David Lodge - Small World (32 page)

“What will you tell them?”

“Oh, that my meetings were cancelled, or something.”

The children were already running down the garden steps to meet their mother, followed by a plump, smiling girl with small black eyes set in a round brown face like currants in a bun. “Be careful!” she cried. “Gerard! Miranda! Not so fast.”

Philip recognized Gerard, who treated him to the same slightly hostile scrutiny that he remembered well from Genoa. Miranda, who looked about three years old, smiled rather sweetly when she was introduced.

“Have you got presents for us, Mummy?” Gerard asked.

Joy looked crestfallen. “Oh, dear, I didn’t have time. I came home so unexpectedly.”

“I’ve got something,” said Philip. “Do you two like Turkish Delight?” He opened his briefcase and brought out a cardboard box packed with rose-hip and almond flavoured delight. “This comes from Ankara—I was told it’s the best you can get.”

“Are you sure you didn’t mean to give that to someone else?” said Joy.

“Oh, no,” said Philip, who had bought it for Hilary. “Anyway, I can always get some more here.”

“Just one piece each for now, then.” said Joy. “Give the box to Selina, and say thank you to Professor Swallow.”

“Please call me Philip,” he said.

“Thank you” said Gerard, rather grudgingly, his mouth full of Turkish delight.

“Thank you Flip,” said Miranda.

“Well, show Philip the way, Miranda,” said Joy.

The little girl put her sticky hand in Philip’s and led him up the steep steps that led to the house. He found himself strangely taken with this child, her trusting eyes and ready smile. Later, as he sat with Joy on the balcony of her first floor apartment, he watched Miranda at play with her dolls in the garden below. They were drinking coffee (a pleasure so rare in Turkey it almost made one faint) and Joy was telling him in condensed form the story of her recent life. “Of course I could have stayed in England and lived on my widow’s pension, but I thought that would be just too dreary, so I persuaded the Council to let me train as a librarian and to give me a job. They weren’t too keen, but I was able to exert a certain amount of moral pressure. Anyway, I’m a good librarian.”

“I’m sure you are,” said Philip abstractedly, peering down into the garden. Miranda had seated her dolls in a semicircle and was earnestly talking to them. “I wonder what Miranda’s telling her dolls.”

“She’s probably telling them about you,” said Joy. “She’s greatly taken with your beard.”

“Is that so?” Philip laughed, and stroked his beard self-consciously.

He felt ridiculously pleased. “She’s a most attractive little girl, isn’t she? Reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who it is.”

“Can’t you?” Joy gave him a rather strange look.

“Well, it’s not you…”

“No, it’s not me.”

“It must be your husband, I suppose, though I don’t remember him very well.”

“No, she doesn’t take after John.”

“Who then?”

“You,” said Joy. “She takes after you.”

Four days later, gazing down at the snow-crusted Alps from the window of a Turkish Airlines Boeing 727, Philip could still go hot and cold at the memory of that extraordinary moment, as the import of Joy’s “She takes after you” sank in, and he realized that the little girl playing in the garden beneath him, a fragile assemblage of brown limbs and blonde hair and white cotton smock, scarcely bigger than the dolls she handled, was a child of his loins; that for the past three years, all unknown to him, this little fragment of flesh had been in existence, orbiting his conscious life in silence and obscurity, like an undiscovered star. “What?” he breathed. “You mean—Miranda is my… our… Are you sure?”

“Not sure, but you must admit the likeness is striking.”

“But, but…” he groped for words, gasped for breath. “But you told me, that night, that you were, you know, that it would be all right.”

“I lied. I was off the pill, John and I were trying to conceive again. I was afraid that if I told you, it would break the spell, you might stop. Wasn’t that wicked of me?”

“No, it was lovely of you, wonderful of you, but, my God, why didn’t you tell me?”

“At first I didn’t know whether I was pregnant by you or by John. The shock of the crash brought on the birth. As soon as I saw Miranda’s eyes, I knew she was yours. But what would have been the point of telling you?”

“I could have divorced Hilary and married you.”

“Exactly. I told you this morning, I didn’t want that.”

“I’m going to anyway, now,” said Philip.

Joy said nothing for a few moments. Then she said, not looking at him, but painting rings on the plastic-topped table, dipping her finger in a pool of spilled coffee: “When I heard that you were coming to Turkey, I decided to avoid meeting you, because I was afraid that it would end like this. I arranged to go to Ankara just over the days when you would be in Istanbul—Alex Custer had been on at me for some time to meet the people up there to discuss policy. I got hold of your schedule and worked it all out so that I would arrive in Ankara just as you left. But I miscalculated by just a few hours. When I got to the Custers, they told me you were coming that evening.”

