David Lodge - Small World (42 page)

Professor Umeda yawns, rubs his eyes, accepts a whisky, and, when Persse’s interest has been explained to him, comes up with “The Mirror of Sincerity” (_Pericles_), “The Oar Well-Accustomed to the Water” (_All’s Well That Ends Well_) and “The Flower in the Mirror and the Moon on the Water” (_The Comedy of Errors_).

“Oh, that one beats them all!” exclaims Persse. “That’s really beautiful.”

“It is a set phrase,” Akira explains. “It means, that which can be seen but cannot be grasped.”

“Ah,” says Persse with a pang, suddenly reminded of Angelica. That which can be seen but which cannot be grasped. His euphoria begins rapidly to ebb away.

“Excuse me,” says Professor Motokazu Umeda, offering Persse his card, printed in Japanese on one side and English on the other. Persse stares at the name, which now rings a distant, or not so distant, bell.

“Were you by any chance at a conference in Honolulu recently?” he asks.

“Morris called me as soon as he got back to the villa,” says Desiree. “At first he was hysterical with gratitude, it was like being licked all over your face by your dog when you get back home from a trip, I could almost hear his tail wagging on the other end of the line. Then when it sank in that I hadn’t paid over any money, he turned very nasty, more like the Morris I remembered, accused me of being mean and callous and putting his life in jeopardy.”

“Tsk, tsk,” says Alice Kauffman on the other end of the telephone line, a sound like the rustling of empty chocolate wrappers.

“I told him, I was prepared to pay up to forty thousand dollars for his release, I was already collecting the notes together and stashing them away right here in the hotel safe, and it wasn’t my fault if the kidnappers decided to let him go for nothing.”

“Did they?”

“Apparently. They must have got scared that the police would find them, or something. The police are all on my side, incidentally, they think I broke down the kidnappers’ morale by bargaining with them. I’m getting a very good press here. ‘The Novelist with Nerves of Steel’, they call me in the magazines. I told Morris that, and it didn’t make him any sweeter… Anyway, I’m going to put the whole story into my book. It’s a wonderful inversion of the normal power relationships between men and women, the man finding himself totally dependent on the generosity of the woman. I might change the ending.”

“Yeah, let the sonofabitch die,” says Alice Kauffman. “Where is he now, anyway?”

“Jerusalem. Some conference or other he’s organizing. Another thing he’s sore about is that a fink called Howard Ringhaum whom Morris specifically excluded from the conference took advantage of his temporary disappearance to get himself accepted by the other organizer. You’d think Morris would have better things to think about, wouldn’t you, a man back from the edge of the grave, you might say?”

“That’s men for you, honey,” says Alice Kauffman. “Speaking of which, how’s the book coming along?”

“I’m hoping this new idea will get it moving again,” says Desiree.

According to Motokazu Umeda, who responded to her paper at Honolulu, Angelica intended to travel on to Seoul, via Tokyo, to attend a conference on Critical Theory and Comparative Literature to which, it was rumoured, various big Parisian guns had been lured by the promise of a free trip to the Orient. Persse, now beyond all thoughts of prudent budgeting, waves his magic green-and-white card again, and takes wing to Seoul by Japanese Airlines. On the plane he meets another Helper, a beautiful Korean girl in the adjacent seat, who is drinking vodka and smoking Pall Malls as if her life depends on consuming as much duty free as possible for the duration of the flight. The vodka makes her loquacious and she explains to Persse that she is going home from the States for her annual visit to her family and will not be able to indulge in alcohol or tobacco for the next two weeks. “Korea is a modern country on the surface,” she says, “but underneath it’s very traditional and conservative, especially as regards social behaviour. I can tell you, when I first went to the States I couldn’t believe my eyes—kids being cheeky to their parents, young people kissing in public—the first time I saw that I fainted. Then smoking and drinking—at home it’s considered insulting for a young unmarried woman to smoke in front of her elders. If my parents knew that I was not only smoking in front of my elders, but living with one of them, I guess they’d disown me. So I have to play the part of the good little Korean girl for the next two weeks, not smoking, refusing strong drink, speaking only when spoken to.” She reaches up and presses the service button above her head to order another vodka. “Now my parents want me to come home and get married to a guy they have lined up for me—yes, we still have arranged marriages in Korea, believe it or not. My father can’t understand why I keep putting him off. ‘You want to get married, don’t you?’ he says ‘Settle down, have children?’ What can I tell him?”

