Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury

than
anything
, and I
don’t even know why.
    The speaker stopped, and Treece thanked him, and asked for questions. ‘I just want to say that I think you’re a very interesting man,’ said a woman from the back. Someone else
then asked how many people Enid Blyton were. Mrs Rogers smiled, and said how interesting it all had been, and how all mothers were often frightened to think of the hands they left the writing of
children’s books in, but now that she’d seen the speaker, she would have no qualms about letting her children read his work. After this a lady at the back, with a long-drawling voice,
said from beneath a large flowerpot hat: ‘Well, I read one of your things, and I didn’t like it.’ ‘Why not, madam?’ said the speaker, a little put out; he was the sort
of man that always called ladies ‘madam’, and it brought in the aroma of an
ancien régime
; one thought of Wells and Bennett and a sort of literary society which was gone –
gone, no doubt, for good. ‘I don’t know
why
,’ said the woman in the flowerpot hat. ‘I just didn’t like it.’ Treece thanked the speaker and brought the
meeting to a close. Mrs Rogers beamed sweetly at him as he did so.
    It was the custom for the members of the literary society then to retire to the lounge of the Black Swan Hotel, where they took tea together. Shepherding their speaker fondly, they made their
way there in cavalcade, past Dolcis and Woolworths and Sainsburys. In the lounge of the hotel were huge leather armchairs that looked like cows; you wouldn’t have thought it odd if someone
had come along to milk them. Here they sat and looked at each other. The lady in the flowerpot hat sat down beside Treece and sighed deeply. ‘It’s terrible to be abnormal,’ she
said, and heaved another sigh. ‘Did
you
have an unhappy childhood?’ ‘I had an unhappy maturity,’ said Treece. ‘I had a frankly bloody childhood,’ said the
woman. ‘Tell me, do you like this hairstyle? Be frank: I can have it done again somewhere else.’
    ‘Darling, I was going to ask you what happened to it,’ said a man in a bow tie. ‘You could have fought back. Or did they give you an anaesthetic?’
    ‘You should have seen what he did to my dog,’ said the lady. She turned again to Treece. ‘I suppose you know lots of writers,’ she said.
    ‘I know some,’ said Treece, ‘but I think I prefer people.’ This remark was not intended as a sally; Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as
a conscious effort, and people, who didn’t; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.
    The lady in the flowerpot hat greeted this with a little giggle; then she said, ‘Do you know any of the London crowd?’ This was said so wistfully, with such an air of hope, that
Treece was sorry to disappoint her. But really, he had to admit, he didn’t.
    ‘It’s so difficult if you don’t live in London,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat. ‘I don’t like London, but I must say I often wish I lived there.
It’s so hard to get published if you aren’t in the swim, and can’t butter up the right people. I mean, I have published, but it’s twice as hard as it would be if you lived
in London. People don’t
ask
you for things.’
    ‘I think it’s much easier now for people from the provinces to publish than it ever was,’ said Treece. ‘Don’t you?’
    ‘Well, no, I don’t think that,’ said the woman. ‘People seem to think that it was hard, once, for provincial writers to get published, but I don’t think it was any
harder then. I think you need to be in London more now than you did in those days . . .’
    Treece had the wit to perceive that this topic was a matter of something more than passing interest to his companion, that they had touched on the soul of something; and it was not difficult to
see what it was, for Treece knew reasonably well the sort of surburban milieu in which the woman circulated;