David Lodge - Small World (33 page)

“Are you crazy? Nobody pays to get laid at a conference.”

Morris has a point. It’s not surprising, when you reflect: men and women with interests in common—more than most of them have with their spouses—thrown together in exotic surroundings, far from home. For a week or two they are off the leash of domesticity, living a life of unwonted self-indulgence, dropping their towels on the bathroom floor for the hotel maid to pick up, eating in restaurants, drinking in outdoor cafés late into the summer nights, inhaling the aromas of coffee and caporals and cognac and bougainvillea. They are tired, overexcited, a little drunk, reluctant to break up the party and retire to solitary sleep. After a lifetime of repressing and sublimating libido in the interests of intellectual labour, they seem to have stumbled on that paradise envisioned by the poet Yeats: Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

The soul is pleasured in the lecture theatre and seminar room, and the body in restaurants and night clubs. There need be, apparently, no conflict of interests. You can go on talking shop, about phonetics, or deconstruction, or the pastoral elegy or sprung rhythm, while you are eating and drinking and dancing or even swimming. Academics do amazing things under the shock of this discovery, things their spouses and colleagues back home would not believe: twist the night away in discotheques, sing themselves hoarse in beer cellars, dance on café tables with flowers gripped in their teeth, go midnight bathing in the nude, patronize fairgrounds and ride the giant roller-coasters, shrieking and clutching each other as they swoop down the shining rails, whheeeeeeeeeeeee! No wonder they quite often end up in each other’s beds. They are recovering the youth they thought they had sacrificed to learning, they are proving to themselves that they are not dryasdust swots after all, but living, breathing, palpitating human beings, with warm flesh and blood, that stirs and secretes and throbs at a lover’s touch. Afterwards, when they are back home, and friends and family ask if they enjoyed the conference, they say, oh yes, but not so much for the papers, which were pretty boring, as for the informal contacts one makes on these occasions.

Of course, these conference affairs are not without their incidental embarrassments. You may, for instance, be sexually attracted to someone whose scholarly work you professionally disapprove of. At the Vienna conference on Narrative, some weeks after the James Joyce Symposium in Zurich, Fulvia Morgana and Sy Gootblatt find themselves in the same crowd in a wine cellar in Michaelerplatz one evening, catching each other’s eyes with increasing frequency across the scored and stained trestle table, as the white wine flows. At a convenient opportunity, Sy slides onto the bench beside Fulvia and introduces himself. In the din of the crowded cellar he only catches her first name, but that is all he needs. Their friendship ripens rapidly. Fulvia is staying at the Bristol, Sy at the Kaeserin Elisabeth. The Bristol having the more stars, they spend the night together there. Not till morning, after a very demanding night, which made Sy think wistfully of the Zurich whores (at least with them you could presumably call the plays yourself) does Sy get hold of Fulvia’s second name and identify her as the raving Marxist poststructuralist whose essay on the stream-of-consciousness novel as an instrument of bourgeois hegemony (oppressing the working classes with books they couldn’t understand) he has rubbished in a review due to appear in the next issue of Novel. Sy spends the rest of the conference sheepishly escorting Fulvia around the Ring, dodging into cafés whenever he sees anyone he knows, and nodding solemnly at Fulvia while she holds forth about the necessity of revolution with her mouth full of
Sachertorte
.