“It was fate,” said Philip.

“Yes, I came to that conclusion myself,” said Joy. “That’s why I joined you on the train.”

“You cut it jolly fine,” said Philip.

“I wanted to give Fate a chance for second thoughts,” said Joy.

Low cloud covered southern England. As the plane dipped through it, the sun disappeared like a light being switched off, and underneath the cloud it was raining. Moisture dribbled down the windows of the aircraft as it taxied on Heathrow’s wet tarmac. Waiting in the stuffy, humid baggage hall, Philip felt himself wilting and shrinking as the intensity of the last few days leaked away. He sank onto a seat, allowed his eyelids to droop, and projected upon their inner surface a home movie of Istanbul, its sights, sounds and smells: churches and minarets, water and sky, the acres of slightly damp carpet under their stockinged feet as they gazed up at the dome of the Blue Mosque, the stained glass glowing like gems in the Palace Harem, the prison-like staircases of Istanbul University with an armed soldier on every landing, the labyrinthine alleys of the great covered bazaar, the waterside restaurant where the wash of a passing ship suddenly slopped through a low window and drenched a whole table of diners; the hotel where he and Joy made love in the afternoons while huge Russian tankers slid past the windows, so close they momentarily blocked out the light that filtered through the venetian blinds. When the sun shone full upon the window, he angled the blinds so that bars of white-hot light striped Joy’s body, kindling her blonde pubic hair into flame. He called it the golden fleece, mindful that the Hellespont was not far away. When he kissed her there, his beard brushing her belly, he made a wry joke about the silver among the gold, conscious of the contrast between her beautiful, still youthful body and his scraggy, middle-aged one, but she stroked his head reassuringly. “You make me feel desirable, that’s what matters.” He nuzzled her, inhaling odours of shore and rockpool; the skin of her inner thighs was as tender as peeled mushrooms; she tasted clean and salty, like some mollusc from the sea. “Ah,” she whimpered, “that’s divine.”

Philip opened his eyes to find his suitcase taking a lonely ride on the carousel. He snatched it up and, somewhat incommoded by the sexual arousal induced by his reverie, ran all the way to Terminal One to catch his connecting flight to Rummidge.

Up, briefly, into the sunshine again, in a noisy Fokker Friendship; then down again through the grey clouds to the sopping fields and gleaming motorways that ringed Rummidge airport. He was surprised and disconcerted to be met by Hilary. Usually he took a taxi home, and he had counted on solitude, during this last stage of his journey, to rehearse what he was going to say to her. But there she was, in her old beige raincoat, waving from the balcony of the terminal building, as he and his fellow passengers descended the steps from the aircraft and picked their way through the oily puddles on the apron.

Inside the terminal Hilary rushed up and kissed him enthusiastically. “Darling, how are you? I’m glad to see you back safe and sound, the most exciting things have been happening—did you see the review?”

“No,” he said. “What review?”

“In the
TLS
. Rudyard Parkinson reviewed your Hazlitt book in the most glowing terms, nearly two whole pages.”

“Good Lord,” said Philip, feeling himself turning pink with pleasure. “That must be Morris’s influence. I’ll have to write and thank him.”

“I don’t think so, darling,” said Hilary, “because Parkinson was frightfully rude about Morris’s book in the same review. He did you together.”

“Oh dear,” said Philip, feeling an ignoble spasm of
Schadenfreude
at this news.

“And the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
have asked for a photograph of you, and Felix Skinner—he’s ever so excited about it—says that means they’re going to review it too. All I could find was an old snap of you at the seaside in shorts, but I expect they’ll only use the head.”

“Good Lord,” said Philip.

“And I’ve got something else to tell you. About me.”

“What?”

“Let me go and get the car first, while you wait for your luggage.”

“I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

“Wait till I get the car.”

When she brought the car round to the entrance to the terminal, Hilary offered to move over into the passenger seat, but Philip told her not to bother. She drove rather boisterously, revving the engine hard between gear changes, and pulling up sharply at traffic-lights. As the familiar suburban streets slipped past the windows, she told him her big news. “I’ve found a job, darling. Well, not a job, exactly, but something I really want to do, something really interesting. I’ve had a preliminary interview and I’m pretty sure they’ll accept me for training.”

“What is it, then?” said Philip.

Hilary turned and beamed at him. “Marriage Guidance,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.” She returned her attention to the road, not a moment too soon. “I see,” said Philip. “That should be very interesting.”

