David Lodge - Small World (23 page)

Rudyard Parkinson curled his lip over this missive and glanced at the book with lukewarm interest. He had never heard of Philip Swallow, and a first book by a redbrick professor did not promise much. As he riffled the pages, however, his attention was caught by a quotation from Hazlitt’s essay on “The Ignorance of the Learned”: “A critic does nothing nowadays who does not try to torture the most obvious expression into a thousand meanings… His object indeed is not to do justice to his author, whom he treats with very little ceremony, but do to himself homage, and to show his acquaintance with all the topics and resources of criticism.” Hmmm, thought Rudyard Parkinson, there might be some ammunition here to use against Morris Zapp. He slipped the book into his briefcase, along with his passport and his red, white and blue airticket.

The journey to Vancouver was not a comfortable one. To make a little profit on the trip, he was travelling economy class, for the host University was paying his expenses based on first-class fares. This proved to be a mistake. First he had an altercation at Heathrow with a pert girl at the checkin desk who refused to accept his overnight case as cabin baggage. Then, when he boarded the aircraft he found that he was most unluckily seated next to a mother with a small child on her lap, which cried and wriggled and spat half-masticated food all over Rudyard Parkinson for most of the long and wearisome flight. He began bitterly to repent of the vanity which had prompted him to accept this perfectly useless degree, flying ten thousand miles in three days just for the pleasure of dressing up in unfamiliar robes, hearing a short and probably inaccurate panegyric in his honour, and exchanging small talk afterwards with a crowd of boring Canadian nonentities at some ghastly reception or banquet where they would all no doubt drink iced rye whisky throughout the meal.

In the event, there was wine at the dinner following the degree ceremony and, Rudyard Parkinson had to admit, rather good wine—Pouilly Fuisse ‘74 with the fish, and a really remarkable Gevrey Chamberlin ‘73 with the filet steak. The conversation at table was as banal as he had feared, but he did have an interesting exchange at the reception beforehand with another of the honorary graduands, Jacques Textel, the Swiss anthropologist and UNESCO bureaucrat, who genially toasted him with a dry martini.

“Congratulations,” he said. “I know I’m only here because the University is hoping to squeeze some money out of UNESCO, but you’re being honoured for your own work.”

“Nonsense, your degree was thoroughly deserved,” anyone else would have replied; but Rudyard Parkinson, being Rudyard Parkinson, merely smirked and fluffed out his whiskers.

“You’ve no idea how many honorary degrees I’ve collected since I became ADG,” said Textel.

“ADG?”

“Assistant Director General.”

“Do you find it interesting work?”

“As an anthropologist, yes. The Paris HQ is like a tribe. Has its own rituals, taboos, order of precedence… Fascinating. As an administrator, it drives me crazy.” Textel deftly placed his empty glass on the tray of a passing waiter with one hand and took a full glass with the other. “Take this chair of literary criticism, for instance…”

“What’s that?”

“You haven’t heard about it? I’m surprised. Siegfried von Turpitz has—he rang me up at seven-thirty in the morning to ask me about it. I’d just dropped off to sleep, too, being jet-lagged after a flight from Tokyo…”

“What is this chair?” Rudyard Parkinson persisted.

Textel told him. “Interested?” he concluded.

“Oh, no,” said Rudyard Parkinson, smiling and shaking his head. “I’m quite content.”

“That’s nice to hear,” said Jacques Textel. “In my experience top academics are the least contented people in the world. They always think the grass is greener in the next field.”

“I don’t think the grass anywhere is greener than in the Fellows’ Garden at All Saints,” said Rudyard Parkinson smugly.

“I can believe that,” said Jacques Textel. “Of course, whoever gets this UNESCO chair won’t have to move anywhere.”

“Won’t he?”

“No, it’s a purely conceptual chair. Apart from the salary, which is likely to be in the region of a hundred thousand dollars.”

