The History Man (10 page)

‘What were you going to tell me?' asks Moira, ‘Is it an issue?' ‘It is,' says Howard, looking around the lift, and leaning towards Moira, and speaking in a very low voice. ‘There's a rumour that Mangel is coming here to speak.' ‘A rumour that who is coming here to speak?' asks Moira. ‘There's a rumour that Mangel is coming here to speak,' says Howard in a very loud voice; students turn and look at him, ‘Mangel. Mangel the geneticist. Mangel the racist.' The metal box in which they stand creaks its way up the central tower of the building; bells keep pinging, the lift stops, and opens its doors, and disgorges persons, at floor after floor after floor. ‘Oh, that Mangel,' says Moira, bouncing her baby, ‘Christ, we can't have him here.' ‘Well, that's precisely what I thought,' says Howard, ‘we really can't.' ‘It's an insult, an indignity,' says Moira. ‘It's an outrage,' says Howard. ‘But who invited him?' asks Moira, ‘I don't remember our agreeing to invite him.' ‘That's because we never did agree to invite him,' said Howard, ‘someone must have acted over the summer, while we were all safely out of sight. ‘You mean Marvin?' asks Moira. ‘I suppose,' says Howard. ‘Well,' says Moira, ‘we're not out of sight now. We all have a say. This passes for a democratic department.' ‘Right,' says Howard. ‘I'll raise it at the departmental meeting tomorrow,' says Moira, ‘I'm glad you told me.' ‘Oh, will you?' asks Howard, ‘I think someone ought to. I thought I might myself, but …' ‘But you'd rather I did,' says Moira. ‘Okay.' The liftbell pings; the doors open at the fourth floor; ‘This is me,' says Moira. With the carrycot in front of her, she jostles through the crowds; she thrusts herself out of the lift; she turns, and stares back into the crowded interior. ‘Howard,' she says over the heads, ‘I'll fight. You can count on me.' ‘Great,' says Howard, ‘that's marvellous.'

The lift doors shut; Howard leans against the metal wall, looking like a man who is no longer looking for someone or something. The doors open again, at the fifth floor; Howard moves to the front, and steps out of the lift, into the stark concourse, for here, high in the building, is where Sociology is. Is, and yet in a sense is not; for no sociologist seriously interested in human interaction could have countenanced the Kaakinen concept at this point. From the lift shaft four straight corridors lead off, at right angles to each other, each identical, each containing nothing but rows of doors, giving or barring access to teaching rooms or faculty studies. There are buildings in the world which have corners, bends, recesses; where seats have been put, or paintings hung on the walls; Kaakinen, in his purity, has rejected all these delicacies. Along the corridors sit many students, waiting to see their advisers on this, the first day of the term. They sit on the tiled floors of the corridors, their backs against the wall, their knees up, their hands holding, or spilling, plastic cups of coffee, obtained from an automatic vending machine next to the lift shaft. The floors smell of tile polish; the corridors are lit only by artificial sodium light. Howard leaves the concourse, and walks along one of the corridors; the students scowl and clown and groan as he passes, and make cracking noises at him with the plastic of their cups. ‘The only activity Kaakinen invented for people to do here, except teach or be taught,' Henry Beamish had once said, in the old days before the anguishes of 1968, when he was still witty, ‘is a game called Fire. Where you ring the alarm, immobilize the lift, and file slowly down the fire escape with a wet jacket over your head.' Only Howard, who has a taste for the spare, finds it forgivable; there are merits in the alienation it promotes. He walks on, down to the very end of the corridor; here, at the most inconvenient point, is the departmental office. He pushes open the glass door, and goes inside. Within the big bare room, responsible for the endless documentation that keeps the community humming, are two nice, neat secretaries, Miss Pink from Streatham, Miss Minnehaha Ho, from Taiwan; they sit in their miniskirts, opposite each other, in front of typewriters, their knees just touching. They look up as Howard comes in. ‘Oh, Dr Kirk, what a very fine hat,' says Miss Ho. ‘Lovely to see your beautiful faces again,' says Howard. ‘Had a good summer?' ‘You were on holiday,' says Miss Pink, ‘we worked.' ‘It only looks like a holiday,' says Howard, going over to the long rows of pigeonholes, where the faculty mail is deposited, ‘that's when the real work of the mind takes place. I come back full of new thoughts.' ‘The trouble with your thoughts,' says Miss Pink, ‘is they end up as our typing.' ‘You're right,' says Howard, dropping most of the correspondence addressed to him in a box marked ‘For Recycling'. ‘Rebel. Fight back'. Through the wall can be heard the sounds of intensive industry; the adjoining room is the office of Professor Marvin, the heart of the operation. Telephones click, buzzers buzz, the high voice speaks on the telephone; there is much to be done. ‘What's this?' asks Howard, holding up a large grey envelope, one of the university's official envelopes for committee documents. ‘That's agenda for the departmental meeting,' says Miss Ho, ‘very good typing.' ‘Oh, I'll read it with scruple,' says Howard, ‘if you've done it. You've had your hair styled. I like it.' ‘He is trying to find something out,' says Miss Ho to Miss Pink, ‘he always likes my hair when he is finding something out.' ‘No, I really like it,' says Howard, ‘look, I'm just glancing at this agenda; you haven't put Professor Mangel's name down on the list of visiting speakers.' ‘It wasn't on it,' says Miss Ho, ‘that is why.' ‘It must be a mistake,' says Howard. ‘You want me to check with Professor Marvin?' asks Miss Ho. ‘No,' says Howard, ‘leave it. I'll raise it with him myself. Can't you just add it?' ‘Oh, no, Dr Kirk,' says Miss Ho. ‘Agenda approved.' ‘Of course,' says Howard, ‘well, type good.' He goes out of the office; he walks back down the corridor. The squatting students stare at him. Two builders on a ladder are removing a ceiling panel, to gain access to the stark intestines of the premises; the whole tower is in an endless state of semi-completion. He stops in front of a dark brown door; on it is a panel, with his own name on it. He gets a key from his pocket; he unlocks the door; he walks inside.

