The Sleep of Reason Page 4

  3: Meeting

  MEETINGS. To twist an old statement, all happy meetings are like one another: every unhappy meeting is unhappy in its own fashion. But was that true? I had been to plenty of unhappy meetings in my time. Whether they were trivial or secret or (by the world’s standards) important, they all had a family resemblance. So had the Court meeting that Wednesday morning.

  It began uncomfortably quiet, the good-mornings muted in the long room. The room was both extravagantly long and as light as though we were sitting in the open air, since one side was all window, looking southwards on to an arena-like court. The unrelieved lightness of the room – I had thought, on occasions before this one – drew people apart, not together. It was like the whole range of the university buildings, handsome, stark, functional, slapped down at prodigious expense in the fields, four miles outside the town. The Victorian buildings of the old college, where I had first listened to George Passant, had been abandoned, turned over to offices in one of the streets where my son and I had walked the previous afternoon. No dark rooms now: no makeshifts: no, the wide campus, the steel, concrete and glass, the stretches of window, at the same time bare, luxurious, unshadowed, costly.

  Arnold sat at the end of the table, behind him on the wall – incongruous in the midst of the architectural sheen – a coloured plaque of the university arms. There were ten people on each side, Hargrave, who had some honorific title in the university, on the Vice-Chancellor’s right, Geary two or three places down, looking at ease and interested. I sat on Arnold Shaw’s left, and on my side sat Leonard Getliffe and several other academics, most of them under forty. The rest of the Court were older, hearty middle-aged local politicians and businessmen, four or five well-dressed strong-built women.

  Item Number 3 on the agenda read, with the simple eloquence of official documents, Appeal by Four Students against Decision of Disciplinary Committee. The first two items were routine, and Arnold Shaw, who was a brisk decisive chairman, wiped them off. Then he said, in the same unexpansive fashion, not encouraging comment or setting people free to talk, that they all knew the background of the next piece of business: he had circulated a memorandum: the students had appealed to the Court, as was their constitutional right: they had now asked to appear before the Court in person. Whether they had this right as well was open to question: there was no ruling and no precedent. But Sir Lewis Eliot, as the students’ representative on the Court, had presented an official request from the student body – that the four students should be given the privilege. He, Arnold Shaw, had with some dubiety granted it. As to the case itself the facts were not in dispute. There was nothing to be said about them. We had better have the students in straight away.

  Better for them if they had not come, I had thought all along. I had tried to persuade them, for I had interviewed the four of them more than once. But the young man Pateman, who was the strongest character among them, was also a good deal of a sea lawyer: there were other sea lawyers among the union leaders: they were insisting on appearance before the Court as an inalienable right. I found it distinctly tiresome. So far as the four had any chance at all, they would worsen it if they came and argued: I knew the impression they would make: I knew also that one of the girls had already lost her nerve.

  As Arnold Shaw had said, picking up the official phrase, the facts were not in dispute. They could hardly have been less in dispute. About 3.0 a.m. on a winter morning (actually it happened early in March) the assistant warden of one of the women’s hostels had gone into a sitting-room. It was pure coincidence that she should have done so; she was having a sleepless night, and thought she remembered seeing a magazine there. She had switched on the light; on the sofa lay one naked pair, on an improvised bed another. What conversation then took place didn’t seem to have been put on record. The assistant warden (who was both sensible and embarrassed) knew both girls, they were members of the hostel and had their own rooms upstairs. Presumably she found out the men’s names at once: at any rate, next day she had no option but to report them. It was as simple as that.

  We had better have the students in straight away, Arnold Shaw was saying. He pressed a bell, told the attendant to bring Miss Bolt.

  Myra Bolt came in. She was a big girl, pretty in a heavy-featured, actressish way: at close quarters she rolled her eyes and one noticed that her skin was large-pored. She was quite self-possessed that morning. I had not yet seen her otherwise: it wasn’t she whose nerve had snapped. She was hearty and loud-voiced, and her parents were much better off than those of most of the students. Her father was a stockbroker who had a country house in Sussex. It was easy to imagine her, a little younger, taking riding lessons and being eager to have a roll in the bushes with the groom. She hadn’t exactly boasted or confided, but let me know that something of that kind had duly taken place. At this time, she was twenty, in her second year, academically not much good.

  The table was bad for interviewing, far too long, the candidate (or, that morning, the appellant) much too far away. Arnold Shaw, though a good chairman, was a bad interviewer. He just snapped out questions, his mind channelled as though he were wearing blinkers. That morning he was not only a bad interviewer but a hostile one, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

  “Miss Bolt,” he said. “We understand that you have representations to make to the Court. What are they?”

  Myra Bolt wasn’t overawed, but she wasn’t specially used to formal speeches. I had told them the kind of questions to expect, but not that one, not as the first.

  “Well–” she began inconclusively, like someone saying goodbye at a railway station.

  I thought that I had to step in. She wasn’t a favourite of mine: there was only one of the four whom I was really fond of, and it wasn’t she. But it was my job to see they got a hearing. I said – “Vice-Chancellor, I wonder if I can help the Court a little, and Miss Bolt? Perhaps I could take her through what the students wish to say?”

