Eating People is Wrong (30 page)

‘Bates is like this, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Oliver, ‘except that one of the conditions of this life is a certain kind of failure; whereas Bates is just a bit successful.’

Across the room Willoughby, going to refill his glass, claimed that he had trodden on Mavis de Thule’s foot and wanted to apologize. ‘It wasn’t my foot,’ said Mavis
sweetly. ‘Of course it was your foot,’ said Willoughby. ‘I trod on your foot and I want to apologize and by God I’m going to apologize.’ Mavis de Thule looked
frightened. ‘Perhaps it was Dr Jenkins’s here’s foot,’ she suggested. ‘No,’ said Willoughby, ‘it was your foot. Why lie about it?’ Elsewhere in the
room Bates was suggesting to Viola Masefield that they all have a play reading.

‘What was the name of the chick with the big behind who sat on my knee in the car?’ asked Willoughby, coming up to Treece.

‘Who do you mean?’ cried Treece.

‘The girl that teaches in your department,’ said Willoughby.

‘That was Dr Masefield,’ said Treece. ‘She’s our seventeenth-century man.’

‘I liked her,’ said Willoughby.

‘She has amazing critical acumen,’ said Treece. ‘An intellect at once malely strong and femalely sensitive, if you follow me.’

‘I’m just an old-fashioned kiss, touch, and smell man, myself,’ said Willoughby. ‘But thanks.’

He went off and talked to Viola, who was taking round drinks on a tray. After this he disappeared altogether. At one point he was noticed in the garden by Mavis de Thule, who threw up the window
and cried chattily, ‘Why, what are you doing out
there
, Mr Willoughby?’ ‘Having a piss,’ said Willoughby, as chattily.

Treece now found himself detained by Tanya. ‘Aren’t you going to talk to me, Stuart?’ she asked. ‘Have we offended you? You don’t come so often now.’

‘No, Tanya, you’re too sensitive,’ Treece replied; he could say this because it so patently was not true.

‘Viola is worried about you, Stuart,’ said Tanya. ‘She is very fond of you. She worries because she thinks you don’t eat enough; she says you are looking ill. I tell her,
if he is not sensible enough to put food in his stomach, then he doesn’t deserve to be well. You
do
look ill, Stuart.’

‘I feel a bit odd,’ said Treece.

‘You know, Stuart, you are a naughty boy. I am very concerned for Viola, and I don’t want her hurt. She told me what had happened before. I told her she was stupid. I said, Stuart is
a man who has no emotions whatsoever. All he will want now, after this, is to escape. He fears he is caught in something. He feels ashamed of himself. He doesn’t like women; all that is a
nuisance to him. He is more than any the sort you should stay away from. I know this seems cruel to you, Stuart, but there are other people to be thought of. I am not blaming you. But I tell you, I
don’t want any hurt to come to Viola. She is not as sophisticated, you know, as she seems. I understand your sort too well.’

‘Isn’t that a bit hard on me, Tanya?’ asked Treece.

‘Ask yourself that,’ said Tanya. ‘I am concerned with the other one.’

Willoughby, when last seen, had been talking to Jenkins about jazz. Now he was nowhere to be seen, and Treece, who was afraid he was probably writing up all the guests in a notebook somewhere,
went off to look for him. It was not, however, a notebook he was engrossed with, but Dr Masefield; he was kissing her at the back of the cloak cupboard. ‘Excuse me,’ said Treece,
‘but Professor and Mrs de Thule are leaving and wish to make their
adieux
.’

‘Good,’ said Willoughby. ‘Now let’s go out and find some jazz.’

‘I don’t think there is any,’ said Treece shirtily.

‘There is,’ said Willoughby. ‘This fellow Jenkins is taking us.’

‘Bye-bye, Mr Willoughby, bye-bye,’ cried Mavis de Thule, sticking her head into the cupboard.

‘Bye-bye, ducky,’ said Willoughby.

