‘I thought you’d bring that up,’ said Louis. ‘I wanted to apologize. You saved my life, too.’
‘I didn’t save your life,’ said Emma.
‘Yes, you did, and I shall never forget it.’
‘Well, I shall,’ said Emma.
‘I shall never forgive myself for the way I behaved.’
‘You will,’ said Emma. ‘Somehow.’
This was dishonest, Emma saw; he was trying to work her into some position in which they were firmly entangled, some vague emotional complex on which he could build, and she determined to resist with all her might. He began to speak of her as honest and virtuous, and this gave her her chance, and she did a stupid thing: she told him about her affair with Stuart Treece. It was an absurd cruelty, but then someone had to pay for the moral damage caused, and who could it be but Louis?
VI
As the days wore on Treece found that the objectivity he had always possessed, the faculty he had for seeing himself as an actor in a play by some outsider, the faculty that looked down upon himself judiciously and thought of other ways to behave, began to fail under his current pressure. He ceased to be inquisitive object and began to be suffering subject. This was happening to him; the pain was his and soon it would be all of him. The experimental character of the whole incident, which had given it an interest for Treece and made it just bearable, now began to fade. He lay in bed, reading nothing; he fed; he moved his bowels. Moving the bowels was, so to speak, the breath of life for him, the real truth about existence, a dramatization of the emotional and intellectual processes that preserve us to go on living.
One night, about eleven, when the ward was dark, an emergency case was brought in. Doctors rushed about and telephoned for other doctors, and in the darkness Treece could hear a low, insistent voice behind the screens asking, over and over again, ‘What did you take? What did you take?’
In the morning the would-be suicide behind the screens was visited by a policeman, and later by a psychiatrist from another hospital, a stout, sleek German who could be heard all over the ward.
‘Why you take all these aspirins?’ There was an inaudible reply, and the psychiatrist laughed. ‘Toothache? I will promise you, you will not have toothache again for ten more years. You were anxious. You were depressed. Why? Was it about the world in general? About your own personal state? Did you want to kill yourself or just make a big demonstration? It says here you left a note. Did you know you would be found so quick? You must answer me, now, or I can do nothing at all for you. I am your friend.’ The weak voice spoke again. ‘You haven’t any friends at all? I do not believe. Now, tell me, why did you not cut your throat? That would have been quicker, yes? Why not? I am afraid aspirins are not a good way. Did you know this? You must tell me these things. I am here to help you. Very well, I do not think this is a very difficult case. I think we understand him from what he does not say. Now, tell me, when you go down the street you hear these voices, yes? They are muttering obscenities, yes?’
‘No,’ cried the voice, audible for the first time. ‘No voices.’
‘But surely you hear some voices occasionally? I am a psychiatrist. I do not think I’m mistaken . . .’ ‘You are,’ said the voice.
The psychiatrist ended his horrifying bravura and went away; and later in the morning the screens about the new patient were removed. There, in a crib bed with iron bars at either side, with the rubber end of a stomach pump coming from his nose and plastered to the side of his face, was Louis Bates. Treece looked and looked again, and was sure. He asked a nurse and was confirmed. He tried to attract Bates’s attention, but he was now sleeping. He was woken for his lunch, but would eat nothing and reverted to sleep again. In the afternoon Treece himself fell asleep for two hours, and when he was woken for his tea the top bed was empty and Louis Bates was gone. He called a nurse and asked where the patient had been taken. ‘He’s been moved to another hospital,’ said the nurse. ‘Which?’ asked Treece. ‘Don’t ask so many questions,’ said the nurse.
In the evening Emma came, and he told her about Bates. But she knew, and she knew something that Treece suspected but could not learn: that Bates had been moved to a mental hospital. He had been in such a hospital before, the sister had told them.
‘It’s terrible; it’s all my fault,’ said Emma, and she began to cry. ‘Think of him locked away in there, for how long? Perhaps for ever.’
‘We’ll get him out,’ said Treece confidently, though here what could he do? ‘It might be better for him too in one respect; he may not have to stand trial.’
