David Lodge - Small World (8 page)

He walked a long way, to be sure of not being observed by any stray members of the conference, and eventually found, or rather lost, himself in the city centre, a bewildering labyrinth of dirty, malodorous stairs, subways and walkways that funnelled the local peasantry up and down, over and under the huge concrete highways, vibrating with the thunder of passing juggernauts. He passed many chemist’s shops. Some were too empty, some too full, for his comfort. Eventually, impatient with his own pusillanimity, he chose one at random and plunged recklessly inside.

The shop appeared to be deserted, and he looked rapidly around for the object of his quest, hoping that, when the chemist appeared, he would be able merely to point. He could not see what he was looking for, however, and to his dismay a young girl in white overalls appeared from behind a barricade of shelves.

“Yis?” she said listlessly.

Persse felt throttled by his embarrassment. He wanted to run and flee through the door, but his limbs refused to move. “Kinoielpyew?” said the girl impatiently.

Persse stared at his boots. “I’m after wanting some Durex, please,” he managed to mutter, in strangled accents.

“Small meedyum or large?” said the girl coolly.

This was a turn of the screw Persse had not anticipated. “I thought they were all the one size,” he whispered hoarsely.

“Nah. Small meedyum or large,” drawled the girl, inspecting her fingernails.

“Well, medium, then,” said Persse.

The girl vanished momentarily, and reappeared with a surprisingly big box wrapped in a paper bag, for which she demanded 75p. Persse snatched the package—it was also surprisingly heavy—from her, thrust a pound note across the counter, and fled from the shop without waiting for his change.

In a dark and noisome subway, decorated with football graffiti and reeking of urine and onions, he paused beneath a lightbulb to inspect his purchase. He withdrew from the paper bag a cardboard box which bore on its wrapper the picture of a plump, pleased-looking baby in a nappy, being fed something that looked like porridge. The brand-name of this product, displayed in large letters, was “Farex”.

Persse walked broodingly back towards the University. He had no inclination to return to the shop to explain the mistake, or to make a second attempt at another chemist’s shop. He took the frustration of his design to be providential, an expression of divine displeasure at his sinful intentions. On a broad thoroughfare lined with motorcar showrooms, he passed a Catholic church, and hesitated for a moment before a notice board which declared, “Confessions at any time.” It was a heavensent opportunity to shrive himself. But he decided that he could not in good faith promise to break his appointment with Angelica that night. He crossed the road—carefully, for he was undoubtedly in a state of sin now—and walked on, allowing his imagination to dwell voluptuously on images of Angelica coming to her bedroom in which he was hidden, Angelica undressing under his very eyes, Angelica naked in his arms. But what then? He feared that his inexperience would destroy the rapture of that moment, his knowledge of sexual intercourse being entirely literary and rather vague as to the mechanics.

As if the devil had planted it there, another notice, printed in bold black lettering on flame-coloured fluorescent paper, caught his eye: THIS CINEMA IS A CLUB SHOWING ADULT FILMS WHICH INCLUDE THE EXPLICIT AND UNCENSORED DEPICTION OF SEXUAL ACTS. IMMEDIATE MEMBERSHIP AVAILABLE. REDUCED RATES FOR OLD AGE PENSIONERS.

Persse swerved in through the doors, quickly, before his conscience had time to react. He found himself in a discreetly dim, carpeted foyer. A man behind a desk welcomed him suavely. “Membership form, sir? That will be three pounds altogether.”

Persse put down the name of Philip Swallow.

“That’s a coincidence, sir,” said the man, with a svelte smile, “We already have a Mr Philip Swallow on the books. Through the door over there.”

Persse pushed through padded doors into almost total darkness. He stumbled against a wall, and remained pressed to it for a moment while his sight accommodated to the gloom. The air was full of strange noises, an amplified mélange of heavy breathing, throttled cries, panting, moaning and groaning, as of souls in torment. A dim luminescence guided him forward, through a curtain, round a corner, and he found himself at the back of a small auditorium. The noise was louder than ever, and it was still very dark, impossible to see anything except the flickering images on the screen. It took Persse some moments to realize that what he was looking at was a hugely magnified penis going in and out of a hugely magnified vagina. The blood rushed to his face, and to another part of his anatomy. Bent forward, he shuffled down the sloping aisle, peering vainly to each side of him for an empty seat. The images on the screen shifted, close-up gave way to a wider, deeper perspective, and it became apparent that the owner of the vagina had another penis in her mouth, and the owner of the first penis had his tongue in another vagina, whose owner in turn had a finger in someone else’s anus, whose penis was in her vagina; and all were in frantic motion, like the pistons of some infernal machine. Keats it was not. It was a far cry from the violet blending its odour with the rose. “Siddown, can’t you?” someone hissed in the circumambient darkness. Persse groped for a seat, but his hand fell on a padded shoulder, and was shaken off with a curse. The moans and groans rose to a crescendo, the pistons jerked faster and faster, and Persse registered with shame that he had polluted himself. Perspiration poured from his brow and dimmed his sight. When what seemed, for one hallucinatory moment, to be the face of Angelica loomed between two massive hairy thighs, Persse turned and fled from the place as if from the pit of hell.