IV

The following morning Treece rose at seven and stoked the boiler, so that Willoughby could have a bath. As they had been retiring for bed at three o’clock that early
morning, Treece had asked Willoughby: ‘Would you like your bath now or in the morning? I ask because if you have it in the morning, it means I shall have to get up at seven and stoke the
boiler.’ Willoughby did not even have to think about the answer to this one: ‘I’ll have it in the morning,’ he said. Treece then went back to bed, and read for an hour; then
he got up again and went along to Willoughby’s room to rouse him. He entered the room in some trepidation, for angry young men seemed to have some special kind of short shrift with guest
rooms, which obviously symbolized something odious about hospitality; in one novel he had read the hero had burned the linen with cigarettes, and in another he had taken down all the pictures and
untacked the carpet and taken that up, and probably (Treece’s recollection of the novel was imperfect) he had put them all in a pile and set fire to them. The room, however, seemed intact,
and the only eccentricity apparent was that Willoughby was not in it at all. He had, Treece discovered on going downstairs again, spent the night on the sofa in the drawing room, because he slept
better on couches, and in his clothes.

‘You can have your bath now,’ said Treece pleasantly. ‘Thank you,’ said Willoughby, equally pleasant. ‘But do I have to take a bath? I mean, you’re not going
to make me go through with this, are you?’ ‘Not if you don’t wish to,’ said Treece. ‘That’s entirely your affair.’ ‘Oh, you protocol boys,’
said Willoughby. ‘I know that phrase. It means: if you’re going to persist in being a boor and a ruffian and an outcast, then I’m not going to blame you; but you realize that we
all disapprove. Look, I don’t
need
a bath yet.’ ‘What would you like for your breakfast?’ asked Treece patiently, for it was too early in the morning even to bother
about all this. ‘Bacon and egg? If you’ll tell me now, I’ll go and cook it and you can lie in for a little longer.’ ‘Thank you. Bacon and egg then,’ said
Willoughby, equally patiently. Treece went and cooked the breakfast and returned to find Willoughby fast asleep, too deeply gone to be roused even. He went back to the kitchen and ate his
breakfast. At one o’clock Willoughby was still asleep. He shook him hard, and woke him, and reminded him that they were due to leave at two for the Poetry Weekend. Merrick was taking them,
and Viola, down in his car, a little red sports model that Merrick ran on his private income.

Willoughby sat up, and flattened his hair down with his hand, and there he was, ready. He went upstairs and presently Treece could hear him shouting down: ‘How modest can you
get
?
Do you know there isn’t a mirror in this house that comes down below the waist? That’s why you never say anything. You’re wondering all the time whether your bloody flies are
fastened.’

Presently he came downstairs drying his hands on his handkerchief. Treece had intended that they go out for lunch, but Willoughby bridled and insisted on cooking a meal. He said a man should be
able to cook for himself, and be self-contained. He went and looked over the food that there was in. ‘Honestly, you live like some old spinster,’ he said. ‘All that front, and
then at home you don’t eat anything. You’re what I call flabby genteel.’

It was a poor meal. And there was flour all over the drawing room, from Willoughby’s cake-making, and fat all over the kitchen wall. As they ate Willoughby took tablets and reflected on
what he called ‘the protocol boys’, who, he said, ‘made him want to puke.’ ‘All these bastions of tired morality; all these little books on Housman. Some day the big
bang’s going to come, and you’ll all wonder what hit you. But you’ll just look at one another and say nothing, because it sounds rather like the toilet flushing and no one
mentions that. You know, I’d like to go back to the Vice-Chancellor’s house and stick my head though the window and shout: “Life is
not
a bowl of cherries.” Just
that.’

‘You mustn’t identify me with him,’ said Treece. ‘His and mine are different worlds. We really have very little in common.’

‘One always dockets old people together, I suppose,’ said Willoughby. ‘They’re all one generation to me, I’m afraid. You know these old dons at Cambridge who sit
over the port and say to one another: “Yes, there was someone once, wasn’t there . . .” This sums up my seniors, and it’s another way of life, these civilized old gentlemen
amateurs, full of charm and kindness, so frighteningly pathetic, saying that literary criticism is horrid and offensive and still, now, talking about
Principia Ethica
. I wouldn’t do
there, you know. All sherries taste the same to me; they’re all like cold tea. I only know two kinds of cheeses, mouse-trap and blue. I think it would be terrible to have to live in Sicily.
I’ve never read Sainte-Beuve. I don’t think that by not having a servant to do all those things of life that don’t really matter I’ve lost everything. Nor do I think that by
not being able to go to those old country house weekends of the early years of the century I missed the most brilliant and civilized gatherings of persons that ever existed. I know this shows on
me. I’m not civilized, I’m no gentleman, I don’t know a great many languages and I’m not erudite in any field, I respect that old sort of scholarship and love of learning,
but it’s no good to me. You see, that’s how we’re different.’

