Read Online Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury - Free Book Online Page A

social
scene, not all is lost, Treece wore an establishment shirt, made to measure for him, usually in blue or grey fine stripe, with three loose collars; a suit, also made to measure for him, from a
small local tailor, with pockets at the back of the trousers, and the side, and the front (this for the wallet), and a buttonhole for the passage of a pocket watch; and braces, because one did,
though belts were pleasanter. Treece’s answer to the problem of what is
à propos
for the person that, in terms of social status, he supposed himself to be, was that if most of
what he had was
à propos
, and a little was flagrantly not
à propos
, then society would grant his recognition of the fact that here was a problem, and that, for the
future, it was an open problem. A partial immersion in professorship was really the most the world could hope for from Treece, and it accepted that.
    Treece was no aesthete, no exotic; his driving forces were self-discipline and moral scruple, or so he was disposed to think. He had no time for the pleasurable, only the necessary. For
instance, he spent most of his time in his office, having painful encounters with students, who wanted him to read stories they had written about sensitive youths, pining for a new world, or
inquired at what sort of shop one could buy books, or wanted to know whether he collected dinner money – although he would much rather have hidden behind the door or in a book cupboard.
People always thought he had been to Oxford or Cambridge, that he was that sort of man. But he had gained his wisdom at the University of London, which is a very different thing; he had gone to
university not to make good contacts, or to train his palate, or refine his accent, but rather to get a good degree. He had had to give up punting, which he enjoyed, because to punt one had to punt
from one end or the other, and one end was the Oxford, the other the Cambridge, end. So much of the world was like that too. The same sort of people wondered too about his regiment, which they
supposed would be the Guards. In fact, during the war Treece had been a member of the London Fire Service, putting out fires with Stephen Spender. People supposed, likewise, that his family would
be a sound one, his father an artist, or a bibliophile, his mother at home on a horse. In fact his father had had a wallpaper shop, and when, once, he had told his father that it was wrong that
people’s relationships should be those of buyers and sellers, his father had gazed at him blankly. What else could they be? Treece was never ashamed that his background was of this sort; but
he was
surprised
by it; it was not what he would, if he had met himself as a stranger, have expected.
    Of Treece’s formative years, which were the nineteen-thirties, of those busy days when to be a liberal was to be something, and people other than liberals knew what liberals were, of this
period Treece had one sharp and pointed memory, that cast itself up like a damp patch on the wall of an otherwise sturdy house, a memory of a time when late one night – indeed, at the two
o’clock of one early morning – he had gone from the room he rented in Charlotte Street because he had had a row with the woman he was living with. On the night in question, Treece, then
a research student with holes in his underpants and not a change of socks to call his own, was determined to leave Fay, in part because she did not like his poetry, but also because he knew that
she did not trust him, since, with the cunning of females who know what faculties are of most or least worth in their prey, she had observed that he was a person without a firm, a solid centre; he
was easily blown or altered. On this topic they had exchanged acrimonious words, and Treece had hurried forth into the dark street, pausing only to dress and snatch up his thesis, which reposed,
well-nigh completed, at the side of the bed. Coming along the Soho street, wearing a leather