Eating People is Wrong (16 page)

‘No, not really,’ said Emma.’

‘Things seem to me rather awful now, and all those foreigners seem to do what they like with us, and people don’t know their places any more. I went into the Post Office this morning
and they were so rude to me because I was slow. I told them: I said, “If you don’t want my business, I’ll give it to another firm.” But’, concluded Mrs Bishop
forlornly, ‘there isn’t any other firm, is there?’

The simple truth was that Mrs Bishop and her husband – he was ‘Rotary’, a businessman, and no one knew exactly what he did (Emma asked him once, and he said that his business
was not her business) – had strayed into Emma’s world out of another one, inconceivably remote, positively unreal, so unreal that Emma could scarcely believe in it. Emma Fielding was,
as she phrased it, ‘upstart middle class’, but until she went to the Bishops she did not really know what middle class meant. When Emma went into other people’s rooms, she found
herself straightening cushions, wiping dust off ornaments with her sleeve, and if she was not shocked by people who passed the salt from hand to hand without putting it down, she noticed and
thought that her mother would have been shocked; this was her vestigial middle-classness, which, like her vestigial Christianity, seemed to her a poor, shady, furtive thing. But to the Bishops, who
believed in Keeping Yourself to Yourself, Having Nice Things, Getting On In the World, Keeping Decent, Settling Down, Having a Bit of Property Behind You, Emma was close to communism. Emma had
inherited a tradition of snobbery, but had spent the last ten years of her life trying either to eliminate it or to make it intellectually respectable; with the Bishops it was there, plain and
overt. Emma did not see why women should want exact equality with men, for, after all, they had their own things in the world, but Mrs Bishop . . . well, Mrs Bishop said: ‘I don’t think
women are intelligent enough to have the vote, do you? At least, not until after the change of life.’ If she had not met the Bishops, thought Emma, she would not have known what the old world
was; as it was, she knew, and wondered. The Bishops talked of the town they lived in, and it was another town; they talked of the time when the poachers used to go out into the country in the
evening, on the tram, and return with their rabbits and pheasants just when the policemen were changing over shifts. They could remember the policemen going round the streets with a handbarrow and
piling the drunks that lay in the streets on to it to take them to the station. They had friends who came round in the evenings and sang; and after they had finished their piece, Mrs Bishop would
clap her hands and cry, ‘
Voix d’ange
!’ Donkey carts and flower shows and conservatories and bicycle trips to the sea figured in their conversation. They thought the
Conservative Party would have Britain back on the Gold Standard by 1960. Emma looked at them, and gasped; and wondered, if the world is what I think it is, how have you lived, how have you carried
on?

II

One damp, rainy day Emma returned home from feeding some pigeons to find poor Mrs Bishop in a state of considerable upset. ‘There’s been a nasty man here this
afternoon,’ said Mrs Bishop, ‘and he’s up in your room and he won’t come out. I don’t know what he’s doing. I’ve been standing on the stairs shouting
“Fire!” but even that doesn’t seem to worry him.’

‘Now, don’t worry so much, Mrs Bishop,’ said Emma, not a little worried herself. ‘Did he say who he was?’

‘Well, he said he was a friend of yours, but he didn’t look like it to me, and I’ve never seen him here before,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘He was tall and frightening and
very ugly and his coat collar was turned up, and he had a foreign black beret on. There were great big drops of rain dripping off his ears. Then when I opened the door a crack, he pushed it wide
open and stepped inside and said if he stood out there in the rain another minute he’d get pneumonia, and he wanted to dry off, and he asked for you then. So I said you were out and he said
he’d go up to your room and wait and dry his clothes.’

Emma rushed upstairs. ‘Mind,’ cried Mrs Bishop. ‘He might be naked.’ She threw open the door and there, in front of the gas fire, a plaid rug round his shoulders, sat
Louis Bates. ‘What do you think you’ve been doing?’ demanded Emma. Louis, who had come expressly to seduce her, was a little taken aback. Looking at it from his point of view, you
could understand his disappointment; it was not a promising beginning.

