Eating People is Wrong (13 page)

Viola had only one popular gramophone record, Trenet singing ‘
Les Enfants S’Ennuyent Le Dimanche
’, and at tonight’s party she had played it six times already. She
played it at parties as a joke (though it was really Tanya’s joke) and now she, and everyone present, was ready to break it. The party was having its peculiar difficulties. The ale-cup, as
she kept telling people, tasted like wee-wee. Viola was a simple yet intelligent woman, and she had friends who were simple and friends who were intelligent; she was always introducing the ones to
the others and discovering that they didn’t like each other; she herself couldn’t tell which were which. The Nicholsons, the people who had Tanya’s bottom flat, were freethinking
and open-minded; they both invariably wore pink shirts. They made dandelion wine and loved to give it to people; they took the
New Statesman
and felt that it was getting very conservative
nowadays; they went to the cinema on Sunday evenings, not because they liked the cinema (they hated it; it was too mechanical), but because they felt that someone ought to go to preserve the right
of Sunday cinema-going for those who did not realize the powerful forces at work against it; they walked two or three times a year along disused footpaths to preserve them as a right of way for
those who did not realize, etc.; they made their own shoes; they prayed, as someone once cleverly said of them, to To Whom it May Concern. If William Morris had still been alive, he would have had
all his time cut out trying to keep them out of his house; they would have been more William Morris than William Morris; he would have died of shame in the realization that he had not been enough
himself. They baked their own bread and wove their own curtains, and it tasted as though they wove their own bread and looked as though they baked their own curtains. Their friends brought them
home-produced honey (they introduced Viola to these friends and Viola said, ‘You made it? You have your own bee?’), and whatever they ate, they ate because it was good for them. Viola,
who had dietetic interests, followed their cuisine with fascination; they practically lived on wheat germ. Now, at the party, the Nicholsons were going about, trying to like everyone, as they
always did, and were finding it terribly hard. Tanya they looked on with a specially kindly eye, because she must have suffered; and Tanya, who had, and was as hard as nails about it, hated their
inquisitive guts, as she put it – her English was not quite perfect, but it was idiomatic. They also looked benevolently on a morose, barrel-chested artist named Herman, and the woman he was
living with. What made them stand out of the ordinary run was that this woman, who was thirty-five at least, ten years older than Herman, went out on the streets in order to earn enough to keep
them both alive. ‘He doesn’t respect her for it, in fact he despises her, but that’s because he despises anyone who earns money, and he treats her badly. But she loves him and she
won’t leave him; so she sells herself. I think she’s a saint,’ Viola was saying. Unfortunately she chose to say this to one of her
other
sort of friends, an elderly
librarian named Miss Enid, who was known to all present as quite an exponent of the harp; and she, as anyone but Viola would have expected she would, set to to dispute this. ‘Viola dear, if
she walks the street, how can you call her that?’ ‘But she’s giving herself because of something she believes in, his work, and because she loves him,’ said Viola.
‘She’s spending herself.’

‘But why, Viola dear, do you call that saintly? I know I’m an old-fashioned thing; but you know a lot of saints got their promotion, so to speak, because of their chastity. You talk
as if she’s doing something very moral; I can’t see how she is even by your standards.’

‘“Even by your standards” isn’t very kind,’ said Viola, ‘but it is moral, in the sense that she’s living life worthily.’

‘I suppose sex has just ceased to be a moral issue,’ said the librarian.

‘No,’ said Viola, shocked. ‘Oh, no. It’s just a different morality. I think sex is full of moral problems; luckily, I like moral problems, and I think that’s the
difference. People are prepared to have moral problems nowadays, instead of shying away from the places where they come up.’

‘I insist,’ said the librarian. ‘You
aren’t
moral about personal behaviour. Look at this situation. This woman, you see, could so easily do some other work and
keep him. But if she worked in Woolworths you wouldn’t call her a saint would you? You’re just being terribly romantic.’

‘I’m
not
romantic,’ cried Viola indignantly, smarting under this insult. Dr Adrian Carfax happened at that moment to be passing by, and Viola seized his arm violently.
‘Adrian, I’m not romantic, am I?’ ‘How should I know that?’ asked Carfax, surprised. ‘I’m a married man.’ ‘I mean in
spirit
,’ said
Viola. ‘Who was it who said at a public lecture that if the nineteenth century did not exist, it would not have been necessary to invent it?’ ‘I shouldn’t bring
that
up,’ said Carfax, who was a Swinburne man, one of the very few of them left.

