Eating People is Wrong (27 page)

‘Good,’ said the man, who, Treece, saw more clearly, was only about twenty-three or twenty-four. ‘Will you read some poems of mine? You won’t understand them, but you
might be able to get them published. Here, buy me a cup of coffee, will you?’ He called over the waitress. ‘Two cups of froth, please, Rita?’

‘Have you got any money?’ asked Rita.

‘He has,’ said the man, and, turning to Treece again, he asked politely: ‘Read much?’

‘Yes; it’s my job,’ said Treece.

‘You see this belt,’ said Walter Oliver on the other side of him, opening his jacket and taking off a leather belt. ‘It was made by the Prince of Wales’s bootmaker. Of
course, the day we’re all waiting for is the one when the Prince of Wales claims his boots are made by Walter Oliver’s belt-maker.’

‘Is there a Prince of Wales?’ demanded Jenkins. Nobody knew. ‘That’s an interesting index of our sense of democratic responsibility,’ said Jenkins brightly. People
were now beginning to wonder whether Treece and Jenkins were not completely insufferable.

‘I’m an anti-monarchist,’ said the man next to Treece showily. ‘Why?’ demanded Treece. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it’s such a waste of
money.’ ‘If they substituted anything else, it would be equally expensive,’ said Treece. ‘Well, perhaps I’m a monarchist after all,’ said the man. ‘It
doesn’t matter to me.’

‘I can forgive the monarchy everything except Annigoni,’ said a man who painted: you could tell he did; the paint was all over his clothes.

‘Of course, monarchy gives cachet to the class system and the nobility,’ said Jenkins.

‘But can one be more democratic than we are?’ asked Oliver.

‘America is,’ said Jenkins. ‘America is constantly in flux, and laid open to alteration. We really aren’t. Of course, in time we will be, because we’re only too
likely to reproduce America’s experiences, thirty years later.’ Most of those present were communists, and they took this rather hard, hearing America praised. To some it was the first
time it had happened. They responded violently and pointed out that at least England had the Welfare State. But, as Jenkins pointed out, they themselves were waifs from the Welfare State; they
refused to have their names written down, and didn’t pay Health Insurance, and the Army somehow never got to know of their existence. ‘That’s the trouble with the Welfare
State,’ said the man next to Treece. ‘They want everyone in. Of course, you can stay out if you’re clever. But one of the great injustices of our time is this: supposing
you’re married, and you want to leave your wife, like I did, and disappear. Now you’d think in any sensibly run society a man could do that. But you try it and see what happens.
It’s impossible to change your bloody name any more. If you get stuck and have to work, you need a bloody card from your last employer. The income tax is after you. That’s what started
me off like this. I was quite willing to work then. I hadn’t discovered my genius. But my point is this: tramps are necessary. Avenues of escape are essential. So why doesn’t the
Welfare State pay tramps to go on being tramps, instead of trying to find ’em work? What’s all this about work? People don’t realize how important tramps are. They challenge the
assumption that you’ve got to be housed and propertied and well-dressed to live in the modern world. I could be like that if I wanted. I was the best pork-butcher in Ilkeston. I outclassed
everybody. But I don’t choose. This is what I chose, the hard way. I read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and I realized I was something more than a butcher. I saw the light. Let me tell you my
story. I think it’s without exception the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard . . .’

But Oliver interrupted. ‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said, ‘how working-class intellectuals thrive on Nietzsche? They all do. It’s the power complex. They’re all
supermen. They all think they’re Jesus Christ risen again. They all want to change the world. Sometimes I just want to run away and keep bees. I get tired of the manifold voices of truth
buzzing in my ears . . .’

‘There’s only one way to shut that fellow up,’ said the cellist, spiteful because of the interruption, ‘and that’s tell him he looks ill.’ He addressed
himself to Oliver: ‘Do you feel all right?’ he asked him. ‘Your face has gone yellow.’

‘My God!’ said Oliver.

‘Much remains to be told,’ went on the cellist, turning back to Treece. ‘I realized, as I said, that I was a genius. It explains so much. Why did people despise me? Why was I
so alone? Actually I wasn’t actually alone. I was living with this Negress, a huge creature she was, with breasts so high up she could rest her chin between them, but spiritually I was alone,
and ununderstood. I read Henry Miller. I saw that I was a rebel. Of course, rebels are never loved. You’ve heard of Rimbaud, Baudelaire? I was of that ilk. However, as it happened, it
isn’t love us rebels want; it’s money. There should be a levy for rebels and poets. Every time those people sit down in their cosy armchairs at the telly they should be made to drop a
shilling in a box for rebels.’

