David Lodge - Small World (31 page)

“Goodbye, then,” he said, trying to hold her gaze. “I hope your little boy is all right. Have you phoned yet?”

“Not yet,” she said. “Goodbye, Professor Swallow.”

And that was that. He shot her one brief, beseeching look, and left the apartment with Custer and Borak. He could only hope and pray that after he had gone she would have made the call to Istanbul and concocted some story about her child that would require her immediate return home.

Philip took another turn beside the wagon-lit and checked his watch against the station clock. There were only three minutes to go before the train was due to depart. The suspense was agonizing, yet he felt strangely exhilarated. The depression of the past week had lifted, was already forgotten. He was again a man at the centre of his own story—and what a story! He could still hardly believe that Joy was not dead, after all, but alive. Alive! That warm, breathing flesh that he had clasped in the purple-lit bedroom in Genoa was still warm, still breathed. He felt himself transformed by the miraculous reversal of fortune, lifted up as by a wave. He heard himself saying to her in the corner of the Custers’ drawing-room, “Because I love you,” simply, sincerely, without hesitation, without embarrassment, like a hero in a film. He was not, after all, finished, washed up, ready for retirement. He was still capable of a great romance. Intensity had returned to experience. Where it would lead him to, he did not know, or care. He had a vague premonition of difficulties and pain ahead, to do with Hilary, the children, his career, but pushed them aside. All his mental energy was concentrated on willing Joy to reappear.

Doors slammed along the length of the train. Railway officials, posted at intervals along the platform like sentries, stiffened and looked to each other for signals. The minute hand of the station clock twitched forward. One minute to go.

Philip climbed reluctantly into the train, lowered the window of the door, and hung out of it, looking desperately in the direction of the ticket barrier. A uniformed official standing just beneath him looked to his left and right, then raised a whistle to his lips.

“Stop!” cried Philip, opening the door and jumping down on to the platform. He had seen a woman’s figure suddenly appear at the ticket barrier, her fair hair catching the light of the arc lamps. The man with the whistle, protesting in Turkish, tried to push Philip back into the train; then, when this failed, to close the door. As they wrestled, Joy came running across the broad platform, swinging a small suitcase in one hand. Philip pointed, the official stopped struggling and indignantly adjusted his uniform. Philip gave him a large-denomination banknote. The man smiled and held the door open for them to board the train. The door slammed behind them. A whistle shrilled. The train jerked into motion. In the dimly-lit corridor curious faces peered out of doorways, as Philip propelled Joy towards his compartment. He ushered her inside and slid the door shut behind him.

“You came,” he said. It was the first word either of them had spoken. Joy sank on to the made-up bed, and closed her eyes. Her bosom rose and fell as she gulped air. “I have a ticket,” she gasped. “But no berth.”

“You can share this one,” he said.

As the train rocked and rumbled through the night they made awkward but rapturous love on the narrow bunk bed, their sighs and cries muffled by the creaking and rattling of the rolling-stock. Afterwards they clung together and talked. Or rather Joy talked—jerkily, hesitantly at first, then more fluently—while Philip mostly listened, responding with phatic strokings and squeezings of her soft limbs.

“That was so lovely, it’s the first time since John… Yes, I’ve had opportunities, but I’ve been so racked with guilt… I thought John being killed was a sort of punishment, you see. For being unfaithful to him. With you, of course—did you think I was promiscuous, or something? The only time, yes, does that surprise you? Why did I let you, yes, I often wondered about that. I never did anything so insane, before or since, until now, and this is different, anyway, since I know you, in a manner of speaking, and John isn’t here to be hurt. But that first time, there I was, a happily-married woman, well fairly happy anyway, as happy as most wives are, and I gave myself to a total stranger who suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night, as if you were a god or an angel or something and there was nothing I could do but submit. When I woke up the next morning I thought it had been a dream, but when I saw that John had left and your bags were in the hall, and realized that it had all really happened I nearly went mad. Well I may have seemed calm to you but I can tell you that I was on the verge of hysteria, I had to keep going into the bathroom and jabbing a pair of nail scissors into my hand so that the pain in my hand would stop me thinking about what I had done.

