Eating People is Wrong (8 page)

‘To revert to this driving test . . .’ said Treece.

‘Well, as I say, you mustn’t feel too disappointed if you don’t pass first time. They throw the book at you. They failed me for not giving proper signals. I was sticking my arm
out as far as the bloody thing would go. But no, they expect you to lean so damn far out of the car that the examiner has to hold on to your feet. They just don’t like passing
people.’

‘This is only a bicycle,’ said Treece.

‘It makes no odds, old boy,’ said Merrick. ‘They’re even worse with those things. If you pass on that it means you’re entitled to ride a bloody great motorcycle.
That’s why they’re so rough. Believe me, no one passes first time. I’ve taken it four times with my motor-mower and I haven’t passed yet.’ Merrick got up off the
corner of the desk and began to depart. ‘Anyway, good luck,’ he said. He nodded affably at Emma and went out. ‘Bye-bye, old boy,’ he said.

Treece, who was to take his driving test that afternoon, was already in a high state of tension; he peered through a haze of distress at Emma Fielding, sitting there in her chair, her intense
black eyes fixed upon him. His stomach felt weak; he wanted to lie down. ‘Pleased to be back?’ he asked. ‘Well, not really,’ said Emma frankly.

‘Well, how’s the thesis coming along?’

‘I’m afraid it isn’t, really,’ said Emma. ‘I haven’t been able to get anything done over the vacation. I’ve been away; and then coming back was so
unsettling; I always get dreams of glory whenever I go abroad, and England is something of a shock when you come back to it. It’s all so matter-of-fact.’

‘That’s the problem with vacations,’ said Treece. ‘It’s a good thing you’re back, really. After all, the function of a vacation is regenerative, not
luxurious. It’s to restore our equipment so that we can live our ordinary lives the better. Do I look pale?’

‘A bit,’ said Emma.

‘I feel queer,’ said Treece: then, with a briskness he didn’t feel, he added, ‘Well, when are you going to let me have something written down?’

‘Next time,’ said Emma.

‘Good,’ said Treece. ‘Well, come and see me when you’ve something on paper.’ He rose, but Emma was not so easily got rid of. ‘There’s something I wanted
to talk to you about,’ said Emma. ‘It’s a personal matter really, and I suppose it’s something I ought to clear up on my own. I mean, I suppose it’s one of the risks
one takes just in being a woman, and one ought to know how to cope with the situation. After all, women are always being pursued, and they ought to learn to live with it, and be pleased, not
sorry.’

‘What
is
it?’ said Treece.

‘Well,’ said Emma, ‘you remember that Negro student that you introduced me to at the departmental reception.’

‘Mr Eborebelosa?’

‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘Well, I thought about this very carefully before I decided to mention it to you, but he really has gone too far.’ She explained that one morning, in a
pause in conversation in the refectory, Eborebelosa had announced, spluttering on the synthetic coffee, that he was in love with Emma and wanted to make her his fifth wife; he was, he said,
prepared to give up entirely intimate relations with the other four; he was jaded with black girls; he wanted only Emma. He further claimed, Emma told Treece, that, because of some action which she
could not identify, she was actually engaged to be married to him. ‘This
is
interesting,’ said Treece. ‘I wonder if it was your holding his teacup for him at the reception?
Isn’t there something about that in
The Golden Bough
?’ – and up he bobbed, to look for it on his shelves. He’s so
annoying
, Emma thought. Was it worth going
on? But she did. When she had told him that she could not marry him, Eborebelosa had become indignant and, waving in the air a box which, he said, contained his grandfather’s skull, which he
wanted her to have, he said he was a chieftain’s daughter (‘Chieftain’s son,’ Emma had corrected him, reflecting as she did so that
this
was the sort of role she had
in mind in relation to him), that she could have as many goats as she wanted, that if she wanted anyone killed she had only to say. ‘You see,’ said Emma, ‘there simply is no
common ground. And then he did this awful thing.’ ‘Great Scott!’ said Treece, forgetting about
The Golden Bough
.

‘Well, he got the idea that I was engaged to someone else, and he said he was going to kill him. He comes up to me every day, grinning like mad, asking if he’s dead yet.’

‘And is he?’

‘Is who what?’ asked Emma.

‘Is this man you’re engaged to dead?’

‘Well, there isn’t anyone. I had to invent someone.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ said Treece.