For weeks now Louis had cavorted with love. Day after day he had searched the University for another glimpse of Emma – peering into lecture rooms, scouting systematically along corridors,
hovering outside the women’s lavatories at strategic times. He had written her letters. He had stopped working. It had disorganized his life. He could live with it no longer; he had to act.
When he looked into the mirror each morning, as he shaved around the contours of each cheek, he had been braving himself up to all this: he half expected to find, one morning, a different face
there, the face of Louis the lover, Louis the seducer, the fresh, cherubic face of a young man with sparkling eyes and shining teeth. Alas, it was always the same face, long and gaunt, that met his
look; and it wasn’t fair, for this was a new Louis, an extravagant, passionate Louis, doing new things, thinking new thoughts. Each morning he gazed at the solemn, hollow face that peered
back at him from the mirror, smiled at it, teased and tempted it, said to it, ‘Emma, Emma, Emma.’ But it didn’t seem to get the point at all. And now that she was sitting before
him, not a fiction, but a real creature, the more desirable, but the less accessible, his daring faltered. How did one do it? Would she mind if he leapt up and heaved her into the bedroom,
stripping off her clothes as they went? Yet he could live with it no longer; he had come to a kind of desperation, and had, somehow, to act.

‘I had to see you,’ he said. ‘I can’t live without you.’

Emma went to the door and shouted downstairs: ‘It’s all right, Mrs Bishop, it’s someone I know.’ Then she returned to Louis. ‘You frightened Mrs Bishop out of her
wits: did you know?’

‘Why?’ demanded Louis. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘Coming storming into the house like that, and waiting in my room when I’m not here. You simply
don’t do
things like that.’

‘Why simply don’t you?’ demanded Louis satirically. ‘I was soaking wet. I have a weak chest. And I had to see you. I can’t go on like this. I can’t work. I
can’t eat. I think about you all the time.’

‘I can’t think why,’ said Emma. ‘You hardly know me; it’s silly.’ She went over to the window and looked out; the weather that day had become wilder and more
blustery; rain bounced in the streets and dripped from the eaves of houses; bedraggled dogs sat in doorways.

‘I’ve changed completely. I’m a new person,’ said Louis. ‘I’m tired, now, of staying indoors and contemplating my navel. I want to get out . . .’

‘And contemplate other people’s?’ asked Emma.

‘Yes, then,’ said Louis. ‘Look. Don’t I matter to you?’

‘It’s very flattering, of course, and I’m grateful.’

‘Look. I’m a human being, you know,’ said Louis. ‘I need love like everyone else. You’re involved in this; you can’t just throw the issue aside. What are you
going to do about it?’

‘Let’s have some tea,’ said Emma.

‘Look. This has to be taken seriously,’ said Louis. ‘I don’t think people know how to take things seriously any more. The world is a great big joke; they want a laugh, a
bit of amusement, and not to worry about anything. But
you
aren’t like that.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Emma.

‘I do know. And nor am I. I can offer you something. I’m old enough and responsible enough to marry; I’m not an ordinary undergraduate, playing at affection.’

‘Please don’t,’ said Emma.

‘I don’t think you realize my . . . well,
feelings
about this. Emma . . .’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘Don’t say any more.’

‘But I’m sure we could make each other very happy,’ said Louis despairingly. The phrase rendered itself ridiculous in the air, for this was surely what Louis did not have the
gift of. ‘I often think about marriage,’ he went on, looking at the door to the bedroom.

‘Do you?’

‘Of course, most men have married by the time they have reached my age. I’m not a young man any more. But my background is rather different from most. I’m working class, you
see; it’s more difficult for me. A man needs to be understood.’

‘So does a woman,’ said Emma.

‘Oh yes; I know,’ said Louis. ‘In a different way, though. But what I mean is, in my class, things are not the same. People don’t
recognize
each other in the same
way. That’s why working-class novels don’t quite come off, because the novel is so often about one person’s sense of another, the recognition of their entity, but where I come
from we don’t exist like that. But a man like myself, with a reasonable amount of intelligence, because I really do have that . . .’

‘I know,’ said Emma.

‘Well, a man of that sort needs an intelligent wife. He needs to flourish as an individual, if you see what I mean. Not to be subjected. He needs really to be the intellectually dominant
party in the relationship. He needs the wife to understand and agree with his allegiances. And there’s something else.’

