Eating People is Wrong (11 page)

‘No,’ said Miss Winterbottom.

There followed a long pause, while everyone looked into his teacup and tried to think of something to say. Louis wondered if he could ask about the virgins now. ‘I like your
curtains,’ offered Miss Winterbottom, ‘or have I said that?’ The pause was resumed, while everyone pretended to listen to the sound of cars passing along the main road outside.
‘How is the thesis going, Miss Fielding?’ said Dr Carfax at last.

‘I’m just reaching the stage where you feel that it will take you at least a hundred years to finish writing it.’

‘What’s your thesis on?’ said Miss Winterbottom politely.

‘It’s a study of the fish imagery in Shakespeare’s tragedies,’ said Emma with a smile. People began to warm again after the shock of Louis’s diatribe.

Meanwhile, Louis had been gazing interestedly around the assembled company, wondering what they were thinking of him. Opposite him he noticed Emma Fielding. She offered, he noticed, a warmth of
feature that was conspicuously lacking in the other students; her comments up to now had been pointed and intelligent, such as they were; and she was not affected noticeably by the common unease.
The process by which she ate a cake, nibbling it with white, straight teeth, somehow held him fascinated; it was as if he had never seen anyone do it before. ‘Do you mind if I change places
with someone?’ he said and, looking at the girl to the right of Emma, added, ‘You, for instance?’ The exchange was effected and Louis, to his great delight, found himself beside
his quarry. ‘Hello,’ he said.

A student who was doing very badly, and thought that Treece had taken a dislike to him, decided to make his mark. ‘I don’t believe Eliot’s poetry means anything at all. I think
everyone’s taken in by it. I’ll bet he doesn’t know what it means himself.’

‘Well, Cocoran has taken only one term to see through our professional charlatanism,’ said Merrick, satirically. ‘Well,’ said Carfax more generously, ‘as one who
has marked finals papers, I wouldn’t say that was completely false.’

‘What do you think of Eliot, then, Bates?’ asked Treece. Louis had been peering inquisitively at Emma’s white arms, and now he looked up questioningly. ‘I never read
any,’ said Bates. Cocoran wished he had said that. ‘Through lack of time or inclination?’ asked Treece. ‘As a matter of principle,’ said Louis impressively.
‘Anyone who has any pretensions to writing poetry, however modest, is better away from him at present, in my view. I read him once, and as you know, his idiom is pervasive. I simply want to
avoid it.’

‘You have literary aspirations?’ asked Treece pleasantly. ‘I’ve had a few poems illustrated in a tiny literary magazine,’ explained Louis. ‘They didn’t
pay me much for them, of course.’ Actually they had not paid him anything, but at least he had
published
.

‘I’m always interested to come upon signs of literary activity among my people,’ said Treece. ‘Do any of you others do anything in that line?’ No one responded.
‘No,’ went on Treece, with a little sigh. ‘I suppose not. Of course when I was up at University, everyone seemed to have a novel or a sheaf of poems tucked away somewhere. It was
that sort of time, of course – Auden at Oxford, Empson and Isherwood at Cambridge; there were so many
enfants terribles
that it was almost fashionable not to be writing anything. I
suppose that kind of thing wasn’t so bad really. You don’t find it so much in the provincial universities, of course; people aren’t so concerned to make an impression, I suppose,
and they come here to work and get a job, not have a good time or enrich their souls too much.’

It was the little sigh, so evocative of vanished glories, that amused Hopgood, to whom the present had a stamina that no other time could ever have had; people, he felt, were sensible, knew
where they were going, wanted to get there safe and sound. He said so.

‘Well,’ said Louis, in defiance of all, ‘I think I’m enriching
my
soul.’

Merrick looked at him in amusement. ‘The trouble is, isn’t it, Stuart,’ he said, ‘that people like that very rarely come to very much in the end? Auden and Isherwood are
the ones who did, but think of all those others.’

‘Oh, that’s almost inevitable, isn’t it?’ answered Treece. ‘There’s always a certain amount of wastage of this sort. The question really is, are universities
the best places for geniuses to prosper? I’m not sure they are. I know they gain some kind of stimulus and training. But then they miss in experience – and so they either overreach
themselves, or they write one of these satirical novels about university life that people keep writing. I hope no one’s writing one of those about us, is he?’

