Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  Viola set to work and made some hot cocoa, to thaw out Treece’s guests, and they all forgathered in the drawing room, expectantly waiting, positively poised ready for the return of Carey Willoughby. They all had questions. Jenkins had expressly asked to come, in order to see an angry young man in, as he put it, the flesh, and observe his social motivations; it wasn’t a chance that came up every day. Oliver was there, because he knew Willoughby; they had once met in the office of the Literary Editor of the Spectator, as they picked books from the shelves for review: somehow Oliver never seemed to have got any of his reviews, though he was always writing them, actually into print. Tanya was there, because Viola had invited her. Professor de Thule and his wife, Mavis, were there, and Mavis was already waxing garrulous. Treece, listening with half an ear and watching the stairs for the famed descent, reflected with growing horror how defenceless these people all would prove when faced with Willoughby, always supposing he came down and joined them. He took Viola aside, and asked: ‘Do you suppose he’s gone to sleep up there?’

  At this moment the telephone rang. ‘It’s me, Bates,’ said a voice when Treece picked up the receiver. ‘I’ve searched the station from end to end and he simply isn’t here.’ ‘Of course he isn’t,’ said Treece. ‘He’s here.’ ‘When’s he going to talk?’ asked Bates. ‘He already has,’ said Treece. ‘All right, was it?’ asked Louis. ‘A virtuoso performance,’ replied Treece. ‘Who introduced him?’ ‘I did,’ said Treece.

  ‘Well, I’d like to meet him,’ said Bates.

  ‘Well,’ said Treece, ‘I don’t know . . .’ The truth was that Treece simply did not feel like handling Bates at this hour and in this context.

  ‘I invited him, after all,’ said Bates.

  ‘Very well,’ said Treece. ‘Come up.’

  Treece put down the receiver wearily, and returned to the drawing room to see whether Willoughby had reappeared. He had not. ‘It’s marvellous what a bassoon can do for a sick man,’ a lecturer from the Music Department, who had a theory that music could cure physical illness, was saying. ‘And those little red Chinese hats, weren’t they charming; I just love Disney,’ uttered the high virginal voice of Mavis de Thule.

  Willoughby now put in his appearance, and all conversation stopped short, as people observed a phenomenon which, while not much in itself, was clearly made of the stuff of drama. Stuart Treece was standing by the fireplace, looking towards the doorway, and Willoughby stood framed in the entrance where all could see him. His head was bent and he was staring down at his feet. Nor was he the only one; Professor Treece, equally, was staring, with rapt attention, at the feet of Mr Willoughby, of the new movement. People all looked at the feet; there was little apparent in them that deserved close study. They looked back at Treece. For a moment more he appeared speechless; then under the force of some powerful emotion, which he was clearly trying to control, he asked: ‘Aren’t those my shoes and socks, Mr Willoughby?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Willoughby.

  ‘Did you take them?’

  ‘Well, how else would they get down there?’ asked Willoughby reasonably. ‘I found them in a drawer upstairs. My feet were wet. My shoes let water in. They’re no good. I’ve put them in the furnace.’

  ‘And your socks too?’

  ‘And my socks too,’ agreed Willoughby. ‘Why, for goodness sake, you don’t mind, do you? What is man in this world for, if not to help his fellows?’

  ‘My name’s Mavis de Thule,’ said Mavis quick-wittedly; she had been brought up on the importance of social tact, which was probably why her husband had got his chair. ‘We haven’t met yet.’

  ‘Hullo,’ said Willoughby.

  ‘Tell me, Mr Willoughby,’ said Mavis, tapping him on the chest with a forefinger; Willoughby looked at the finger with fascination, as if he was considering biting it. ‘I mean, I’ve always wondered, where do novelists get their ideas from? What sets things in motion, you know?’

  ‘Fruit-salts,’ said Willoughby.

  ‘Oh, don’t be like that with me,’ said Mavis winsomely. ‘I really want to know. I mean, it must be awfully exciting to conceive a book that you know is a masterpiece.’ This was rather clever for Mavis, and it even worked.

  ‘You never know that,’ said Willoughby, ‘and really you never know where the idea actually came from, or how much of it you actually had when you started to write. It’s like conceiving a baby; babies really start when the woman first drops her glove.’

  ‘My God! We must be careful,’ said Tanya, who was standing by. ‘So that is how babies start.’