‘Do you take sugar?’ asked Emma.

‘Two spoonfuls. My health isn’t good. I have a weak chest. I need a lot of looking after. You see, I’m frank. And an intelligent woman doesn’t have a lot of time for
that. Sometimes I think I’m like William Blake . . .’

‘Yes, I expect you do,’ said Emma.

‘And that I’d like to marry an ignorant but good woman who’d know how to look after me, and who, perhaps, would agree with my opinions simply because they’re mine, and
would enjoy making love in the garden. What do you think?’

‘What about love?’ asked Emma. ‘Does that enter into your scheme of things?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Louis. ‘Love is a problem, but one often loves the sort of person one wishes to. It’s a problem, but I think I’ve solved it.’ He nodded
solemnly at her, and his meaning was unmistakable; all Louis’s meanings were.

She looked at him, and wondered why he revolted her so much. She had to admit that it just wasn’t fair. But there were, it seemed, some people to whom one never could be fair, whom one
could never take seriously, however generous one wished to be. Because of some grotesqueness, or a simple lack of charm, one didn’t allow them the dues that one granted to people one knew.
She had to recognize that Louis had such a place in her scheme, and that she did not know how to handle him. Now, as he became supplicant, a sort of horror fell upon her. He said that there were
problems, but that they could be solved. Life was not simple and it was folly to expect that of it. She was of another status and another class. She would want to eat in expensive places and he
wouldn’t. She would want their children to go to public school and he would not. But with goodwill this could be solved. ‘I’m like the poet Keats,’ he added. ‘I am
certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections. The Heart’s affections – that’s what I believe in.’ That is all I am certain of, thought Emma, but
between what you mean by those affections and what I do there is all the difference in the world, and try to solve that one by goodwill! To you it is a poultice for your chest, for me it is the
most intense of frictions, consuming and purifying and changing. The heart did not make one happy – one registered the beat of one’s living on it, happiness and sadness, pain and
desire. How could he say they were alike? They were at opposite poles of the world. As she watched his lips moving, close to her, there seemed an immensity of distance between them, as though he
stood at the far end of some long but distorted perspective.

‘I have never felt like this before,’ Louis pressed on. ‘Passion has happened to me before; I’m a man, after all. But generally I preferred to ignore it, to get on with
my work.’ This was true enough; it had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity; that he was at the
root of things. All this was, in a sense, something of a come-down. He
could
have remained independent; he wouldn’t have lost his vote, food would still be served him, there was no
real excommunication. But he had decided that this was not enough, that he had to
act
, get mixed up in the world. ‘I’m of this world; I
feel
, you know,’ he cried.
‘Up to the time I met you I had an unrealized sense of isolation, one that I only perceived at parties or in theatres. It hadn’t mattered. But then I saw you, at the Prof’s party,
and I said, “There, that’s the one; get
involved
. Life is spending itself in events, not withdrawing from them.” It was such a change I promised myself, such a change. This
will make you normal, I said.’

‘Oh, Louis,’ said Emma.

‘I don’t claim to be handsome or charming. I expect you like that sort of thing. But I have other virtues. I’m not in the pattern of modern romantic love; but nor are you. You
feel beyond the ordinary – you’re like me.’

‘Not very,’ said Emma. ‘Not much like you.’

Louis leapt to his feet, pushed beyond endurance. ‘Emma, we’re both adult men and women,’ he said.

‘I know that,’ said Emma.

‘Don’t you ever think about sex?’

‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘I like it as a system.’

‘Emma,’ cried Louis, gulping with terror, at the apogee of his courting play, ‘let’s go and drink this tea in the bedroom.’

‘What for?’ said Emma.

‘My God! Women!’ said Louis; sometimes the opposite sex were just too opposite for him. He went over to the bedroom door and went in. Panties and nightdresses lay in exotic array
about the room; family photographs stood on the dressing table; on one wall hung some postcard reproductions of classical statuary; on another a sign, stolen from some public place. It said,
‘Please Adjust Your Dress Before Leaving’. What’s he doing? wondered Emma. His head popped suddenly round the jamb and, with infinite cunning in his voice, he said, ‘Come in
here.’