At that juncture a servant announced that dinner was served. Rudyard Parkinson was seated at some distance from Jacques Textel, and the latter was hustled away immediately after the meal to catch a plane to Peru, where he was due to open a conference on the preservation of Inca sites the following day. This separation was a cause of some concern to Rudyard Parkinson, who would have liked an opportunity to correct the impression he might have given that he was wholly lacking in personal interest in the UNESCO chair. The more he thought about it—and he thought about it for almost the entire duration of the flight back to London—the more attractive it seemed. He was so used to receiving invitations to apply for lavishly endowed chairs in North America that refusing them was by now a reflex action. They always tried to tempt him with the promise of teams of research assistants, for whom he would have no use at all (could research assistants write his reviews for him?) and generous travel grants that would allow him to fly to Europe as often as he wanted. (“But I already am in Europe,” he would point out, if he took the trouble to reply at all.) This chair, however, was decidedly different.

Perhaps he had dismissed it too hastily, even if UNESCO was an institution routinely sneered at in Oxford Common Rooms. Nobody was going to sneer at one hundred thousand dollars a year, tax-free, to be picked up without the trouble of moving one’s books. The problem was, how to intimate these second thoughts without crawling too obviously to Textel. No doubt the post would be advertised in due course, but Rudyard Parkinson was experienced enough in such matters to know that the people who were appointed to top academic posts never actually applied for them before they were approached. That, of course, was what Textel had been doing—it was clear as daylight in retrospect—and he had muffed the opportunity. Rudyard Parkinson clenched his grip on the armrest of his seat with chagrin. Well, a discreet note to Textel could hint at a change of heart. But something more was needed, something like a campaign, a broadside, a manifesto—but subtle, indirect. What could be done?

Opening his briefcase to find a notepad on which to draft a letter to Textel, Rudyard Parkinson’s eye fell upon the book by Philip Swallow. He took it out, and began to browse. Soon he began to read with close attention. A plan was forming itself in his mind. A long middle for the TLS. The English School of Criticism. How gratifying to encounter, in the dreary desert of contemporary criticism, an exponent of that noble tradition of humane learning, of robust common sense and simple enjoyment of great books… Professor Swallow’s timely and instructive study… In contrast, the jargon-ridden lucubrations of Professor Zapp, in which the perverse paradoxes of fashionable Continental savants are, if possible, rendered even more pretentious and sterile… The time has come for those who believe in literature as the expression of universal and timeless human values to stand up and be counted… Professor Swallow has sounded a clarion call to action. Who will respond?

Something like that should do the trick, Rudyard Parkinson mused, gazing out of the window at the sun rising or setting somewhere or other over a horizon of corrugated cloud. Vancouver, of which he had in any case seen little except rainswept roads between the airport and the University, had already faded from his memory.

Philip Swallow set off for his Turkish lecture tour in a more than usually flustered state. He had been working up to the last minute on his lecture about Literature and History, Society, Philosophy, and Psychology, to the neglect of more mundane preparations, such as packing his suitcase. Hilary was sullen and uncooperative as, late on the eve of his departure, he hunted fore clean underwear and socks. “You should have thought of this earlier,” she said. “You know I do my big wash tomorrow.”

“You knew I was leaving tomorrow,” he said bitterly, “you might have deduced that I’d need some clean clothes to take with me.”

“Why should I give any thought to your needs? Do you give any thought to mine?”

“What needs?” said Philip. “You can’t imagine that I would have any, can you?” said Hilary. “I don’t want to have a big argument,” said Philip wearily. “I’d just like some clean socks and pants and vests. If that isn’t too much to ask.”

He was standing on the threshold of the drawing-room, holding a tangled bundle of soiled underwear which he had just excavated from the laundry basket. Hilary put down her novel with a thump, and snatched the bundle from his arms. She stomped out to the kitchen, leaving a trail of odd socks in her wake. “They’ll have to be dried in the tumble-drier,” she threw over her shoulder.

Philip went to his study to gather together the books and papers he would need. As usual, he wasted a great deal of time wondering which books to take on his journey. He had a neurotic fear of finding himself stranded in some foreign hotel or railway station with nothing to read, and in consequence always travelled with far too many books, most of which he brought home unread. Tonight, unable to decide between two late Trollope novels, he packed both, along with some poems by Seamus Heaney, a new biography of Keats and a translation of the Divine Comedy which he had been carrying around with him on almost every trip for the last thirty years without ever having made much progress in it. By the time he had completed this task, Hilary had retired to bed. He lay beside her, wakeful and restless, listening to the noise of the tumble-drier churning in the kitchen, like the engine of a ship. His mind anxiously reviewed a checklist of the things he should have packed: passport, money, tickets, traveller’s cheques, lecture notes, sunglasses, Turkish phrasebook. They were all in his briefcase, but he had a feeling something was missing. He was catching the same early morning plane to Heathrow as Morris Zapp had taken, and wouldn’t have much time to spare in the morning.

