Into the pulsing body of False Trentham pours his model’s high color. The body softens and solidifies. Warmth radiates: he fills the space he occupies.
“Mind you,” the preferable student says, “I wonder if we ever know what’s going on in someone else’s head—if they’re in pain, or listening, or if”—he pauses with a smile at me—“they care much what we think.” He drops his eyes. “Or think us capable of thought at all.”
“That is the solipsistic point of view,” I say. “Best to assume everyone thinks.”
“And feels,” Trentham urges.
“I feel I ought to thank you properly, at least.” I get up, test my ankle, find it strong enough, and limp the few paces to where he stands. And rest my chin on his shoulder, my arm lightly about his waist, partly to know that he is flesh and blood. He turns and hugs me with some force.
“War’s coming,” he murmurs. “Roehm has been shot. It makes one think. I’m not brave, but I’ll act as if I am.”
I’m not sure what to say to this unfocused fear, although I sympathize with it. The specters of the morning nag me, too, so I suggest a walk. Some coffee in the Market Square. Trentham is moodily subdued.
“Alec,” he says, “d’you think they’d shoot us—our sort—here?”
“I’ve never given it much thought. Some might.”
No more I had. And yet, as soon as said, I know it to be true.
My foot is comfortable and we make fair progress on King’s Parade, the day now clear but cold, the skies packed down, until a crowd of agitators stops us on the road to Great St. Mary’s—anti-war radicals, vocal, shivering.
Trentham explains the bone of contention: the Tivoli is showing a new film this week, Our Fighting Navy, which is, so he says, the “most appalling propaganda for the weapons’ manufacturers.” I spot some notable Quakers holding placards, among them Arthur Eddington, that eminent and kindly soul whose moustache hangs like Spanish moss over a hidden entrance to the underworld. The rest are King’s students mostly, a few Nomads, the usual skeptics. They are to march at noon on the theater, where opposing militarists are out in force.
The pacifists do not huddle, despite the chill. They listen, read leaflets, stand off from each other. I note the absence of the émigré fraternity, the Jews lately arrived. I wonder what they’d make of this, and wonder it aloud.
Trentham responds. He makes a little speech about the fight for peace exceeding circumstantial barbarism. “It isn’t just a stance, dictated by the Chancellor, or Parliament’s warmongering,” he says. “It is a point of principle. I couldn’t fight.” He stops, reflects. “But that doesn’t mean I’d run.”
I brought him out for coffee, but some different purpose is at work. Events are mustering themselves to illustrate a proof, of Trentham’s bravery or—what? I look down at my shoes. I drag my feet.
We skirt the market, passing fruiterers and old clothes’ men, the grocer with baskets of late samphire, the rows of parked Bentleys and scattered bicycles, until we reach Rosselli’s cafeteria beside the Tivoli. A few whiskery men in homburgs line the steps—hardly a force. In front of them, some underfed idlers. Reservists, probably. Where is the vocal military support? Where are the rustic patriots, the Tories low and high? Only the café teems, with wives, shoppers, and butchers’ boys waving their mugs, haggling for tea.
Trentham directs me to a window table and a view of the approaching pacifists, who do not seem so disparate as heretofore and wear the leveled expression of those who, on a point of principle, know what they’re going to do. And in the scuffle, it’s an ardent objector who has the best of it, before the two policemen in the back of Rosselli’s put on helmets and go outside to break things up. His last punch thrown, into the face of an astonished veteran with pouchy eyes, the fighter is restrained to jeers and shouts. But by our seat he stops, struggling within his captors’ arms, the other side of the window.
He frees one hand. He points at us, at me. His face is flushed, working with muffled rage. He spits upon the glass. Shrill calumnies draw interest from the crowd, and even from the policemen who edge closer, searching the café’s silent depths. For Rosselli’s is emptying, its stoves unlit, its tables cleared or abandoned. A cup rocks on its side. A light goes off. Out of the door into the street the customers go, the mothers and their smiling, headscarfed friends; the satisfied retired teachers who can’t remember what they taught; urgent young scribes, tradesmen yawning (they’re up at four, the market day is almost done), choirboys clutching their dog-eared copies of Stanford in C, Molyneaux with a bloodstained handkerchief pressed to his mouth, Stallbrook from Wargrave, puce with lust or shame, and Matron yapping on her lead.
The rest, all those who spend their lives in restaurants eavesdropping on the next table, are chivvied through the doorway by Piero Rosselli himself. Go on, he says to the rowers hugging their puppet blades, “Ma andiamo!”
“What will you have?” Trentham asks me.
In Market Square, the Bentleys’ doors open and men get out, carrying planks, nothing so very bad, but then I cannot tell idlers from subversives. They build a scaffold in the center of the market and put sawdust down.
“What do you feel as if you’d like?” Trentham demands again.
I will not look out of the window anymore.
According to the menu, I can have Set One or Set Zero.
Trentham is calm; needs me to act as if nothing is wrong. His neat solicitude, nice hair, and very nearly straight necktie are true. But looking at the bunch of paper flowers in the vase, I think of all the real blooms twenty yards away, the bucket’s sloppy edge, the roars of approval, the generous display.
Dear June,
It’s interesting that you should mention fair play, because as you know I’ve always felt it to be an important point. If a machine appears to think, why should we go on insisting it does not? And then the subject came up again at that very dinner you mention with Max N. My probation officer was present, yes, but then it is his job to keep an eye on me, and as it happens the arrangement is quite convivial. He is an intelligent young man—he was the one who congratulated me on my “lovely statement,” as I think I told you—and was asking me if I’d ever been a member of the Cambridge secret societies. Max choked on his homemade sponge cake and said they wouldn’t have been very secret with me on board, which I took to be an unkind reference to my cantabile voice, or possibly my innate sense of style, but June, I forgave him. I said I understood him (the officer) to mean the Nomads, and, no, they’d never made any overtures. And then I stopped, and thought about it.
Because the point of the Nomads’ ceremonious election procedure was that you never knew if it was taking place or not. Very unfair. You could be in bed with someone or making tea in your underclothes or on the toilet and someone might ask you a question (call out to you, I imagine, if you were on the toilet) and that would be the interview and you wouldn’t know anything about it. You wouldn’t have any way of knowing the significance of anything: the whole of your life could have a determined structure—be part of an interview—and you wouldn’t know.
And if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be any less free to “do as you please,” it always seemed to me. If a computer somehow managed to simulate a world with conscious yous and mes running about in it, then from your point of view and mine we’d be conscious and the fact that we were simulated would be neither here nor there.