The History Man (13 page)

Barbara says, ‘You mean you blame him because he does stay at home.' ‘That's right,' says Myra. ‘Much more of this bloody connubial bliss, and I swear we'll kill each other, Henry and me.' Howard laughs; he says, ‘Myra, you really don't make sense.' ‘I'm not as clever as you,' says Myra, ‘but I want to leave him. And I came to you so that you could tell me why and how. You're experts, aren't you?' There is car noise outside in the terrace. ‘Oh, Christ,' says Barbara, ‘I must go and put on my dress.' Myra says suddenly, ‘Look, you mustn't tell Henry I'm leaving him. I haven't told him myself yet.' ‘We'll have to have a longer talk,' says Barbara. ‘Tomorrow, call me.' ‘I'll probably be gone by then,' says Myra. ‘You won't,' says Howard. ‘I mean it,' says Myra. ‘Yes,' says Barbara. ‘Go and let them in, Howard.' ‘Is my face a mess?' asks Myra, as they hear Barbara's feet rushing up the stairs. ‘You're fine,' says Howard. ‘Do you remember when we slept together?' says Myra. ‘Yes, we did once, didn't we?' says Howard. ‘The only time,' says Myra, looking at him. ‘The only bloody time I ever did it. I bet you find that extremely ridiculous.' ‘No, I don't,' says Howard. ‘I want to fix my face a bit,' says Myra, ‘you go and welcome your guests. I hope I've not spoiled things.' ‘Of course not, Myra,' says Howard, and he goes out of the kitchen and along the cool long hall to the front of the house, to open the door to arrivals.

He opens the door. Out over the town the sodium lights are lit, and they cast an artificial red tint into the air, illustrating the jagged shapes of the decrepit houses opposite, where no one lives. The bright lights from the windows of the Kirks' house fall out over the old, broken pavement stones of the terrace, which are drying now, for the rain has stopped. In the terrace a big black Daimler hearse, of rather old vintage, has come to a stop. There are artificial flowers stuck in its elegant silver flower-holders; on the etched glass of the long side window is a sticker, saying, ‘Make Africa Black'. The rear window rises; out slide three young men, all in jeans; two more descend from the front, one wearing a floppy leather hat, the other carrying a guitar. They begin to walk towards Howard's front door. Now a reconstituted pre-war Standard Eight, in good condition, halts across the street. A thin young man in a black leather jacket gets out of the driving seat, and goes round to the passenger door to draw forth a very pregnant woman, in loose top and trousers. They too cross the street toward the Kirks' bright house. Behind Howard there is a bustle; Barbara comes hurrying down the stairs, her hair up in a social bun, her healthy peasant bosom thrusting through the lines of a pink velvet Biba dress she has brought back from her most recent trip to London, her face bright. She comes and stands beside Howard in the hall, her hand on his shoulder. ‘First arrivals,' says Barbara. ‘Come on in,' says Howard. They stand together, Barbara big and blonde, Howard neat in his turned down moustache. The students come in freely, saying ‘Hi,' their unfitting shoes flapping on the sealed wood floor. The other couple, a sociologist from Howard's department, a new appointment, and his very round wife, are more nervous; they stand in hesitation on the threshold, each looking equally weighted by the heavy pregnancy. ‘You must be the Kirks,' says the sociologist. ‘My name's Macintosh.' ‘Come inside,' says Howard, the manager of this social theatre, ‘I'll bring some drinks.' ‘This is nice,' says Macintosh, looking around, ‘you really know how to live.' They go through into the living room; Howard gives out drinks; the students sit in a circle on the floor, while the Macintoshes stand, he dour, she sharp with the divine anger of the bright wife.

