Read Online The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury - Free Book Online

or her own story. It had been a busy summer; and there were stories to tell. For now it was coming to seem to Barbara that this was a false move, a victory for Howard, a defeat for her; passing through the Midlands, south of Birmingham, they crossed a line into error. One trouble was that, over the summer, despite the fact that she believed herself scientifically sealed inside against this sort of intrusion, she had found herself pregnant again; it was a matter of mystery and anger. She was also angry because she saw now that Howard was in the vastly stronger position over the move; he was coming to Watermouth with a reputation ahead of him. It was, admittedly, a slightly shaky reputation, for popularizing innovation; but it really was a reputation. For, also over the summer, his book had come out, and done well. The publishers had changed a franker title to The Coming of the New Sex , which they thought would sell widely; and it was already clear that the book would be a commercial success. It had also been greeted, by the culturally attuned critics of the Sundays and the intelligent weeklies, as a work in consort with the times. Howard had not done a great deal of research on the book, and it was weak on fact and documentation; but what it lacked there it made up in argumentative energy, and a frank sense of participation in the permissive scene. As Barbara would tell people who came up to talk about it, at the many parties they were invited to in Watermouth that autumn: ‘Oh, sex is Howard’s field. I think you can say he’s done a really big probe there.’ But it had generally been found a committed, advanced book, on the right side; and it did sound quite sociological as you read it. So Howard, of course, arrived with an air of esteem already promised him, as well as a useful status as a sexual performer. Barbara, on the other hand, was coming pregnant, and part disabled, and with no reputation ahead of her, one way or the other, and brooding on this over the summer she had begun to resent the fact.
    It was lucky that, on arrival, they were able to stay for a while with some old Leeds friends of theirs, the Beamishes, who had made the move down to Watermouth one year earlier, and had helped interest Howard in the place. Henry Beamish was a social psychologist, who had himself made quite a stir the year before by proving in a book that television socialized children much more effectively than their parents ever could. From this controversy he appeared to have done extremely well. Certainly the Beamishes, when the Kirks found them again, had changed. They had left the atmosphere of Leeds’ radical bedsitterland, of beer parties and trips to watch City on Saturdays and demos outside the Town Hall, well behind them, and had found a new style for their new setting. These people who in Leeds had no money, and used to borrow kettles from their friends because they could not afford to buy one of their own, were now settled, outside Watermouth, in an architect-converted farmhouse, where they were deep into a world of Tolstoyan pastoral, scything grass and raising organic onions. Henry Beamish had grown a new beard of the naval type, heavily touched with grey. He looked very well, despite the pallor left by an unfortunate episode shortly before when he had been poisoned by a mushroom, gleaned at dawn off his own estate; he had even acquired a certain baffled, slightly elderly dignity. Myra now looked stouter, wore her hair in a tight Victorian bun, and smoked small brown cigars. It seemed to Howard that there were two accurate phrases for what they had become over the move, though he forbore to use them, for they were his friends, and they both involved the profoundest condemnation: but weren’t they both middle-aged now, and middle-class? The Kirks stared, on their arrival, at the house, at their old friends; they spent much of the visit on their hands and knees with wet toilet paper, sponging out babysick