“Do you ever have a feeling when you’re driving fairly fast, in heavy traffic, that the whole thing is extraordinarily precarious, though everyone involved seems to take it for granted? All the drivers in their cars and lorries look so bored, so abstracted, just wanting to get from A to B; yet all the time they’re just inches, seconds, away from sudden death. It only needs someone to turn their steering-wheel a few inches this way rather than that, for everyone to start crashing into one another. Or you’re driving along some twisty coastal road, and you realize that if you were to take your hands off the wheel for just a second you would go shooting off the edge into thin air. It’s a frightening feeling, because you realize how easy it would be to do it, how quick, how simple, how irreversible. It seemed to me that I had done something like that, only I had swerved off the road into life, not death.

“I couldn’t complain about John as a husband. He was a kind man, faithful as far as I know, doted on Gerard, worked hard at his career. By normal standards it was a successful marriage. The physical side was all right, as far as I could tell. I mean, I didn’t have any experience to compare it with, and John didn’t have much either. We met when we were students at university, and we lived together for several years before we got married, our parents were terribly shocked when they found out, but actually it meant that we were pretty innocent about sex, never having known anybody else that way. I sometimes had an uneasy suspicion that John had decided to, not consciously you know, but well decided to find himself a girl as soon as he could in his first year and settle into a steady relationship, so as not to be distracted from getting on with his studies by sex. I mean, it was just like being married, really, and when we actually got married it was a purely social event, an expensive party, there was no difference in our lives before and after. The honeymoon was just a foreign holiday. I remember feeling rather sad on our wedding night that it was all so familiar, that neither of us was nervous or shy, and I had a wicked thought that perhaps we should go out and find another couple in the same situation—the hotel was full of honeymooners—and exchange partners, or all get into bed together. I wasn’t serious, it was just a thought, but I suppose it was symptomatic. I didn’t mention it to John, he wouldn’t have understood, he would have been hurt, thought I was getting at him. He was a conscientious lover, read up books about foreplay and so on, did his best to please me, and he did please me—I mean I never actually wanted to make love with him, not enough to take the initiative, I left that to him, but if he wanted to I usually enjoyed it.

“But somehow there was something missing. I always felt that. Passion perhaps. I never felt that John desired me passionately, or I him. I used to read about people making love in novels, and they seemed so ecstatic, so carried away. I never felt that. Then I would read sensible books about sex and marriage and the correspondence columns in the women’s magazines and decide that the novels were lying, the writers were making it all up, that I was jolly lucky to be having sex at all, never mind whether it was ecstatic or not. And then, that night, you appeared, and for the first time in my life I knew what it was like to be desired, passionately.”

Here there was a hiatus in Joy’s monologue while Philip once more fervently demonstrated how well-founded this intuition had been. Some time later she resumed.

“While I was sitting on the sofa with John, opposite you, and he was chuntering on about phonetics and testing techniques and language laboratories, I could feel your desire coming from you like radioactivity, burning through my dressing-gown. It astonished me that John couldn’t sense it himself, that he was so oblivious to it that he was going to go off and leave us alone together. I was fascinated, excited. I had no intention at that point of letting you make love to me, indeed I didn’t think you would have the nerve to even make a pass. I was so sure of myself that I let John go off to Milan without a qualm. But when I came back into the living-room and you started to shake, I started to shake too—you noticed? And then when we were in the bedroom and you were shaking more than ever, it seemed to me that you were like the core of a nuclear reactor that’s, what’s the word, gone critical, that you would shake yourself to pieces, or melt a hole in the floor, consume yourself with your own passion, if I didn’t do something.”

“I had come back from the dead,” Philip groaned, remembering. “You were life, beauty. I wanted to be reconnected to life. You healed me.”

“I took my hands off the wheel,” said Joy. “I went over the edge with you because I had never been wanted like that before.”

In the early morning, they sat face to face in the restaurant car, with their fingers entwined beneath the table, sipping glasses of hot black tea from their free hands, as the train trundled through the pleasant little towns and villages on the Asian shore of the Sea of Marmara. There was vegetation here—trees and shrubs and vines—between the houses. The landscape seemed positively lush after the arid heights of Ankara. A few early risers were out in their gardens, watering the plants, or enjoying a quiet smoke in the slanting light of the rising sun. They waved as the train passed.

