Cuts: a Novel by Malcolm Bradbury

Author:Malcolm Bradbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2015-03-25T15:01:07+00:00

8

WHEN HENRY BABBACOMBE made his second arrival at the great glass tower that housed Eldorado Television, he did not, it has to be admitted, cut nearly as much of a dash as before.

The long and troubling journey across the bumpy, mountainous spinal cord of England proved no simpler by car than by train, and no more pleasant by night than by day. Great howling winds troubled the moorland tops, a baleful moon shone red, and just before dawn Henry’s Traveller bumped into a very large sheep that had chosen to pass the night in the middle of the road. The animal, after Henry had extricated it, appeared unhurt, though angry, and ran off into the darkness, bleating blasphemously. The car had done worse, and Henry’s radiator promptly leaked out its contents. By the time the meeting at Eldorado began, Henry was still completing a three-hour wait for a small village garage to open, and it was another two hours before the repair was complete. Henry decided to cut across to the motorway, beset by flood, tempest and a plague of savage lorries. These passed him at lunatic speeds in the fast lane, flashing great lights, spraying him with sheets of water, every kind of detritus, and finally a hail of gravel which shattered his windscreen. That took another hour to mend, and it was already early afternoon by the time that Henry reached the great steaming city that was his destination. Here he spent another futile hour, circulating a devious and obscure one-way system that spiralled round the Eldorado building. The great glass tower rose above him, ever visible, never attainable. Finally Henry disposed of his car in a concrete, graffiti-daubed multi-storey car park, and, his briefcase on his head, made the last stage of his journey on foot through the pouring rain.

There was a short cut through the courts and archways of the great Victorian university, and Henry took it. The great Gothic buildings, much blackened by the industrial smoke that had largely financed them in the first place, stood silent, for evidently in the world of academic life the peace of vacation, the ideal time in the university calendar, continued. Something like a hallowed silence reigned. A few dirty pigeons cooed malevolently at him from the sagging gutterings, and from the stone head of the statue of the founding Victorian philanthropist that rose up like a ghost in the middle of the court. The bell in the broken clock tower bronchitically croaked out the turning hour. Someone without musical ability was practising the bassoon. A few notices flapped away on a board, announcing essay competitions on whether there should be a third sex or pointing directions to a place where one could give one’s blood. The campus was quite different from Henry’s own, and yet he felt at once at home in the distinctive world of intellectual contemplation, quietude, mannered eccentricity, and indifference to sad and foolish reality, which quite simply, he felt, represented the best of all human life.

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