Malcolm Bradbury - The History Man

'You were very anti-male last time we talked,' says Howard. 'Oh, last time we talked,' says Felicity, 'that was last term. I was coming to terms with my sexuality then. But now I've found that my sexuality isn't the one I've come to terms with, if you can see what I mean.'

'Oh, I can,' says Howard. 'Well, that shouldn't be a problem.'

'Oh, it is, Dr Kirk, Howard.' says Felicity Phee. 'You see, the girl I'm with, Maureen, says it's reactionary. She says I'm collapsing into a syndrome of subservience. She says I have a slave mentality.'

'She does,' says Howard. 'Yes,' says Felicity, 'and, I mean, I couldn't do something reactionary, could I?'

'Oh, no, Felicity,' says Howard. 'So what would you do?' says Felicity. 'I mean, if you were me, and belonged to an oppressed sex.'

'I'd do what I wanted to,' says Howard. 'Maureen throws shoes at me. She says I'm an Uncle Tom. I had to talk to you. I said to myself, I have to talk to him.' 'Look, Felicity,' says Howard, 'there's only one rule. Follow the line of your own desires. Don't accept other people's versions, unless you believe them true. Isn't that right?'

'Oh Howard,' says Felicity, kissing him on the cheek, 'you're marvellous. You give such good advice.' Howard says: 'That's because it so closely resembles what people want to hear.'

'No, it's because you're wise,' says Felicity. 'Oh, boy, do I need a flat male chest for a change.'

He goes through into the kitchen. It is filled with people; a male human leg protrudes from under the table. A baby lies asleep in a carrycot on top of the refrigerator. 'Is it your view that there is a constant entity definable as virtue?' asks the Pakistani thought leader of the advanced priest, in front of the globular wallpaper. The record player roars; the booming decibels, the yelps of a youthful pop group on heat, bounce round the house. Howard takes some of the bottles of wine, dark red in the glass, and uncorks them. A stout, maternal girl comes into the kitchen and picks up a baby's bottle, which has been warming in a saucepan on the cooker. She tries the contents by squirting them delicately onto her brown arm. 'Oh, shit,' she says. 'Who's Hegel?' says a voice; Howard looks up, and it is the bra-less girl who had come to his office that morning. 'Someone who…' says Howard. 'It's Howard,' says Myra Beamish, standing beside him, her wig tipped slightly to one side, laughing enormously. She has her arm around Dr Macintosh, who still holds his bottle. 'Oh, Howard, you give great parties,' she says. 'Is it going well?' asks Howard. 'Oh, great,' says Myra, 'they're playing "Who am I?" in the living-room. And "What are the students going to do next?" in the dining-room. And "I gave birth at three and at five I was up and typing my thesis" in the hall.'

'There's also a thing called "Was it good for you, too, baby?" in the guest bedroom,' says Macintosh. 'It sounds like the description of a reasonable kind of party,' says Howard. 'How does someone as beastly as you manage to make life so nice for us?' asks Myra. 'It's zap,' says Howard. 'It's zing,' says Myra. 'It's zoom,' says Macintosh.

Howard picks up the new bottle, and returns to the livingroom. He bears the libation about, hoping for transfiguration to follow. 'Is his vasectomy reversible or not?' asks someone. 'Tell him you're coming to Mexico with me,' says someone. A fat girl with chopped-down hair, lying on the floor, looks up at Howard and says: 'Hey, Howard, you're beautiful.'

'I know,' says Howard. Across the room Barbara is ministering with nuts and pretzels. 'All right?' asks Howard, approaching her. 'Good,' says Barbara. He carries the bottle over to a corner of the room, where, in a cluster, stands a group of bearded Jesuses and dark, sunglassed faces, students from the Revolutionary Student Front. They look aggressive and they stand in a rather tight circle; 'We only want to destroy them,' Peter Madden is saying in a loud voice. 'It's not personal.' Somewhere in the middle of the circle is a human figure, smaller than the others. It wears a white hat. 'Can I ask you just one wee question?' asks the figure in the middle, in a female, faintly Scots voice. 'Don't you think that politics is really just about the lowest form of human knowledge? Lesser than morals, or religion, or aesthetics, or philosophy. Or anything that's concerned with real human density?'

'Christ, look,' says Peter Madden, who stands there in his gunmetal sunglasses, 'all forms of knowledge are ideological. That means they are politics.'

'Are reducible to politics,' says the female voice. 'Can be rendered down, like soup.' Beck Pott is there, in a combat uniform with a 'Rocket Commander' patch sewn onto the shoulder, and with a white silver peace symbol hanging on a chain around her neck; she turns and finds Howard behind her, coming with the bottle. 'Who is this crazy doll?' she asks. 'She says we don't need a revolution.'

'There are people who think like that,' says Howard. 'I don't understand them,' says Beck Pott. 'There have to be,' says Howard; 'if there weren't, we wouldn't need a revolution.'

'You're right there, Howard,' says Beck Pott, 'right.' Howard offers the bottle to the girl in the middle of all this; she wears a blue trouser suit and a neat scarf, and is much too formal for the party. 'A wee drop,' says the girl. 'If you're not the solution,' says Peter Madden, 'you're part of the problem.'

'It would be terribly arrogant of me to believe I was the solution to anything,' says the girl. 'Or you, too, for that matter.'

Howard turns, with his bottle, and goes back through the house, to the gaunt, flowerless Victorian conservatory at the back of it. The pink sodium lights of Watermouth shine in through its glass roof; this is now the only illumination. The place booms with violent sound. Dancers sway their bodies; a baby, high up in a papoose-rig, jogs on the back of a noisy daddy. The German girl in the see-through blouse has started, in a corner, with a group of men around her, to take it off. She lifts it upward, over her head, and it whirls in the air above them for a moment. It is hard to get through the crowd. 'Who's Hegel?' says someone. It is impossible now quite to tell who are faculty, who students, who strangers, who friends. The social mix has remixed itself. The music thumps in the half-dark; bodies gyrate, and minds are sacrificed to beat. The Catholic priest's Ouspenskyite companion is close by him, on the floor, demonstrating bodily positions from an exercise she has recently learned. The German girl has joined the dancing, and is gyrating in front of him, her big breasts bouncing, a mobile Aryan sculpture of the New Woman. 'This is heuristic, ja?' she says to Howard. 'ja,' says Howard. 'Gesundheit.' Howard looks at the moving spectacle; as he watches, he sees the silvery twirl of a glass as it spins from a hand and crashes to the floor. The fragments disappear under the busy feet. 'Are all these persons intellectuals?' asks the Pakistani thought leader of the Catholic priest. 'The orgy is replacing the mass as the prime sacrament,' says the priest. 'Is this an orgy?' asks the Pakistani. 'There are better,' says the priest. But not for Howard; what he sees in front of him is man free, free of economic timidity, sexual fear, prescriptive social norms, man cocky with the goodness of his own being. Now food, drink, and Barbara all seem to have disappeared, but no matter. The party is now totally self-governing, feeding on its own being.

He walks back through the house. The party is busy everywhere; everywhere, it seems, but by the wall in the living-room, where a large circle of space has cleared around the dark girl in the trouser suit and the white hat, who stands, one leg crossed over the other, holding up a veined marble egg that is part of the mantelpiece decor, and inspecting it with a fastidious expression. Her air is that of a figure in a Victorian painting, portraying, in rococo fashion, innocence. Her clothes have a formality which makes it impossible to judge her age, and therefore guess whether she is a teacher or a student. Howard takes the bottle over to her, and puts it to her glass. 'Just a very, very tiny drop,' says the girl. 'Enough.'