The Sleep of Reason (4 page)

Then she asked me favours: could they come and see us at our London flat? Could I bring him down to the university some time? She was innocent and shameless: yet anyone would have said that she was one of the stablest of young women, and it would have been true. That was why it was a liberation to abandon herself like this. If he arrived that moment, I was thinking, she would be proud to throw her arms round his neck.

I asked for another drink. With a shake of her head, coming back to other people’s earth, she poured me a small one.

“Go slow on that,” she said, tapping the glass, talking to me like a brisk, affectionate and sensible daughter. “You’ll get plenty tonight. Remember, you’ve got to stay up with him (her father) when they’ve all gone.”

Once more she was businesslike, thinking of her duty. How could I handle him? We were talking tactics, when Arnold Shaw himself entered the room. At first sight, he didn’t look a martinet, much less a puritan. He was short, well-padded, with empurpled cheeks and a curving, malicious, mimic’s mouth. He kissed his daughter, shook my hand, poured himself a lavish Scotch, and told us: “Well, that’s polished off the paper for today.”

He was an obsessively conscientious administrator. He was also a genuine scholar. He had started life as an inorganic chemist, decided that he wasn’t good enough, and taken up the history of chemistry, out of which he had made a name. In this university the one person who had won international recognition was young Leonard Getliffe. After him, a long way after, in a modest determined fashion, carrying on with his scholarship after he had ‘polished off the paper’, came the Vice-Chancellor himself. It ought to have counted to him for virtue. It might have done, if he could have resisted making observations about his colleagues and his fellow Vice-Chancellors. It wasn’t long since he had told me about one of the latter, with the utmost gratification: “I wouldn’t mind so much that he’s never written a book. But I do think it’s a pity that he’s never read one.”

That night he moved restlessly about the drawing-room, carrying glasses, stroking his daughter’s hair. The dinner was a routine piece of entertaining, part of the job which he must have gone through many times: but he was nervous. As soon as the first car drove up the drive, he became more nervous and more active. When the Gearys came in, he was pushing drinks into their hands before they could sit down. Denis Geary, who had been a small boy at my old school just before I left it, gave me a good-natured wink; he was the headmaster of a new comprehensive school, nominated to the Court by the local authority, a relaxed and competent man, not easily put out. The Hargraves followed them in, not as relaxed, knowing no one there except through Court meetings and dinners such as this: both of them diffident, descendants of Quaker manufacturers who had made tidy – not excessive – fortunes in the town. Mrs Hargrave, true to her teetotal ancestry, asked timidly for a tomato juice, which with a flourish Arnold Shaw produced. Then Leonard Getliffe entered, black-haired, white-faced, handsome in a Mediterranean fashion: he couldn’t help his eyes searching for Vicky as he shook hands.

Arnold Shaw was settling them all down, braced on the balls of his feet: there was a buzz of titular enunciation. The mention of Lord Getliffe – Professor Getliffe’s father, Arnold Shaw found it desirable to explain – was frequent: there was a good deal of Sir Lewis-ing. But he was not only being nervous, active and snobbish, but also peremptory. The party still had the first drinks in hand, Shaw had only just sat down himself at last, when he gave an order.

“About the Court meeting – discussion tonight forbidden,” he announced.

His bright hot eyes swept round the room. Some were relieved, one could feel, but not Denis Geary.

“That’s going a bit far, Vice-Chancellor,” he said. He was hawk-nosed, grizzled, tough as well as harmonious, no man’s pushover. He was also a figure in local progressive politics: he had come prepared to argue, not just to dine out.

“Absolutely forbidden.”

“With respect–” Denis began.

“Host’s privilege,” said Arnold Shaw.

Denis looked over at me, gave a slight shrug.

“If you say so,” he said with a good grace. He knew when not to force an issue: recently I had often thought that he could have been a good politician on a bigger scale.

“Nothing contentious tonight,” said Arnold Shaw, rubbing it in. “We’re going to enjoy ourselves.”