‘Not so very different,’ said Treece. But Willoughby did not hear this, for Merrick’s horn sounded in the driveway. Viola was already in the car and Willoughby sat beside her.
‘What are you talking about this afternoon, Carey?’ she asked. ‘God knows,’ said Willoughby, settling in the car and putting one arm around Viola. ‘Don’t tell
Him. Tell us,’ said Viola reprovingly. ‘Oh,’ said Willoughby carelessly. ‘I’ll think of
something
.’ ‘Charming man,’ said Viola, looking over
at Treece; and she winked.

Merrick, sitting behind the driving wheel with his county cap on, looked a real
rat
. Viola once pointed out a profound truth about Merrick, and that was that all his friends had
inflatable lifejackets. It could rain for forty days and forty nights and you wouldn’t catch
them
bending. All they needed, as Viola pointed out, was
bulletproof
inflatable
lifejackets and they needn’t have a care; all eventualities were catered for. Actually, of course, they had their lifejackets because to a man they all of them had dinghies, and went sailing
at weekends; but it was somehow appropriate that these people, the self-engrossed middle classes (the other side of the coin from the civilized liberal middle class that Treece saw as the salt of
the earth), should be so guarded. However, the amusing truth about Merrick was that he was, in fact, vaguely communist. He was a walking personification of Jenkins’s dictum that you could,
always, have your cake and eat it. He was the enlightened landowner breeding lamp-posts so that the mob would have something to hang him on. And, as Treece expected, and feared, he did not make
exactly a good impression on Willoughby.

It was a bright, sunny afternoon as they drove on through the Midland countryside, splashing through the water-splashes, roaring through the villages. All over England, in just such large
country houses, once the homes of the nobility, as they were going to, associations of computing-machine operators and folk-dance societies hold weekend conferences, playing parlour games in the
evenings and having practical jokes with lavatory paper in the dormitories. Mr Schenk, with his extra-ordinary organizational talent, had once again persuaded the AA to make large yellow signs,
saying
POETRY CONFERENCE
, which they bracketed up all over the Midland counties. Unfortunately, on the same day, there was also a
POULTRY CONFERENCE
,
and this was signposted too, and many an ardent poetry-reader that day ended up at the wrong house, amid clucking birds, while dung-covered farmers kept arriving at the poetry conference and
slapping their leggings with riding crops.

At the entrance to the hall, Schenk and Butterfield were waiting to greet them, looking rather frightened as they weighed up Willoughby and wondered whether today was going to be better, or
worse, than yesterday. Willoughby removed his arm from around Viola’s neck and got out of the car. Willoughby was speaking that afternoon, and Treece the following morning, while the
afternoon was given over to a Brains Trust which included on the platform Willoughby, Merrick, Viola, and Treece again.

At three o’clock Willoughby’s lecture began. He commenced by standing up and asking if anyone had a copy of the collected verse of Wallace Stevens. No one had; the first blood was to
Willoughby. He went on to announce that his subject for the afternoon was: were artists, and particularly poets, insane? There was a splutter of applause from the audience, who were all poets, and
would have hated it if people had not thought they were insane; that is,
they
knew they weren’t, but they liked for the common man to think that they were. Willoughby then began to
talk about Philoctetes, a social discard, marooned on a desert island because he had been so socially dissolvent as to have a wound in his foot that stenched abominably. He was marooned by his
fellow Greeks on the way to the Trojan War, and ten years later they found that they needed Philoctetes’ magic bow, given him by Hercules, in order to finish off the war. Willoughby was
clearly talking about his own symbolic foot (he said the wounded foot was a castration symbol, and that Henry James had a bad leg, an important fact to remember when you read his work; but
Willoughby did not look very castrated to Treece), and he told how crafty old Ulysses, a great businessman, had come to the island and tried to bargain with Philoctetes for the bow. Treece knew
that Willoughby was getting all this from a book by Edmund Wilson, and he hoped that Willoughby was at least going to credit his sources (the first thing Treece had been told in the academic world,
as a simple freshman, had been: a gentleman always credits his sources). Finally, said Willoughby, Ulysses had had to accept the wound with the bow, the wound as a condition of the bow, for the
thing that made Philoctetes abhorrent and separate from other men also made him powerful . . .