Eating People is Wrong (31 page)

‘Why?’ demanded a woman with a flower-pot hat –
the
woman with
the
flowerpot hat, in fact. ‘Why does the bow go with the wound? Why didn’t Ulysses
wait until he was asleep, and take the bow, and leave him on the island?’

Willoughby stepped back as if struck; now they had upset him, you could tell. ‘This is the last time I do you an analogy,’ he said bitterly.

‘Well, it’s right, isn’t it?’ cried the bronzed
Woman’s Journal
woman, stirring Treece’s soul by her very presence and action.

‘What a low-down lot you are,’ said Willoughby. ‘But of course, that’s what people would do these days.
Do
do. Who’d be an artist these days? You’re
like a pack of vultures. Have you ever seen it when a poet dies? It’s like a night of long knives. He wasn’t a good man, he was rude, he was promiscuous . . .’

This was all just his kind of thing. The audience, pleased that he was insulting them again, just like yesterday, nodded in agreement. They were all in fact civilized, human, good-hearted people
who, had Philoctetes come to them with a bad foot, would have bathed it, and not even
mentioned
that it smelled, and put him in their car and driven him down to Dr Scholl’s shop, and
paid for the treatment. If only, you felt of them, Van Gogh had been alive, so that they could have sewn his ear back on.

It was a hot day; flies buzzed in the air. Treece coddled his knees in his arms and smiled at the members of his poetry class who were there and who noticed him. He waved cheerily to Emma, who
was present and sitting on the other side of the room. A few people in the audience were peering out rather uncomfortably through the windows at the parkland beyond. Willoughby was not having this:
‘Listen,’ he cried and the errant heads swung back. Willoughby was making so much noise now that gardeners were peering curiously in at him through the long Georgian windows.
Treece’s mind began to drift away into more glorious spheres; there was no place for militancy in his view of literature. For Treece literature’s function lay here: as a humanist he
pursued the record of experience as he pursued experience itself, seeking to distil from it more searching exploration of the human fabric, to chart new worlds in the universe in which human
sensations are played out; he looked searchingly into the ocean to see what sort of channel was made by the human passage across the world. All that Willoughby said of literature was not of
his
literature at all. But in feeling the challenge, he also felt the failure. He had not learned very much. His passage had left nothing. He had never really come to grips with the world,
after all. And now it was getting rather too late.

Willoughby was closing, now, still talking of how the world paid out its maladapted ones, for the fact was, he said, that society regarded cultural things not as living appurtenances of its
world, but as dead things, museum pieces, and it would rather have the work of a dead artist than a living one; people paid a king’s ransom to buy pictures by painters who had been left
starving by their contemporaries. His point was that the world was mad, and the artist sane; but all madmen think this, and likewise all artists. He read from a letter of Van Gogh’s, when he
had nothing and expected nothing. Nothing was, he said, what he got. Van Gogh
was
mad, yet everyone who looked hard into his pictures found in them the most painful kind of sanity. The words
of the letter ran: ‘How can I be of use in the world? Cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good? How can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects? You see, that is what
preoccupies me constantly, and I find myself imprisoned by poverty, excluded from entering on certain work, and certain necessary things are out of my reach. That is one reason for not being
without melancholy, and then one feels an emptiness where there might be friendship and deep and profound affections, and one feels a hideous discouragement gnawing at one’s very moral
energy, and fate seems to block up all the instincts of affection, and a flood of disgust rises to choke one. And one cries out: “How long, my God?”’ And yes, cried Treece within
himself, how long? Life was a dry and cruel estate without love, without thought of the future, without care and responsibility.

And he looked across at Louis Bates, who, along with several other students, was present just for the afternoon, and he thought of Willoughby’s cry that the artist’s madness was
grown out of the most painful kind of sanity. Bates did not look harrowed; he approved of what was said, as his applause showed, as if he actually knew that what had been said would vindicate him.
He realized that Bates had seen something in the discourse other than what he had seen; that what lay before
his
eyes was of the romantic figure of the poet, Shelley-like . . . no,
Christ-like. This was not what Willoughby meant, Treece felt sure; he was talking of the lot of the plain and ordinary man who carries the burden of being an artist, not of the great soul and the
huge spirit.

