The Sleep of Reason (7 page)

“Vice-Chancellor,” I said, returning to the occasion, “I have a simple proposition to make.”

“Yes?”

“I suggest we take no formal action at all. Let’s leave it over till the next meeting of the Court” (which was due to take place two months ahead, in June).

“With respect, I don’t see the force of that.” Shaw’s lips were pouting.

“There is a little force in it.” I explained that to me, and I thought to some others, the formality and the procedures were not important. We should be content, if we could save some chance for the students’ careers. Given two months, Leonard Getliffe could talk to his physicist colleagues in other universities: come clean about the events: some department might be willing to take Llewellyn in. And so with the others. Many of us had contacts. Then, if and when they were placed elsewhere, the Court would be happy, or wouldn’t worry further about its own disciplinary step.

“Not satisfactory,” said Arnold Shaw, but Geary broke in: “Vice-Chancellor, in the circumstances nothing is going to be satisfactory. But I must say, I’ve never heard of a compromise which made things so easy for the powers-that-be. You’re not being voted against, you’re just being asked to wait a minute.”

“It’s not even rational.”

“Vice-Chancellor,” Geary was speaking heavily, “it will be difficult for me, and I know I’m speaking for others, if you can’t accept this.”

Hargrave coughed. Under his white hair with its middle parting, his face, often quietly worried, looked more so. He was more distressed by the hearing than anyone there. He rarely spoke on the Court, but now he forced himself.

“It’s usually right to wait, if one is not hurting anyone.”

“You’ve listened to those four this morning,” said Shaw.

Hargrave kneaded his temples, like one with a migraine, and then said with surprising firmness, “But if we wait a little, we shan’t hurt anyone, shall we?”

Even then, I doubted whether Shaw was going to budge. At last he shook his head.

“I don’t like it,” he said. “But if you want me to put your motion (he turned to me) to the Court, I’m willing do to so. As for myself, I shall abstain.”

With bad grace, he sat in the chair while the hands went up. Only three against. There was a susurration of whispers, even giggles, as people stirred, ready to leave.

It wasn’t a rational compromise, Arnold Shaw had complained. But then he was expecting too much. I had twice heard an elder statesman of science announce, with the crystalline satisfaction of someone producing a self-evident truth, that sensible men usually reached sensible conclusions. I had seen my brother cock an eyebrow, in recognition of that astonishing remark. I had myself reported it, deadpan, to others – who promptly came to the conclusion that I believed it myself.

It was not even a rational compromise. I packed up my papers, quite pleased with the morning’s work. Others were talking, glad to have put it behind them. They were used, as people were in a society like ours, highly articulated, but so articulated that most lives touched only by chance, to hearing names, even to meeting persons in the flesh, once, twice, then not again. To most of the Board, the four we had interviewed were strangers, flickering in and out. Myra Bolt, David Llewellyn – they had swum into others’ consciousness that morning, like someone sitting next to one in an aircraft, talking of where he had come from and where he was going to. To people round the table, the names they had heard weren’t likely often to recur. That seemed entirely normal to them, just as it so often seemed to me.

YET for me, later that day, one of the names flickered, not out, but in again. I had arranged to spend another night at the Residence, in order to have my ritual drink with George Passant, and was sitting alone in the drawing-room after tea. Vicky had not returned from hospital, and Arnold Shaw had gone to his vice-cancellarial office for another of his compulsive paper clearing spells.

I was called to the telephone. This was Dick Pateman, a voice said, lighter and more smooth than it sounded face to face: he was anxious to see me. He knew about the result, or rather the non-result? Yes, he had been told: he was anxious to see me. Well, I accepted that, it was all in the job. In any case, I couldn’t stay with him long. Where, I asked? At the Residence? Not much to my surprise, he said no. Would I come to his own home? I asked for the address, and thought I remembered the road, or could find it.

