The History Man (20 page)

Howard sits down in his desk chair. ‘You can help me, Felicity?' he asks, ‘How can you do that?' ‘I didn't sleep at all last night,' says Felicity, ‘I just thought about you. Do you know what I thought? I thought, if that man only really knew himself. He thinks he's free. He talks about liberation, openness, all the time. And what is he? An institutional man. That stuffy job he does. That stuffy desk he sits at. That stuffy academic manner he has, that he thinks is so equal, so matey. He hasn't started on himself yet. He's in a mess of inconsistencies. I know it's hard for you to admit it. But isn't it just true?' ‘And you have a means for freeing me from this disaster?' asks Howard. Felicity leans forward. ‘Oh, Howard,' she says, ‘why don't we just go?' ‘Go where?' asks Howard. ‘Just walk out of here with me,' says Felicity. ‘Let's take off. Let's stop being teacher and student, let's go somewhere and be us.' ‘Did you have somewhere in mind?' asks Howard. ‘Somewhere cheap,' says Felicity, ‘The South of France.' ‘To do what?' asks Howard. ‘You can write books, get mixed up with the French radicals,' says Felicity. ‘I'll cook French food, I'm a good cook. And we'll swing.' Howard looks at her. He says: ‘Felicity, are you really a good cook?' ‘Not very,' says Felicity. ‘And the South of France isn't cheap.' ‘It doesn't have to be the South of France,' says Felicity. ‘And I'm not trapped that way,' says Howard, ‘I'm very free.' ‘You're not,' says Felicity, ‘you just think you are.' ‘Felicity,' says Howard, ‘this is one of your fantasies. You're a fantasy-maker.' ‘You don't see, do you?' asks Felicity. ‘You don't see what you could be. I think I've thought about you more than you ever have yourself.' ‘Nobody has ever thought about anybody more than they have themselves,' says Howard. ‘So nobody can teach anybody anything?' asks Felicity. ‘You don't believe that.' ‘Of course people teach other people things,' says Howard, ‘it's the critical education.' ‘But you're so smart you only do it to others,' says Felicity. ‘No one can teach you a thing about you. Aren't you lucky? But you want to see yourself from outside. It looks different then.'

Howard looks at Felicity. He says, ‘You're determined to wriggle into my life. You track me, you spy on me. Then you start accusing me of flaws that only you can solve. It's a game to hook me with. But what for, Felicity?' ‘You ought to know,' says Felicity, a tear in her eye, ‘it's what some people call love.' ‘Love's a strange business,' says Howard, ‘an activity that needs very close examination.' ‘Oh, God,' says Felicity, ‘aren't you stuffy? Aren't you what I said?' ‘You say you want to free me,' says Howard, ‘but what you mean is you want to own me. And you'll never develop a relationship like that. With me, or anyone else.' The old stable clock at Watermouth Hall rings out its ten o'clock, in high, absurd notes, over the campus. Felicity's tear runs down her nose. ‘You're cheating me,' says Felicity. ‘Come on, Felicity,' says Howard, ‘come on to class.' ‘Have you got some tissue?' says Felicity. Howard reaches in his desk drawer and hands Felicity a white Kleenex. ‘I expect you need that all the time,' says Felicity, ‘for the rows and rows of us.' ‘No,' says Howard, ‘get up.' ‘You win by being older,' says Felicity, ‘but that's how you lose, too.' ‘All right?' asks Howard, and opens the door. Felicity throws the Kleenex into the wastepaper basket; she crosses the room and goes out into the corridor; she stands slackly, waiting while Howard picks up books and notes, and then steps out of his room and locks the door. They begin walking down the corridor, under the sodium lights. Felicity says, sniffing, ‘When will you see me again?' ‘We can talk again tomorrow,' says Howard. ‘Are you really going out tonight?' asks Felicity. ‘Yes,' says Howard, ‘I am.' ‘Who are you seeing?' ‘I have a professional meeting,' says Howard. ‘Do you have a sitter?' asks Felicity, ‘can I come?' Howard stops and looks at Felicity; her face is innocence.