‘I know,’ said Emma Fielding. She looked downcast; she bent her head; and then, Treece noticed with horror, there was a bright crystal tear in each of her eyes. She hadn’t
meant to tell this bit, for how guilty she felt about it. Oh, she had never meant to lie; it wasn’t as if it was an ordinary lie, which would have been bad enough; she was lying to a member
of a race which had been lied to too much already. If he ever found out, he would surely take it as an insult to his colour, though it had been meant to spare him. But, in any case, was it, for a
liberal-minded person, fair even to spare him? Would one want to spare a white person like that? Yet if one told him what one would tell a white person – ‘I don’t love you’
– wouldn’t this seem like an attack on his colour? And if he had been a white person, wouldn’t one perhaps have married him?

‘Oh,’ she sobbed, ‘it’s so difficult.’

Treece, watching her body shake with sobs, got up and popped halfway round the desk; then he thought better of it, and popped back. Someone might come in and catch him at it. ‘Now,
now,’ he said from his safe distance.

‘That’s not all, either,’ said Emma. ‘It was
you
. It’s you he’s sticking pins into an image of.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Treece.

Well,’ cried Emma, ‘I said I was engaged to you. It had to be someone he was scared of, you see. So I thought of you.’

‘Did you, by Jove?’ said Treece.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Emma accusingly. ‘This is the sort of thing that only happens to women. Men don’t see this dilemma. One is congenitally a woman, you
know; one tries not to be, but it’s a condition of one’s humanity. But his being a Negro makes everything so much worse. It’s not just a question of doing what a woman ought to
do, is it?’

‘No,’ said Treece.

She blew her nose. ‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘And that’s why I came to you, because it isn’t just a personal problem, and I can’t handle it on my own. I mean,
it is very flattering, to be admired by someone out of a different culture. But you see – if I turn away from him it won’t just seem like a simple
rejection
, will it?’

Treece pondered a moment. ‘Well, will it?’ demanded Emma, and Treece found that her eyes, sprouting tears, were gazing accusingly at him, as if
he
were to blame, as if he were
the cruel arbiter of dilemmas of this sort (which, in a sense, he had to admit, he was). ‘He’ll think, won’t he, that I’m discriminating against him because of his
colour.’

‘And you aren’t?’ asked Treece, taking strength.

‘Oh, oh, I don’t
know
,’ said Emma. ‘But I couldn’t marry him. I don’t want to.’

‘But you must give him a fair deal, now, mustn’t you? That’s all that’s necessary. Have you thought it through in the way that you would have if he were a white
suitor?’

‘Well, how do I know, because he isn’t,’ said Emma. ‘White suitors don’t try to give you their grandfather’s skull. And when one’s getting married one
has to take things like that into consideration. I mean, it does matter, doesn’t it?’

‘But have you even thought of the matter as a feasible possibility?’ asked Treece. ‘At least you have to do that, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Emma.

‘I think you do,’ said Treece. ‘In many ways, Eborebelosa is an admirable man. His ways are not our ways, but that doesn’t mean they’re any worse.’ Treece
weighed this for a moment, and then added, scrupulously (scrupulously was his word), ‘Or any better. He does have the advantage of national vigour on his side; he’s close to his roots,
you know. That should appeal to a woman, shouldn’t it? I mean, he’s extra-ordinarily male, vital, in a way . . . well, you’ve read Lawrence. He deserves to be considered on his
merits.’

‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘Yes.’ A brave smile shone through the tears. Treece felt as though he had put the case rather well, had given her something to think about. That was
his job.

‘Are my eyes terribly red?’ asked Emma.

‘No,’ said Treece, adding, as if he were her father,
somebody’s
father, ‘Sit here for a minute; and stop rubbing them.’ Treece tried to think of something
nice and warming to say; but he could only, really, think of one thing. This was the driving test.

‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t to take my driving test,’ he said; somehow, after the tears, it didn’t matter about telling Emma. ‘I hate that machine. You know I get off it
every time shaking like a leaf. It’s full of vibration. It has a life of its own. I dream about it in bed at night.’

‘Why not get rid of it?’ said Emma.

‘It’s a challenge, you see. They shouldn’t make people take these cruel little tests, it’s so belittling.’

‘Well, you do,’ said Emma.

‘Yes, I know, but it isn’t the
same
, is it? I wasn’t at all nervous when I took my Ph.D. The thing with this one is that you aren’t being judged on your own terms.
I’m an expert in English literature, and they’re going to ask me questions about street signs. It’s a field outside the ones in which I have control, you see. I shall
expose
myself, I know.’

‘It isn’t so very hard,’ said Emma.

‘You’ve taken it, then, have you?’

‘Yes,’ said Emma.

‘And passed?’

‘Yes,’ said Emma.

‘Oh, well,’ said Treece, ‘perhaps you have a mechanical mind. What I’m getting at is how cruel life is in the spheres of it in which you aren’t influential. You
think you have a protected corner, and you’re safe; but once you emerge from it, war is declared. You think life is ideal, so long as you can pursue it along the lines you favour; and then it
suddenly comes upon you that it isn’t, it’s corrupt, that the area in which you are resolute, and make decisions, is so very small. And now and then life goes to work to remind you of
it.’

