“That,” said Bowman, “might be acknowledging that they have squatters’ rights. Depending on what you say.”
“They probably do have squatters’ rights,” said Tewfell.
“They think they do, do they?” said Bowman.
Tewfell didn’t answer. Bowman asked what the adjacent landowner thought.
“The land belongs to a Mr. and Mrs. Gunner Nighby,” said Hodgkiss. “Mr. Nighby has left the country after some problems with the law. Mrs. Nighby was, until recently, in hospital. She is now in a therapeutic community in her own house—Dun Vale Hall. Various letters have been written to her about the use of the land, but no replies have been received, that I know of. The land was never in use, although sheep did graze from time to time, both from her farm and from others.”
“I think watchfulness is all that is called for,” said Wijnnobel. “At present.”
“If we bore them enough with inaction,” said Hodgkiss, with a pursed smile, “they may strike camp and move on.”
Tewfell, who had been staring baffled at Wijnnobel, felt restored to healthy animosity by the high little laugh with which Hodgkiss accompanied this observation.
Striking camp was by now an accurate metaphor for any potential dismantling of the anti-institution. Someone had procured—whether by theft or by loan was not quite clear—two large marquees, of the kind normally on hire for wedding receptions or flower shows. One of these had been painted blood-red, and hung with streaming banners of hammers, sickles and little brass bells. It had a placard at the door saying Mao-Marx Marquee. There was a poster with a picture of Che Guevara. Inside the space had been divided into one large speaking area (“Bring your own chair, stool, cushion, carpet etc.”) and several small spaces for discussion groups. The other had been painted in gaudy psychedelic jungle and hothouse floral patterns, pink, mauve, lime, banana, sky blue, orange. Over the door hung a board painted lovingly by Deborah Ritter, announcing that this was “The Teach-Inn of Cosmic Empathetic Wisdom.” This work of art (decorated though it was with lotus-flowers and huge blankly calm eyes), was covered with graffiti denying the meaning of these words all and severally. Noteachcan’tbetaught. WisdomisNothing. Cosmosisgrainsofsand. And oddly “Empathyisinvasion.”
Inside the Teach-Inn, there were moveable canvas walls and painted paper screens. There was a space covered with mattresses, velvet cushions and Indian bedspreads, there was a circular dais for musicians and a pile of cushions for listeners, there were spaces resembling fairground booths which offered information on biotic diet and brown rice, a disc exchange and a henna expert who coloured hands, hair, and other body-parts. Everywhere was lit by floating candles in bowls and buckets, by dangling lamps with red glass and brass. Both tents were heated with rickety paraffin stoves, and smelled of paraffin and incense, curry and an underlying taint of sewage (a smell which was indeed everywhere on the anti-campus).
Lectures were advertised daily on notice-boards posted at the doors of the marquees and the door of the cottage occupied by the Core People (they did not want to use the word “administration” and half of them disliked the word “committee”). Lectures that were advertised did not happen, at least as often as they did happen, and they could last anything from a minute—“If you think I think I can tell you anything useful you can think again—” to lectures that went on for four or five hours, to audiences varying from sixty to two or three.
Often also—it was winter, and raining or snowing—the schedules of gatherings were washed into trickles of weeping ink, or blown into trees and bushes (from which nobody thought they need be collected). The trees and bushes were also hung with shreds and streamers of ripped and rippling plastic, moving like perched ghosts or faded knightly pennants. Some of the more mystical Anti-Universitarians thought these bleaching strips resembled Tibetan prayer-rags. Others thought they were not nice and represented the last vestige of capitalist conspicuous waste. No one fetched a ladder to take them down.
