Eating People is Wrong (24 page)

Whenever he came, he always began by walking slowly round the room, inspecting its contents, reading the titles of books, as if he had never seen them before, or was trying to reconstruct some
experience. She always felt uneasy at this: ‘Sit down and talk to me!’ she would say, and he would sit down in the armchair near the gasfire, and in conversation they would do the same
thing, walking around each other, starting again. Only then, when he had smoked several cigarettes and they had talked for a while in a distant, untrusting way, would she come and sit on the floor
beside him and take his hand, saying, ‘Well, how are you?’ Then, laying her head upon his lap, she’d throw her arms around him, crying, ‘Oh, oh, why don’t you trust me
more?’ ‘What is it, dearest?’ Treece would say; she did not answer. He never quite knew, and he was somehow reassured by these dull cries, this unspoken hint of her need for him;
it stirred him each time. He’d put his arm round her shoulder and tilt her head up to kiss her. Then her hand would come round his waist, pull up his jacket and shirt, and run over the warm
flesh at the small of his back. Meanwhile, he sat stiffly, while she lay twisted on the floor close to him, her hands running over him. Status-wise, it seemed like sacrilege, but what was so
peculiar about Stuart was that he had no status, or could not accept the terms of the one he had. If his helplessness was attractive, for she perceived him to be helpless, it was also not good
enough; you couldn’t go on like this, you had to reclaim some pieces of the world for yourself. Why didn’t he learn to cook properly? – at least, that was one way of subduing the
objects of the world about him, and objects were an image of the soul. In his view, man had simply no territory to walk on and call his own; there was nothing reclaimed from the jungle.

He was always passive, not easy to excite, and she began to feel that she was artless. She was afraid that he was tired of her, or self-conscious and ashamed, and she blamed herself; she wanted
to do what he liked and when he liked. At the same time she knew she was up against something harder and more difficult than this, up against some quality in himself which he only half perceived.
Afterwards when he went he seemed to hurry away, as if he carried some positive burden of guilt. ‘What is it?’ she asked. He never really knew; in part it was disappointment, part a
desire to escape, part a sense of human mortality. Perhaps too (he began to suspect) he was overtired, or ill, or out of stamina, for the whole world seemed colourless, and not simply times like
these.

There were other things that pained Emma. One was that their relationship had simply no cultural life; it existed only in her room and not in the world outside. It had no social quality or face
except there, it had no places, no public images. Viola Masefield had begun to invite her to parties, and she had met Tanya, whom she liked; sometimes Treece was at these parties, sometimes not,
but there was never anything to show that they were anything other than teacher and student. Viola thought that she was the girlfriend of Louis Bates; indeed, she began to observe in Viola a kind
of possessive curiosity about the matter.

‘Don’t you think it’s time you let this Louis Bates business drop?’ demanded Viola one evening.

‘Why?’ demanded Emma in reply.

‘Well, you’re only wasting your time and his. You can’t marry him, can you?’

‘No,’ said Emma honestly.

‘Then why don’t you tell him so?’

‘But
why
can’t I marry him? That’s the problem. I don’t even know.’

‘Oh really, Emma,’ said Viola. ‘You aren’t fascinated by his charm, are you?’

‘He doesn’t have any,’ said Emma.

‘It isn’t his appearance?’

‘No.’

‘Quite. I think he ought to have an X certificate.’

‘But that’s not fair; that’s not a reason.’

‘I know; you must have the
reason.
Honestly, Emma.’

‘But I must.’

‘Well, then, surely it’s that he’s too wrapped up in himself. He just doesn’t understand people; therefore he offers them nothing. Emma, you’re stupid about this,
you know. You have this saint complex. You always want to help lame dogs over stiles. You should keep away from people like that. They drag you down. You have to stay away from people who
can’t give you anything, or otherwise you destroy your own potential. It sounds cruel, but it’s a truth of existence that everyone accepts.’

‘Is it?’ said Emma miserably.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Viola firmly. ‘Think about it. Surely, vitality of personal relationships is
all
; it’s all there is. Life is catalysed by knowing interesting
people. That’s where the vivid moments come from. And there just isn’t time for bores and fools.’

‘And Louis is one of those?’

‘Louis is a fool. I don’t just mean that he does silly things. There’s something entire and complete about his foolishness. He renders things absurd by doing them. He renders
you absurd by your interest in him.’

‘But isn’t it just because we can’t take his seriousness seriously? There’s surely nothing wrong in being serious.’

‘That just isn’t the issue, though,’ said Viola. ‘I have nothing against seriousness, or
naïveté,
or adolescent romanticism, all of which things Bates has. He
thinks he’s a latterday Rimbaud, his soul an open sore, and all he wants is a nice, soulful woman to kiss the wound and make it well. For Christ’s sake, what year is it? He carries his
soul around in a paper bag as if he’d just bought it at Marks and Spencer’s; but you can’t live like that now. A lot of water has flowed under Robert Bridges since then. I once
made the mistake of talking in front of him about William Blake and his wife, reading
Paradise Lost
naked at the bottom of their garden: and, my God, you could see he was thinking: when can
we go and do it?’

‘But I mean, what about Rimbaud and Blake – do you call them fools as well?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Viola. ‘It’s a question of modes of the mind that are fitting. Theirs was an age of the heroic, and ours is an ironic mode. Rare spirits just
aren’t our cup of tea, in spite of D. H. Lawrence. Louis is one of these people who want to live so intensely. They want an orgasm every time it rains. Well, really, how would you like to
make love with someone who kept twittering about his pure mystic nodality and wanted to stick flowers in your navel?’