A pair of buttocks suddenly emerge from a door to the right of the corridor, and collide with Howard; they belong to a colleague of his, a young man of radical persuasion called Roger Fundy, who is dragging a slide-projector forth from a classroom. He stands upright; he stares briefly at Felicity's wet face, but students at Watermouth, with its rigorous teaching, cry so often that his attention is not detained. ‘Howard,' he says, ‘have you heard all this talk about Mangel?' ‘What's that?' asks Howard. ‘He's supposed to be coming to speak,' says Fundy. ‘You ought to stop it,' says Howard. ‘I'm a good babysitter,' says Felicity, as they walk on, ‘I like kids.' ‘But if you came, you'd pry,' says Howard, ‘it wouldn't work, would it?' They come towards the end of the corridor; in front of them, around the lift shaft, a crowd of students mills, leaving classes that have just ended, going to classes that are about to begin. ‘If I didn't?' says Felicity. ‘If I reformed?' ‘But can you?' asks Howard. They stop on the fringe of the crowd, waiting for the lift to come. ‘I cheated,' says Felicity, ‘I know you didn't take me seriously last night. I know you were just being kind.' The bell pings; the lift doors open; they move in with the crowd. ‘The trouble is it's hard to know you're little,' says Felicity, ‘people like to make themselves matter.' The lift descends one floor, and then they get out again. They are standing in another service area identical to the one they have just left; a similar pattern of corridors leads off it. ‘I can face reality,' says Felicity, ‘it's just that I remember how you told us reality doesn't exist yet, it's up to us to make it.' They move into the corridor to the right; Felicity pads at Howard's side down the long bright passage. ‘I'm afraid what happened in my study was just a fragment of what was happening in my house last night,' says Howard, ‘you weren't the only one to get hurt.' ‘Someone got hurt?' asked Felicity. ‘Only really hurt,' says Howard. The vacant doors line the corridor walls; they move towards their classroom at the end. ‘Wow,' says Felicity, ‘what happened?' ‘I wasn't there,' says Howard, ‘it was while we were downstairs. You remember the blue light? That was the ambulance.' ‘Oh, Christ,' says Felicity, ‘you mean it was a real accident?'

VIII

The seminar room where Howard meets this weekly class, Socsci 4.17, is an interior room without windows, lit by artificial light. The room is a small one; on three of its walls are pinned large charts, illustrating global poverty, while the fourth wall is occupied by a large green chalkboard, on which someone has written, as people are always writing, ‘Workers unite'. The room contains a number of tables with gunmetal legs and bright yellow tops; these have been pushed together in the centre to form one large table, where some previous tutor has been holding a formal class. In the room stand three students, positioned somewhere indeterminate between the tables and the walls; it does not do, at Watermouth, to take it for granted that a room arrangement that suits one teacher will ever suit another. Classes at Watermouth are not simply occasions for the one-directional transmission of knowledge; no, they are events, moments of communal interaction, or, like Howard's party, happenings. There are students from Watermouth who, visiting some other university, where traditional teaching prevails, stare in amazement, as if confronted by some remarkable and exciting innovation; their classes are not like that. For Watermouth does not only educate its students; it teaches its teachers. Teams of educational specialists, psychologists, experts in group dynamics, haunt the place; they film seminars, and discuss them, and, unimpressed by anything as thin as a manifestation of pure intellectual distinction, demonstrate how student C has got through the class without speaking, or student F is expressing boredom by picking his nose, or student H has never, during an hour-long class, had eye-contact with the teacher once. They have sample classes, where the faculty teach each other, sessions in which permanent enmities are founded, and clothes get torn, and elderly professors of international reputation burst into tears. So Howard comes into the room, and he looks around it, and he inspects the arrangement of the tables. ‘I'm afraid this is what Goffman would call a bad eye-to-eye ecological huddle,' he says. ‘We don't want these tables here like this, do we?'

‘No, Dr Kirk,' says one of the students standing in the room, a big-boned girl named Merion Scoule, in a nervous way. Watermouth makes students nervous; you never know quite what to expect. There are classes where you have, on arrival, to eat something, or touch each other, or recount last night's dreams, or undress, in order to induce that strange secular community that is, in Watermouth terms, the essence of a good class, a class that is interesting. There are others where you have to sit and listen to tutors in self-therapy, talking about their problems or their wives or their need to relate; there are other classes where almost the reverse happens, and the students become objects of therapy, problem-bearers, and where an apparently casual remark about one's schoolboy stamp collection, or a literary reference to the metaphoric significance of colour, will lead to a sudden psychic foray from a teacher who will dive down into your unconscious with three shrewd enquiries and come up clutching something in you called ‘bourgeois materialism' or ‘racism'. Howard's classes are especially famous for being punitive in this way. Altogether, caution and courage are necessary, and a protean nature; there are so many roles for a student to perform. There are classes where the teacher, not wanting to direct the movement of mind unduly, will remain silent throughout the class, awaiting spontaneous explosions of intelligence from his students; there are classes, indeed, where the silence never gets broken. There are other classes where the teacher never appears in person at all, but materializes suddenly into existence on a screen in the corner of the room, beamed there from the audio-visual centre, mouthing sound that can be turned up, or down, or off, according to the dedication and whim of the class, while he is off lecturing for the British Council in Brazil. Anything can happen, except the normal, save that the very idea of innovation becomes customary; to experienced Watermouth students, like these, it is conventional for Howard to come into the room, as now, and make the students form pairs – Merion Scoule and Michael Bennard; Felicity Phee and Hashmi Sadeok, from Morocco, who, older than the others, is better at carrying tables – and hump the furniture out into the corridors.