Getting off the bus at the Park gates, I looked down into the town. There was a dip, and then a rise into the evening haze: lights were coming out, below the blur of roofs. On the left, down the New Walk, I used to go to Martineau’s house. I must have looked down, at that density of lights and roofs, many times in those days: not with a Rastignac passion that I was going to take the town, any more than I had felt it looking down at London roofs (that was too nineteenth-century for us), but with some sort of pang, made up of curiosity and, perhaps, a vague, even sentimental, yearning.

I had been over-confident about my local knowledge, and it took me some time to identify the road. This was a part of the town which in the last century had been a suburb, but was so no longer; it certainly wasn’t a slum, for those had gone. It was nothing in particular; a criss-cross of tidy streets, two-storeyed houses, part working-class, part the fringe of the lower middle. I asked my way, but no one seemed clear. So far as I could remember, I had never set foot in those particular backstreets: even in one’s native town, one’s routes were marked out, sharp and defined, like the maps of underground railways.

At last I saw the street sign; on both sides stood terraced houses, the same period, the same red brick, as those my son and I had passed on the way to my father’s room. At the end of the road some West Indians were talking on the pavement. That would have been a novelty years before. So would the sight of cars, at least three, waiting outside houses, including the house I was searching for. The window of the front room gave on the pavement: as in the window of the Residence the night before, a light was shining behind the curtains.

When I rang the bell, Dick Pateman opened the door. His greeting was off-hand, but I scarcely noticed that, since I was puzzled by the smell that wafted out, or one component of it. I was used to the musty smell of small old houses, I had known them all my childhood, and that was present here – but there were also something different in kind, not repulsive but discomforting, which I couldn’t place.

Behind the closed door of the front room, pop music was sounding: but Dick Pateman took me to the next, and only other, door. This would be (I knew it all by heart) the living-room or kitchen. As I went in, Dick Pateman was saying: This is my father and mother.

That I hadn’t bargained on. The room was cluttered, and for an instant my only impression was of the idiosyncratic smell, much stronger. I was shaking hands with a man whose head was thrown back, his hand stretched out, in a gesture one sometimes sees displayed by grandiose personages.

My eyes became clearer. Mr Pateman was taller than his son, with high square shoulders and a heavily muscled, athletic body. His grip on my hand was powerful, and his forearms filled his sleeves. His light blue eyes met mine unblinkingly, rather as though he had been taught that, to make a good impression, it was necessary to look your man straight in the eye. He had sandy hair, pale eyebrows, and a sandy moustache. Under the moustache two teeth protruded a little, his underlip pressed in, with the suggestion of a slight, condescending smile.

“I’ve never met you,” he said, “but I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

I said that he was not to believe it. Mr Pateman, humourlessly, without any softening, said that he did.

Then I shook hands with Mrs Pateman, a tiny little woman, a foot shorter than her husband or son, wrinkled and dark-skinned. She gave me a quick, worried, confiding smile.

As we sat down, I didn’t know why I had been enticed like this, how much the parents knew, nor how to talk to them.

The room was crammed with heavy nineteenth-century furniture. There was a bookcase with a glass window in the far corner, and a piano on the other side. A loose slack fire was smouldering in the grate, and the air was chilly. On the table, upon a white openwork cloth spread upon another cloth of dark green plush, with bobbled fringe, stood a teapot, some crockery, and what looked like the preparations for a “high tea”, though – by the standards of my mother’s friends – a meagre one. Everything was clean: and yet, about the whole room, there hung a curiously dusty air, less like the grime of neglect than like some permanent twilight.

Mrs Pateman asked whether she could help me to some food. When I answered her and said no, her husband smiled, as though I were proving satisfactory.

He himself was eating tinned salmon. He said: “Well, we’re giving them something to think about, I’m glad to say.”

I was still at a disadvantage. This was obviously a reference to the morning’s meeting, and he seemed as invulnerable as his son. If he had been a softer man, worried or even inconsolable because his son’s future was in danger, I should have been more at home. I should have been more at home with Mrs Pateman, who was watching the two of them with shrewd, puzzled anxiety. But, in the presence of the father, it wasn’t in the least like that.