“Absolutely fascinating. I can’t wait to start the training.” She glanced at him again. “You don’t seem very enthusiastic.”

“It’s a surprise,” said Philip. “I wasn’t prepared for it. I’m sure you’ll be very good at it.”

“Well,” said Hilary, “I feel I do know something about the subject. I mean, we’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re still together after all these years, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” said Philip. “We are.” He gazed out of the car window at the names of shops: Sketchleys, Rumbelows, Radio Rentals, Woolworths. Plateglass windows stacked with refrigerators, music centres, televisions.

“And what was it you wanted to tell me?” said Hilary.

“Oh, nothing,” said Philip. “Nothing important.”

Part IV

One

whhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeEEKEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

To some people, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of three or four big fan-jet engines rising in pitch, as the plane they are sitting in swivels at the end of the runway and, straining against its brakes, prepares for takeoff. The very danger in the situation is inseparable from the exhilaration it yields. You are strapped into your seat now, there is no way back, you have delivered yourself into the power of modern technology. You might as well lie back and enjoy it. Whhheeeeeeeeeeeeee! And away we go, the acceleration like a punch in the small of the back, the grass glimpsed through the window flying backwards in a blur, and then falling out of sight suddenly as we soar into the sky. The plane banks to give us one last glimpse of home, flat and banal, before we break through the cloud cover and into the sunshine, the no-smoking sign goes off with a ping, and a faint clink of bottles from the galley heralds the serving of cocktails. Whheeeeeeeee! Europe, here we come! Or Asia, or America, or wherever. It’s June, and the conference season is well and truly open. In Oxford and Rummidge, to be sure, the students still sit at their desks in the examination halls, like prisoners in the stocks, but their teachers are able to flit off for a few days before the scripts come in for marking; while in North America the second semester of the academic year is already finished, papers have been graded, credits awarded, and the faculty are free to collect their travel grants and head east, or west, or wherever their fancy takes them. Wheeeeeeeeee!

The whole academic world seems to be on the move. Half the passengers on transatlantic flights these days are university teachers. Their luggage is heavier than average, weighed down with books and papers—and bulkier, because their wardrobes must embrace both formal wear and leisurewear, clothes for attending lectures in, and clothes for going to the beach in, or to the Museum, or the Schloss, or the Duomo, or the Folk Village. For that’s the attraction of the conference circuit: it’s a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s expense. Write a paper and see the world! I’m Jane Austen—fly me!

Or Shakespeare, or T. S. Eliot, or Hazlitt. All tickets to ride, to ride the jumbo jets. Wheeeeeeeeee!

The air is thick with the babble of these wandering scholars’ voices, their questions, complaints, advice, anecdotes. Which airline did you fly? How many stars does the hotel have? Why isn’t the conference hall air-conditioned? Don’t eat the salad here, they use human manure on the lettuce. Laker is cheap, but their terminal at LA is the pits. Swissair has excellent food. Cathay Pacific give you free drinks in economy. Pan Am are lousy timekeepers, though not as bad as Jugoslavian Airlines (its acronym JAT stands for “joke about time”). Qantas has the best safety record among the international airlines, and Colombia the worst—one flight in three never arrives at its destination (OK, a slight exaggeration). On every El Al flight there are three secret servicemen with guns concealed in their briefcases, trained to shoot hijackers on sight—when taking something from your inside pocket, do it slowly and smile. Did you hear about the Irishman who tried to hijack a plane to Dublin? It was already going there. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Hijackings are only one of the hazards of modern travel. Every summer there is some kind of disruption of the international airways—a strike of French air-traffic controllers, a go-slow by British baggage handlers, a war in the Middle East. This year it’s the worldwide grounding of the DC-10, following a crash at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on May 25th, when one of these planes shed an engine on takeoff and plunged to the ground, killing everyone on board. The captain’s last recorded word was “Damn.” Stronger expletives are used by travellers fighting at the counters of travel agencies to transfer their tickets to airlines operating Boeing 747s and Lockheed Tristars; or at having to accept a seat on some slow, clapped-out DC-8 with no movies and blocked toilets, flying to Europe via Newfoundland and Reykjavik. Many conferees arrive at their destinations this summer more than usually fatigued, dehydrated and harassed; the dying fall of the engines’ WHHHEEEEEEEeeeeeeeee, as the power is finally switched off, is sweet music to their ears, but their chatter is undiminished, their demand for information insatiable.