  ‘You write because you’re a writer,’ went on Willoughby, at the same time taking a surreptitious look at Tanya, and being impressed; ‘what you write about is incidental, just simply what your world happens to be. I write about universities because I work in a university and I can collect the stuff . . .’

  ‘What’s this I hear about your novels being romans à clef?’ interposed Professor de Thule.

  ‘Oh, everyone thinks he can identify people in these books. He can’t of course. I’m not a fool. I like to keep my friends. I can’t afford to lose any more friends. A man needs friends. It’s simply that my novels are about people who exist in such multiplication in our world.’

  ‘Oh, I hope you won’t put us in, then,’ said Mavis.

  ‘What Mrs de Thule means,’ interposed Tanya, ‘is that she hopes you will put us in.’

  ‘Now would I tell you?’ asked Willoughby, feeling warmed by all this attention. The group grew larger.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mavis, laughing appreciatively. ‘You know, people, we shall all be in a bestseller and the whole world will laugh at us.’

  ‘Ah, a sad fate,’ said Tanya ironically.

  ‘Not the whole world,’ said Willoughby. ‘Have you ever considered what a lousy proportion of the public ever actually read my books? And of that small proportion, what a small proportion actually buy them? Have you read any of mine?’

  ‘Both,’ said Mavis promptly. ‘And I thought they were awfully good.’

  ‘And did you buy them or get them from a library?’

  ‘We have a very good library in town, so there was no need to buy them.’

  ‘No need?’ cried Willoughby. ‘If you liked them, why not reward me, make sure I write another one? You talk about being in my next one. What next one? I work at a full-time job like you . . .’

  ‘Yes, Willoughby, where do you find the time?’ asked de Thule.

  ‘I make it,’ said Willoughby. ‘I work hard. If everyone in this room bought at full price a copy of my novels, and everyone else in every room that contains so-called intelligent people, who could claim to be interested in this sort of thing, I could write full-time.’

  ‘Would you say, then,’ asked Jenkins, ‘that this was broadly why you are angry? Let me put it another way: do you find that the material rewards and status claims available to writers seem to you inferior, and a source of frustration therefore? Actually I’m just testing out a little theory . . .’

  The doorbell rang. It was Louis Bates. Treece went to let him in, and introduced him to Willoughby. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said Bates. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said Willoughby; Louis looked very pleased. ‘You owe me two quid.’

  ‘What for?’ asked Bates.

  ‘You don’t think I’m going to pay my own train fare for the privilege of talking to you boys, do you?’ asked Willoughby.

  ‘This place,’ remarked Mavis, ‘is turning into a bourse.’

  Willoughby overheard this remark and turned to face Mavis. ‘You people,’ said he, ‘you don’t know what it is to have money matter to you, because you have it. I used to go into cafés once, and have a meal and then walk out without paying, because if I hadn’t done that I would have starved. There was one thing you could always do, if you were really bad; there was a photographer who took special pictures for homosexuals, and he’d help you if you’d oblige. But that sort of question doesn’t occur to you at
all. Does it ever occur to you that your comparative civilization, if that’s what it is, is a condition of your freedom from financial embarrassment?’

  ‘I think this point is clear to us all, dear Mr Willoughby,’ said Tanya. ‘But because we do not want for money is no reason that we should be ashamed of our civilization. I happen to think it important that we have it. But then, you see, I lived somewhere where it would have mattered had there been more civilization and less people who thought as you do.’

  ‘I agree with him,’ said Louis Bates, and he turned to Willoughby. ‘That’s why you can’t have the train fare. The society will see to that. Do you know how much I have left, after paying for a taxi down to the station to meet you, when you weren’t even there? Eightpence.’

  ‘Hell,’ said Willoughby, and it was clear that he was touched, unbelievable as it seemed to all about. ‘Forget about the train fare. You get it from the society and keep it. I know how poor some of you boys are. Anyway, it didn’t cost me anything. I came on a platform ticket.’

