Eating People is Wrong

by Malcolm Bradbury

  In the evening he asked the man next to him: ‘Where’s the toilet?’

  ‘Down at the end on the right,’ said the man.

  Treece got up and walked unsteadily down the room and into the mean little toilet. Here at least he could be for a moment alone. He stayed there for a few minutes and then suddenly he heard a loud voice in the ward cry: ‘And where is Mr Treece?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The fellow that came in this afternoon.’

  ‘He’s in the sluice.’

  There were heavy footsteps. Treece pulled up his trousers. Then the door of the cubicle was flung open and the strong-willed staff nurse said: ‘And what do you think you’re doing, if it isn’t a rude question?’

  ‘Using the toilet,’ said Treece.

  ‘Don’t you know you’re on complete rest?’

  ‘There are some things one has to do,’ said Treece.

  ‘You can do them in bed,’ said the nurse.

  ‘Well, I didn’t know that,’ said Treece.

  A chair was fetched and he was wheeled up the ward, in public disgrace. The nurse lifted him into bed. ‘If I catch you out of here again,’ she said, ‘I’ll put you in a crib bed that you can’t get out of.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Treece.

  ‘You’d better be,’ said the staff nurse, with a laugh.

  ‘I thowt tha shudna ha’ got up, but it weren’t none of my business,’ said the man in the next bed when the nurse had gone.

  ‘Well, really,’ said Treece, rather annoyed.

  At ten o’clock the lights were put out and immediately people began to cough and spew up and down the ward. ‘Fetch me a bottle,’ said the old man on Treece’s other side.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Treece. ‘I’m not allowed to move.’

  The old man got up and sat on the side of the bed and urinated on the floor. Treece felt sure he would get blamed for this as well, but the night nurse came and mopped up and told the old man not to do it again. ‘It’s the only way to get a bottle,’ said the old man with a clucking laugh.

  Someone got up and went to the toilet and then tried to get into Treece’s bed by mistake. In the top bed someone was groaning hideously. Behind the screen the night nurse was telling the runner about her love life and reading aloud to her from the case history. ‘He isn’t a professor, is he?’ cried the runner. ‘He doesn’t look much like one to me,’ said the night nurse. This was true, thought Treece, for he didn’t look much like one to himself any more.

  Throughout the night transactions of all sorts continued – some got up and began to run up and down the ward in hysteria, someone died amid sobs and groans, the old man in the next bed kept shouting that he wanted to go home – and Treece got no sleep whatsoever. He was in a drowsy stupor the next morning at 5 a.m. when the nurse came and washed him and rubbed surgical spirit on his behind. The day continued much as the previous one had done. In the afternoon Treece had a group of visitors: Dr Carfax, Merrick, Viola Masefield. Merrick was complete with umbrella. They all looked an impressive sight. ‘We told them that we were all doctors – didn’t say what of,’ said Viola with a smile. ‘They thought the place had gone mad. They think you’re the Prince of Wales or something.’ Merrick said: ‘Are they looking after you all right? Pretty rum crowd you’ve got in here, haven’t you?’

  ‘I wonder what happens to middle-class people when they’re ill,’ said Treece. ‘There are none here.’

  ‘Why don’t you go in the pay-bed wing?’ asked Merrick.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Treece. ‘It doesn’t seem right that one should.’

  ‘Honestly, Ian,’ said Viola. ‘You come in here with that umbrella as if this were the London Clinic or something.’

  ‘This wouldn’t suit me,’ said Merrick.

  ‘It suits me,’ said Treece.

  ‘Well, tell us, Stuart, what have you got?’ asked Viola. ‘Stigmata?’

  ‘I think it’s some sort of ulcer . . .’ said Treece.

  ‘Oh, ulcers. That’s very good,’ said Viola. ‘Did you see in last Sunday’s Observer, where it said that only successful . . . But need I go on? Everyone see last Sunday’s Observer?’ Heads nodded. ‘Some time I must make some friends who don’t read the Observer.’