‘You don’t understand me,’ said Miss Enid forgivingly.

‘Excuse me, Viola, but now you’re here, may I carry you off,’ said Carfax, giving Viola a significant look.

‘Wherever you like, dear,’ said Viola.

‘Just a minute,’ said Carfax. They withdrew to a cranny beside the fireplace and Carfax said: ‘Are we going to talk to Treece tonight about you know what?’

‘Yes; when he gets here,’ said Viola. ‘It gets worse.’

‘Faculty politics?’ inquired a passer-by perceptively.

‘Illicit passion,’ said Viola with a laugh. She turned back to Carfax. ‘But we mustn’t press him too hard. You know what Stuart’s like.’

‘He means well, you know, Viola,’ said Carfax, who prized loyalty. ‘Oh, I know,’ said Viola, ‘he couldn’t mean anything else if he tried. Don’t
misunderstand me, Adrian; I
like
Stuart.’ Children sometimes say, I
like
you, and you feel honoured that, when they have so much to choose from, when they live in such a
thoroughly amiable world, they should bother to pick you distinctly out, to like; Viola’s comment, Carfax felt, had a lot of this intonation; he wished that he could tempt her to say the same
thing about him. How nice of her, in her headlong rush through life, that she should stop and like someone! Love, these days, is so firmly
in
that liking has quite gone out; and here was
Viola doing it.

Time passed; beer was drunk; the evening wore on and finally Stuart arrived. He was covered in snow and had virtually to be carried to the fireplace and stripped of his outer clothing.
‘Oh, what a night,’ he said. ‘I’ve had such a rumpus at my evening class. Keats, Keats, Keats,’ he said spitefully. ‘I don’t care if I never see another
keat again.’ He looked up at Viola; she looked charming, with her hair done in what Treece always called her lunatic fringe, and with a low-cut dress that ought to have been more
tight-fitting; it would have made a baby cry. Some of the younger sporters in the room kept placing things she wanted to pick up low down and just out of reach; and Viola, delightfully herself, had
no idea why. ‘Did you bring a book to read?’ asked Viola, when Treece had had time to thaw a little. This was a reference to the fact that, at parties, Treece had a habit of reading in
a corner, with his back to the assembled company; there was a famous occasion when, at a faculty dinner, he got through
A Farewell to Arms
.

‘I have just the thing to warm you up,’ said Viola. ‘Vodka. You drink it all down at one go.’

‘Did you know that vodka is made from potatoes?’ said Treece when she brought it.

‘Oh damn,’ said Viola. ‘And I’ve been boiling mine.’

The drink warmed him and he smiled benevolently at Viola. Then he noticed that she had someone with her. It was Carfax. ‘We want to talk to you, Stuart,’ said Viola.
‘Oh,’ said Treece suspiciously; they looked as though they were going to steal his trousers.

‘It’s about Louis Bates,’ said Carfax.

‘He’s not here, is he?’ cried Treece.

‘No; of course not,’ said Viola.

Treece realized that one of the symptoms of paranoia was the feeling that one was constantly pursued, and he tried to control himself; but, damn it all, he
was
constantly pursued,
wasn’t he? ‘I’ve had enough trouble from
that
source for one evening,’ said Treece. ‘Must we talk about him?’

‘I don’t know whether you’ve had any work from him lately?’ asked Carfax. Treece hadn’t, of course, but he wasn’t going to tell Carfax that.
‘Why?’ he asked.

‘What do you think of it?’ asked Carfax, swaying judiciously back and forth on the balls of his feet.

‘Why?’ demanded Treece.

‘Now please tell us,’ said Viola, ‘because it’s a matter of some importance.’

‘Well now,’ said Treece. ‘It was passable.’