Tewfell and Maggie Cringle picked their way through rain, across sucking mud, between the big and little tents, benders and scout tents, wooden huts and bits of sacking. Maggie Cringle was wearing a strawberry-coloured mini-skirt, a tight blue jumper with silver and puce stars sewn on to it and a transparent hooded raincoat, also mini, that skimmed her strawberry buttocks, above an expanse of plum-dark, violet-blue, goose-pimpled fleshy thighs, above a jaunty and very muddy pair of tight white plastic boots. Under the hood her hair was a mass of Medusa-coils. Tewfell, walking behind her, thought, in words, “Mini-skirts only work on thin women.” Maggie Cringle, a second-year student reading English, had been elected because the Vice-Chancellor had said that two student reps would be better than one—for the students—they could feel freer to speak and would have someone to discuss projects and debates with. Tewfell found Cringle’s presence largely hampering. He was more worried about her judging him than whether she supported him. She never said anything, ever, in the university committees, but sat picking at bits of her body and crossing and uncrossing her legs. Her face was heavily made up, with careful eyeliner and dark brownish blusher. Underneath there was a small, nicely symmetrical face with intelligent grey eyes, which he had never really seen, because of the fake eyelashes and the descending hair. But he had noticed that she could not stop looking at Jonty Surtees. She turned into “one of those pointing dogs” he said to himself, when they entered the Cottages.
Outside the cottage, a hand-written schedule promised
“Mao-Tse-Tung-thought—the astonishing genius, philosopher and general poet and statesman”
“Correct theory is fact because it is correct theory.”
“Ongoing analysis of bourgeois ideology. Criticism of British philosophy and economics.”
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. Where shall the young, disgusted with their parents’ materialism and narrowmindedness, look for reality? We can change minds—literally. And minds change matter. They do. Come and hear.”
“The signs of the Zodiac and their esoteric natures.
This week we shall speak of SCORPIO.
Private consultations also given on Tarot,
Clairvoyance and avoiding malign influences.”
Maggie Cringle was intrigued by this last. She stopped to read it, and Tewfell stopped to wait for her. She said she might look in on the talk on Scorpio. “I am a Scorpio,” she said. Tewfell said noncommittally that it might be interesting. He was curious about Eva Wijnnobel.
The atmosphere inside the Griffin Street Cottages was at once heady with loose energy, and soporific with smoke of various kinds, lounging bodies, and streams of speech. There were heaps of paper everywhere now, yellow and purple, posters and pamphlets, typescript and hand-written documents. There was a scattering of enamelled Polish dishes, scarlet and ink-blue, full of half-eaten curry and fruit-skins, amongst the papers. There were two paraffin stoves, a sullen fire in the grate, which belched smoke as Nick and Maggie came in, and a mixture of fug and icy draughts of air. A typewriter clicked; it was Greg Tod, writing an article on the hidden ideology of British historical writings. A ladle clattered. It was Deborah Ritter making soup in a preserving pan. The soup had a strong, pleasant scent of apricots and cumin. Tod wore a tartan blanket like a cloak, and a crimson knitted hat. Waltraut Ross was arguing with Jonty Surtees. Phrases purred through the air like sexual provocations, which perhaps they were. Greg Tod looked up uneasily from time to time and clacked louder. “A culture whose dogmata presume that self-organisation has to be hateful and derogatory,” “The hypostasisation of a static concept of freedom defined as freedom from neurosis,” “ Curing the individual means accepting rebellion or martyrdom ... ,” “false consciousness,” “illusory centre of self ” ...
“Ah, Tewfell,” said Jonty Surtees, stopping Deborah in mid-sentence. “Come to report?”
Nick Tewfell’s hackles wriggled. He knew very well that Surtees regarded him as his delegated and manipulated organiser within the target institution; he
had read the handbooks for revolutionaries; the idea was to keep him happy by showing a specious interest in his own immediate aims (getting rid of maths and language, relaxing exams, improving the library) so that he would be led to help with a far more radical overturning of order. Surtees saw him as a minion reporting to a general. That was OK, as long as he himself knew he was not. Two could use people for their own ends. The presence of the antis could (couldn’t it?) help liberate students from hampering regulations and structures?
That wasn’t why he was here, he knew. It was the whiff of the possibility of unimaginable violent change, that drew him like a magnet crackling with power. He didn’t know what might happen. He didn’t want to back off. He sat down without being asked and offered Surtees his delicious information. Pinsky thought Eichenbaum was a Nazi. He had the references to the offending article. He recited what he could remember of Pinsky’s letter. “The vocabulary echoes the National Socialists’ detestable vocabulary,” “The desirability of breeding improved individuals,” “social-darwinism,” “eugenicist.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Waltraut Ross. “He has to be stopped.”
“We don’t want Pinsky, either. He’s CIA-funded.”
“We don’t know that,” said Greg.
“That’s worse,” said Waltraut. “If it isn’t open, if it’s covert, that’s even worse.”
