Eating People is Wrong (20 page)

‘No, don’t leave me,’ said Louis, grasping her by the arm. ‘Let
go
,’ said Emma, prising his fingers from her.

‘Damn,’ said Louis furiously. ‘You said damn,’ said a voice at his side; it was the girl who had been smoking the pipe and reading the Talmud. She wore black woollen
stockings and a folk-weave skirt. Louis decided to make Emma jealous, and he sought something to say to the girl. He remembered Dale Carnegie and asked about her hobbies. ‘I collect
conches,’ said the girl, puffing on her pipe. ‘Can anyone do it?’ asked Louis seriously, ‘or do you have to be childish?’

Meanwhile Emma had slipped away, out into the garden, which smelled freshly of the recent rain. In the darkness she saw someone coming towards her. It was Walter Oliver. Without speaking he put
his arms around her and began to kiss her. He smelled of sick. She pushed his arms away and freed herself. ‘Why not?’ said Oliver. ‘It’s only little old me.’
‘No,’ said Emma. ‘Sex rules the world, you know,’ said Oliver. He put his arms around her again and at this moment Louis, who had been looking everywhere for Emma, stumbled
upon them. He looked at them in horror. ‘I just came for some fresh air,’ he said. ‘The fresh air’s over there,’ said Oliver.

Treece nodded pleasantly to Louis as he went back inside. ‘All right?’ he asked. ‘Not feeling sick?’

‘No, thank you,’ he said. When Emma came in a moment or two later, a few spots of rain beaded in her hair, she found Louis waiting for her in the kitchen.

‘What are you up to?’ he demanded. ‘Is it just everybody except me?’

‘You know it’s not,’ said Emma, starting to cry a little. She felt hideously ashamed of herself.

‘He’s only playing with you, Emma; I’m not. I’m serious . . . What is it about me?’

‘Oh, please don’t keep on,’ said Emma.

‘No; I want to know. This is important to me. I have all the big virtues, don’t I? Aren’t I honest, fair, reasonable? I know I lack the small virtues, charm, good manners,
pretty speeches. But are those all that count with you?’

‘Oh, I hope not,’ cried Emma. ‘The trouble is one does like charming people better than good people. It’s a hideous truth; it’s a moral corruption. But it’s
so. Look, Louis, I’m like most women; I have my limitations. I’m just practical. I’m damned if I’m going to live in some mean little house all my life. If you marry me, you
do it to make me happy, to take me away from the things that depress me, not to make life harder to bear. I don’t want marriage to be the end of my life, but the beginning. Marriage
isn’t suicide, you know. I know it can destroy, but not me, please. I have immortal longings, I suppose. So you see.’

‘I see,’ said Louis. ‘People like me don’t matter, because we don’t say things out of a handsome enough face or with a charming enough voice. Have you ever thought
that your distrust of me might come from a deficiency in you?’

‘Yes, I have,’ said Emma, ‘but it doesn’t do you any good to point it out.’

‘You don’t know what you do to me. You show everyone I’m unlovable. People would like me more if you could love me.’

‘This conversation’s getting us nowhere,’ said Emma.

‘Won’t you give me one little kiss?’

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘No.’

‘You kissed him.’

‘I’m sorry, Louis, no.’

Watching him go off in his dejection, she felt herself suffused with pain; yet as he went, his shoulders exaggeratedly drooped, there was an air of falsity about his actions which lay behind all
he did. He didn’t really know what was happening to him. Even so, Emma had to feel ashamed; she had dismissed him far too easily, had as good as said that he didn’t count for much.
Wanting to live her life with point and relevance, she found herself looking for meanings under stones; she saw what she had done as an ethical decision. She had rejected a great deal that was
worthy under the personal detestation that she confessed she felt for Bates. By being such an awful person, he had driven her to something for which she could not now forgive herself. Back in the
living-room there was hardly anyone left. All the bottles were empty save one – the British Wine Port Type that Louis had brought.