At Heidelberg, Desiree Zapp and Ronald Frobisher find adultery virtually thrust upon them by the social dynamics of the conference on
Rezeptionsasthetik
. The only two creative writers present, they find themselves constantly together, partly by mutual choice, since they both feel intimidated by the literary critical jargon of their hosts, which they both think is probably nonsense, but cannot be quite sure, since they do not fully understand it, and anyway they can hardly say so to the faces of those who are paying their expenses, so it is a relief to say so to each other; and partly because the academics, privately bored and disappointed by the contributions of Desiree Zapp and Ronald Frobisher to the conference, increasingly leave them to amuse each other. Siegfried von Turpitz, who invited them both, and might have been expected to concern himself with their entertainment, decided early on that the conference was a failure and after a couple of days discovered that he had urgent business in another European city. So Desiree and Ronald find themselves frequently alone together, walking and talking, walking along the Philosophenweg above the Neckar or rambling through the gardens and on the battlements of the ruined castle, and talking, as professional writers will talk to each other, about money and publishers and agents and sales and subsidiary rights and being blocked. And although not irresistibly attracted to each other, they are not exactly unattracted either, and neither wishes to appear in the eyes of the other timidly afraid of sexual adventure. Each has read the other’s work in advance of meeting at the conference, and each has been impressed by the forceful and vivid descriptions of sexual intercourse to be found in those texts, and their common assumption that any encounter between a man and a woman not positively repelled by each other will end up sooner or later in bed. In short, each has attributed to the other a degree of libidinous appetite and experience that is in fact greatly exaggerated, and this mutual misapprehension nudges them closer and closer towards intimacy; until one warm night, a little tipsy after a good dinner at the Weinstube Schloss Heidelberg, with its terrace right inside the courtyard of the floodlit castle, as they totter down the cobbled hill together towards the baroque roofs of the old town, Ronald Frobisher stops in the shadow of an ancient wall, enfolds Desiree in his arms and kisses her.

Then of course there is no way of not going to bed together. Both know the inevitable conclusion of a narrative sequence that begins thus—to draw back from it would imply frigidity or impotence. There is only one consideration that cools Ronald Frobisher’s ardour as he lies naked under the sheets of Desiree’s hotel bed and waits for her to emerge from the bathroom, and it is not loyalty to Irma (Irma went off sex some years ago, following her hysterectomy, and has intimated that she has no objection to Ronald seeking carnal satisfaction elsewhere, providing it is nothing deeply emotional, and she and her friends never hear about it). Unknown to Ronald, an identical thought is troubling Desiree as she disrobes in the bathroom, performs her ablutions and fits her diaphragm (she has ideological and medical objections to the Pill). Getting into bed beside Ronald in the darkened room, she does not immediately turn to him, nor he to her. They lie on their backs, silent and thoughtful. Desiree decides to broach the matter, and Ronald clears his throat preparatory to doing the same.

“I was thinking—”

“It occurred to me—”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry.”

“What were you going to say?”

“No, please—you first.”

“I was going to say,” says Desiree, in the darkness, “that before we go any further, perhaps we ought to come to an understanding.”

“Yes!” says Ronald, eagerly, then changes his intonation to the interrogative: “Yes?”

“What I mean is…” Desiree stops. “It’s difficult to say without sounding as if I don’t trust you.”

“It’s only natural,” says Ronald. “I feel just the same.”

“You mean, you don’t trust me?”

“I mean there’s something I might say to you which might imply that I didn’t trust you.”

“What is it?”

“It’s… hard to say.”

“I mean,” says Desiree. “I’ve never done it with a writer before.”

“Exactly!”

“And what I’m trying to say is…”

“That you don’t want to read about it in a novel one of these days? Or see it on television.”

“How did you guess?”

“I had the same thought.”

Desiree claps her hands. “So we can agree that neither of this will use this as material? Whether it’s good or bad?”

“Absolutely. Scout’s honour.”

“Then let’s fuck, Ronald,” says Desiree, rolling on top of him.

Whheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! The spin-drier cycle of Hilary Swallow’s washing machine makes a sound not unlike a jetplane, especially when she punches the button to stop the motor, and the piercing whine of the rotating drum dies away, falling in pitch, just like the engines of a jumbo jet when the pilot finally cuts them at the end of a long journey. The similarity does not strike Hilary, as she opens the windowed hatch at the front of the appliance, and lifts out a plaited tangle of damp, compacted clothing, for the sound made by a jet engine is less familiar to her than it is to her husband, who is not present to remark upon the likeness, but is in fact in Greece. Philip’s absence is a source of understandable grievance in Hilary, as she hangs out his shirts, pants, vests and socks in the garden, for it seems as if he is only at home these days long enough to empty his suitcase of soiled linen, and pack it with freshly laundered shirts and underwear, before he is off on his travels again.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Philip had said to her this last time, “but Digby Soames is begging me to go to Greece. I think someone else must have dropped out at the last moment.”

“But why does it have to be you? You’ve only just come back from Turkey.”

“Yes, I know, but I feel I should help the Council out if I can.”