‘No one, surely, would set out to be a social outcast,’ said the girl in spectacles, with a laugh. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Merrick. ‘There are many who like
it.’ ‘Besides,’ said the girl, ‘we don’t do funny things.’

Louis felt extremely rebuffed. ‘I think I’m not without wider experience, in so far as what you say applies to me; not that I want to be hypersensitive about all this. Besides, I
spent several years in a girls’ school.’

‘And then they spotted you?’ asked Hopgood.

‘No,’ said Merrick. ‘You won’t be without experience, then.’

But Emma Fielding thought these remarks rather unkind; she began to feel about Louis that he was not as black as he was painted. Treece’s nervousness of him seemed to be highly
exaggerated; but since he expected her to shepherd Louis, and control his extravagances, she determined to do so – but now for his own sake. ‘I think it’s wonderful to be able to
write,’ she said, and Louis, turning amid the laughter, found her pretty face bent in his direction, intense, serious, her dark eyes clouded with thought, her dark, wispy hair falling over
her brow, her white teeth shining. ‘You know, what amazes me about writing is this,’ said Emma, ‘what an amazing organization of all corners of the spirit goes on, if you see what
I mean, to concentrate on what’s being written. When it’s good, I mean.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Louis speculatively; women, he thought, said things like this, of course – it was part of their congenital course towards maternity, their natural proclivity
towards the mystic. Yet as a remark it was more than kind; Louis was at least not too pedestrian to see that. He looked at her and grew warm. What if he surrendered to mad passion and kissed the
inside of her elbow there, in front of Treece and Merrick, Carfax and the prim virgins of the department? Would he be sent down? Would he be regarded as a lovable literary eccentric? Would his
marks in terminal examinations have gone up or down? And if he could have no more kissed her arm than have thrown cakes at Professor Treece, yet it was still the fact that this fresh, vigorous,
youthful passion has grown where there was none before. He leaned close to Emma’s ear and murmured, gently, confidingly, ‘I like you.’

‘Well, now,’ said Professor Treece all at once; a plate from his lap tumbled to the floor as he rose and was picked up by some student attentive to his chances in examinations,
‘I expect you’ll all want to be getting back.’ Treece wanted to have a bath and cut his toenails. Most people took his point. ‘I suppose we’d better,’ said
someone, glossing over what Treece had not even bothered to conceal. ‘Is that the time?’ proffered someone else; and they all began to troop, in little bands, into the hall, carefully
avoiding the debris of the accident with the tea trolley. Only Louis lingered; he wanted to talk about literature. ‘Talking of creation . . .’ he began; his voice echoed in an empty
room. He rose and went across to the doorway, where in frantic haste everyone was busy with the process of departure. Coats and hats were put on at speed; dishevelled people burst at trotting pace
out of the door, uttering terse farewells.

‘Such a pleasant evening,’ said Miss Winterbottom to Louis. ‘I don’t know how he can
endure
on his own like this, do you? What he needs is a nice wife.’
‘Isn’t he a lovely man?’ remarked the girl in spectacles, while Louis held her handbag as hastily she powdered her nose. ‘I wonder if he realizes how devastating that sort
of embarrassed look of his can be?’ ‘I wonder,’ murmured Louis.

Then Treece was among them once again, ten coats over his arm. ‘Does anyone want to use a cloakroom?’ he asked politely. ‘What for?’ murmured Hopgood to Louis. ‘No,
thank you,’ said someone who obviously did.

Treece was looking for Emma. We all of us have small secrets that we would not wish to have charted up against us in any history of our days, and Treece’s was that, when Emma had told him
that, in her crisis with Eborebelosa, she had named him as her suitor, named him surely with consideration, he had felt enormously pleased. It was not a passing gesture; it counted for something,
but what? Treece had, of course, absolved Emma from any responsibility concerning Eborebelosa; in fact, when he had returned home, chastened after the driving test, he had written at once to tell
her so; and she had written back, telling him that she had already absolved herself, and that, while she still suspected her reasons, each human being had to live a liveable way of life, a
modus
vivendi
, and life with Eborebelosa as his fifth wife was certainly, for her, not that. Treece now wanted to see her and tell her that he thought this reasonable and right. But already she had
gone.