  ‘What else is there for us poor Lib.-Labs.?’ said Merrick. ‘The Sunday Times, I suppose, but it keeps having editorials beginning: “Mr Macmillan has been proved right again.” ’

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked Viola.

  ‘Miserable,’ said Treece. ‘I feel that when they made me, they botched it.’

  ‘Serves you right for eating the things you cooked,’ said Viola. ‘No one else would have dared.’

  They sat for a minute or two, trying to be cheery, but no one could think of anything to say. Then Dr Carfax told the story of the time when he was in hospital and had his appendix out, and the day after the operation he was visited by a Chinese doctor, who, as Chinese are wont, did not pronounce his plurals: ‘Have you had your bowel open?’ he had asked Carfax. And ‘My God!’ Carfax had, so he said, cried out in alarm, ‘You haven’t taken them out too, have you?’

  Then they went. ‘Take care of yourself, Stuart dear,’ said Viola. ‘Is there anything you want?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Treece.

  ‘Well, be good, and don’t get Complications. They’re much worse than Symptoms. Goodbye.’

  ‘Ta-ta,’ cried the man in the next bed, eyeing Viola with a warmed look on his face. ‘Ta-ta,’ shouted the other patients as they all went out. ‘That your missus?’ asked the man in the next bed. ‘No,’ said Treece; ‘she’s not.’

  IV

  Life in hospital is not the boring and peaceful experience that many imagine it to be. While nothing of great interest happens, and the mind does grow stale and concern with outside things subsides into selfishness, the sort of selfishness one has on shipboard, when all links with responsibility seem severed, something happens all the time. In fact, as Treece complained to his nurses, life in hospital was so arduous that it was a pity it had to happen to sick people; at least they should let them go home, now and then, for a rest. From 5 a.m. in the morning, when he was roused, Treece was subjected to an endless battery of attentions. During the day, when he tried to sleep, he was roused and told that the nights were for sleeping. At night, when he tried to sleep, people vomited by his ear, and nurses woke him up to give him sleeping tablets. He was permanently tired. Doctors and specialists prodded and poked him, almoners came to ask if he had a suit, Legion of Mary girls to ask if he was a Catholic, other patients to ask him to make their wills, fetch them a bottle, write to their relatives, shave off their whiskers, hold bowls while they were sick into them. There were nurses of all nationalities who needed things translating. Physiotherapists came to read his Times and night orderlies – nearly all pacifists with high IQs, who wrote verse in the linen store when they were not busy – to read his Manchester Guardian.

  A stand was erected by his bed, a needle gouged into his arm, and the blood-drip began. It dripped on inexorably for two days and nights. And as the days passed slowly on and his contingency to the world seemed to disappear, he found himself increasingly listless and depressive. It was a world almost wholly uncongenial. Deprived of his society he seemed nothing, so much did he depend on his society for his existence; now he was a lump of flesh only. Believing in civilized and respectful contacts, deep personal relationships, honesty and integrity of motive, recognition of the individuality of persons, he was lost in a world where all that mattered was the simple physical constitution, the preservation of life itself, at whatever torture to the personality. The staff here were very hard-working – but to them the personality issue was often an excrescence, and even to some a nuisance. As the staff nurse had told Treece, it wasn’t a tea-party.

  This situation was a problem for Treece alone. For it seemed as if his special human situation had somehow sapped him morally, in the plain sense of the word moral, which demands a so
und and simple capacity for living life itself. Outside his own environment Treece’s vital force emerged as a small thing, that was weak in front of the most eternal human test, whether he was to endure or to die; there is a further edge to alienation beyond which one ceases to have a real place in the world; and Treece had found himself more and more pushed towards the fringes of the society he lived in, into a peripheral and invalid existence.