The facts of the matter are rather different. As soon as he got back from Istanbul, Philip was on the phone to Digby Soames begging him to fix him, Philip, up as soon as possible with another lecture tour, conference, or summer school—anything, as long as it was in south-east Europe. He had already arranged with Joy to meet her in Israel during Morris Zapp’s conference on the Future of Criticism, but that wasn’t till August, and he felt that he couldn’t wait that long to see her again.

“Hmm,” said Digby Soames. “It’s an awkward time for Europe, the academic year is almost over. You wouldn’t be interested in Australia by any chance?”

“No, Australia’s too far. Greece would be handy.”

“Handy for what?” said Digby Soames suspiciously.

“I’m doing some research on the classical background to English poetry,” Philip improvised. “I just want an excuse to go to Greece.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” said Digby Soames.

What he was able to do was to arrange a few lectures in Salonika and Athens. “It won’t be a proper specialist tour,” he warned. “We’ll pay your fares but no subsistence. You’ll probably get fees for your lectures, though.”

Philip flew to Salonika via Munich, gave his lectures, and met Joy by arrangement in Athens. While Hilary is hanging out the washing in her back garden in St John’s Road, Rummidge, Philip and Joy are having a late breakfast on the sunny balcony of their hotel room, with a view of the Acropolis.

“Will your wife divorce you, then?” says Joy, buttering a croissant.

“If I choose the right moment,” says Philip. “I went home with every intention of telling her about us, but when she announced that she wanted to be a marriage counsellor, it just seemed too cruel. I thought it might destroy her morale before she’s even started. Perhaps they wouldn’t even have taken her on. You can imagine what people might say—physician heal thyself, and so on.”

Joy bites into her croissant and chews meditatively. “What are your plans?”

“I thought,” says Philip, squinting in the sun at the Acropolis, already teeming with tourists like a block of cheese being devoured by black ants, “that we might hire a car and drive to Delphi.”

“I don’t mean this weekend, idiot, I mean long-term plans. About us.

“Ah,” says Philip. “Well, I thought I wouldn’t say anything to Hilary until she’s well settled into her training for marriage guidance. I think that when she feels she’s got a purpose in life, she’ll be quite happy to agree to a divorce.”

“And then what?”

“Then we get married, of course.”

“And settle where? Not Rummidge, presumably.”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” says Philip. “I think I could probably get a job somewhere else, America perhaps. My stock has gone up rather surprisingly, you know, just lately. One of the Sundays even mentioned my name in connection with this UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism.”

“Would that be in Paris?” says Joy. “I wouldn’t mind living in Paris.”

“It can be anywhere you like, apparently,” says Philip. “But it’s wishful thinking, anyway. They’d never appoint me. I can’t think how my name got into the paper.”

“You never know,” says Joy.

Far away in Darlington, Robin Dempsey has also been reading the Sunday papers.

“HALLO, HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY?” says ELIZA “TERRIBLE,” Robin Dempsey types.

“WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU MEAN BY TERRIBLE?”

“ANGRY. INCREDULOUS. JEALOUS.”

“WHAT HAS CAUSED YOU TO HAVE THESE FEELINGS?”

“SOMETHING I READ IN THE NEWSPAPER ABOUT PHILIP SWALLOW.”

“TELL ME ABOUT PHILIP SWALLOW.”

Robin Dempsey types for twenty-five minutes without stopping, until Josh Collins wanders over from his glass-walled cubicle, nibbling a Kit-Kat, upon which Robin stops typing and covers the computer with its plastic hood.

“Want some?” says Josh, offering a piece of the chocolate-covered biscuit.

“No, thank you,” says Robin, without looking at him.

“Getting some interesting stuff from ELIZA, are you?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t think you’re overdoing it?”

“Overdoing what?” says Robin coldly.

“No offence, only you’re in here morning, noon and night, talking to that thing.”

“It doesn’t interfere with you, does it?”

“Well, I have to be here.”

“You’d be here anyway. You’re always here.”

“I used to like having the place to myself occasionally,” says Josh, going rather red. “To work on my own programs in peace. I don’t mind telling you,” he continues (it is the longest conversation Josh has ever had with anyone) “That it fair gives me the creeps to see you hunched over that VDU, day in and day out. You’re becoming dependent upon it.”