Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury Page B

accents and short hair. The countryside around
was hunting country. They sat down in Windsor chairs and ordered. Treece now found himself next to Butterfield, the man who ran the Department of Adult Education. Butterfield, who had got the job
because at the interview he claimed that he had once taught an all-in wrestler to love Shakespeare (he was, Butterfield explained afterwards, a very literate all-in wrestler), always described
himself as ‘a pleb’; it was his ambition to retire and keep a pub somewhere. Academic life at once charmed and bored him; he liked, as he said, to be in the vicinity of a university,
but not too firmly anchored to it. He used to go over to Cheltenham most weekends; he was having an affair with a very slick and sophisticated woman who had a hairdresser’s shop. The woman
had now decided that she wanted to marry Butterfield, and he was having rather a bad time; he had told the woman, falsely, that he was already married, and she now wanted to meet his wife so that
they could decide between them who was to have him. ‘She’s here,’ said Butterfield. ‘She’s rampaged all over the town, looking for my wife. If you should come across
her, don’t tell her I’m single. That would be the finish.’ Butterfield, who, rumour had it, had fathered two children by his hairdresser, didn’t look any too worried; he was
splendidly aware of his ability to cope with the most extreme situations. ‘I’m a bit of a rat, aren’t I?’ said Butterfield. ‘Still, they say the strongest human
instinct is self-preservation, and once they get the noose round your neck, you can never get it off.’
    ‘. . . I always feel that reading does much more good to others than it does to me,’ Treece found a stout elderly lady saying to him good-naturedly, as she sipped a gin and
orange.
    The children’s novelist now leaned over. ‘Do you read much children’s literature, Professor?’ he asked. ‘I don’t,’ said Treece. ‘I think
you’re ignoring, if you don’t mind my saying so, a very fruitful field for study,’ said the novelist. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Treece, ‘but the
trouble with me is that I have a sophisticated mind. Was it Chesterton who said he didn’t like children because they smelled of bread and butter? I dislike them because they aren’t
grown up.’
    ‘But aren’t you charmed by their innocence?’ asked the lady in the flowerpot hat.
    ‘But innocence is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?’ said Treece, ‘and in any case innocent is the last thing that children are. I think they’re cruel and
savage. If I had any children, I’d lock them up in a cage until they could prove that they were moral creatures. That’s because the only interesting thing about man, to me, is that
he’s a moral animal; and children aren’t.’
    ‘I can see now why you aren’t married,’ said the lady in the flowerpot hat. ‘Of course, you’d soon change your mind if you had any children.’
    ‘Besides, children are like old people; they’re culturally disconnected,’ said Treece.
    ‘You think that children should be seen and not heard then?’ asked the novelist.
    ‘I don’t approve either category,’ said Treece. He was growing expansive, more and more so as the day wore on; he thought the bit about not being married was funny enough,
funny but true, but that all this was funnier still. However, no one seemed very amused. He realized that he was in a mood of almost manic elation and irresponsibility, and that he would have to
pay for it all with a countervailing depression. ‘Of course,’ he said, concluding the topic, ‘what you don’t realize is, I’m a bastard.’
    The lady in the flowerpot hat had sweet little ears, and Treece was just taking a really good look at them when Butterfield turned around to him, and said, ‘Mr Schenk asked me to have a
word with you about the poetry conference. He wanted to know if you’d be prepared to speak at