Stepping Westward by Malcolm Bradbury

Author:Malcolm Bradbury [Bradbury, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781447205616
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

5

THE FALL SEMESTER at Benedict Arnold had not begun; there were four more days of peace before it did. Party and the campus rested on in the summer sunlight, and the mountains sat quietly behind them all. In the university buildings, classrooms stood empty and cavernous, their desks with little curved writing arms waiting to be filled. The soda fountain in the union contained only faculty members in nylon shirts and the campus maintenance men and policemen. In the university bookstore, behind a display of university pennants and sweatshirts with cartoon characters on the bosoms, a single, bored clerk read, for curiosity’s sake, Up from Liberalism, a required text in the sophomore course on International Affairs in the Modern World (Dr Jochum). Only a few small faculty children bathed noisily in the lake. In the driveway of the Sigma Chi house the fraternity’s red fire-engine, an assertive symbol of manhood, awaited the return of the residents from the delectations of the fifty states and Bermuda and Europe. The clean air sang. In the mornings, before the sun grew hot, the day came up fresh, bright and cool. People stirred early; at the Bourbon household Dr Bourbon was up with . . . if not the lark, then the vulture. Clad in a handsome Japanese kimono, carrying about a peanut-butter sandwich, he did half an hour of push-ups on the patio and turned on the sprinklers before going into his study to write, before breakfast, a thousand words of Marston: the Man, the Moment and the Milieu. The keys of the typewriter flicked; the pages of reference books flipped; and new horizons of Marston thinking opened while the sprinklers bubbled outside. The carillon on campus began a morning rendition of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’. The garbage cart coasted down the street. In bed James Walker slept further on into the day.

The heat thickened. The mountains grew hazy. Late night adulterers walked quietly home. Crispin, the Bourbons’ maladjusted son, rose, showered, pulled on his Levi’s and a sweatshirt, fixed himself some fruit-juice, got into his hotrod car and roared away in a scurry of dust, heading for town to exercise his devil. The carillon played ‘These Foolish Things’. Walker stirred but slept on. The sun rose higher and the areas of shade disappeared. Mrs Bourbon, in a Japanese kimono that matched Harris’s, got up and went into the kitchen to ladle out breakfast, a feast habitually used by Alphonse and Brandy as missiles in substitute for other forms of communication between them. The carillon rendered ‘Bless You for Being an Angel’. And Walker stirred and began to heave himself into consciousness. The day shone bright into the room, penetrating the vestigial drapes. The light had a colour and vigour that he was not used to and he found himself meeting it – was it the light that did it, or something else? – with expectation. His dreams seemed curiously energetic; his body, this last few days, seemed to be taking on new power.

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