  How often had I seen others start a clash like that, voices smoothed down by official use? Arnold Shaw glanced at me with aggressive eyes – but he couldn’t have stopped me easily. He seemed to like having an adversary, me in particular. He nodded, and projected my name.

  I began by one or two innocuous questions: how long had she been living in the hostel? How well did she know the other girl, Joyce Darby? Not all that well, said Myra: just to have coffee with, or go out with for a drink. I had two objectives: I wanted to domesticate the whole business, to make them look more acceptable, so that they might express some sort of regret (which I knew that two of them at least, Myra among them, weren’t inclined to do). Then I wanted them to make a responsible case about their careers: what would happen to them if they were thrown out of this university, and so couldn’t get into another? The more professional it all sounded, the easier for them – and, I had hoped until the night before, the easier for Arnold Shaw.

  How had they ever got into it? They didn’t usually have this kind of party, did they? I was speaking casually. Myra answered: no, there’d never been anything like it before. She added: “I suppose we all got carried away. You know how it is.”

  “Had you been drinking?”

  “A bit. I must say, it was a bit off.”

  That was mollifying. But she was preoccupied – as she had been when I talked to her – by the fact of the two couples in the same room, what in her language they called an orgy.

  “If David and I had gone off in my car that evening, and the other two in somebody else’s, then I don’t suppose we should have heard another word about it.”

  That was less mollifying. Across the table, nearer to Myra, one of the women members of the Court broke in. She had a beaky profile, fine blue eyes, and a high voice. She said, in a sharp, sisterly, kindly tone: “You didn’t think you were doing anything wrong?”

  “That depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it?”

  “But how do you look at it?”

  “Well,” said Myra, “I’m sorry
other people got dragged in. That wasn’t so good.”

  The women member nodded. “But what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “I mean, do you think you’ve done anything wrong?”

  Myra answered, more lucidly than usual: “I don’t think there’s anything wrong in making love, if you’re not hurting anybody else.” She went on: “I agree with Mrs What-do-you call her, wasn’t she an actress, that it doesn’t matter what people do so long as they don’t stop the traffic.”

  It was like her, in her bumbling fashion, to get the reference wrong. Some of the Court wondered, however, where she had picked it up. Probably from one of their student advisers, trying to rehearse them.

  But, bumbling or not, when Denis Geary asked her about the consequences of the punishment, she did her best. Denis was playing in with me: he was experienced, he knew the tone of the people round this table much better than I did: he didn’t sound indulgent or even compassionate: but what did the punishment mean? To herself, she said, nothing but a headache. She could live at home or get a job with one of her father’s friends (what she meant was that she would find someone, probably someone quite unlike her student fancies, to marry within a year or two). But to the others, who wanted careers, it meant they couldn’t have them. Unless some other university would take them in. But they were being expelled in squalid circumstances: would another institution look at them? David Llewellyn, for instance (he had been Myra’s partner: she didn’t pretend to love him, but she spoke up for him) – he wanted to be a scientist. What chance would he have now?

  “Has any member of the Court anything further to ask Miss Bolt?” Arnold Shaw looked implacably round the table. “Have you anything further you wish to say, Miss Bolt? Thank you.”

  With the next girl, I had one aim and only one, which was to get her out of the room with the least possible strain. She wasn’t in a fit state to be interviewed. That she showed, paradoxically helping me, by beginning to cry as soon as Arnold Shaw asked his first formal question. “Miss Darby, we understand–” She was a delicate-looking girl, actually a year older than Myra, but looking much younger. She appeared drab and mousey, but dress her up, make her happy, and she would have her own kind of charm. She came from a poor family in industrial Lancashire, a family which had been severe with her already. She was a bright student, expected to get a First, and that, together with her tears, made Shaw gentler with her. All she said was: “I was over-influenced. That’s as much as I can tell you.”

  It was not gallant. In secret (it sounded hard, but I had seen more of her than the others had) I thought that she was not only frightened, which was natural enough, but self-regarding and abnormally vain.

  She spoke in a tiny voice. Quite gently, Shaw told her to speak up. She couldn’t. Whether she was crying or not, she wouldn’t have been able to. Anyone used to interviewing would have known that there are some people who can’t. Anyone used to interviewing would also have known that – despite all superstitions to the contrary – the over-confident always get a little less good treatment than they deserve, and girls like this a little more.

  Someone asked her, who had influenced her? She said: “The rest of them.” She wouldn’t, to do her justice, put special blame on Dick Pateman, her own lover. One of the academics who had taught her, asked her what, if she continued with her degree work, she hoped to do? She wanted to go on to a Ph.D. What on? Henry James. She began to cry again, as though she felt herself shut out from great expectations, and Arnold Shaw was in a hurry to ask the dismissive questions.