When they have moved the tables, Howard has the students arrange their chairs in a neat little circle, near to but not at the precise centre of the room. ‘Right,' he says, dragging his own chair into the circle, ‘that should improve interaction. We can't see you properly, Hashmi. Move your chair forward about two feet.' Hashmi stares. ‘A metre and a half,' says Michael Bennard. Hashmi smiles; the group, shapely now, relaxes. Felicity and Merion sit side by side, an anguished Watermouth pair, Felicity in her shirt and long skirt, Merion in incredible thicknesses of garment, including a skin waistcoat and a crocheted long cardigan. Michael Bennard is next to Felicity; he has a large black beard, and wears a frock coat and jeans. Hashmi is next to Merion; he has a fine splayed-out hairdo, and platform shoes. ‘There's something wrong,' says Howard. ‘Well, we're not all here,' says Merion. ‘No,' says Howard, ‘who's missing?' ‘George,' says Michael, ‘he's starting discussion.' ‘Has anyone seen him?' asks Howard. ‘He's always late,' says Hashmi. ‘His congenital disease,' says Howard, ‘just as it's mine to eliminate him from memory. I wonder what that signifies.' The class laughs. Howard says, ‘Did he show up this term?' ‘Well,' says Merion, ‘he's not the kind of person we associate with.' ‘He'll come,' says Michael Bennard, ‘he always comes.' ‘We could start without him,' says Merion, ‘I expect we've all read the stuff.' ‘No,' says Howard, ‘I really think we ought to hear George exercise himself on the topic of social change. It should be quite an occasion.'

At this moment the door is jogged, and then it opens. In the aperture stands a student; he carries a large stack of books, which reach from the level of his crotch to just under his chin. His chin holds the pile unevenly steady. From two of the fingers of his hands, which are clasped underneath the books, there dangles a shiny new briefcase. The established circle inspects the stranger, who appears confident. ‘I'm sorry I'm late, sir,' he says, ‘I've been working all night on my paper. Just this minute finished.' ‘Get a chair,' says Howard, ‘bring it into the circle.' ‘Hold my books,' says the student, who is very neat, to Merion; he brings a chair, inserts it into the group, causing much scraping of the floor; ‘Is that all right, sir?' he asks, ‘can everyone see my face from this position?' ‘Enough of it,' says Howard. ‘Look, I asked you to prepare this class over the summer, not leave it until last night.' ‘I wanted to be fresh,' says the student. ‘Besides, I was shooting in the summer.' ‘Who were you shooting?' asks Howard. ‘I was shooting film in Scotland,' says the student. ‘Bag any?' asks Michael Bennard. ‘Come on,' says Howard, ‘I want to get started. Theories of social change.' ‘If you could just give me half a minute,' says the student, ‘I just have to sort these books out. Would you mind if I had a table? There are some outside in the corridor.' ‘We've just taken them out,' says Howard, ‘and what is all this stuff, George?' The student has begun to arrange the large pile of books around his chair; each of the books has little bits of toilet paper protruding from its pages, no doubt to mark significant references. ‘I've tried to be as scholarly as possible,' says the student, ‘I wouldn't want to go off at a tangent with a crucial issue like this. Social change, sir.' ‘It doesn't seem necessary to me,' says Howard, ‘but we'll start off by giving you the benefit of the doubt. Now are you ready?' ‘One more tiny moment?' says the student; he reaches into his shiny leather briefcase, and brings forth a blue cardboard file. From the file he removes a fat document, written in very cramped, close handwriting, places it on his knee, and looks up. ‘Ready to go now, sir,' he says.