‘Yes, I know exactly what you mean,’ said Emma. ‘The blind, uncontrollable forces of the universe break through, suddenly, the great overpowering energies of the world. As in
Moby Dick
.’

‘Quite,’ said Treece. ‘And the question remains: is it right to stay in the protected corner, where things are controllable, or should one venture out, and start again in a new
world, where things are strenuous, and reclaim something else from the wild?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Emma. ‘How does one decide? One concludes, I suppose, that one world is worth more, I imagine, and opts for that.’

‘It isn’t even as simple as that,’ said Treece, morosely; the discussion was affecting him profoundly; these were his corns that they were treading on. ‘Because when one
ceases to cultivate one’s own garden, then one ceases to be influential. There’s so much to lose, not in goods, but in manners, patterns of living. Outside those that one has, one is
nothing – one is a buffoon. Like Mr Eborebelosa. He’s not funny on his native heath – but here! No, there’s nothing really you can do; for then the abrasion itself becomes a
dominant condition of life, and one gives more time to it than it deserves. And one has to commit oneself to actions that perhaps are not right – or they might be right for you, but not for
other people.’ He stood up and walked over to the door, taking a black cycling coat from a hook on the back of it. ‘It’s a problem, Miss Fielding,’ he said, putting on the
coat. ‘It’s a problem.’ On the hook there also hung a pair of cellophane goggles, and these he seized and pulled down over his eyes, ruffling his hair wildly as he did so.

‘Well, you look your normal self now,’ he said, presuming on their intimacy. His eyes crinkled into a smile behind the cellophane. ‘I hope it will all come out all
right,’ he said, ushering her out of the door and following her down the corridor. Notices flapped on the boards like great birds as they swept past them.

‘And good luck for your driving test,’ said Emma.

Treece paled, but regained his composure. Students swept round them as they stood still in the middle of the corridor. ‘Oh,’ said Treece. ‘There’s something I wanted to
ask you.’ He began to fiddle with his clothes, right there in the middle of the corridor, in a most alarming way; is he going to do it here, in public, to compromise me? Emma wondered. But it
was nothing like that at all; Treece’s black motorcycling coat was covered with great zips, which he kept undoing, thrusting his hand inside, in order to produce, after a great deal of
struggle, simply a diary. ‘I wonder if I could trespass on your time and good nature again,’ said Treece. ‘I’m giving a little tea next Friday for the first-year honours
people, at four, and I wondered if you could come along.’

Both of them realized, simultaneously, that this was how it had all started last time; after playing with the thought for a moment, both politely ignored it. ‘I’d be pleased
to,’ said Emma. ‘Nothing formal, you understand,’ said Treece, looking down gratefully at her through his goggles. ‘It would be pleasant and I thought too that you could act
as a sort of bridge between them and me.’

‘I suppose I could,’ said Emma, pocketing any expectations of the evening; no-man’s-lands were notoriously difficult to populate. ‘Well, I must be on my way,’ said
Treece, doing up his zippers; and with one more nod and a smile apiece, both went their ways to their respective problems.

Treece went out to his bicycle, in the middle of the back wheel of which sat a squat black engine. He climbed aboard and drove off, his L-plates fluttering in the October wind, the engine
puttering down there in the wheel behind him. ‘Mind,’ cried a nervous old man as he whistled past. A drizzling rain was splashing coldly on his face and misting his goggles. Treece
scarcely noticed, for he was still within the warmth of the little encounter. Emma Fielding was a sensitive and mature woman, careful of the feelings of others, and what he was wont to call
‘a very worthwhile person’: if anyone had asked for a reference, that was what he would have said. Sensitive, intelligent, scrupulous, liberal-minded (and pretty, too – one had
better not forget that), she was just the sort of person to marry Eborbelosa. Why, then, had she rejected him? Perhaps he was being unfair – and then he saw that he
was
, of course. Why
had he been feeling so offended? As if it was he who had been rejected? Because it was he who had been rejected; this had been the thought nagging at the back of his mind. His motives were far from
pure; it was his protest on behalf of the international spirit, his cry for foreign races, that he felt had been turned down. All that Emma was doing was conceiving the matter in simple human
terms; she was all that he thought she was; she had simply wanted to do as little harm as possible. Like so many liberals, he had conceived of actions in terms of ideas, when there was nothing in
the action but pure action. As soon as he observed the treacherous nature of the moral stance he had taken, he was bathed in apology. Of course she didn’t have to marry Eborebelosa, not if
she didn’t want to.