  What was the poor little liberal humanist to do? The world was fragmented and there was no Utopia in sight, and as a liberal he was a symptom of the fragmentation he abhorred. He would not have been anything other – it was a special fate. He coddled his fancy scruples, and they were everything to him. The great authoritarian structure of the Christian Church had tumbled under the impact of just such honest scruples; and the eye of God, which was the eye of structured society, no longer peered and penetrated into every nook and cranny. Life, Treece would claim, was more real when you went on from God, and go on you had to in order to live fully now. Once the principle of doubt had been admitted all was lost, as far as He was concerned. Whether you believed or not, men now fluttered foolishly like young birds tumbled out of the nest, at their highest point of freedom and more glorious than ever before, yet on the edge of an ungovernable disaster . . . or so it seemed to Treece. He could not be sure whether this was a figment of his own depressed mind or a discernible fact in the universe. The fact remained that he was a scrupulous liberal, too scrupulous to believe anything, willing to make his mind up only on the evidence; and in the end what he had was really nothing. Of course, he preferred it this way. If the choice was between compromise and destruction, then he was willing enough to destroy himself. In any case, whether he lived chastely or lecherously, believed or doubted, it made no difference. Because he lived late in the world, and was a civilized creature, he stabbed as few people in the back as possible and did as little harm as he could. But there was nothing he really wanted to do. And life was no longer, for people like him, a thing to trust so deeply, because there were other things he trusted more; what was proper became less and less what was viable. He had no goods or chattels or causes or faiths – or loved ones – to tie himself to now, when it was of use to be tied. The moral passions can drive one too hard, until, as with Gulliver, home from his travels, ordinary life is hardly to be borne.

  And Treece, to whom illness had always seemed a cruel and unfair chance that attacked randomly its victims, was now forced into taking the things of sickness into his consciousness for the first time. And it was a cruel, defeating thing, a betrayal of the human possibility, a canker in the self, that he saw – a betrayal, he came to feel, that was internal. It seemed to him as he surveyed his weakly self that for this he had only himself to blame. It was a facet of his own soul. It was a savage test to have to take, this one, worse than any driving test, and it showed up one’s weaknesses mercilessly.

  V

  After Treece had been in hospital for a few days, and Emma, surveying the notices that declared, ‘Professor Treece is unable to teach today’, wondered what had become of him, she had a telephone call from Viola Masefield. It was to tell her that Treece was in hospital – they had she said, caught up with him at last. She thought that Emma might like to know, if she hadn’t heard, and might even like to visit him; this was possible the following evening. Admission was by card, absolutely free, and if Emma wanted to go she would post a card on to her.

  At the hospital, the following evening, Emma said, ‘I’m sorry you’re ill.’

  ‘I never thought I’d end up like this,’ said Treece. ‘Did you?’

  ‘I did,’ said Emma. ‘To be honest.’

  ‘I always had such promise,’ said Treece. ‘I was a man of promise until last week. But one has to stop and do something, I suppose, and I did. I was ill. I suppose one thinks one lives in a state of moral suspension, praise or blame deferred, for ever. It’s only the others who are guilty. Until at last the challenge comes.’

  ‘But how long have you been ill?’

  ‘For months, I suppose.’

  ‘When did you have the first haemorrhage?’

  ‘Just after the poetry weekend, after I talked to you.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Well,’ said Treece. ‘It wouldn’t really have been fair would it? One can’t use one’s illnesses as a kind of moral lever, and if I had told you, that’s what I would have done. I would have said, “Look, I need looking after. Won’t you marry me?” I want to say that now. You see how much I need you. I have no one. And when one’s like this – you need to be tied to something, to have something to bother about getting better for. I hate to be left alone. I feel so depressed. I think I have a fragmented gestalt . . .’

  ‘But, Stuart, this just isn’t a real situation. It’s a distortion. How can one make a pure choice at a time like this? You’re right; it wouldn’t be fair.’

  ‘No; I knew it wouldn’t be,’ said Treece. ‘But you know, sometimes, just now and then, I don’t want to be fair. I can’t say it’s ever got me very much. Not that one seeks that: one isn’t like that in order to be self-seeking. But they say: virtue has its own rewards, and I know it does, yet from time to time I feel like shouting out, just like an angry young man. Well, let’s see some of them. You must admit that the rewards of virtue grow less and less as the present society goes on.’