Treece sat there, with his washed hair and thin fingers, and asked himself: What can you do? The coffee machine hissed savagely at him. He wanted to escape from the place. He felt like a useless
butterfly. The ground began to open beneath his feet; he found himself dispossessed, as if he were alone in a big city, circulating among hostile formations of passers-by. He wanted to see Emma.
Dejection seeped like sludge into his spirits as the cellist went on uttering his history into his ear. The crowds in the coffee bar seemed all at once to be the busy world about him, the people
who were
in
on things, the people with jobs, the people with a sense of mission. Their lives were full of matter; they were in the class system; they were social functionaries. He alone did
not feel a part of Jenkins’s schemes and overall patterns; he was an alien in the universe; while everyone else’s blazer and moustache were class symbols, it seemed to him that his hat
was just a hat, his suit an ordinary unsocial suit and his tie an innocent, uncommitted tie. He felt alone, he felt as if he had no tenure in the world, as if every moment came to him, alone of
men, unexpectedly. He felt that he wanted not just to be with Emma, but more: to be involved with her, to be in love with her, to be a social group of two. And he suddenly wished that Emma was
here, to be turned to.

He decided to go. Jenkins seemed happy enough in this company, and so Treece went alone. He walked down to the market place to get a taxi. A crowd was gathered there, among the deserted stalls;
a fight was going on. Several teddy boys had set upon a man who was on the ground at the centre of the milling group. The assailants jostled their way through the crowd and trotted off down a side
street. A moment later, as if at a signal, two policemen appeared and scattered the crowd. ‘Always too late, aren’t you?’ cried a little man. ‘Always stay out of the way
until it’s over. That’s the cops every time.’ ‘I’ll have you inside if you don’t watch it,’ said the policeman. He advanced towards Treece. The victim was
being helped to his feet, and Treece saw, with a sudden shock of shame – as if his own shame for not intervening weren’t enough – that the face was black, and belonged to Mr
Eborebelosa. His hands were cut with knife wounds and he had a pain in his shoulder. He saw Treece with surprise. The attack had been a motiveless one, by youths out nigger-hunting, and he
couldn’t quite understand what had happened to him. Treece took him up to the hospital in a taxi and then, when his broken collarbone had been set, took him to his home. He said little. It
seemed useless to apologize; yet he knew he could, had he dared, have intervened, and he did not know how to forgive himself. ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Eborebelosa, back at his digs.
‘Thank you,’ said Treece.

8

I

A
S
T
REECE
had had grudgingly to admit, Louis Bates had been very enterprising in engaging the services of Carey Willoughby as
his speaker, and on the afternoon of the lecture everyone had been telling him so. All day he was to be seen, for once, in the centre of an admiring host; by four o’clock he was as dizzy as a
sick bee on a surfeit of praise, and his sense of participation in the events about him was noticeably diminished. One of these events was that already a crowd some seventy strong, and including
the Vice-Chancellor and his wife, the town clerk and the manager of the local dancehall, Mr Schenk and Mr Butterfield, were packed in a large lecture room on hard wooden benches; and Willoughby was
half an hour overdue.

‘I hope he really is coming,’ said Butterfield, who, since Willoughby was speaking for the Poetry Weekend he had arranged with Mr Schenk, had a vested interest in the occasion, and
was frightened of what Bates was going to pull out of the bag next.

‘Someone
has
gone down to the station to meet him?’ asked Professor de Thule, of History, sneaking out of his own department.

‘Well,’ said Bates, bright as a pin. ‘Well . . .’ – and in spite of a barrage of subtle prevarication on his part, it became apparent to all present that this
courtesy had, somehow, been completely overlooked. All depended on Bates; he had dismissed the rest of the Committee of the society for all except trivial purposes; Bates worked alone. But that
capacity for bold strokes which had characterized his reign had not deserted him; he produced his masterpiece: he was going, he said, to telephone the station and broadcast a message for Mr
Willoughby on the loudspeakers:
Come on up
. This, it seemed to Treece, waiting disturbedly in the main hall with the academic contingent, while draughts blew up the legs of their trousers
and skirts, was a typical Bates extravagance, but there was no help for it; every time Bates popped into the lecture room with new reassurances, laughter and the singing of an old University song,
‘Why are we waiting?’ greeted his entrance and exit, and people were beginning to leave, unmelted by his honeyed persuasions. By now he was known to his audience as a supreme buffoon,
and his ears had turned the colour of terracotta. Happily for Louis this stratagem had worked. But, alas, when he emerged from the telephone booth five minutes later, even his superb aplomb was
somewhat dishevelled. ‘I can’t get through,’ he said with a catch in his voice. ‘I keep getting the station and then when I try to tell them what I want they ring
off.’ A little tear grew in the corner of his eye and he added pettishly: ‘I’m going to call the telephone exchange and ask them to exchange this telephone.’