‘Was it?’ demanded Carfax. ‘Well, that’s more than I can say for the work I’ve been getting.’ Carfax sat down and began to puff militarily at his pipe; Carfax
had been an officer in the First World War and always stood very stiffly, talked jovially but with a somewhat officers-to-men attitude, and had a precise sense of discipline which, if violated by
anyone, stirred in him violent indignations. He was in this mood now. Treece had once heard him, in an argument with a student about some critical point of view, say, in reply to the
student’s tentative ‘Well, I think . . .’ ‘You’re not here to think’; and then he remembered that he was in a university, not the Army, and to think was just
what the student was here for; he had apologized handsomely and genially. About Carfax not all has been told. He was also Uncle Adrian in the schools broadcasts put out by a commercial television
station in the afternoons; his bluff avuncular figure, smoking a pipe, could be seen, once a week, talking heartily about Shakespeare and what folk were like in them days; his producer had urged on
him a quaint West-Country accent for these occasions, and he was now known in the University as the poor man’s Bernard Miles.

‘I haven’t been able to persuade him to do any work for me at all,’ said Viola, ‘so I can’t even offer a judgement. But it seems to me that if he doesn’t
intend to get anything out of this place then he’d better get out and make room for someone who does.’

Treece realized that Carfax and Viola had already met on this point, and reached agreement, and without disclosing the fact that he had himself, earlier that evening, been proposing to himself
some action of this sort, he tempted Carfax and Viola to a firmer stand. ‘It’s true he’s guilty of a high degree of irreponsibility,’ he said.

‘He told me in the middle of one of my lectures that I ought to take rose-hip syrup,’ said Carfax, furnishing what seemed to him incontrovertible proof.

‘And the way he looks at me sometimes,’ said Viola with an embarrassed laugh.

‘What does he do?’ said Treece interestedly.

‘Nothing,’ said Viola. ‘He just looks.’

‘Well, I found him cutting his hair in my drawing room the other afternoon before the departmental tea party.’

‘Fantastic,’ said Viola.

‘Well, there’s only one way to talk of someone whose values are as remote from life and independent as his are, isn’t there?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Viola.

‘You mean he’s mad,’ said Treece.

‘He wouldn’t be the first person of that sort to be found in a university. I always thought my tutor was; he’d change over from one set of false teeth to another in the middle
of a lecture.’

‘Well,’ said Viola. ‘Then we ought to get him out of here as soon as possible, to somewhere where he can be looked after.’

‘No,’ said Treece; ‘we can’t do that.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Carfax. ‘I thought you were agreeing with us?’

Treece turned to Viola. ‘What Carfax means, when he says Bates is mad, is that he’s psychotic, that he suffers from schizophrenia, and is subject to delusion about his status in the
world. And I suppose it’s true that his character does lie within that pattern of derangement. But if he is like that, that puts our whole problem on another dimension.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Carfax. Treece’s change in spirit was too much for a simple Army man; Treece’s own image of Louis had seldom changed, and in this new
perspective Bates’s faults seemed eminently permissible; they were pathological lesions and excusable on that count. His virtues, on the other hand, became his own. ‘You can’t
punish a man for his nonconformity, after all. We can punish him for his lack of quality or for his failure to obey the rules. But it isn’t that at all; he doesn’t lack quality, I feel
convinced. He simply has qualities of a different kind. We have to keep him. Where else can a man of his kind go if not into a university?’

‘Into a mental hospital,’ said Viola.

‘But do you know what mental hospitals are like? Do you suppose he’s a severe case? It seems to me more than likely that a mental hospital would send him over the edge.’

‘But he might do someone harm,’ said Viola.

‘Nonsense, Viola; he’s not psychopathic. It isn’t that kind of derangement at all, as far as I see it. Madness, genius, originality – it’s all the same thing;
it’s a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one. In a sense we all do this. He’s simply an original; he’s no more wild than that. His delusions
don’t prevent him from living in the ordinary, everyday world; he isn’t that severely impaired. No, better throw out all the other students than throw out the one man we can help, the
one honest man.’

‘Why honest? Are you sure you don’t just like the idea of having a madman of your own, Stuart? I’m sorry, but I really mean this, Stuart,’ said Viola, ‘because in
some ways I think you’re a sort of moral cheat. You always espouse the right cause; look how well you show up in relation to us in this. You do the proper moral thing, as it appears under the
gaze of the
New Statesman
or whatever the proper moral agencies are these days. But after you’ve done that you’ve still left everything in the air. Your soul rests easy, but
nothing’s solved.’