  ‘But isn’t the proverb: virtue is its own reward?’

  ‘Then it’s too sanctimonious for me,’ said Treece. ‘If one takes delight in virtue, then it ceases to be virtue; it becomes self-seeking. I haven’t even got that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Stuart. I feel very cruel to you. I keep doing this. I’m a hideous creature to fall in with. But I must do what’s right. I’m too good at making other people suffer. I suppose one day I shall have to pay for it. I don’t know how I have the gall to feel, always, so superior. Sometimes I feel so remote from other people that I find it hard to believe that they really do exist in the way that I do, as subjects rather than objects. All these people here think I’m mad, look, talking like this.’

  ‘Be careful,’ said Treece. ‘I have to live with them! You can go home.’

  ‘Oh, Stuart,’ said Emma. ‘I’ve been terrible to you. Can one lead a good life in this world? I mean, without doing too much harm, and retiring too much out of it, so that people you are involved with suffer? I suppose I have an image of some perfect human condition that one day I shall reach by finding someone I wholly and fully love. But what about the people one meets up to then, and what about the things one does to them?’

  ‘I suppose everyone thinks his kind of innocence the ideal innocence, and the inside chambers of oneself richer and finer than anyone else’s. I can’t blame you. But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don’t recognize that, then that’s the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares everyone else’s fate to some extent.’

  ‘I think we have a lot in common,’ said Emma. ‘I certainly never thought to hear you say that.’

  ‘Why not?’ cried Treece. ‘Haven’t I always? No, perhaps not. Still, one can’t go on being a professional young man all one’s life, even nowadays when being young counts for so much. But one can’t live as amorphously as this for ever. That’s why people convert to Catholicism, or become party members, or marry. At least they have a sense of identity and cause and effect. But I’ve never been under the usual compulsions; I haven’t really ever had to settle down; I’ve lived largely outside ordinary responsibilities, like having to worry about money or property or what will happen to one’s children. I don’t have to guard my actions. Then suddenly I see myself as some ordinary person sees me . . . like the people in here. I have no real relationships with anyone, though I have this broad and firm faith in human relationships. I contribute nothing at all to them, though. I look for love and can scarcely find it in me. Everything turns to ashes. I am ashes.’

  ‘It’s a crue
l warning,’ said Emma.

  ‘For you? Of course, it’s different when you’re young,’ said Treece. ‘The young have terrible advantages: they have enthusiasms, vigour, power, new eyes; they’re never ill and nothing can tie them down for a while.’

  ‘I’m not that young,’ said Emma.

  ‘So . . . it’s no good?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Emma. ‘Wait until you’re out and we’ll see.’

  When Emma left the hospital she had an appointment with another invalid. Louis Bates had been in hospital at Stratford with pneumonia, and had really rather enjoyed it. He had been for once the centre of the world; international diplomacy had been nothing, compared with the movements of his fingers and toes. Coming back to University and to his work, he had found the self-conscious and highly personal state of mind he had developed in hospital slow to subside. Up to now events had existed simply to be reflected on in his bed; this was the point of concentration for the whole of human experience. It was just like sex, as he imagined it, only longer-lasting.

  When she reached his room, uncomfortable and foetid, Louis lay in his bed of convalescence, eating bread and jam. He moved some dirty pyjamas off a chair by the bed and she sat down. He showed her how, from his window, he could see a house across the road where another student lived. He keeps having his girlfriend in, said Louis, and his bed is just under the window and you can see her legs kicking in the air. ‘Actually you’re smaller than I am,’ added Louis. ‘You’d probably have to stand on a chair.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Emma. ‘So you watch?’

  ‘What else can I do?’ asked Louis. ‘All that’s left for me is artistic withdrawal. The truth about the artist is that he takes his tranquillity along with him everywhere he goes; he is recollecting even as he acts. His acts are of a different sort from other people’s. I envy him, over there.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Emma.

  ‘You know why. A man needs a nice woman.’

  ‘Please, Louis, I thought we’d finished with all that.’