How much should you tip? What’s the best way to get downtown from the airport? Can you understand the menu? Tip taxis ten per cent in Bangladesh, five per cent in Italy; in Mexico it is not necessary, and in Japan the driver will be positively insulted if you do. Narita airport is forty kilometres from downtown Tokyo. There is a fast electric train, but it stops short of the city centre—best take the limousine bus. The Greek word for bus stop is
stasis
. The Polish word for scrambled eggs is
jajecznice
, pronounced “yighyehchneetseh”, which is sort of onomatopoeic, if you can get your tongue round it. In Israel, breakfast eggs are served soft-boiled and cold—yuk. In Korea, they eat soup at breakfast. Also at lunch and dinner. In Norway they have dinner at four o’clock in the afternoon, in Spain at ten o’clock at night. In Tokyo the nightclubs close at 11.30 p.m., in Berlin they are only just beginning to open by then.

Oh, the amazing variety of
langue
and
parole
, food and custom, in the countries of the world! But almost equally amazing is the way a shared academic interest will overcome these differences. All over the world, in hotels, university residences and conference centres, in châteaux and villas and country houses, in capital cities and resort towns, beside lakes, among mountains, on the shores of seas cold and warm, people of every colour and nation are gathered together to discuss the novels of Thomas Hardy, or the problem plays of Shakespeare, or the postmodernist short story, or the poetics of Imagism. And, of course, not all the conferences that are going on this summer are concerned with English literature, not by any means. There are at the same time conferences in session on French medieval
chansons
and Spanish poetic drama of the sixteenth century and the German
Sturm and Drang
movement and Serbian folksongs; there are conferences on the dynasties of ancient Crete and the social history of the Scottish Highlands and the foreign policy of Bismarck and the sociology of sport and the economic controversy over monetarism; there are conferences on low-temperature physics and microbiology and oral pathology and quasars and catastrophe theory. Sometimes, when two conferences share the same accommodation, confusions occur: it has been known for a bibliographer specializing in the history of punctuation to sit through the first twenty minutes of a medical paper on “Malfunctions of the Colon” before he realized his mistake.

But, on the whole, academic subject groups are self-defining, exclusive entities. Each has its own jargon, pecking order, newsletter, professional association. The members probably meet only once a year—at a conference. Then, what a lot of hallos, howareyous, and whatareyouworkingons, over the drinks, over the meals, between lectures. Let’s have a drink, let’s have dinner, let’s have breakfast together. It’s this kind of informal contact, of course, that’s the real
raison d’ętre
of a conference, not the programme of papers and lectures which has ostensibly brought the participants together, but which most of them find intolerably tedious.

Each subject, and each conference devoted to it, is a world unto itself, but they cluster together in galaxies, so that an adept traveller in intellectual space (like, say, Morris Zapp) can hop from one to another, and appear in Amsterdam as a semiologist, in Zurich as a Joycean, and in Vienna as a narratologist. Being a native speaker of English helps, of course, because English has become the international language of literary theory, and theory is what unites all these and many other conferences. This summer the topic on everyone’s lips at every conference Morris attends is the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism, and who will get it. What kind of theory will be favoured—formalist, structuralist, Marxist or deconstructionist? Or will it go to some sloppily eclectic liberal humanist, or even to an antitheorist like Philip Swallow?

“Philip Swallow?” says Sy Gootblatt incredulously to Morris Zapp. It is the 15th of June, the eve of Bloomsday, halfway through the International James Joyce Symposium in Zurich, and they are standing at the bar of the crowded James Joyce Pub on Pelikanstrasse. It is a beautifully preserved, genuine Dublin pub, all dark mahogany, red plush and brass fittings, rescued from demolition at the hands of Irish property developers, transported in numbered parts to Switzerland, and lovingly reconstructed in the city where the author of Ulysses sat out the First World War, and died in the Second. Its ambience is totally authentic apart from the hygienic cleanliness of everything, especially the basement toilets where you could, if you were so inclined, eat your dinner off the tiled floors—very different from the foetid, slimy hellholes to be found at the bottom of such staircases in Dublin. “Philip Swallow?” says Sy Gootblatt. “You must be joking.” Sy is an old friend of Morris’s from Euphoric State, which he left some five years ago to go to Penn, switching his scholarly interests at the same time from Hooker to the more buoyant field of literary theory. He is good-looking in his slight, dark way, and a bit of a dandy, but small in stature; he keeps rising restlessly on the balls of his feet as if to see who is to be seen in the crowded room.

“I hope I’m joking,” says Morris, “but somebody sent me a cutting from a London paper the other day which says he’s being mentioned as an outsider candidate for the job.”