Butterfield rose and asked for questions. A lady from the poetry society thanked Willoughby for the good advice about being a poet. What she wanted to know was, did he think there were enough
openings for poets to publish nowadays, what with
John o’ London’s
ending and all? This was how all poetry society meetings ended, in Treece’s experience. Willoughby asked
the audience if they were not living in a fool’s paradise. There were, he said, more poets actually writing poetry than there were reading it. He asked why they didn’t just give up and
go home. With this thought, they all dispersed for their tea.

Treece retired to his room after tea in some upset. He felt himself assailed by a violent unrest, a positive physical discomfort, a sense of loss, though he could not say what was lost or whence
the feeling came. It was a sense of having uprooted himself and cut himself off from any vigorous way of life, this, and an oppressive loneliness. He realized that the last few days and weeks had
passed in a kind of arduous, strained state, in a painful intensity; he could scarcely remember what he had done over these weeks. He felt challenged; he needed somewhere to turn, someone to love.
He crossed over to the mirror and looked at himself, and was impressed by some change in his appearance: his face seemed strained, his eyes puffed, and his hair drier and rougher than usual; there
were rather a lot of white hairs. He was sure he was ill, and that the illness, if not physical, was then mental. For weeks he had been threatened with a kind of paranoic depression, in which the
universe seemed to him unerringly hostile and all persons appeared creatures fully separate from himself yet in communion with each other; they were
there
and here, alone and unwanted in
their counsels, was he. Events conspired with persons to belittle him. He thought of the previous evening, when he had been the odd man out, sitting with his back to the others and sneering up his
sleeve at the jazz-lovers. He thought of his hideous sense of incapacity on the evening when Eborebelosa had been attacked. How unlike people seemed to him, how great the immense human
estrangement, how little they shared any common ground, how momentary and evanescent their contacts as they passed and repassed each other. And how he wanted to see that his fate was shared. Treece
was sufficiently under control to see that this sense of intense dislocation was not a normal condition of his human relationships, but an exaggerated form; his depression was, he felt, psychotic.
The prevailing sense of a conspiracy, which disturbed him most, the feeling that fate and persons were organized together to achieve his personal downfall, that everything was working actively and
deliberately against him, was paranoic; he knew it was and yet, he found himself insisting, wasn’t it true, wasn’t it true?

In the evening there was a poetry reading; then they played parlour games, in one of which Treece found himself, for no good reason that he could recall, wrapped from head to foot in toilet
paper and swaddled like a mummy, and then released again. He endured all this in a decidedly grudging spirit and wished that, like Butterfield and Willoughby, he had had the good sense to sneak off
to the nearest inn when the poetry reading ended. Finally, he managed to get a moment alone with Emma. He took her outside, and they walked down to the pub. It was a warm night. He said:
‘Will you come up to my room tonight?’ ‘Oh Stuart, how can I?’ cried Emma. ‘It’s terribly risky. Someone will see me.’ ‘Of course they
won’t,’ said Treece. ‘They’re all very tired. They’ll sleep like logs. And you can say you’re going to the toilet. You’re in a single room, aren’t
you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘Well, I’ll come there then, if you won’t come to me,’ he said. ‘It’s very important, you see. I want to talk to
you.’ ‘Very well,’ said Emma. ‘I’ll come to yours.’

It was after one when she came. Treece lay fully dressed on the bed smoking, eaten by his ungovernable depression. ‘I know this was foolhardy,’ he said when she was there, ‘and
it was hard for you. I’m sorry. But I just had to see you, Emma. I want to marry you.’

‘Why, Stuart,’ cried Emma surprised. ‘Whatever put
that
idea into your head?’