The room is raw in the wet, dull light; it is a simple rectangle, with unpainted breezeblock walls, described in the architectural journals as proof of Kaakinen's frank honesty. The rooms at Watermouth are all like this, stark, simple, repetitious, each one an exemplary instance of all the others. The contents, standard, are as follows: one black-topped Conran desk, one grey gunmetal desk lamp; one plain glass ashtray; one Roneo-Vickers three-drawer filing cabinet; one red desk chair; one small grey easy chair; one gunmetal wastepaper basket; a stack of four (4) black plastic chairs, their seats moulded to the shape of some average universal buttock; six (6) wall-hung bookshelves. Howard, who likes economy, has amended it very little; the one mark of his presence is the poster of Che, sellotaped to the breezeblock wall above the Conran desk. There are big, bare windows; beyond the windows you can see, dead centre, the high phallus, eolipilic in shape, of the boilerhouse chimney, the absolute focus, the point of maximum architectural eminence, of the entire university, its substitute for a tower or a spire or a campanile. Howard hangs up his coat on the hook behind the door, and puts his hat on top of it, he puts his briefcase down on the desk; he begins, after his absence over the summer, when the room has been in the hands of cleaners only, to re-establish occupancy. He sits down at the red desk chair in front of the black-topped Conran desk, switches on the gunmetal desk lamp, removes the agenda from its big grey envelope, opens the Roneo-Vickers three-drawer filing cabinet, and puts the agenda in a pocket file; scrumples up the big grey envelope, and tosses it into the gunmetal wastepaper basket. This work done, he rises, goes to the window, adjusts the plastic blind, and stares out at the rain, dropping very wetly over the Kaakinen concept that is spread out below, far below him. Down in the Piazza there is a scurrying of students; against the grand style of Kaakinen walk, in the wet, the small personal styles of the people, who always alter from autumn to autumn, in the changing rhythm of human expression, which takes skirts higher or lower, gives faces more hair or less, alters posture and stance. These are matters of serious attention to true cultural inspectors, like Howard; he stands at his window, high in the glass tower, and examines the latest statements on the human prospect.