That was one of the inapposite remarks, I thought, as we went in to dinner, and I sat on Vicky’s right hand. For Denis Geary, at any rate, despite his good manners, the night had become pointless. For his wife also: she spoke in a soft Midland voice like my father’s but was as firm as her husband. As dinner began, at my end of the table I had to exert myself to keep any sort of conversation going. And yet the meal was superb. Arnold Shaw indulged in food and drink; in the Residence both were better than at any private house I knew, out of comparison better than at great houses such as Basset. Dinner that night was as good as ever: borsch, whitebait, tournedos Rossini: while Arnold Shaw was jumping up and down, going round the table with decanters, buttling. There was plenty of buttling to be done: he loved wine, and was more knowledgeable about it than any of my old Cambridge colleagues: wine drinking of that quality didn’t happen nowadays among my friends.

The food and drink ought to have acted as a social lubricant. But they didn’t. To most of the party they were an embarrassment. The Hargraves were rich, but they went in for austerely simple living. The Gearys weren’t at all austere but didn’t understand fine wine or the wine badinage that Shaw insisted on exchanging with me. I was a light eater, though out of politeness I was doing my best. Leonard was gulping down the drink, hoping to see Vicky before the night was over. As so often, Arnold Shaw could not put a foot right.

In fact, he was proceeding, I could hear down the table, to put two feet wrong. He at least was enjoying his meal, and even more his wine: he was not a heavy drinker, I had never seen him drunk, but alcohol made him combative. He was choosing the occasion to parade himself as an extreme reactionary; in particular an extreme reactionary about education. He flourished his views, vigorous and bantam-bright, in front of the Gearys, who in the terms of that period believed the exact opposite, and the Hargraves, who spent their money on benefactions. “You’re all wrong about education,” he was saying. “Quite wrong. Education isn’t social welfare. You’re quite wrong about universities. A university isn’t anything like what you think. Or it oughtn’t to be.” He went on, with a kind of ferocious jocularity, temper not far beneath the surface, making himself clear. A university was a place of learning. No more, no less. The senior members existed to add to knowledge. If they couldn’t do that, they shouldn’t be there. Some of them had to teach. The students existed only to be taught. They came to learn. They weren’t there for social therapy. They weren’t there to be made useful to the state: that was someone else’s job. Very few people could either add to knowledge, or even acquire it. If they couldn’t, get rid of them. He wanted fewer university students, not more. Fewer and better. This university ought to be half its present size.

I heard Hargrave, who didn’t speak often, say that he couldn’t agree. I heard Denis Geary arguing patiently, and turned my head away. I met Vicky’s frown, troubled and cross. I tried to distract her, but she was on edge, like someone conducting an intolerable interview, waiting to call time.

For myself, I couldn’t intervene: Shaw thought that I was not stupid, but misguided, perhaps deliberately so, and that provoked him more. I let my thoughts drift, wondering why, when I was young, I hadn’t known Denis Geary better. He was a good man, and his character had worn well: he had become more interesting than many who had once, for me, outshone him. But, of course, one doesn’t in youth really choose one’s friends: it is only later, perhaps too late, that one wishes, with something like the obverse of nostalgia, that it had been possible to choose.

The men alone, the port, more of the political testimony of Arnold Shaw. But, despite the luxurious meals, parties at the Residence had a knack of finishing early. All the guests had left, with suitable expressions of reluctance, by 10.45.

Tyres ground on the gravel, and Arnold returned to the drawing-room, lips pursed in triumph.

“I call that a good party,” he proclaimed to Vicky and me, challenging us to deny it. Then he said to Vicky, affectionate, reproachful: “But I must say, you might have kept young Getliffe behind a bit–”

I had to save her. I said: “Look, Arnold, I do rather want a word with you.”

“About what?”

“You know about what, don’t you?”

He glared at me with hot, angry eyes. He decided that there was nothing for it, and said with increasing irascibility that we had better go to his study.

Before I had sat down, beside the reading lamp in front of the scholar’s bookshelves, ladder close by, he said: “I warn you, it’s no use.”

“Listen to me for a minute.”

“It’s no use.”

“I’m thinking of you,” I said.

“I don’t want anyone to think of me.”