  It had done harm: it might have been worse. David Llewellyn, though he was as nervous as she was, gave a good performance. This was the one I liked, a small neat youth, sensitive and clever. When one compared him and Myra, there was no realistic doubt about who had done the seducing. Probably she was his first woman (they had been sleeping together some months before the party), and I expected that he was proud of it and boasted to his friends. But how he got led into the ‘orgy’ I couldn’t understand, any more than if it had been myself at the same age. When I had asked him, he looked lost, and said: “Collective hysteria. It can’t have been anything else.”

  After his name was announced, people round the table may have been surprised to hear him talk in a sub-cockney accent. His parents, I had discovered, kept a small shop in Southend. Of the four of them, only Pateman lived with his family in the town. But then, the great majority of the university’s students came from all over the country, to be put up in the new hostels: just as the local young men and women travelled to other parts of the country to be put up in identical hostels elsewhere. It might have seemed odd, but not to anyone acclimatised to the English faith in residential education.

  Llewellyn did well, without help from me or Geary. He was ready to apologise for what had happened: it had given trouble, it had stirred up a scandal. The circumstances were bad. So far as they were concerned, he had no defence. The party was inexcusable. He was nervous but precise. No one pressed him. If they had, he would have been honest. His private sexual behaviour was his own affair. On that he and Myra had made a compact: and their student political adviser was backing them. But Llewellyn didn’t require any backing. He was ambitious, and shaking for his future. He had his own code of belief, though. An attempt by Shaw or one of the others to make him deny it would have got nowhere.

  However, that didn’t happen. Leonard Getliffe, not preoccupied as on the night before, asked him some questions about his physics course: Leonard, sharp-witted, was talking like a master of his job, but without any condescension at all: the answers sounded sharp-witted also.

  In the silence, after he had left and we were waiting for Pateman, someone said: “I must say, that seems a pity.”

  Across the table, Leonard Getliffe said: “He has talent.”

  For the next quarter-of-an-hour, Dick Pateman sat at one end of the table arguing with the Vice-Chancellor and the others. Pateman’s head was thrown back, whether he was listening or speaking: he had staring light eyes in deep orbits, a diagonal profile, and a voice with no give in it. Less than any of the others, he did not want to make human contact: with his contemporaries, this gave him a kind of power; he seemed to them uninfluenceable, waiting only for them to be influenced. It was the kind of temperament which wasn’t necessarily linked with ability – he was not clever, he ought to have been finishing his degree but had been dropped back a year – but which is sometimes dangerous and not often negligible. It did not seem negligible at the table that morning – though his logic-chopping and attempts at legalism were stirring up Arnold Shaw’s contempt, which Pateman met by a contempt, chilly and internal, of his own.

  On the surface it might have sounded like a trade union boss negotiating with an employer. On one side stood the student body, Pateman was grating away (I had anticipated this, tried to stop it, could only sit by): on the other “the authorities”. It was necessary for matters of discipline to be settled by the two sides in combination.

  “Nonsense,” said Arnold Shaw.

  Shaw’s temper was seething. The young man seemed to have no temper. He went on: “If that’s the attitude the authorities take up, then the students will have to join forces with students of other universities–”

  “Let them,” said Arnold Shaw.

  So it went on. The authorities had no right to impose their own laws unilaterally on the students, said Pateman. The students had their own rights.

  “In that sense,” said Shaw, “you have none at all.”

  Pateman said that they were free citizens. They paid their fees. They were prepared to collaborate in drafting laws for the university, and would abide by them. They accepted that the authorities had their own rights about examinations. Everything else should be settled by mutual consent. Or, alternatively, the students should simply be subject to the laws of the land. In the present case, there was no suggestion that anything had been done contrary to the laws of the land.

  “Lo
ok here,” said Denis Geary, “this isn’t very profitable.”

  “I was speaking for the students–”

  “You’d better speak for yourselves. You’ve behaved like damned fools, and messy damned fools, and you know it. You’d better give us one good reason why we should be spending our time here this morning–”

  Young Pateman gave something like a smile. He must have realised, since Geary was well-known in the town, that here was one of their best hopes: he didn’t mind, he was enough of a politician to be easy with rough words.

  “I don’t take back the students’ case,” he began, and Geary broke in: “Drop that.”

  “I should have thought the practical thing you’ve got to consider this morning,” Pateman went on, in precisely the same ungiving tone, “is whether you want to ruin us.”

  “Ruin’s a big word,” said Geary.

  “What else do you think you’re doing?”

  The Vice-Chancellor was interrupting, but Denis Geary had his own authority and went on: “I want to know one thing. How much do you feel responsible?”

  “What do you mean, responsible?”

  “If it hadn’t been for you, would this have happened?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You’re the oldest of this group, aren’t you?”

  “Joyce is older than I am. So is David.”

  “Never mind about calendar age. You’re a grown man, aren’t you?”

  He was young enough to be softened, for an instant. Geary asked: “Do you think it’s a good idea to get hold of youngsters like this–”

  “It depends on the co-operation I get.”

  The answer was brash. Geary used more force: “But you ought to feel responsible, oughtn’t you?”

  “I don’t know about that.” Pateman was repeating himself.

  “You do feel responsible, though, don’t you?”

  There was a long pause. Pateman said, slowly, his voice more grating still: “I don’t want to see anyone ruined.”