“What are the odds—nine million to one?” says Sy, who remembers Philip Swallow chiefly as the author of a parlour game called Humiliation, with which he wrecked one of his and Bella’s dinner parties many years ago. “He hasn’t published anything worth talking about, has he?”

“He’s having a huge success with a totally brainless book about Hazlitt,” says Morris, “Rudyard Parkinson gave it a rave review in the
TLS
. The British are on this great antitheory kick at the moment and Philip’s book just makes them roll onto their backs and wave their paws in the air.”

“But they tell me Arthur Kingfisher is advising UNESCO on this appointment,” says Sy Gootblatt. “And he’s surely not going to recommend that they appoint someone hostile to theory?”

“That’s what I keep telling myself,” says Morris. “But these old guys do funny things. Kingfisher doesn’t like to think that there is anyone around now who is as good as he used to be in his prime, and he might encourage the appointment of a schmo like Philip Swallow just to prove it.”

Sy Gootblatt drains his glass of Guinness and grimaces. “Jesus, I hate this stuff,” he says. “Shall we go someplace else? I found a bar on the other side of the river that sells Budweiser.”

Pocketing their James Joyce Pub beermats as souvenirs, they push their way to the door—a proceeding which takes some time, as every few paces one or the other of them bumps into someone he knows. Morris! Sy! Great to see you! How’s Bella? How’s Desiree? Oh, I didn’t know. What are you working on these days? Let’s have a drink some time, let’s have dinner, let’s have breakfast. Eventually they are outside, on the sidewalk, in the mild evening. There are not many people about, but the streets have a safe, sedate air. The shop windows are brightly lit, filled with luxury goods to tempt the rich burghers of Zürich. The Swissair window has a coy display of dumpy little airplanes made out of white flower-heads, suspended from wires in the form of a mobile. They remind Morris of fancy wreaths. “A good name for the DC-10,” he observes, “The Flying Wreath.”

This black humour reflects his sombre mood. Things have not been going well for Morris lately. First there was the attack on his book by Rudyard Parkinson in the
TLS
. Then his paper did not go down at all well in Amsterdam. A claque of feminists, hired, he wouldn’t be surprised to learn, by his ex-wife, heckled him as he developed his analogy between interpretation and striptease, shouting “Cunts are beautiful!” when he delivered the line, “staring into that orifice we find that we have somehow overshot the goal of our quest.” Young McGarrigle, to whom he might have looked for some support, or at least sympathy, in that crisis, had unaccountably disappeared from Amsterdam, leaving no message. Then there was this report that Philip Swallow was being considered for the UNESCO chair—preposterous, but seeing it in print somehow made it seem disturbingly plausible.

“Who sent you the cutting?” Sy asks.

Morris doesn’t know. In fact it was Howard Ringbaum, who spotted the item in the London Sunday Times and sent it anonymously to Morris Zapp, guessing correctly that it would cause him pain and anxiety. But who inspired the mention of Philip Swallow’s name in the newspaper? Very few people know that it was Jacques Textel, who had received from Rudyard Parkinson a copy of his review article, “The English School of Criticism”, together with a fawning covering letter, which Textel, irritated by Parkinson’s pompous complacency at Vancouver, had chosen to misinterpret as expressing Parkinson’s interest in promoting Philip Swallow’s candidacy for the UNESCO chair rather than his own. It was Textel who had leaked Philip’s name to his British son-in-law, a journalist on the Sunday Times, over lunch in the splendid sixth-floor restaurant at the Place Fontenoy; and the son-in-law, who had been ordered to write a special feature on “The Renaissance of the Redbrick University” and was rather short of facts to support this proposition, had devoted a whole paragraph of his article to the Rummidge professor whose recent book had caused such a stir and whose name was being mentioned in connection with the recently mooted UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism—causing Rudyard Parkinson to choke on his kedgeree when he opened that particular issue of the Sunday Times in the Fellows’ breakfast-room at All Saints.

Morris and Sy walk across the bridge over the Limmat. The bar that Sy discovered at lunchtime turns out to be in the middle of the red light quarter at night-time. Licenced prostitutes stand on the street corners, one per corner, in the methodical Swiss way. Each is dressed and made up in an almost theatrical fashion, to cater for different tastes. Here you have the classic whore, in short red skirt, black net stockings and high heels; there, a wholesome Tyrolean girl in dirndl skirt and embroidered bodice; and further on, a kinky model in a skin-tight leather jump suit. All look immaculately clean and polished, like the toilets of the James Joyce Pub. Sy Gootblatt, whose wife Bella is visiting her mother in Maine at this time, eyes these women with covert curiosity. “How much do you think they charge?” he murmurs to Morris.