‘Did you press button A?’ asked de Thule brutally.

‘No,’ said Bates. ‘Anyway, I’ve run out of pennies.’ He started to explain that he was working class, unlike everyone else, and not used to telephones, but Treece
cut him short. ‘I think you’d better hurry down to the station in a taxi and meet him.’ It was but the work of another ten minutes to put Bates in a taxi and send him down to the
station to salvage what he could from the debris. As his taxi swung out of the drive, with Bates gesticulating out of the rear window, a second taxi swung in and pulled up in front of the steps to
disgorge what was obviously a Bright Young Man, with a Marlon Brando haircut, Army-surplus trousers, and a suede zipper jacket, carrying a khaki haversack from which protruded a bottle of milk.
‘Do you mind if I change my socks?’ he asked. It was, of course, Willoughby.

‘I’m Treece, head of the English Department,’ said Treece stepping forward.

‘Pay for the taxi, will you, there’s a good chap?’ said Willoughby. The cavalcade passed through the entrance hall and on up to the Senior Common Room, where all the assistant
lecturers were gathered, doing funny walks and pulling faces in the hope of being put into a Willoughby novel. ‘Treece, Treece, Treece,’ said Willoughby. ‘The Housman
Treece?’ ‘Yes; that’s my book,’ said Treece. ‘I tell my students not to read it,’ said Willoughby.

‘Here we are,’ said Treece. Willoughby sat down in an armchair and peeled off his shoes, then his socks; one seedy foot appeared, and then the other. ‘Well, you’re a rum
lot,’ he said. ‘I sat down at the station on my fanny for half an hour.’ ‘There was a misunderstanding,’ said Treece. ‘Seems like it,’ said Willoughby.

The cavalcade stood to one side, whispering. ‘But he’s
awful
,’ said the wife of the Vice-Chancellor, ‘and I’ve arranged to have him for dinner. I can’t
cancel it now. Can I? Can I?’ She looked at his bare feet with distaste.

‘Excuse the tootsies,’ said Willoughby. ‘Doctor’s orders, this.’ He reached in his haversack and produced a clean pair of socks, which he donned. The
Vice-Chancellor’s wife watched all this in horrified fascination; you felt that she had not really seen feet before, or if she had seen them, she had not thought about them; she was thinking
now.

‘I just want to make a call,’ said Willoughby, and he disappeared into the toilet. They could hear him whistling gaily within.

‘Is he a friend of yours?’ demanded the Vice-Chancellor’s wife.

‘I’ve never met him before,’ said Treece.

‘Does he always take his shoes off?’ demanded someone else.

‘This is as strange to me as it is to you,’ said Treece, disclaiming the whole thing entirely.

Perhaps, he thought generously, it was fame that had made Willoughby like this; and really this was true. You not only had to be someone, these days, but to look as if you
were
someone;
otherwise the gossip columnists were simply not interested. Willoughby was really rather mystified by the whole business of his success; people said he was an angry young man, though he was not
conscious of it – he had thought himself a perfectly detached observer of the modern scene. They compared him with people he scarcely knew, like Amis and Wain, and called him a movement.
Actually he felt as doubtless Amis felt, and Wain, that he had got on to it all first, and the others were just taking advantage. He did not know what to make of it all. He had noticed that great
artists usually had a great deal of
panache
and manner, and he went in for manner, but sometimes it was this sort of manner and sometimes that. This time he was the Marlon Brando type, with
his hair slicked down and the cares of the world upon his sullen shoulders. He was the victim of misfortunes, the charming buffoon, the delightful incompetent who forgot what he wanted to say in
lectures and seduced his women students, who beneath his expansive exterior was nigh to tears. There was one thing he could not understand about his literary fame; and that was this: he had
observed that artists – there were so many examples one could name, Brecht, Picasso, so many more – had a special dispensation where women were concerned. They could ill-treat and
deceive and betray them, and subject them to every kind of indignity, and they, in their dozens, loved it, and him. Willoughby ill-treated and deceived and was cruel to his women, in their twos or
threes, and subjected them to every kind of indignity, and they hated it, and him. There comes a point in a relationship, he had noticed, where a woman can no longer do without a man, whatever he
is; yet there was never any point in
his
relationships where a woman could not do without him. He therefore saw himself as a literary waif, cut off from all the advantages that his role
should rightfully bring.