“You never wrote to me,” said Joy.

“I didn’t know how to, without risking compromising you,” said Philip. “I thought you wouldn’t want me to, anyway. You seemed so cold that morning I left Genoa, I thought you wanted to forget the whole thing had happened.”

“I did,” said Joy, “but I found that was impossible.”

“Then it wasn’t long before I read in the newspaper that you were dead.”

“Yes, I never thought of that. The papers did publish a correction.”

“I must have missed it,” said Philip. “Anyway, you could have written to me, especially when your husband… I mean, when you were…”

“Free? I didn’t want to interfere with your life. I looked you up. I know all about you. You’re married, with three children, Amanda, Robert and Matthew. Wife Hilary, née Greenstreet, daughter of Commander and Mrs A. J. Greenstreet. I didn’t want to break up your marriage.”

“It’s not much of a marriage,” said Philip. “The children are all grown up, and Hilary’s fed up. We nearly separated ten years ago. I think we should have done.” The image of Hilary’s breast had almost faded from his memory, expunged by the more recent, keener sensation of Joy’s blunt, cylindrical nipples stiffening under his touch. “I’ve stood in Hilary’s way,” he said earnestly. “She’d do better on her own.”

“This is where Asia meets Europe,” said Joy, as a battered taxi rushed them across a vast, new-looking suspension bridge. Far below, huge tankers and a multitude of smaller craft churned the waters of the Bosphorus. To their right, green hills dotted with white houses rose steeply from the narrowing channel. To their left, domes and minarets punctuated the skyline of an immense city, behind which the water broadened out into a sea. “Sea of Marmara,” Joy explained. “The Black Sea is at the other end of the Bosphorus.”

“It’s wonderful,” said Philip. “This combination of water and sky and hills and architecture reminds me of Euphoria, the view I used to see every morning when I woke up and drew the curtains. It’s the Bay Area of the ancient world.”

“I tell you what we’ll do,” said Joy. “We’ll take this cab down to the Galata bridge, and take a ferry boat up the Bosphorus to Bogazici, where I live. That’s the best way to get your first impressions of Istanbul, from the water.”

Philip squeezed her knee. “You are my Euphoria, my Newfoundland,” he said.

Half an hour later they stood hand in hand on the deck of a white steamer as it surged up the Bosphorus, away from the teeming quayside. Joy pointed out the landmarks. “That’s Santa Sophia, that’s the Blue Mosque. I’ll take you to see them later. The Golden Horn is behind the bridge. That’s the Sea of Marmara, with all the wrecks.”

“Why so many?”

“There’s far too much traffic on the water here, the ships keep colliding, especially the big tankers. Sometimes they crash into the houses at the edge of the Bosphorus. I took an apartment well up in the hills.”

“Am I going to stay with you?” Philip asked.

Joy frowned. “I don’t think it would be a good idea. I have a Turkish girl living in, and the children would be inquisitive. There wouldn’t be much privacy. I know a nice hotel not far away, I’ll come and see you there. But you can eat with us, of course.”

“But won’t you be able to spend the night with me?” Philip pleaded. “I want to wake up in the morning and find you beside me.”

“You can’t have everything you want,” she said, smiling.

The ferry boat stitched its way up the Bosphorus, stopping frequently at small wooden jetties that were like aquatic bus-stops. The boat would swerve inshore, pull up amid much foaming and rattling as the screws were reversed; passengers carrying shopping bags and briefcases briskly disembarked, new passengers scurried aboard, a bell rang, and in seconds, it seemed, they would be off again. The houses on the shore gradually took on a less antique aspect, the landscape in the background became boskier, as they proceeded. At one of the stops, which had a relaxed, seasidey air to it, Joy led him ashore, and they took a taxi to Joy’s apartment, situated on a road that twisted steeply between walled gardens matted with flowering vines. Childish shrieks and cries were heard from the windows as Philip paid the taxi driver the fare for which Joy had bargained at the outset of their ride (“If you don’t beat them down by at least half, you’ve been diddled,” she had warned him). “The children are surprised to see me back home so soon,” she said.