‘I don’t know. Willoughby, I suppose. You know, I never really thought that new men could happen to me. I always felt that mine was the last generation. But it’s not, is it?
I’m middle-aged, and set in my ways. I’m nearly forty. I can’t even cook myself a proper meal. And Willoughby can, and he’s in his twenties. I feel so painfully lonely. I
suppose I always wanted to settle down, but just never knew how you did it. I’ve never possessed anything. Every stage of my life up to now has seemed a temporary arrangement, that
didn’t warrant purchasing or possessing, but hiring and borrowing. Not to have
love
– that’s the most terrible thing. Not to be loved by
anyone
, or to have any love
of your own and spend it in the world. I mean, the love we give to women is part of the force of passion we have for the world. Don’t you think?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Emma. She sat silently for a moment on the bed.

‘Well?’ said Treece.

‘Well, what?’

‘Will you marry me?’

‘Stuart, I’m very flattered, but I can’t,’ said Emma. ‘You don’t want to marry
me
; you just want to marry. I’m a perfectionist. I can’t
make do with that.’

‘But, Emma . . .’

‘Please, Stuart, it isn’t any use,’ said Emma. ‘You mean a very great deal to me. I admire you in the way you like to be admired and I pity you in the way you like to be
pitied. I don’t mean that cruelly; this is what we share. But you don’t even like me, Stuart, not
me
.’

‘Of course I do. I find that quite absurd,’ said Treece.

‘I know you do, because you don’t understand it, but it’s true. Do you know, you’ve never talked to me. You’ve never told me a thing that you think or feel. I
don’t know you any better than I did that evening at the Christmas Ball. Why do you keep yourself so apart? Why don’t you trust people? What’s this great sacrifice you make when
you consent to be with me? We went down to the pub this evening and what did you do? You didn’t ask me what I wanted; you just bought me gin and tonic because I always drink gin and
tonic.’

‘What did you want?’

‘Gin and tonic,’ said Emma, ‘but I also wanted something else; I wanted to be asked. And then, we have never had one scrap of life together outside my bedroom. There are no
cultural experiences we can remember about
this
. We’ve never existed together. And something else, Stuart, have you ever thought how insulting it might be to me that you can’t
wait to get out of the door when you’ve been to see me? You see, your feelings must seem to you so much rarer and richer than anyone else’s. I feel too, you see; we all feel.’

‘I don’t know why I was like that,’ said Treece. ‘It bothered me. It wasn’t quite of my volition. I just felt I must get away. I felt that if I didn’t
something fatal would happen.’

‘Yes, it might; I would have asked you what you were thinking; I would have wanted to
talk
. You know you
never
enjoyed it, you never enjoyed me. You never
do
anything.
You always look as though you pretend you’re not here. You never look at me. You’ve never planned one event for us. You’ve never had anything laid on. What there was to be done, I
did. You had to have everything suggested to you. A woman needs more than that. She needs to feel safe with a man. Do you know what sticks with me most? You’ve only,
ever
, used my
Christian name once, before tonight, when we’ve been together. I thought you’d forgotten it, and were afraid to ask me. I’ve only once existed as a person to you. That was once,
in the Town Hall gardens, when you first asked to kiss me. I said there was nothing special about me and you said: “Emma, there is.” I think you meant it, but whatever it was you saw in
me, you’ve forgotten it.’

‘Believe me, that’s just not true,’ said Treece.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Stuart; perhaps it’s not, but it’s too late now.’

‘You’re so unfair,’ cried Treece, ‘because it simply hasn’t been like that. Why, I
need
you. I can’t live without you.’

‘I know you need me, Stuart,’ said Emma, ‘and that’s why I stay with you, because you’d be so lost without me. I enjoyed feeding you. I’m always pleased to
see you eating, and being looked after. You need me more than anyone I ever met; you
need
, just into the void. I truly wish I could say that that were enough. But the simple and honest and
open truth is that for me it isn’t.’

‘I suppose everything you say about me is the truth,’ said Treece slowly. ‘I’m simply parasitic on other people and compelled to be so by a force I can’t even
explain, a lack of responsibility to other people and an inability to form proper relationships. And it’s so cruel, because responsibility and relationships are the things I believe in so
deeply; they are all there is. I’ve always believed, you know, in my own goodness, and thought I could never do anything wrong in the things of love. Yet it seems to me that I
have.’