Deborah Ritter laid aside her ladle and joined them.
“We should organise a march.”
“I support that,” said Nick Tewfell.
“Wait a little, wait a little,” said Jonty Surtees. “The time is not ripe.” He turned to Nick Tewfell. “You must get a copy of the whole Eichenbaum article, and a translation.”
“Get it yourselves. You have contacts in Germany. I’m just a student with an inadequate library. We don’t have old German periodicals.”
“Microfilm,” said Surtees, his eyes glinting with argumentative pleasure.
“OK. I order microfilm. If I can. And they see we are interested. Very clever.”
“He’s right,” said Greg Tod. “Ask the Germans.”
“Then we can march,” said Waltraut.
“Wait a little, wait a little. Let them come, and then confront them. Lie low, and when they are here, throw everything at them. Stick to constant criticism as Che said, and then, when the enemy is assembled, move to de-stabilise. De-sanctify the institutions. Expose the kind of corrupt power-structure they are. Make Sir G’s Round Table into a Witches’ Sabbath.”
“With what ultimate aim?” Nick Tewfell asked.
Surtees smiled. He had the most pleasured, the most animated smile Tewfell had ever seen.
“Anarchy, initially. Followed by a free restructuring. A new Heaven and a new Earth, so to speak.”
Maggie Cringle smiled in response to his smile. Tewfell drew himself together. He said tightly that his own aims were not as extensive as that. He really didn’t want to countenance people like Pinsky and Eichenbaum, who supported, or were supported by, evil entities.
“Evil, you say,” said Jonty Surtees. “You say evil, you don’t say incorrect. Evil is out of my vocabulary. Recognising Evil leads to trying to establish a new Heaven and a new Earth, when the things of this world have been burned away.”
Tewfell realised, with an edge of distaste, that Surtees was off on some trip, had expanded his consciousness chemically in one way or another. Tewfell himself was a cautious man. He liked control too much to experiment. And yet, and yet, the thread of sulphurous smoke, the crackle of hidden flames, attracted him. What if you didn’t compromise, what if you broke up the whole rotten structure, what if you pulled down the self-important mighty? He thought of what eugenicists had done in Auschwitz; he thought of what the CIA was doing in Vietnam; he thought of the crowding police horses in Grosvenor Square, where he had not been.
“We can’t let them come,” said Greg Tod. “We have to take a stand.”
“We must let them come,” said Surtees. “We must be quiet, and secret, and plan our campaign, and blow all this apart when it happens, we must get the police to descend in force, and the Press to expose both of these men—these bad men—and with them the complicity of the Establishment ...”
Nick Tewfell said that the television would be there, as the whole conference was to be filmed by Edmund Wilkie.
“We could hijack the film crew,” said Deborah Ritter. “Tell the world how it is.”
A smell of burning molasses was adding itself to the apricot smell. She went back to her cooking. Surtees grinned mightily at Nick Tewfell.
“This is a great day,” he said. “Well spotted, well spied, Nick Tewfell. Keep your beady eye on developments. Keep us posted in our encampment. Will you stop for soup?”
Nick was feeling suffocated, and it was no meal time he recognised. He said no, he must leave, and took Maggie Cringle with him.
Maggie said she just wanted to bob in to the Talk-Inn and see if there was any astrology going on. Astrology was so fascinating.
“Astrology is nonsense,” said Nick Tewfell.
“No more than most things,” said Maggie. “And it’s old, and it seems to work, and it’s fascinating—”
Nick reflected that it might be expedient to see Lady W. in action. She was, she must be, the weak spot in the Vice-Chancellor’s armour. It might prove very useful to know what she was up to.
