Free The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury Page B

treated them as an interesting, attached couple. Towards Christmas, Howard got a large royalty cheque for his book, and put most of the money into the house, buying some white Indian rugs that would cover the downstairs floors. Barbara’s was a smaller, more manageable pregnancy this time. Because they lived in a slum area, she got a good deal of treatment and, though it was a second baby, she was allowed forty-eight hours in hospital after the delivery. Howard was there, instructive in his white mask, as she produced the new child. It was a simple, routine delivery, she knew the rhythms perfectly: an elegant achievement, and one that, this time, seemed to offer no direct threat to Howard. He had not had time to get on with another book, but he was deep in pleasure with his new job; he had good students, and the courses he was working out were going well, amassing a considerable following. The house was now in good shape for the baby to come back to; it had its own room, as did the older child; the floors were clean, and there was a sound kitchen. The baby lay in its carrycot in its room; a lot of people came by; they spent a buoyant Christmas. ‘I never wanted any possessions, never,’ you could hear Barbara saying, as they stood in the house, during the parties they now started to give. ‘I never wanted marriage; Howard and I just wanted to live together,’ she said too, as they met more and more people. ‘I never wanted a house, just a place to be in,’ she also said, as they looked around at the bright clean walls and the clear wood floors, ‘they can pull it down when they like now.’ But the house was a perfect social space, and it was regularly filled with people; and as time went on and the place became a centre it seemed harder and harder to think that it ever could be.
    As it turned out, there were a lot of people, and a lot of parties, in Watermouth. All through that autumn they had been going to them, in the gaps between working on the house: student parties, political parties, young faculty parties, parties given by vague, socially unlocated swingers who were in town for a while and then disappeared. There were even formal parties; once they were invited out by Howard’s head of department, Professor Alan Marvin, that well-known anthropologist, author of a standard work entitled The Bedouin Intelligentsia . Marvin was one of the originators, the founding fathers, of the university at Watermouth; these were already a distinguishable breed, and, like most of the breed, the Marvins had chosen to live in a house of some dignity in the countryside on the further side of the university, in that bewildering world of paddocks and stables Henry had adopted. The Kirks had already made their mark with the young faculty, but they were instinctively at odds with the older ones; they had a clear-headed refusal to be charmed, or deceived by apparent or token innovation. They drove out in their minivan, self-consciously smelling of the turpentine they had used to get paint off themselves after an afternoon’s work on the house, a smell that gave them the free-floating dignity of craftsmen. The Marvins’ house turned out to be an old, whitewashed converted farmhouse; there were Rovers and Mercedes parked in the drive when they arrived. Howard’s colleagues had warned him that the Marvins lived in a certain Oxbridge dignity, even though Marvin himself was, in the department, a shabby little man who always wore three pencils held by metal clips in his top pocket, as if research and accurate recording of data were never very far from his mind. And so it was; in an ostentatious gesture, lights had been strung in the trees of the big gardens that surrounded the house, and there were people in suits – the Kirks saw suits infrequently – on the lawn, where white wine, from bottles labelled ‘Wine Society Niersteiner’, was being served by quiet, recessive students. The