  People were beginning to feel that it was time that Louis was weaned away from the guest of honour, and Professor de Thule popped up at Bates’s elbow. ‘Do you have any other speakers lined up as delightful as our guest of this evening?’ he asked. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ said Bates. ‘I just want to ask him to look at some poems of mine.’ He did, and Willoughby looked, and he surveyed Bates, up and down, and said that he would show them to an editor. Bates looked very pleased and asked Willoughby why he didn’t get out of universities, among all these effete liberals, these jolly groves of academe, and into real life. ‘The danger of too much criticism really is, isn’t it, that it tends to destroy creative activity altogether in the critic, by making him too self-conscious about his task? Whereas I write a shocking poem and think a lot of it at the time, and keep on doing that until I turn out something better.’

  Mavis de Thule set to work on Willoughby. ‘Isn’t this a splendid sideboard?’ she said. ‘You don’t have to say that to me,’ replied Willoughby. ‘I don’t live here – it’s just so much firewood to me.’ He turned back to Louis Bates.

  In a corner, Stuart Treece was talking to Oliver about his friends of a few evenings before. ‘How did you meet these people?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, what we do, people like us, is, when we see someone who looks interesting, we go up to them and say, “You look interesting; what do you do?” You see, I’m interested in people of that sort. I suppose it all started with the milk-bar habit. I used to go into milk-bars, and one day I got talking to a group of three or four people, who just talked. What I mean is, if there was any subject that came up, they knew something about it. They read all the time. They knew something about everything. It wasn’t particularly good talk, but it was exciting. And then there was another thing about these people that fascinated me even more. They didn’t work. I couldn’t understand this. I couldn’t see how people managed without working; I’d never really known anyone who had. But it’s all quite simple really: how it’s done. You simply don’t work. And everything follows from that.’

  ‘What struck me about them, really,’ said Treece, ‘was their cruelty. They seemed so careless of people.’

  ‘To you they would seem that. They’re many of them self-destructive, and, like most self-destructive people, they see to it that their fate is shared; they destroy other people. But then they’re so creative as well, creative of ideas, I mean. I’ve known running conversations that have gone on for months, every night from eight till four the next morning, about the relation between the finite and the infinite, or about Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. A lot of them became interested in German philosophy during the war, because, of course, none of them was in the Army, because they got out by taking a hundred aspirins or affecting to be homosexuals. They weren’t identified with the war effort, so they went the other way. A lot of them really wept, this is true, when Il Duce was hanged. What surprises me is how underground this strain of thinking, which is all perfectly connected and rather widespread, or was, manages to be. In America it would have all been written up a thousand times. Here there’s just Colin Wilson, Stuart Holroyd . . . that’s the kind of preoccupation.’

  ‘Bates is like this, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Oliver, ‘except that one of the conditions of this life is a certain kind of failure; whereas Bates is just a bit successful.’

  Across the room Willoughby, going to refill his glass, claimed that he had trodden on Mavis de Thule’s foot and wanted to apologize. ‘It wasn’t my foot,’ said Mavis sweetly. ‘Of course it was your foot,’ said Willoughby. ‘I trod on your foot and I want to apologize and by God I’m going to apologize.’ Mavis de Thule looked frightened. ‘Perhaps it was Dr Jenkins’s here’s foot,’ she suggested. ‘No,’ said Willoughby, ‘it was your foot. Why lie about it?’ Elsewhere in the room Bates was suggesting to Viola Masefield that they all have a play reading.

  ‘What was the name of the chick with the big behind who sat on my knee in the car?’ asked Willoughby, coming up to Treece.

  ‘Who do you mean?’ cried Treece.

  ‘The girl that teaches in your department,’ said Willoughby.

  ‘That was Dr Masefield,’ said Treece. ‘She’s our seventeenth-century man.’

  ‘I liked her,’ said Willoughby.

  ‘She has amazing critical acumen,’ said Treece. ‘An intellect at once malely strong and femalely sensitive, if you follow me.’

  ‘I’m just an old-fashioned kiss, touch, and smell man, myself,’ said Willoughby. ‘But thanks.’

  He went off and talked to Viola, who was taking round drinks on a tray. After this he disappeared altogether. At one point he was noticed in the garden by Mavis de Thule, who threw up the window and cried chattily, ‘Why, what are you doing out there, Mr Willoughby?’ ‘Having a piss,’ said Willoughby, as chattily.

  Treece now found himself detained by Tanya. ‘Aren’t you going to talk to me, Stuart?’ she asked. ‘Have we offended you? You don’t come so often now.’

  ‘No, Tanya, you’re too sensitive,’ Treece replied; he could say this because it so patently was not true.