Outside there are more arrivals; souped-up Minis, beach buggies, psychedelically painted wrecks are drawing into the terrace, the first of many that will park in the broken curve and then in the streets beyond. The people begin to come in; there are people in old suits that look new and new jeans that look old. There are students and youths in Afghan yak, loon-pants, combat-wear, wet-look plastic; bearded Jesuses, long-haired androgynes, girls with pouting plum-coloured mouths. There are somewhat older people, the young faculty, serious young men, bright young women, bearing babies in harnesses on their backs, or in carrycots, slung between them, that are subsequently disposed of in many corners of the house. The groups that began as separate and compartmentalized begin to merge and mix; the few becomes a crowd, and moves from room to room. The students begin to talk to the faculty, and both groups begin to talk to the third, the strangers: a civic leader from the local Pakistani community, a young man in dark sunglasses who owns the town's sex shop, which is called Easy Come, a Women's Lib polemicist from London in an Afro fright-wig, a radical Catholic priest and his Ouspenskyite mistress, the man with the Smile badge from the wine store, and, much later, when the performance is over, the entire cast and production staff of the nude touring production of
The Importance of Being Earnest
, in Watermouth this week. Howard is busy and protean, a knowing host, a master in the enterprise of sociability. Now he stands at the door or circulates carrying a bottle, negotiating contact and association. Now he disappears backstage, to shift a table, open a door, expose a bed, remove a strategic fuse from the fusebox in the hall, to advance the contingent but onward progress of the illusion that is taking place under his guidance. He watches social animation jerk into operation. He sees the dresses flutter, the clothes flash and, with precision, does all he can with light and sound and movement to stimulate the performance. Talk begins to rise in level, to fill all the aural spaces; conjugal loyalties begin to dissipate; peer-group affiliations start to shift; cathexis takes place; people talk to and touch and tease one another.

Now, in the Victorian conservatory at the back of the house, the lights have almost gone out, and rhythmic dancing has started. The group from the theatre arrive, talking very loudly. A local vigilante group, with signs saying ‘Keep Britain Clothed', have picketed the theatre, and this has made them passionate and argumentative. They have also brought with them several bottles of spirits, which they pass liberally around. Their arrival has the effect of increasing social particle-drift, the patterns of fission and fusion. The party has found new obstacles and options in new places. The collective appetite has struck, as food has been discovered; tables arranged with cheese and pâté have been suddenly cleared. Upstairs, Howard puts a record on a player; downstairs, from speakers in a bookcase, the voice of Joan Baez sounds. Momentarily, another of the impresarios appears; Barbara, in her long pink dress, passes around with olives and pretzels, saying, ‘Eat, I'm a Jewish mother.' A small, podgy girl named Anita Dollfuss, in her second year, wearing long curled hair with an Indian headband, steel-frame spectacles and a patchwork skirt almost too long to walk in, has arrived dragging a small, brown terrier on a string. Mrs Macintosh, who, having made her timely appearance, has been sagging slowly downwards towards the floor all evening, is put to sleep on a daybed. The rumour has passed that there are drugs upstairs, which has spread the party upward through the house. Someone has gone to fetch a guru who was advertised to be in town, but who will never in fact arrive at the party. A German lectrice in a see-through blouse is being encouraged to take it off. Howard stands at the head of the stairs and surveys the spectacle. ‘My wife and I have an arrangement,' says a man sitting on the top stair, to a girl. ‘That's what all the married men say,' says the girl. ‘This is different,' says the man, ‘my wife doesn't know about it.' The downstairs of the house looks like a vast museum of costume, as if all the forms and styles of the past have been made synchronic and here, in Howard's own house, have converged, and blurred; performers from medieval mystery plays, historical romances, dramas of trench warfare, proletarian documentaries, Victorian drawing-room farces play simultaneously in one eclectic, postmodern collage that is a pure and open form, a self-generating happening.

Howard walks down the stairs in pleasure, feeling the dull and contingent reality of things mysteriously transformed. He looks at these people, instinct with the times, and feels their newness, their possibility. He goes from mouth to mouth in the crush, looks into eye after eye, hunting the contemporary passion. ‘Would that be an authentic kind of guilt?' asks someone. ‘That marvellous surrealistic sequence in colour towards the end,' says someone else. Downstairs Mrs Macintosh has some time back declared labour pains; there has been much fuss as she has been driven off to hospital in the Standard Eight. The divine anger of wives has sensed a case of suppression; anxious about her interrupted career in social work, which is being sacrificed for mere child-bearing, they are becoming neurotic about their own careers as well. Meanwhile her husband, Dr Macintosh, has returned to the party; he sits in the hall by the telephone, with his own bottle, an object of curiosity and contemplation. At the front door, Anita Dollfuss's small, brown, untrained terrier has bitten the ankle of a new arrival: the arrival is Henry Beamish, who has come on foot, looking dishevelled, wearing a big bush hat, and having the manner of one fresh from a dangerous safari. He is taken upstairs for antisepsis, his hat still on and tipped over one eye. ‘Sit, Mao,' says Anita Dollfuss to the dog. In the living room, faces and voices throw violent sound around; it is the noise of man, growing. ‘Kant's version of the inextricable entanglements of perceptual phenomena,' says someone. ‘I'm low because I'm high,' says someone else. By the wall Barbara is talking to a small, dark girl standing by herself, in a white hat and a dark blue trouser suit. ‘What kind of contraceptive do you use?' asks Barbara socially. ‘What about you, Mrs Kirk?' says the girl, who has a mild Scots accent. ‘Oh, I'm Pill,' says Barbara, ‘I used to be Bung but now I'm Pill. What's your method?' ‘It's called Brute Force,' says the girl. ‘The devious workings of the totalitarian mind,' says someone. ‘You're trying to confuse me and fuck up my head,' says someone else. Empty glasses prod at Howard, as he passes on his way to the kitchen to fetch more bottles.