“That you’re already engaged?” Persse suggests.

“Ah, but I’m not,” says the girl sadly. Her name is Ji-Moon Lee, and she seems, to judge from the names she casually lets drop, to move in high academic circles in the United States. She tells him that the conference on Critical Theory and Comparative Literature will almost certainly be held at the Korean Academy of Sciences, a purpose-built conference and study centre just outside Seoul. He can take a taxi from the city centre, but must be sure to agree the fare first and should refuse to pay more than 700 won. Later, after they have landed, he sees her in the Arrivals hall of the airport, demurely smiling and amazingly sober, being greeted with bouquets by proud parents in tailored Western clothes.

It is the monsoon season in Korea, and Seoul is wet and humid, a concrete wilderness of indistinguishable suburbs ringing a city centre whose inhabitants are apparently so terrorized by the traffic that they have decided to live under the ground in a complex of subways lined with brightly lit shops. Persse takes a taxi to the Korean Academy of Sciences, a complex of buildings in oriental-modernist style set at the feet of low wooded hills, but the conference on Critical Theory and Comparative Literature has, he is hardly surprised to learn, finished and its participants have dispersed—some on a sightseeing tour of the south. So Persse takes a train which trundles through a sopping and unrelievedly green landscape of paddy fields and tree-topped hills swathed in mist, to the resort town of Kongju, site of many ancient monuments, temples and modern hotels, and an artificial lake on which floats, like a gigantic bathtoy, a fibreglass pleasureboat in the shape of a white duck, disembarking from which Persse meets, not Angelica, but Professor Michel Tardieu, in the company of three smiling Korean professors, all called Kim. Angelica, he learns from Tardieu, was indeed at the conference, but did not join the sightseeing tour. Tardieu seems to remember that she was going on to another conference, in Hong Kong.

Now it is mid-August, and Morris Zapp’s conference on the Future of Criticism in Jerusalem is in full swing. Almost everybody involved agrees that it is the best conference they have ever attended. Morris is smug. The secret of his success is very simple: the formal proceedings of the conference are kept to a bare minimum. There is just one paper a day actually delivered by its author, early in the morning. All the other papers are circulated in Xeroxed form, and the remainder of the day is allocated to “unstructured discussion” of the issues raised in these documents, or, in other words, to swimming and sunbathing at the Hilton pool, sightseeing in the Old City, shopping in the bazaar, eating out in ethnic restaurants, and making expeditions to Jericho, the Jordan valley, and Galilee.

