The History Man

things, a handyman's skills he had not known he possessed, skills he had, he supposed, picked up from his father. They had all the windows fixed and the boards taken off the ones at the front. Of course, because the place was condemned, it was pointless to do anything major to the fabric. But the house was surprisingly sound. Water ran in through the roof beside the chimney stacks; someone' got up there and stripped away all the lead flashing, not even before they had moved in, but a little after, one night when Barbara was there but Howard was away, up in London doing a television programme on the drugs problem on which he was taking a liberal line. The windows kept getting smashed, but Howard learned how to putty in new ones; and after a while this stopped, as if, by some massive consensus created between themselves and the unknown, their residence had at last been granted.

All through that first autumn term, the Kirks worked on their terrace house, trying at first to make it habitable, then more than habitable. Howard would dash back from the university in the minivan as soon as he was through with his seminars and tutorials-those instructive, passionate occasions where he was experimenting with new forms of teaching and relationship-in order to change clothes and set to work again on the rehabilitation. He got some help to fix things, like the lavatories, which were smashed when they came, and the stair-rail which he couldn't manage himself. But most of the work the Kirks did together. They spent two weeks stripping Off all the brown paint that coated the interior woodwork, and then brushed seal into the natural colour of the wood. They bought saws and planks-and rulers and replaced floorboards that had gone in. Singlehandedly Howard started painting, doing a lot of walls white and a lot of facing walls black, while Barbara borrowed a sewing machine and put up wide-weave curtains in yellow and orange at the windows. Since the place had to be rewired, they took out all the central lights from the ceilings and focused new lights off the walls at the ceilings and off the floor at the walls. Howard, as the term went on, got to know more and more students; they started to help. Four of them with a rented sander exposed, and then waxed yellow with a rented waxer, the good old wood of the floors. Another brought a sand-blaster and cleaned off the walls of the basement. They would stop in the middle of this to drink or eat or make love or have a party; they were making a free and liveable open space. At first the main furniture was the mattresses and the cushions that lay on the floor, but gradually the Kirks got around to going and buying things, mostly on trips up to London; what they bought was transient furniture, the kind that inflated, or folded up, or fitted this into that. They built desks with filing cabinets and doors, as they had in Leeds, and bookcases out of boards and bricks. What had started as a simple attempt to make space liveable in gradually turned into something stylish, attractive, but that was all right; it still remained for them an informal camp site, a pleasant but also a completely uncommitting and unshaped environment through which they could move and do their thing.

One of the results of this was that things became surprisingly better between the two of them. For the first time, they were giving shape to their lives, making a statement, and doing it out of their own skill and craftsmanship, working together. Watermouth began to please them more and more; they found shops where you could buy real yoghourt, and home-baked bread. They acquired a close, companionable tone with each other, partly because they had not made other friends yet, acquired other points of reference, partly because the people they did meet 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 clearheaded 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, white-washed 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', were being served by quiet, recessive students. The Kirks, Howard in an old fur coat, Barbara in a big lace dress spacious enough to contain the bump of her pregnancy, felt themselves stark against this: intrusive figures in the scene. Marvin took them around, and introduced them, in the near dark, to many faces; only after a while did it dawn upon the Kirks that these were people in disguise, and that these faces he was meeting, above the suits, were the faces of his own colleagues, clad in the specialist wear they had acquired from marriages and funerals, supporting ceremony.

In the adjacent countryside, disturbed birds chattered, and sheep ran about heavily and snorted; Howard stared, and wondered at his place in all this. Barbara, who was cold, went inside, escorted by a punctilious Marvin, concerned about her pregnancy; Howard found himself detained in lengthy conversation by a middle-aged man with a benign, self-conscious charm, and the healthy, crack-seamed face of an Arctic explorer. Moths flew about them while they talked. Howard, in his fur coat, discoursed on a topic he had grown greatly interested in, the social benefits and purgative value of pornography in the cinema. 'I've always been a serious supporter of pornography, Dr Kirk,' said the man he was talking to, 'I have expressed my view in the public forum many times.' It dawned on Howard, from the tone of demotic regality in which he was being addressed, that he was talking to no other person than Millington Harsent, that radical educationalist, former political scientist, well-known Labour voter and mountain climber, who was Vice-Chancellor of the university of which Howard was now a part. He was a man of whom Howard had heard much; the radical aroma, the sense of educational freshness, that the colour supplements and professional journals had found in Watermouth were said to emanate from him. More locally, he had the reputation of suffering from building mania, or, as it was put, an Edifice Complex, and to have put many of his energies into dreaming up, along with Jop Kaakinen, the futuristic campus where Howard taught. It is hard to be a Vice- Chancellor, who must be all things to all men; Harsent had won the reputation for being this, but in reverse; he was thought by the conservatives to be an extreme radical, by the radicals to be an extreme conservative. But now this man, who was known for bonhomous democracy (he rode round the campus on a bicycle, and was said to have smoked pot occasionally at student parties), stood before Howard, and spoke to him warmly, and squeezed one of his shoulders, and congratulated the university on Howard's presence there, and discussed his book as if he knew what was in it; Howard warmed, and felt at ease. 'I can't tell you how pleased we are to have someone of your stature here,' said Harsent. 'You know,' said Howard, 'I'm quite pleased to be here.'

Harsent and Howard passed into the house together, in search of the source of the Niersteiner; Harsent pressed on Howard, out of a briefcase in the hall, a copy of the university's development plan, and a special brochure, an elegant document printed on dove-grey paper, and written five years earlier still, at the beginning of all