Calling all toreadors.’ There was a sort of overall grotto effect; Jenkins claimed that when it opened the proprietor, a Pole named Stanislaus, had, in an excess of enthusiasm, planned to have it flooded to a depth of one foot, and issue people with waders, but had reluctantly abandoned the idea when he realized that you couldn’t do that on the second floor. But if the décor and comparative licence carried one into another world (if only, Treece thought, there had been windows, so that one could make sure the real world was still there) the clientele was very English. ‘It’s like being on the Continong, except you can get a decent cup of tea,’ said Jenkins. ‘The English heaven.’ Within the room, amours and intellectual discussion equally ran their fervent courses. In the corners couples embraced and fondled, stopping just short of actual fulfilment; at a centre table someone was declaring, ‘Well, you can’t make value-judgements about value-judgements, can you?’
‘What mystifies me,’ said Jenkins in a whisper, ‘is where they dug all these people up from. They weren’t about before this place started; and you never see them in the streets. They must come in through the drains.’
‘They’re very new to me,’ said Treece, a naïve Dante being shown through Hell by this strangest of Vergils. ‘Is it always like this?’ The skiffle group were now at work on a number, pertinently called, ‘I was a Big Man Yesterday, but Oh You Ought to See Me Now’.
‘Listen, they’re playing our tune,’ said Jenkins. He went on in an excited sociologist’s whisper, ‘A year ago, two years ago, this seemed like just an ordinary, dull provincial city, with housewives shopping at Dolcis and having coffee in the Kardomah, and going home to their suburb to count the change. You know. But now . . . now it seems full of all sorts of bohemians, political insurgents, masochists, lesbians, men who think they’re Jesus Christ, men who sleep on the radiators in the Public Library. And do you know what’s done it? Italian coffee.’
Behind them the coffee machine kept giving out large, sighing hisses, like a railway engine discharging. It was a plaintive sound. ‘It works without steam,’ said Jenkins. ‘Oh, if only I did.’
‘Why is this special?’ demanded Treece. ‘Why is it necessary to correct the universal misconception that it works with steam?’
‘Oh, don’t be like that,’ said Jenkins.
The espresso machine, all gilt and fancy lights, with a huge gold eagle on the top, was about the size and shape of a coffin; it was being operated – one might even say played – by a Sikh dressed in his native garb. ‘Cappuccino?’ asked a husky, alluring female voice, high above them. Treece looked up and perceived a very tall and extremely handsome girl, wearing a low-cut sweater and a tiny little apron like a fig-leaf, giving them a well-dentifriced smile. ‘Cappuccino?’ she asked again. Treece felt highly flattered that this should have happened to him. He didn’t intend to let the language barrier be an obstacle to this. ‘Non capisco,’ he said (he’d handled this sort of problem before) ‘Lo scrivere.’ ‘She wants to know if you want black or white coffee,’ said Jenkins. ‘Tell her white,’ said Treece, beaming and nodding at the girl. ‘Two whites,’ said Jenkins. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said the girl. ‘She spoke English all the time,’ said Treece indignantly. She arrived
back a moment later, bearing the coffee in tiny perspex cups. ‘Two shillings, please,’ she said. ‘It’s terribly expensive, isn’t it?’ Treece said when she had gone. ‘Do they sprinkle gold dust on it?’ ‘You aren’t paying for the coffee,’ said Jenkins. ‘You’re paying for the atmosphere, the sniff you got at her Chanel Number Five. You pay to look down the fronts of their dresses. They always have such nice waitresses.’
‘But can people really afford a shilling for a cup of coffee?’ asked Treece.
‘Well, look,’ said Jenkins, and gestured around. It was true that the place was so packed that, had the people been animals, it would have been banned by the RSPCA. ‘It’s the new idle rich, you see, the young.’
‘I see,’ said Treece. ‘Are you supposed to lift the cup from down there with your feet?’
‘The waitresses are aristos. They only go out with top people, the mews cottage boys. You have to own a horse to get off with them. It’s a special kind of girl, you see. They bat their long, silky legs at you, but if their sex dropped off and you handed it back to them they wouldn’t know what it was. You get my point. They’ve never really looked down in all their lives; they know someone’s going to open all the doors, move all the stones out of their path, get the car waiting. This too makes the angry young men even angrier. They hate to see the sort of rats that get girls like this. They want them themselves. But if they get saddled with one, all hell breaks loose.’ Jenkins thought all this very funny and laughed loudly. He sang: ‘So I took her into bed and I covered up her head, just to shield her from the doggy, doggy few.’
It was a long time since Treece had been so conscious of the English class system. He had supposed it had been quite subverted by the new post-war system of rewards; but it certainly didn’t confuse Jenkins. ‘Don’t you ever feel doubtful of your categories?’ he asked Jenkins suspiciously.
‘Well, I’m speaking ex cathedra, of course,’ said Jenkins, wiping milky froth from his lips, ‘and I wouldn’t want you to quote me, but it does bear some relation to reality, don’t you think?’
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