‘Trial?’ cried Emma. ‘What for?’
‘Attempted suicide.’
‘Do they try people for that?’
‘Yes, they do.’
‘But that’s shocking,’ said Emma. ‘Doesn’t it shock you?’ Treece said that it did. ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Emma. ‘This is a free country. Surely you can do what you like with your own life?’
‘No, that’s simply not true; you can’t,’ said Treece. ‘I think it’s legally assumed that every sane person must want to continue living, and therefore suicide is considered as an aberration, and one punishable by law.’
‘It was all my fault,’ said Emma tearfully.
‘Why was it all your fault?’
‘I made him do it. I went to see him. I told him what he was, how people saw him. I told him about us, you and me, what we did. I said he was other people’s scapegoat, you know, a whipping-boy, the one they spanked when the prince was naughty so that wrong shouldn’t go unpunished. I was absurd. I said all artists were like that. I said he should be pleased, not sorry. I said artists were the ones who felt the malice and frenzy of the universe for all the rest of us, and that it was in a sense a favour as well as a cruelty. I told him perhaps he was lucky. He didn’t have to live with his own crimes. He simply suffered for other people’s. You know the poem: “See the scapegoat, happy beast, From every personal sin released.” I told him that.’ She put her head down on the bed and cried. ‘And then I gave him some money. His clothes were ruined when he was in the river. I gave him twenty pounds and told him to buy a suit. I said it was the least the world could do for him, at least if the world made its artists suffer then there ought to be a levy. At least the whipping-boy got paid, and fed, and clothed.’ She stopped and looked at Treece. ‘I never thought he’d do this. You see, I couldn’t love him; people couldn’t. There were other women like me who thought this. I respected him, but not, you know, really love. And he had to know, really, or he would never have gone right. I said how much I respected him. I said it was only the uncommitted ones who could see the real tragedy and the real horror and the real excellence too. The others might hang on for a while, but they sell out in the end. And it’s for them that the rebels sacrifice themselves.’ She looked at Treece again and hoped he would absolve her. He listened and could not. It was his wound, as well, that the knife was being twisted in.
A bell rang and it was time for her to go. ‘Take care of yourself,’ said Treece. ‘Don’t you get in here; I’m running out of patience.’
‘It’s like Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony in reverse,’ said Emma, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.
‘Come again,’ said Treece.
‘Very well,’ said Emma.
‘I feel guilty about him too,’ said Treece. ‘Guilty’s all you can feel. I suppose all you can say for us is, at least we can feel guilty.’
She went away and he lay there in his bed, and felt as though this would be his condition for evermore, and that from this he would never, never escape.
EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG
MALCOLM BRADBURY is a well-known novelist, critic and academic. He set up the famous creative writing department of the University of East Anglia, whose students have included Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. He is the author of seven novels: Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize; Rates
of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts (1987); Doctor Criminale (1992); and To the Hermitage (2000). He has also written several works of non-fiction, humour and satire, including Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go (1982) and Why Come to Slaka? (1992). He is an active journalist and a leading television writer, responsible for Porterhouse Blue (Channel Four), Cold Comfort Farm (BBC TV), many TV plays and episodes of Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Kavanagh QC and Dalziel and Pascoe. He lives in Norwich, travels a good deal, and was awarded a knighthood in the year 2000.
Also by Malcolm Bradbury in Picador
FICTION
Stepping Westward
The History Man
Rates of Exchange
Cuts
Doctor Criminale
To the Hermitage
NON-FICTION
Who Do You Think You Are?
All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go
Why Come to Slaka?
With acknowledgements to
Michael Flanders and Donald Swann,
originators of the song The Reluctant Cannibal
from which the title of this novel
is taken.
First published 1959 by Secker & Warburg
This edition published 2000 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-447-20560-9 EPUB
Copyright © Malcolm Bradbury 1959
The right of Malcolm Bradbury to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.
Eating People is Wrong Page 28