The university gets bigger, year by year; a new building, a new path, a new stretch of water, takes it inexorably towards its fuller realization. The place has been functioning for only ten years; but in those ten years it has done everything, indeed has enacted the entire industrializing process of the modern world. Ten years ago this stretch of land was a peaceful, pastoral Eden, a place of fields and cows, focused around the splendours of Watermouth Hall, the turreted Elizabethan mansion now screened from sight by the massive constructions that have grown on the pasture and the stubble. At Watermouth Hall, peacocks strutted; so did the very first students, pleasant, likeable, outrageous people, stylists of quite another kind from the present generation, inventors of societies and lectures and concerts, smart souls who, when the photographers from the Colour Supplements came down, as they did all the time in those days, photographed well, and reputedly had all the makings of a modern new intelligentsia. The sun shone regularly then, the same sun that had shone on Edwardian England; the students had their tutorials in the ancient library of the hall, surrounded by busts of Homer and Socrates, by leatherbound volumes scarcely disturbed since the onset of Romanticism, or, in summer, in the box maze, while gardeners clipped respectfully around them. The faculty met ceaselessly, innovating, planning, designing new courses, new futures, new reasons for trips to Italy; endless optimism reigned, and novelty was everywhere, and Kaakinen came, and stared at the grass, and dreamed dreams, while cows peered over the haha at his Porsche. A year later the box garden was gone; in its place was a building, the first of the modern new residences, called Hobbes, with round porthole windows scooping down to the floors, and transparent Finnish curtaining, and signs in lowercase lettering. The feudal era was ending; a year later it was gone for good, when teaching was shifted from Watermouth Hall, which became an office block, devoted to administration, into the bright new buildings, some high, some long, some square, some round, that began to spring up here and there all over the estate. There were two more residence halls, Kant and Hegel; the gardeners, their deference spurned, had gone to greener pastures, while men on brushbearing vehicles swept the new asphalt.

For now the university was beginning to secrete its history in clear annual stages, like a tree; and it was, in encapsulated form, the history of modern times. The bourgeoisie rose (Humanities and Natural Science opened their doors); the industrial revolution took place (the Business Building and the Engineering Building were opened); the era of the crowd and the factory arrived (the glass tower of Social Science came into use). The sun shone less often; the students appeared less and less in the newspapers, and looked different, and more confused. The new buildings all had toilets with strange modern symbols of man and woman on them, virtually indistinguishable; the new students came, and they stared at the doors, and at themselves, and at each other; they looked, and they asked questions like ‘What is man, any more?' and so life went on.
Gemeinschaft
yielded to
Gesellschaft;
community was replaced by the fleeting, passing contacts of city life; people came into the university, and disappeared; psychiatric social workers were appointed, to lead them through the recesses of their angst. By 1967, when Howard came, it had been noticed that no given teacher could possibly remember the names and features of all the students he was teaching, nor master in face-to-face contact the number of colleagues he was teaching with. There were those who pined, and said more was worse, more people was worse life; but, as Howard told them, it was simply that the community was growing up. It grew and grew, up and up. In 1968, the year after Howard, full proletarian status was adopted; the students wore work-clothes, and said they were not an élite any more, and cried ‘Destroy, destroy,' and modern citizenship was established. So it went on; in 1969, existential exposure, modern plight, the contemporary condition of pluralism and relativity, were officially accredited, with the opening of the multi-denominational chapel, named, to avoid offence, the Contemplation Centre; rabbis and gurus, ethical secularists and macrobiotic organicists presided at what was carefully not called its consecration. In 1970 the technotronic age became official; the Computing Centre was put into use, and it began work by issuing a card with a number on it to everyone on campus, telling them who they were, an increasingly valuable piece of information.

And now the campus is massive, one of those dominant modern environments of multifunctionality that modern man creates: close it down as a university, a prospect that seemed to become increasingly possible, as the students came to hate the world and the world the university, and you could open it again as a factory, a prison, a shopping precinct. There is a dining hall with a roof of perspex domes, looking like sun umbrellas, by the manmade lake; there is an Auditorium in the shape of a whale, its hinder parts hung out on an elegant device of metal ropes over the lake; the buildings poke and prod and shine in a landscape itself reconstituted, as hills are moved here and valleys there. Some eclecticism and tolerance prevails; at the Auditorium they perform that week a Marxist adaptation of
King Lear
, this week a capitalist adaptation of
The Good Woman of Setzuan
. But a zealous equality prevails in the air, and the place has become a little modern state, with the appropriate services, in all their inconsistency: a post office and a pub and a Mace supermarket and a newsagent stand side by side with the psychiatric service, the crèche, the telephone lifeline for the drug addicts, the offices of the Securicor patrol. The sun rarely shines; the peacocks have gone; the students are not bright originals in the old style, but bleaker, starker performers in the modern play; and when they are photographed by the press, which is rather less often, they appear not in the glossy pages but in the news pages, and upside down, hanging between two policemen. The campus spreads; now and then Air Force planes swoop low over it, as if inspecting to make sure it is still in the nation's hands, before they sweep on to the woods and cornfields beyond. A plane flies over now, as Howard stares out of his window; down below, in the Piazza, the students criss and cross, this way and that, in elaborate, asymmetrical patterns, ants with serious yet unguessable purposes.