‘I think you know him a lot better than I thought you did,’ said Emma, ‘but even so, he has nobody. We all think like that. We make a victim of him. You may find this stupid
but I respect him.’

‘Yes, so do I, in a perverse sort of way,’ said Viola. ‘I’m full of good things to say about him, though you wouldn’t believe it; he’s sensitive, intelligent,
intense, rare . . . but once you’ve said all this, you have to add one more thing, always, and that is to say, he’s a fool.’

‘Well, he needs a friend,’ said Emma. ‘I just don’t want the sexual bit, though; if it weren’t for that, I could be his friend.’

‘You can’t just be friends with a man and stop at that,’ said Viola. ‘There are other emotions involved, always. Friendship between men and women is the stage before
courtship; either you go on or you let it drop. When people get to know you they feel deeply about you.’

‘But why do they feel sexual love?’

‘Perhaps people are simply lacking in imagination nowadays,’ said Viola. ‘I don’t know; I think it’s a very good way of getting to know people.’

‘You see, I need men friends, because men are so much more intelligent than women, with ideas I mean, and I respect that. I liked Mr Eborebelosa; he was gentle and warm. I even like Louis
Bates. So . . . why is one able to hurt people one likes, so callously?’

‘It’s one of the privileges of being a woman,’ said Viola. ‘One of the very few.’ ‘But I don’t want it, I don’t want that kind of power over
people,’ said Emma. ‘It makes me feel like some Belle Dame Sans Merci, who takes love without giving it.’

‘Well, you don’t have to listen to me,’ said Viola. ‘You’re an intelligent woman. And I have no special dispensation on insights.’

And this was the extra dimension of her affair with Stuart, for a guilt about Bates, about Eborebelosa, pervaded all they did. Both knew it. The image of Louis, standing helpless under
Viola’s onslaught at the ball, truly at a loss for once and speechless under its violence, was the last sight she had of him for some time. He was, Stuart told her, working very hard, and
doing well. All there was beside was a queer, pathetic letter that she could not answer:

It was silly, of course, yet there, amid the stupidities, were such generous compliments and warm appraisals. ‘Some generosity in their view of man, some sensation that in them life is
well lived’ – what greater human testimonial could there be in the world than that? If he only
knew
how awful she was. Yet she had done enough to prove it, to him more than
anyone. And a sense of an enormous betrayal came over her as she thought of this phrase, which was her aim and yet showed up, at its cruellest point, her failure. She didn’t show the letter
to Stuart but somehow he was still there, between them, and they both knew it. On him their guilts focused, and with him their civilized pretensions – one hoped it was not true, one feared
that it was – fell down.

II

Who was it that always tore pages out of
Essays in Criticism
? Professor Treece, penetrating into the Senior Common Room for tea, had found the new copy, mutilated as
usual. He picked it up and shook it, scarcely able to believe his eyes; the world, he felt, was tumbling to pieces about him; people – people he
knew
, people he took coffee with, even
– were chipping steadily away at its hard, round moral core. Consider the circumstances: the Senior Common Room, entered only by persons of faculty rank; a serious intellectual review, of
interest only to highly educated specialists. He was surrounded, it was clear enough, by intellectual crooks and vagabonds, people cultivated enough to teach in a university and read this, yet
boorish enough to tear it up before anyone else had read it.
That
was the thing; the wooden horse was inside their gates; the enemies were within the town he had thought so well protected.
Who was it? Any of these somnolent figures, sipping lethargically on their tea, could be the one. The soft, refined, civilized atmosphere of the Common Room suddenly curdled; he looked again at the
copy of ‘Bateson’s little effort’, as he was wont to call it, as if he could not believe the mutilation there. Moral decline drifted everywhere around him in the air, like the
stench of drains. One could only – the fact had to be faced – suspect a
conspiracy
, an overall challenge to the moral universe. There was no other way to perceive it.

‘Conspiracy!’ This was the first thought that had come into Treece’s mind when he learned that the University literary society had invited Carey Willoughby, the novelist and
critic and . . . well, there was so much; he did everything . . . to lecture to it. Treece had been sitting in his room at the University that morning, under the most normal of circumstances,
spraying his bookshelves with insecticide, when there had been a knock at the door and the head of Louis Bates had appeared round the jamb. Treece asked him to sit down, and he advanced into the
room and did so genteelly. There was a pleased smile on his face. ‘I wondered whether you had a spare bedroom,’ he said.

‘Did you?’ asked Treece.

‘Mr Willoughby, the novelist, you know, is coming to lecture to us, and he said that you were a friend of his and would probably put him up.’

‘I’ve never met the man in my life,’ said Treece.

‘But that’s not what he said in his letter,’ said Bates.

‘Then it’s his word against mine, isn’t it?’ said Treece rather angrily.

‘You see, frankly, we can’t afford to pay his hotel bill,’ said Bates, ‘because we’ve got so many other speakers coming this season. There’s Eliot coming, and
Harold Nicolson, and I don’t suppose he’ll be satisfied with steak and chips and a bottle of Bass.’ Louis Bates was now Chairman of the student literary society, and he was really
making a rather good job of it. He had been proposed by Oliver, and since he was Oliver’s candidate he had gone unopposed, for Oliver had no small influence. Apart from one or two unfortunate
incidents – a refusal to present a bunch of chrysanthemums to a lady novelist who attacked Shelley, and a fondness for dismissing the rest of his Committee and running things solo –
Bates’ régime was passing off very impressively. As Treece had grudgingly to admit to himself, Bates had been clever in obtaining Willoughby, who was fashionable and was on television
more often than not.