6

I

I
T WAS
the last tutorial of the Michaelmas term, and Professor Treece sat at his desk, his back to the window, while the dull December light shone on to
the pile of examination scripts upon his desk, on to the faces of his three students. Two of them were, he knew, pondering on the quality of their amorous performance for the Christmas Ball, which
was to be held in the Town Hall that night, an end-of-term festivity before everyone left for home on the morrow. The third student, Louis Bates, lacked the general excitement. Wedged there tightly
in his chair, he looked a pathetic figure, and Treece felt a sense of guilt as he looked at him. The performance of that do-it-yourself intellectual in terminal examinations had been shocking;
there were good reasons for sending him down, and the attack had been strongly renewed by the anti-Bates faction at a faculty meeting, where Carfax, careful not to make the same mistake twice, had
claimed that Bates had deliberately and while of sound mind abrogated his responsibilities as a student and should be asked to leave. Invited to contribute essays on literary subjects to his tutors
for evaluation, he had refused; the fact was, simply, that. Treece had, it must be said, been tempted; Bates didn’t now seem to fit so well into the category which Treece had designated for
him, that of the working-class intellectual rising in the world through his own efforts, aided by the tutelage of liberal-minded teachers. Yet in a sense he was this. For it wasn’t necessary
that he should be pleasing, or grateful, or even liberal like his teacher. One doesn’t have to stamp the new generation with one’s own concerns and attributes. One has simply to give it
the means to emerge in its own shape.

What made Treece so uncomfortable was that he was talking at this moment about Shelley. He remembered the nasty little mistake that Oxford had made in expelling
him
. He read out to his
tutorial group Shelley’s indictment of Oxford: ‘Oxonian society was insipid to me, uncongenial with my habits of thinking. I could not descend to common life; the sublime interest of
poetry, lofty and exalted achievements, the proselytism of the world, the equalization of its inhabitants, were to be the soul of my soul.’ Treece read, and watched Louis’s eyes light
up. To think that Louis might be put in a position to say the same about their own University was too, too much. Shelley had been an oddity, just like Bates; and at school and university they had
called him what Carfax, what they all, had called Bates – mad. Treece knew now that this word should never have been used of Bates. It was strange how unseriously serious men could use
serious words. Shelley used to send out offensive atheistic letters to divines, over a false name; to blow up fences with gunpowder; to ask mothers carrying babes in arms, ‘Will your baby
tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?’ All right, thought Treece, so he was interested in dianetics? Shelley, it was said, had his tutor ‘in great perplexity’; and Treece
had to admit that when they wrote up Bates they could use the same phrase of him.

He looked over at this erratic, easily despised, and pitiable figure, unstable, yes, but honest, pure, and concerned for human values, sitting there in his chair, scratching the end of his nose
with a long, nobbly forefinger. He made a lousy symbol, if it was a symbol you wanted, Treece told himself; but then people always did make poor symbols, even in his view. Treece had to recognize
an uneasiness here; Louis was brilliant, did not crave the cheaper kinds of success, had worked hard for what he had, which was little enough. Yet what mystified Treece, who really only needed to
look at his own case for illumination, was that someone could be so clever at his subject and so unclever at living. Louis’s brilliance was a narrow strip of cultivated ground; the ordinary
experience of the world, however, was, to him, untilled ground, something that he had just not bothered to go to work on. And because of this, Treece further perceived, there was – you had in
all honesty to recognize this, as Emma already had recognized it – something faintly ridiculous about Louis. Other people knew thus; it was, indeed, all they did know about him. Louis’s
manners were as strange as Eborebelosa’s; he came out of as foreign a culture. Treece could not help but think of a story which Walter Oliver had told him about Bates, and the story was
this:

In the early days of his attendance at the University, Louis had sent to Oliver, as Editor of the student literary magazine, a sheaf of poems for him to consider for publication. A few days
later, Louis received a note from Oliver, saying, ‘I think we’re on to something,’ and asking Louis to go and see him in his lodgings. When Louis arrived, Oliver, who was sitting
on the bed clad in a pair of Y-front undershorts, stringing a cello and eating cheese, greeted him with great warmth, offering him cheese and making him sit down. He produced the poems (which had,
Louis noticed, been heavily overdrawn with sketches of girls) and, ‘You know, dumbo, you’ve got something here,’ said Oliver, in a voice that seemed to Louis to mingle distrust
and pride – distrust, doubtless, at what Louis had got and pride at his having been able to spot it, whatever it was. Once you got Oliver’s patronage, you did not get rid of it easily.
A few days later Oliver returned the call, to tell Louis that he had decided to publish his poems. Louis was clearly loath to let him in; he disliked having visitors. The room was redolent with the
rich, plummy smell of sweat-filled socks; it smelled, said Oliver, when he told this story, as he so often did, like the women’s changing room at Holloway Prison. Oliver had thrown open the
window, and Louis protested, saying that he was medically excused from having the window open in the winter, or taking baths, because of his weak chest. ‘Look,
amigo
,’ said
Oliver, who had little time for this sort of thing, ‘these poems are good, but you smell like a goat. I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll publish these poems if you’ll have a
bath.’ ‘Do you want to kill me?’ cried Louis. ‘It’s for the sake of art,’ said Oliver implacably. Louis, though he had not let Oliver in until his privates were
covered over with water, had at least taken the bath, there and then; and the poem had been published in the University literary magazine, to universal apathy.

Treece looked at Bates and thought of this tale, which Oliver had put into wide circulation. Bates was seedy, frowsy; he wore ugly and ungainly clothes; he spoke with long sheep-like
North-Country a’s (and had, thought Treece, who loved this sort of joke, a long, sheep-like North-Country arse); he did, to some extent, smell. The perception of this ridiculousness came to
Treece as a kind of insight. He was immediately aware of the need to protect Louis from odious people who thought like himself. It was not, therefore, abruptly, but with a sympathetic mien, that
Treece addressed Louis thus at the end of the tutorial:

‘I have your examination papers here, Bates, and they were not, to be honest, very satisfactory.’

Louis had been sat sullenly waiting for this. ‘I didn’t think they would be,’ he said.

‘Now you understand there’s nothing personal in this if I say I’m disappointed. We like you as a person . . .’ this touch was a bit overwarm, Treece knew, but how could
this be done otherwise? ‘. . . but academically your work has been falling off, and if it continues like this I’m afraid I can’t hold out any hope that you’ll get even a
poor degree.’ Bates looked very chastened. ‘Now, what’s wrong? Do you feel you can do better than this? Is this a fair sample of your work?’

‘You know it’s not,’ said Louis. The remark sounded like an impertinence, but then so many of Louis’s remarks did.

‘Then what went wrong?’ demanded Treece sharply. ‘Are you short of money? Are you unhappy in your lodgings?’

‘It’s
her
, you know,’ said Louis. The two other students present exchanged a look and giggled audibly. ‘You know I’m in love. I told you.’

‘That has nothing to do with me,’ said Treece, brusque because Louis should have had more sense than to embarrass him; that surely was not too much to expect. ‘The simple
question is: do you
intend
to improve, or am I to recommend that you be asked to make way for someone who
will
work?’

‘I’ve had enough of her,’ said Louis. ‘If that’s love I prefer not to be in it. Everything will be all right next term.’ He sat unmoved while Cocoran
dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.

‘Don’t be childish, Cocoran,’ said Treece. ‘I don’t know that you have anything to delight in; your marks weren’t much better. I suppose we have that
luxurious blonde to thank for that?’

‘I suppose so, sir,’ said Cocoran.

‘Well, I’m not going to keep either of you here simply so that your sex life can bear fruit. I should probably be doing the fair sex a good turn if I brought both your stays here to
an end.’

‘You don’t need to worry about them any more,’ said Louis. ‘I shall start work again tonight.’

II

The note said:

Louis had returned home hideously chastened, and full of determination to get down to some good hard work. Everything, he felt, had gone wrong, and he had only succeeded in
getting himself detested in all the departments where he hoped to have himself acclaimed. To offer to pull the ears off the Head of the Department was no way to get a first; and he had likewise
proved a failure in the world of human love. He had treated himself suicidally, he felt. Admittedly what had happened was in part an indictment of the University itself, and those who attended it;
it offered neither the liberality nor the respect for wild genius that he had expected to find there. His function here was negative – he might as well have taken his degree by correspondence
course. He decided to detach himself; after all, life could not be simply spending oneself in events, or who would praise the celibate, the ascetic, and the saint? Emma and the Emma values were a
scented delusion.