  ‘Viola is worried about you, Stuart,’ said Tanya. ‘She is very fond of you. She worries because she thinks you don’t eat enough; she says you are looking ill. I tell her, if he is not sensible enough to put food in his stomach, then he doesn’t deserve to be well. You do look ill, Stuart.’

  ‘I feel a bit odd,’ said Treece.

  ‘You know, Stuart, you are a naughty boy. I am very concerned for Viola, and I don’t want her hurt. She told me what had happened before. I told her she was stupid. I said, Stuart is a man who has no emotions whatsoever. All he will want now, after this, is to escape. He fears he is caught in something. He feels ashamed of himself. He doesn’t like women; all that is a nuisance to him. He is more than any the sort you should stay away from. I know this seems cruel to you, Stuart, but there are other people to be thought of. I am not blaming you. But I tell you, I don’t want any hurt to come to Viola. She is not as sophisticated, you know, as she seems. I understand your sort too well.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit hard on me, Tanya?’ asked Treece.

  ‘Ask yourself that,’ said Tanya. ‘I am concerned with the other one.’

  Willoughby, when last seen, had been talking to Jenkins about jazz. Now he was nowhere to be seen, and Treece, who was afraid he was probably writing up all the guests in a notebook somewhere, went off to look for him. It was not, however, a notebook he was engrossed with, but Dr Masefield; he was kissing her at the back of the cloak cupboard. ‘Excuse me,’ said Treece, ‘but Professor and Mrs de Thule are leaving and wish to make their adieux.’

  ‘Good,’ said Willoughby. ‘Now let’s go out and find some jazz.’

  ‘I don’t think there is any,’ said Treece shirtily.

  ‘There is,’ said Willoughby. ‘This fellow Jenkins is taking us.’

  ‘Bye-bye, Mr Willough
by, bye-bye,’ cried Mavis de Thule, sticking her head into the cupboard.

  ‘Bye-bye, ducky,’ said Willoughby.

  IV

  The following morning Treece rose at seven and stoked the boiler, so that Willoughby could have a bath. As they had been retiring for bed at three o’clock that early morning, Treece had asked Willoughby: ‘Would you like your bath now or in the morning? I ask because if you have it in the morning, it means I shall have to get up at seven and stoke the boiler.’ Willoughby did not even have to think about the answer to this one: ‘I’ll have it in the morning,’ he said. Treece then went back to bed, and read for an hour; then he got up again and went along to Willoughby’s room to rouse him. He entered the room in some trepidation, for angry young men seemed to have some special kind of short shrift with guest rooms, which obviously symbolized something odious about hospitality; in one novel he had read the hero had burned the linen with cigarettes, and in another he had taken down all the pictures and untacked the carpet and taken that up, and probably (Treece’s recollection of the novel was imperfect) he had put them all in a pile and set fire to them. The room, however, seemed intact, and the only eccentricity apparent was that Willoughby was not in it at all. He had, Treece discovered on going downstairs again, spent the night on the sofa in the drawing room, because he slept better on couches, and in his clothes.

  ‘You can have your bath now,’ said Treece pleasantly. ‘Thank you,’ said Willoughby, equally pleasant. ‘But do I have to take a bath? I mean, you’re not going to make me go through with this, are you?’ ‘Not if you don’t wish to,’ said Treece. ‘That’s entirely your affair.’ ‘Oh, you protocol boys,’ said Willoughby. ‘I know that phrase. It means: if you’re going to persist in being a boor and a ruffian and an outcast, then I’m not going to blame you; but you realize that we all disapprove. Look, I don’t need a bath yet.’ ‘What would you like for your breakfast?’ asked Treece patiently, for it was too early in the morning even to bother about all this. ‘Bacon and egg? If you’ll tell me now, I’ll go and cook it and you can lie in for a little longer.’ ‘Thank you. Bacon and egg then,’ said Willoughby, equally patiently. Treece went and cooked the breakfast and returned to find Willoughby fast asleep, too deeply gone to be roused even. He went back to the kitchen and ate his breakfast. At one o’clock Willoughby was still asleep. He shook him hard, and woke him, and reminded him that they were due to leave at two for the Poetry Weekend. Merrick was taking them, and Viola, down in his car, a little red sports model that Merrick ran on his private income.