What I had just told him happened to be true. I was not exerting myself, and not crossing wills, entirely – or even mainly – for Vicky’s sake. I should have been hard put to it to define my feeling for him, but it contained strata both of respect and affection. Whether he believed that or not, I didn’t know: he was not used to being liked: if someone did appear to like him, it affected him with something between exasperation and surprise.

He poured out whiskies for us both, but became more ugly-tempered still. It was the kind of temper that is infectious, and I had to make myself keep my own. I told him that tomorrow’s meeting wasn’t just a matter of form: if he pressed for the Court to confirm his verdict, then he would certainly get a majority: some would vote against, certainly Geary, probably Leonard Getliffe and two or three of the younger academics. I should, I said in a matter-of-fact tone, vote against it myself.

“Vote against anything you like,” he snapped.

“I shall,” I said.

He would get a clear majority. But didn’t he realise that most of the people voting for him nevertheless thought he had been too severe?

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“It is, you know,” I said.

I tried another tactic. He must admit, I said, that most of the people we knew – probably most people in the whole society – didn’t really regard fornication as a serious offence. In secret they didn’t regard it as an offence at all.

“So much the worse for them,” he said.

How could he be so positive? I was getting rougher. Most people couldn’t find any moral sanction for such an attitude. I couldn’t. Where did he get his?

“That’s my business.”

“Not if it affects us all.”

“I’m not going to talk about my moral sanctions. I’m not going to talk about fornication in general.” His cheeks had gone puce. “We’re talking about a university, which you seem to have forgotten. We’re talking about a university which I’m in charge of. While I’m in charge of it, I’m not going to allow promiscuous fornication. I don’t see that that needs explaining. It gets in the way of everything a university stands for. Once you turn a blind eye, you’d make nonsense of the place before you could look round.”

Then I used my last resource. I said that I too was concerned for the university: and that he was valuable to it. He would never get any credit for that. But he had a single-minded passion for academic merit. As a Vice-Chancellor he couldn’t do some things, but he could do one superlatively: that is, he was a connoisseur of academic promise with as great accuracy as he was a connoisseur of wine. It wasn’t an accident that this obscure university had put in a bid for Leonard Getliffe. And Leonard Getliffe, though much the best of his collection, was not the only one. He had backed his judgment, appointed three full professors in their twenties and thirties: so that the university was both better staffed, and more adventurously staffed, than any of its class.

I hadn’t been flattering him. That was the fact. For the first time I had touched him. The smouldering rage dropped down for an instant, and he said: “Well, I’ve got hold of some good men.” He said it humbly.

If he left the place, no one else would have the same gift, I said. And it was possible that he would have to leave. You couldn’t fight all your opponents on all fronts. He was making opponents of people who needn’t be: they thought that he wasn’t living in the climate of his time: he gave them some excuse.

“I’ve no use for the climate of my time. To hell with it,” he said.

All I wanted him to do – I was being patient – was to make some compromise. The slightest compromise. Even just by permitting the four students to withdraw, as though of their own free will.

“I’ll compromise when I can,” he said. “Not when I can’t.”

I told him, as straight and hard as I was able, that if ever there was an occasion to offer a token compromise, then tomorrow was the time. With an angry pout, eyes flat and fixed, he shook his head.

I had had enough, and sat back, silent. Then he said, not so much in a conciliatory manner but as though he wanted me to understand: “I’ll tell you this. You say they may want to get rid of me. That’s their business. They won’t find it so easy as they think. But if I decide that I’m doing the place more harm than good, then I shall go next day.”

He had spoken in a brisk tone, his anger quite subsided, rather as though he were stating his plans for his summer holiday. In precisely the same tone, he added: “I shall decide. And I shan’t ask anyone else.”

Even more briskly, he said good night, and at something like a trot went out of the room and upstairs. I noticed that the lights were still on in the drawing-room, and there I found Vicky waiting up.

“Any change?” she asked.

“None,” I said.

She swore. “He’s hopeless.”

Then she, who usually was considerate, who noticed one’s physical state, went on as though I were neither jaded nor tired. Couldn’t I still do something tomorrow? I was used to this kind of business: couldn’t I find a way to smooth things over?