Philip seldom slept well before leaving on one of his trips abroad, but tonight he was particularly wakeful. Usually he and Hilary would make love on such occasions. There was an unspoken agreement between them to sink their differences in a valedictory embrace which, however perfunctory, at least had the effect of relaxing them sufficiently to send them both off to sleep for a few hours. But when Philip tried an exploratory caress or two on Hilary’s humped form, she shook off his hand with a sleepy grunt of irritation. Philip tossed and turned, filled with resentment and self-pity. He postulated his death in an air crash on the way to Turkey, and imagined with grim satisfaction Hilary’s guilt and self-reproach on hearing the news. The only drawback to this scenario was that it entailed his own extinction, a high price to pay to punish her for not washing his socks in good time. He essayed, instead, a compensatory amorous adventure in Turkey, but found this difficult, having no idea what Turkey, or Turkish women, looked like. Eventually he settled for a chance meeting with Angelica Pabst, who, since nobody seemed to know where she had come from, or departed to, might as well be encountered in Turkey as anywhere else. One of the many disappointments of the Rummidge conference had been his failure to follow up the friendly relations he had established with that very attractive young woman on the first evening. With the help of a fantasy in which he rescued Angelica from the clutches of political terrorists on a Turkish railway train, and was rewarded with rapturous sexual intercourse, Angelica being conveniently clad in nothing more than a diaphanous nightie at the time of this crisis, Philip dozed off, though he woke at frequent intervals in the course of the night, and felt more fatigued than rested when his alarm clock finally roused him at 5.3o.

Five-thirty isn’t really early enough, considering that the taxi has been ordered for six, as Philip quickly realizes, washing, dressing, and shaving himself with ill-coordinated limbs, groping in the drawers and wardrobes of the darkened bedroom for his travelling clothes, fumbling with the locks on his suitcase. Hilary makes no move to get up and assist him, or to make him a cup of coffee. He cannot really blame her, in view of the hour, but he does, nevertheless, blame her. At three minutes to six he is, in a manner of speaking, ready—unevenly shaven, with hair uncombed and shoes unpolished, but ready. Then he remembers the item missing from his mental checklist—lavatory paper. He searches in the kitchen cupboard for a fresh roll without success and with increasing panic, throwing aside packets of detergent, soap powder, paper napkins, washing-up liquid, Brillo pads, in the urgency of his quest. He bounds up the stairs, bursts into the bedroom, hits the light switch, and peremptorily questions Hilary’s shrouded back.

“Where’s the toilet paper?”

Hilary raises and twists her head, stupid with sleep. “Eh?”

“Toilet paper. I need to take some with me.”

“We’re out of it.”

“What?”

“I was going to get some today.”

Philip throws his arms into the air. “Marvellous! Bloody marvellous!”

“You could buy some yourself.”

“At six o’clock in the morning?”

“The airport might—”

“And the airport might not. Or I might not have time.”

“You can take what’s left in the downstairs loo, if you like.”

“Thanks very much,” says Philip sarcastically. He thumps down the stairs, two steps at a time. There is half a roll of pink toilet tissue in the downstairs cloakroom, suspended from a cylindrical roller attached by a spring-loaded axle to a ceramic holder screwed to the wall. Philip fumbles with this apparatus, seeking to remove the toilet roll from the roller. The front doorbell shrills. Philip starts, the toilet roll falls off the roller and unwinds itself across the floor of the cloakroom with amazing rapidity. Philip swears, tries to roll the paper up again, abandons the attempt, opens the front door to the taxi-driver, indicates his suitcase, runs to his study, stuffs a wad of A4 Bank typing paper into his briefcase, runs back to the hall, shouts an angry, “Goodbye, then,” up the stairs, snatches his raincoat from its hook and leaves the house, slamming the front door behind him.