In the crush, a hand plucks at his sleeve. He looks down into the face of a thin, dark-eyed girl; it is one of his students, called Felicity Phee. ‘I have a problem, Dr Kirk,' she says. Howard pours some wine into her glass, and says, ‘Hello, Felicity. What's wrong this time?' ‘I always have a problem, don't I?' says Felicity. ‘That's because you're so good at solving them.' ‘What is it?' asks Howard. ‘Am I a sexist?' ‘I doubt it,' says Howard, ‘with your radical record.' Felicity is well known for keeping advanced company; she appears now cleaner, now dirtier, now saner, now more psychotic, according to the group she happens currently to be running with. ‘I'm in a hang-up,' says Felicity. ‘I'm tired of being lesbian. I'd like to be with a man.' ‘You were very anti-male last time we talked,' says Howard. ‘Oh, last time we talked,' says Felicity, ‘that was
last term
. I was coming to terms with my sexuality then. But now I've found that my sexuality isn't the one I've come to terms with, if you can see what I mean.' ‘Oh, I can,' says Howard. ‘Well, that shouldn't be a problem.' ‘Oh, it is, Dr Kirk, Howard,' says Felicity Phee. ‘You see, the girl I'm with, Maureen, says it's reactionary. She says I'm collapsing into a syndrome of subservience. She says I have a slave mentality.' ‘She does,' says Howard. ‘Yes,' says Felicity, ‘and, I mean, I couldn't do something reactionary, could I?' ‘Oh, no, Felicity,' says Howard. ‘So what would you do?' says Felicity. ‘I mean, if you were me, and belonged to an oppressed sex.' ‘I'd do what I wanted to,' says Howard. ‘Maureen throws shoes at me. She says I'm an Uncle Tom. I had to talk to you. I said to myself, I have to talk to him.' ‘Look, Felicity,' says Howard, ‘there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires. Don't accept other people's versions, unless you believe them true. Isn't that right?' ‘Oh Howard,' says Felicity, kissing him on the cheek, ‘you're marvellous. You give such good advice.' Howard says: ‘That's because it so closely resembles what people want to hear.' ‘No, it's because you're wise,' says Felicity. ‘Oh, boy, do I need a flat male chest for a change.'

He goes through into the kitchen. It is filled with people; a male human leg protrudes from under the table. A baby lies asleep in a carrycot on top of the refrigerator. ‘Is it your view that there is a constant entity definable as virtue?' asks the Pakistani thought leader of the advanced priest, in front of the globular wallpaper. The record player roars; the booming decibels, the yelps of a youthful pop group on heat, bounce round the house. Howard takes some of the bottles of wine, dark red in the glass, and uncorks them. A stout, maternal girl comes into the kitchen and picks up a baby's bottle, which has been warming in a saucepan on the cooker. She tries the contents by squirting them delicately onto her brown arm. ‘Oh, shit,' she says. ‘Who's Hegel?' says a voice; Howard looks up, and it is the bra-less girl who had come to his office that morning. ‘Someone who …' says Howard. ‘It's Howard,' says Myra Beamish, standing beside him, her wig tipped slightly to one side, laughing enormously. She has her arm around Dr Macintosh, who still holds his bottle. ‘Oh, Howard, you give great parties,' she says. ‘Is it going well?' asks Howard. ‘Oh, great,' says Myra, ‘they're playing “Who am I?” in the living room. And “What are the students going to do next?” in the dining room. And “I gave birth at three and at five I was up and typing my thesis” in the hall.' ‘There's also a thing called “Was it good for you, too, baby?” in the guest bedroom,' says Macintosh. ‘It sounds like the description of a reasonable kind of party,' says Howard. ‘How does someone as beastly as you manage to make life so nice for us?' asks Myra. ‘It's zap,' says Howard. ‘It's zing,' says Myra. ‘It's zoom,' says Macintosh.