Louis permitted himself to leave fast. ‘Thank you very much, professor,’ he said, hovering in the hope of some final blessing. ‘Good night, Bates,’ said Treece; bath and
not benediction was what was in
his
mind. ‘A most pleasant evening,’ went on Louis tentatively; the girl in spectacles pulled warningly at his coat. ‘Don’t slip in
the drive,’ said Treece. ‘It’s turned rather icy.’ Aware of strong pressures against him, Louis gave ground. His purpose changed; now what he wanted was to find Emma
Fielding. She seemed to have disappeared completely. ‘Oo, I’m cold,’ said Miss Winterbottom pleasantly. ‘I can’t talk to you now,’ said Louis.

Hopgood was saying: ‘I was sitting next to Carfax. His stomach never stopped rumbling all the time we were there.’ ‘His wife doesn’t feed him properly,’ said Miss
Winterbottom. ‘It was like a ball rolling very slowly down a bagatelle board until it reached the bottom,’ said Hopgood. ‘Then it would somehow go back to the top
again.’

They emerged into the road and then Louis saw Emma, in the distance, riding away on her bicycle. ‘Lend me your bike,’ he said to Cocoran. ‘No,’ said Cocoran. ‘I
don’t lend it.’ ‘You’re so naïve,’ said Louis spitefully, and he set off hastily down the road in pursuit of the red tail light. In another moment it was gone
from view. Ah,’ sighed Louis, and he turned his footsteps homeward. As he walked, frost biting his ears and fingers, the collar of his long overcoat turned up, he devoted himself to
reflection on the events of the evening. For the most part, the people he met had been passers-by; that is, he did not see them as a source of profound sympathies, or in any context wider than the
immediately social. To experience people in the context of their full humanity, their whole width of being, was a rare and moving experience; none the less, he had experienced it, and with no less
a quantity than Emma Fielding. Parading on through the streets of the municipality, he shortly came to the house at which he lodged. The household – a Mr and Mrs Hopewell, and dog –
were sitting in the lounge in silence, contemplating the crumbs of their existence with an admirable solidity. Louis went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of the malty night beverage he
always took before retiring. A man has to coddle himself when there is none to do it for him. Then he went upstairs, opened the door of his room, put on the light, shut the window firmly and drew
the curtains, for he did not like draughts, took off his overcoat and placed it on the bed as an extra blanket, for he did not like cold, stored away in a drawer two lumps of sugar he had captured
at Treece’s, went to the bathroom, sat on the toilet, used it and flushed it, washed, cleaned his teeth, and squeezed out a facial blemish, returned to his bedroom, shutting and bolting the
door, stripped off his pyjamas, which were rather tatty, sat on the bed and scratched his athlete’s foot, and climbed into bed. As he lay there in the darkness, shivering with cold, he
thought to himself, I am a lover. He tasted the role for a moment or two; it wasn’t all it was said to be. He was not a ladies’ man; indeed, he was not anyone’s man. But passion
visited him from time to time, as it does do most of us, and he had a disposition which laid him open to falling in love quite frequently with persons whom he had never seen before and was not
likely to see again. He was not even sure, at times, that success in love was what he wanted; that took you on to the next stage, and this was the one he liked. But now (his face beamed in the
darkness) there was Emma. Quite, quite different. Did he want her? Yes he did. Did he love her? Yes yes yes. Did she like him? He rather fancied that she did. He would write to her, or seek her
out, tomorrow. And he fell asleep in the warmth of two delightful thoughts: ‘I am in love with Emma’ and ‘Won’t she be pleased when I tell her.’

III

A day or two later Treece took his driving test again. It was the same examiner and, Treece felt, rather a strange relationship was growing up between them; it was as if both of
them realized that they would both be at this little job for a long time, and had better face up to the fact. ‘I like your tie,’ said the examiner when Treece turned up again. It was a
frosty day and Treece’s ears were cold. He slapped them a few times. ‘I feel nervous again,’ he said. ‘If it hadn’t been for all that twisting last time, the clutch
cable wouldn’t have snapped. Look, I’ve got it again.’ He held out his hands, which were vibrating hysterically. ‘Now, now, take it easy,’ said the examiner.
‘I’m not going to chop off your head, you know.’ They went out into the road. The bicycle stood there, seedier-looking than ever. ‘I want you to go up the hill on
this,’ said the examiner, ‘and come down towards here, making the appropriate signals as you go. We’ll try the emergency stop; I’ll step into the road and you stop as you
would if I was an ordinary road user.’