The Israeli scholars, a highly professional and fiercely competitive group, are disgruntled with this arrangement, since they have been looking forward to attacking each other in the presence of a distinguished international audience, and the tourist attractions of Jerusalem and environs naturally have less novelty for them. But everybody else is delighted, with the exception of Rodney Wainwright, who still has not finished his paper. The only finished paper he has in his luggage is one by Sandra Dix, submitted to him just before he left Australia as part of her assessment in English 351. It is entitled “Matthew Arnold’s Theory of Culture,” and it begins: According to Matthew Arnold culture was getting to know, on the matters that most concerned you, the best people. Matthew Arnold was a famous headmaster who wrote “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” and invented the game of Rugby as well as the Theory of Culture. If I don’t get a good grade for this course I will tell your wife that we had sex in your office three times this semester, and you wouldn’t let me out when there was a fire drill in case somebody saw us leaving the room together… Rodney Wainwright goes hot and cold every time he thinks of this term-paper, to which he awarded a straight “A” without a moment’s hesitation, and which he has brought with him to Israel in case Bev or some colleague should happen to go through his desk drawers while he is away and find it. But he goes even hotter and colder when he thinks of his own conference paper, still stalled at, “The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism…” If only he had completed it in time! Then it could have been photocopied and circulated like most of the other contributions to the conference, and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been unconvincing, or even unintelligible, because nobody is seriously reading the papers anyway—you keep coming across them in the Hilton waste baskets… But because he hadn’t a finished text to give Morris Zapp when he arrived, Rodney Wainwright has been allocated one of the “live”, formal sessions—yes, he has been accorded the privilege of delivering his paper in person, on, in fact, the penultimate morning of the conference, for he was obliged to ask for as much grace as possible.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that Rodney Wainwright is unable to throw himself enthusiastically into the giddy round of pleasure that his fellow-conferees are enjoying. While they are at the poolside, or at the bar, or within the walls of the Old City, or in the air-conditioned bus, he is sitting at his desk behind drawn blinds in his room at the Hilton, sweating and groaning over his paper—or if he is not, he is guiltily aware that he ought to be. His colleagues’ carefree high spirits add gall to his own misery, and as the week passes with no progress on his paper, and professional humiliation looming ever nearer, his resentment of their euphoric mood focuses upon one man in particular: Philip Swallow. Philip Swallow, with his theatrical silver beard and his braying Pommie voice and his unaccountably dishy mistress. What does she see in him? It must be the randy old goat’s appetite for sex, because they seem to have a lot of that: Rodney Wainwright happens to occupy the room next to theirs and is not infrequently disturbed, working on his paper in the watches of the night, or in the middle of the afternoon, by muffled cries of pleasure audible when he presses his ear to the party wall; and if he should go out onto his balcony in the cool of the evening to stretch his cramped limbs, the chances are that Philip Swallow and his Joy will be on the adjacent balcony, clasped tenderly together, Joy rhapsodizing about the sunset reflected on the roofs and domes of the Old City, while Philip fondles her tits under her negligé. Rodney surprised Joy sunbathing topless on her balcony one morning when she evidently expected him to be at the formal paper session, and he has to admit that the tits would be well worth fondling. Not quite as spectacular as Sandra Dix’s, perhaps, but then Sandra Dix seemed to derive little pleasure from having them fondled by Rodney Wainwright, or indeed, from any aspect of his sexual performance, insisting on chewing gum throughout intercourse, and breaking silence only to ask if he wasn’t finished yet. For such meagre erotic reward has he risked domestic catastrophe in Cooktown, which makes it all the more aggravating to face professional disgrace in Jerusalem to the accompaniment of loudly voiced orgasmic bliss from the next room.

How does Philip Swallow do it? After screwing his blonde bird into the small hours, he is up bright and early for a swim in the hotel pool, never misses the morning lecture, is always first on his feet with a question when the speaker sits down, and signs up unfailingly for every sightseeing excursion on offer. It is as if the man has been given ten days to live and is determined to pack every instant with sensation, sublime or gross. No sooner have they all returned from retracing the Way of the Cross or inspecting the Dome of the Rock or visiting the Wailing Wall, than Philip Swallow is organizing a party to eat stuffed quail at an Arab restaurant hidden away in some crooked alley of the Old City which has been particularly recommended to him by one of the Israelis, setting off afterwards in a taxi with Joy and other dedicated hedonists to find a discotheque that is functioning clandestinely on the Sabbath. Yes, while Jerusalem is hushed in holy silence, the streets deserted and the shops all shut, Philip Swallow is bopping away under the strobe lights to the sound of the Bee Gees, his silver beard beaded with perspiration, his eyes fixed on Joy’s nipples bouncing under her cheesecloth blouse as she twitches to the same rhythm. Rodney Wainwright knows because he squeezed into the taxi himself at the last moment, rather than return to the solitary contemplation of his unfinished paper, though he does not dance, and sits gloomily on the edge of the dancefloor all evening, drinking overpriced beer and also watching Joy’s nipples bounce.

The next morning, Rodney does not hear Philip Swallow go whistling down the corridor for his early morning swim, so perhaps at last his excesses are taking their toll. But after breakfast he is down in the lobby with Joy, looking only a little pale and drawn under his tan, all ready for the day’s outing—it is a free day (free, that is, from even a single formal lecture) and an excursion has been arranged to the Dead Sea and Masada.

Rodney Wainwright knows that he ought to give this outing a miss, because his paper is due to be delivered the next morning, and it is still no further forward than when he arrived. He ought to spend the day alone in his room at the Hilton, with a carafe of iced water, working on it. But he knows all too well that he will fritter the day away, tearing up one draft after another, distracted by envious speculation about the fun the others will be having, especially Philip Swallow. Rodney Wainwright accordingly constructs a cunning plot against himself, whereby he will leave the composition of his paper to the last possible moment, viz., tonight, and thus force himself to finish it by the sheer, inexorable pressure of diminishing time.