The astrological booth in the Teach-Inn was full of a gloomy hay-coloured light from the canvas roof, spotted by patches of crimson light from two ornamental silver lamps with glass shades which had been arranged provisionally on cast-iron tripods. To the left of the space was a small cast-iron table with Egyptian-looking legs in the form of sharp-breasted sphinxes, painted gilt. On it were terrestrial and celestial globes, an astrolabe, a few peacock feathers in a silvery vase, and some small Egyptian-looking figurines of cats, scarabs, coiled snakes, ankhs, winged messengers, and a hippopotamus. The hippopotamus was painted with an overall design of flowers and leaves, on a bright blue-green ground. There were also various leather-bound books, and some dusty papers. The speaker herself stood behind a brass lectern in the form of an eagle with spread wings. The stem of the lectern was a scaly dragon, whose claw-feet clutched a sphere which was the counterweight to the eagle. The dragon appeared to have no head and the whole impressive object appeared to have been cobbled together from at least two sources. Behind the speaker, flapping on the canvas wall of the tent, was a map of the heavens with the signs of the Zodiac picked out in gold on black, the sidling Crab, the twisting Fish, the majestic Ram, the stolid Bull, the Twins in each other’s arms, two-in-one. It was home-made, but not unimpressive. From the lectern dangled a lively home-made Scorpion in black cardboard, gilt paint, and crimson bead-work, its tail poised to strike, its claws open. On each side of the speaker crouched the fat border collies, Odin and Frigg, their noses on their paws, their tails in the dust, their eyes bored somnolent slits. There was a water-dish with DOG in black on gold under the table. The dog-smell mingled with the incense-smell from various candles and incense sticks in glass pots around the space.
The talk on Scorpio had already begun when Nick Tewfell and Maggie Cringle arrived. The audience was small but rapt—several young women with flowing hair and mystic head-bands, some long-haired men in Indian shirts, two with strings of bells round their necks, and some indefinable people in overcoats, hunched against the outside weather, though the tent was full of currents of hot, doggy, incense-laden air cycled by the paraffin stoves behind the speaker. Some of the audience were sitting on oriental kilim cushions and rugs. Near the entrance to the booth, on a campstool he had brought himself, sat Avram Snitkin, the ethnomethodologist, a heap of curly pelt, his own long, uncombed hair flowing into his beard and the unkempt fleece of his Afghan jacket and his fleece-lined felted boots. He was taking notes—to distract attention from the whirr of the recording-machine concealed in his bulky garments. His lips were spread in a perpetual benign smile. He was engaged on
one of his many projects—a study of the definition of “charisma” by those who considered themselves “charismatic” and also by those who received, or responded to, or were exposed to, or created, the charisma (if it existed, which was still unproven).
Eva Wijnnobel at least had presence. She wore long, black, voluminous robes, under a black and purple velvet cloak with a huge, Hollywoodish hood. Her very straight black hair was cut with an Egyptian fringe and shone with oils, either natural or applied. Her lips were sculpted with blood-dark lipstick, and her large, black-brown eyes stared from under gilded lids and thick black brows and lashes. Her skin was uniformly whitish, and a little dead-looking. She had a heavily-sculpted gilded breast-plate hanging from gold chains about her neck, dangling tiny bells and charms from its periphery. When she saw Maggie Cringle and Nick Tewfell hesitating in the mouth of the booth, she lifted her arms like a bat, or a great bird, and made a circling movement to draw them in.
“The most terrible, the least attractive, perhaps the most potent and poetic of all the Signs ...
“Welcome, welcome to our midst, please take a cushion. We are discussing a difficult subject, the Sign of Scorpio, which is of all the signs the one a man or a woman would—you might think—least choose to be born under, if we had free-will, which of course we have not.
“The Scorpion is a dry, terrible creature, a creature with a scaly, exogenous skeleton, which hides under stones and inhabits deserts, and bears at its tail-tip a terrible secret sting. The time of year allotted to the dominance of this creature by ancient wisdom is the time of the autumnal withdrawal of the sun from the earth, the time of decomposition and disintegration, of analysis not synthesis, of the reduction of living cells to dead excretory products.
“The sign of Scorpio is a Water sign, but it represents not the flowing Spring waters of Pisces, the rising tides, the source of life, nor yet the sun-kissed ocean of Cancer, full of mid-year light, but the dark depths, where the light scarcely penetrates, and matter decays and becomes mud and silt. Scorpions avoid light—they are creatures of darkness. Because of this association with the Dark Forces, the Scorpion has always been viewed as a special entry-point for the forces of evil in the cosmos. It paralyses its prey with liquid poison, it flees the harmony of the creatures and tries to hold what it has greedily to itself. The Scorpio character in human beings is capable of great malice and pleasure-in-suffering. This is so, it has been noted again and again. You may think, we should ask, how may those who are born under this dark Sign mitigate the dangers and restrictions of their destiny?