The Sleep of Reason Page 5

  Geary glanced at me, a partner’s glance. That was the most he could extract. I touched the Vice-Chancellor’s sleeve. He didn’t want to let Pateman go, but he acquiesced.

  Coffee was brought in. It was about a quarter past eleven, and we had started at ten. Motion: that the Court confirms the decision of the Disciplinary Committee.

  In the unconfined, hygienic room the air was tight. Not, so far, with anger: remarks were quiet: there was curiosity, unease, something else. I heard, or thought I heard, someone whispering about the university premises. Arnold Shaw stared down the table. He wasn’t pleased to have lost his leadership during the hearings: he was asserting it now.

  “There is a motion before the Court,” he said. “Before I put it, I should like to hear whether anyone wishes to discuss it.”

  Pause. One of the academics spoke up: “Some of us are wondering, I think, Vice-Chancellor, whether it isn’t possible to make distinctions between these students–”

  Shaw sat, high-coloured, without answering. Others were doing that. It was a line some were eager for. Surely one of the girls had been dominated. Didn’t she deserve different treatment (I noticed that the handsome blue-eyed woman, though she sat silent, had her own view of Joyce Darby)? No one had any use for Pateman. There was a great deal of talk, scrappy, some of it merciful. Someone said: “Whosoever shall cause one of my little ones–” and trailed off. I caught the word “degenerates”. It was left for Leonard Getliffe to make a special case.

  “I should like the Court to give consideration to young Llewellyn. I can speak for the physics department. He’s worth saving. I said before, he has talent. He’s certainly the best student I’ve taught here. I don’t know about the general position. I mean, I can’t reach absolute conclusions about student behaviour. I should say, in terms of character as I understand it, he is a decent young man.”

  Leonard was speaking politely but without concessions. On his clever conceptualiser’s face there was a half-smile, a mannerism which some found irritating. It meant nothing. He spoke like a man sure of himself. Underneath the fine nerves, he was more virile than most. If Vicky had been an older woman, she would have been bound to perceive it. Yet it had quite escaped her. I wondered if, free that morning from his obsessive love, he had time to be bitter because it was weakening his manhood, just as, younger than he was, but in this same town, and for the identical cause, I had been bitter myself.

  I wondered also if he felt envy for the culprits. Envy because, instead of being prisoners of love, they took sex as though it didn’t matter. Or because they just took sex as it came. At various places round the table, through the curious unease, through both the mercifulness and the disapproval, there had been those stabs of envy.

  He went on: “There is another point. I admit that it’s a slightly more abstract one. The more people the university sends down, the less penalty it really is. That is, the importance of the gesture is inversely proportional to the number involved. If you send the whole university down, no one will care. If you send one person down, then that is a genuine penalty.”

  He had spoiled his case, I thought irritably. That was what the theoreticians called cat-humour. Why didn’t they keep it for their seminars?

  One of his colleagues, more worldly than he was, thought the same. “Never mind that,” he said. “Vice-Chancellor, going back to Professor Getliffe’s first point, there does seem to be some feeling for discretionary treatment on behalf of two of these students. We should like to ask, rather strongly, whether that isn’t possible?”

  Shaw had been quiet, like a discreet chairman letting the discussion run. Now he looked round, took his time, and said: “No. I have to tell the Court it is not possible.”

  There were noises of disappointment, but he was in control.

  “No. The Court must face the position. This is all or nothing. If you ask me for the reason, I give it you in one word. Justice.”

  Denis Geary said that justice could be unjust, but for once he was over-weighted.

  “No,” said Arnold Shaw. “It would be wrong to distinguish between these four. Morally wrong. There are no respectable grounds for doing so. Age. Some people might think that a respectable ground, though I should beg to differ. In any case, the students whom some members want to favour are the two oldest. Academic ability. We are not judging a matter of academic ability. We are judging a matter of university discipline and moral behaviour. No one wants to deprive the university of able students. We haven’t got enough. But you can’t make a special dispensation for the able when they’ve committed exactly the same offence. Personally I am sorry that Pateman ever became a student here – but to dismiss him and let others stay, who are precisely as guilty on the facts, simply because they might get better classes in their degrees – well, I could have no part in it. I’m surprised that anyone could find it morally defensible. Finally, influence. It’s easy to think we know who is responsible. We don’t. We can have our suspicions – but suspicions aren’t a basis for just action. Anyone who is certain he knows what happens between two people is taking too much on himself. In this case, it would be utterly unjustified to go behind the facts. I repeat, I for one could have no part in it.”