“The best we can do now” – I was feeling my way, speaking to Dick Pateman – “is to try and get you fixed up elsewhere. As soon as we can.”

“That’s not very satisfactory,” said Dick Pateman.

“No,” said Mr Pateman.

“It’s a bad second best,” said Dick – as though he were arguing with me at the end of the long table.

“Some of us,” said Mr Pateman, “aren’t prepared to see our children get the second best.”

I didn’t want to show impatience, though it was displeasingly near. Above all, I didn’t want to give pain, certainly not to Mrs Pateman. I couldn’t speak frankly. With an effort, I said: “You’ve got to regard this as nothing more or less than a friendly talk. I can’t do much. I might be able to give you a little advice, simply because I know the rules of this game, but that’s all.”

Mr Pateman faced me with a set cunning look, which declared that he was not to be taken in. He assumed that I was a man of influence, he had an unqualified faith in what he called “pulling strings”. The more I disclaimed being able to act, the more convinced he was of my Machiavellian power.

Dick argued, so did his father.

I was becoming certain that he didn’t know much, nothing like the full story. Not that Dick had deceived him. He didn’t want to know, he didn’t even want to hear. He was positive that he was right. Obviously his son was being badly used: which meant, and this was how he translated it, that he himself was being badly used. He was a churchgoer, he pointed out to me, assuming, with an air of pitying superiority, that I wasn’t. With a family in distress, I should have expected to feel protective, even though I hadn’t asked to be there, even though I didn’t like them. But Mr Pateman made that impossible. By some extraordinary feat of character or moral legerdemain, he took it for granted that all I had to do was my simple duty. So far as there was any pity flowing, he was pitying me.

It was a long time since I had met a man so self-righteous. And yet his son was self-righteous too. That was what had exacerbated the Court, that billiard ball impregnability in circumstances where self-righteousness didn’t appear to be called for. With a prepotent father like that, some sons would have been worn down. Not this one. There did not seem any tenderness, or even much communication, between them. They treated each other like equal powers, each censorious, each knowing that he was right.

The person I was curious about was Mrs Pateman, not bullied, but excluded from the talk. What could it be like to live here?

Mr Pateman made a practical point, as though I were responsible. If Dick had to transfer to another university (did Dick himself believe it would be all that easy, I was thinking? when was the right time to stop them hoping too much?) he wouldn’t be able to make a contribution to the housekeeping. As it was, he had been doing so out of his student grant.

“The grants are miserable, I suppose you know that,” said Dick, ready to argue another grievance.

“Take him away,” said Mr Pateman, “and he won’t be able to pay a penny. There’ll be nothing coming in.”

I had nothing to say on this topic, but Mr Pateman needed to finish it off. “It’s diabolical,” he said.

Soon afterwards a young woman came in, unobtrusively, slipping into the room. This must, I thought, be Dick’s sister, whom I had just heard of, but not more than that. Although she had only recently come in from work and could not have known of the Court result, she did not make any enquiry, nor even look at her brother. Instead, she was asking for jam. There wasn’t any jam today, said Mr Pateman. There must be jam, she was saying. She was sounding peevish when, with a grandiloquent air, Mr Pateman presented me. She was a small girl, not much bigger than her mother. She had fine eyes, but she turned them away from mine in a manner that could have been either shy or supercilious. In a delicate fashion, she was pretty: but, although she was perhaps only two years older than her brother, she had that kind of feminity which throws a shadow before it: her face was young, yet carried an aura, not really a physical look, of the elderly, almost of the wizened.

They called her Kitty. There was also a mention of someone named Cora: in the conversation I gathered that she and Cora shared, and slept in, the front room. It must have been Cora who had been playing records when I entered the house, which I had only just realised was so packed with people. I had another thought, or half-memory, from something I had heard not long before. Wasn’t this Cora the niece of George Passant, the daughter of one of his sisters who had died young? I asked Kitty: she looked away, gave a sidelong glance, as though she wanted to resist answering me straight.

“I think she is,” she said, with what seemed a meaningless edge of doubt.