  Quiet. It was time to turn the argument. I said, perhaps I might put another point of view. “Do,” said Arnold Shaw, firm and beady-eyed.

  I was deliberately cool. I didn’t want to get entangled in the legalities of the case, I remarked. So far as they went, the Vice-Chancellor’s statement was unanswerable. And everyone round the table understood the position in which the Disciplinary Committee had found themselves. All that any of us wished to say was, weren’t we making too heavy weather of it? The Committee had been obliged to take action: that was accepted. But wasn’t the penalty, now we had had time to realise the repercussions, too severe? Send the students down for the rest of the academic year, and no one would have asked a question. But were we really intending to cut them off from finishing their university education anywhere? It wouldn’t have happened at other institutions or American colleges that I knew. Wouldn’t it be fairly easy for the Committee to have another look, just as an act of grace?

  Arnold Shaw turned half-left towards me: “Sir Lewis, you’ve just said that this wouldn’t have happened at other institutions?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “I did say that.”

  “You were a don yourself once, weren’t you?”

  That was a rhetorical question.

  “Might I ask,” said Arnold Shaw, “what would have happened at your own college if undergraduates had behaved like this?”

  I answered that I couldn’t recall a case.

  “The question,” he persisted, “seems to me a fair one.”

  Sometimes, I said, I had known blind eyes turned.

  “The question,” Arnold Shaw went on, “still seems to me a fair one. In your college. Two of your own undergraduates and two women. Or in a room in Newnham. What about it?”

  He had won that point, I was thinking to myself. I had to remember a time when Roy Calvert nearly missed a fellowship, because he was suspected, as a matter of gossip, not of proof, of keeping a mistress.

  “I grant you that,” I said with reluctance. “Yes, they’d have been got rid of.”

  Then I recovered myself. “But I want to remind you that that was getting on for thirty years ago. The climate of opinion has changed since then.” I was trying to work on the meeting. “So far as I can gather the sense of this Court today, the general feeling is very different from what it would have been thirty years ago. Or even ten.”

  Some murmurs of support. One or two noes. I was right, though. The tone that morning had been calmer and more relaxed than in our youth most of us could have imagined.

  “I’ve told you before, I don’t believe in climates of opinion,” said Shaw. “That seems to me a dangerous phrase. But even if opinions have changed, are you maintaining that moral values have changed too?”

  I had had too much pra
ctice at committees to be drawn. Arnold Shaw wore a curving, sharp-edged smile, enjoying the debate, confident that he had had the better of it. So he had. But, with some, he was doing himself harm. They wanted a bit of give-and-take, not his brand of dialectic.

  I was having to make my next, and final, move. I looked across at Denis Geary, the only useful ally there, wishing that we could confer. I was trying to think of two opposite aims at once, which was a handicap in any kind of politics. On the one hand, I didn’t want Shaw to do himself more harm (about that Geary would have been indifferent): if we pressed it to a vote, the Vice-Chancellor would get his support, but – as I had told him flatly the night before – it would be remembered against him. On the other hand, I wasn’t ready to surrender. For the students’ sake? For the sake of the old-Adam-ego, for after all I was fighting a case? That didn’t matter. Someone was saying, and this time the words were clear: “If only it hadn’t happened on the University premises.”

  I had been reflecting only for moments. There wasn’t time to delay. But I found myself infected by a subterranean amusement. Arnold Shaw had made me think back to my college in the thirties: and, hearing that single comment, I was thinking back again. A college meeting. Report of a pyromaniac. He had set fire to his sitting-room once before, and that was thought to be accidental. Now he had done it again. One of the senior fellows, our aesthete, old Eustace Pilbrow, raised his voice. The young man must be got out of college at once. That day. But he must be found (since Pilbrow was a kind man) a very good set of lodgings in the town.

  “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.

  4: A Simple Home

  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.