The man behind the reception desk looked up, startled, as Persse catapulted into the foyer. “Too tame for you?” he said. “You can’t have a refund, I’m afraid. Try next week, we’ve got some new Danish stuff coming in.”

Persse grabbed the man by his lapels and hauled him halfway across he desk. “You have made me defile the image of the woman I love,” he hissed. The man paled, and lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. Persse pushed him back into his seat, ran out of the cinema, across the road, and into the Catholic church.

A light was burning above a confessional bearing the name of “Fr Finbar O’Malley,” and within a few minutes Persse had unburdened his conscience and received absolution. “God bless you, my son,” said the priest in conclusion.

“Thank you, Father.”

“By the way, do you come from Mayo?”

“I do.”

“Ah. I thought I recognized the sound of Mayo speech. I’m from I he West myself.” He sighed behind the wire grille. “This is a terrible sinful city for a young Irish lad like yourself to be cast adrift in. How would you like to be repatriated?”

“Repatriated?” Persse repeated blankly.

“Aye. I administer a fund for helping Irish youngsters who have come over here looking for work and think better of it, and want to go back home. It’s called the Our Lady of Knock Fund for Reverse Emigration.”

“Oh, I’m only visiting, Father. I’m going back to Ireland tomorrow.”

“You have your ticket?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Then good luck to you, and God speed. You’re going to a better place than this, I can tell you.”

By the time Persse got back to the University it was afternoon, and the Conference had departed on a coach tour of literary landmarks in the region. Persse took a bath and slept for a few hours. He awoke feeling serene and purified. It was time to go to the bar for a drink before dinner.

The conferees were back from the sightseeing trip, which had not been a success: the owners of George Eliot’s childhood home had not been warned in advance, and would not let them inside the house, so they had had to content themselves with milling about in the garden and pressing their faces to the windows. Then Ann Hathaway’s cottage proved to be closed for maintenance; and finally the coach had broken down just outside Kenilworth, on the way to the Castle, and a relief vehicle had taken an hour to arrive.

“Never mind,” said Bob Busby, moving among the disgruntled conferees in the bar, “there’s still the medieval banquet to look forward to.”

“I hope to God Busby knows what he’s doing,” Persse heard Philip Swallow saying. “We can’t afford another cockup.” He was speaking to a man in a rather greasy charcoal grey suit whom Persse had not seen before.

“What’s it all about, then?” said this man, who had a Gauloise smouldering in one hand and a large gin and tonic in the other.

“Well, there’s a place in town called ‘Ye Merrie Olde Round Table,’ where they put on these mock medieval banquets,” said Philip Swallow. “I’ve never been myself, but Busby assured us it’s good fun. Anyway, he’s booked their team to lay it on here tonight.

They have minstrels, I understand, and mead, and…”

“And wenches,” Persse volunteered.

“I say,” said the man in the charcoal grey suit, turning smoke-bleared eyes upon Persse and treating him to a yellow-fanged smile. “It sounds rather fun.”

“Oh, hello McGarrigle,” said Philip Swallow, without enthusiasm. “Have you met Felix Skinner, of Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein? My publishers. Not that our professional association has been particularly profitable to either party,” he concluded with a forced attempt tempt at jocularity.

“Well, it has been a teeny bit disappointing,” Skinner admitted with a sigh.

“Only a hundred and sixty-five copies sold a year after publication,” said Philip Swallow accusingly. “And not a single review.”

“You know we all thought it was an absolutely super book, Philip,” said Skinner. “It’s just that there’s not much of an educational market for Hazlitt these days. And I’m sure the reviews will come eventually, in the scholarly journals. I’m afraid the Sundays and weeklies don’t pay as much attention to lit. crit. as they used to.”

“That’s because so much of it is unreadable,” said Philip Swallow. “I can’t understand it, so how can you expect ordinary people to? I mean, that’s what my book is saying. That’s why I wrote it.”

“I know, Philip, it’s awfully unfair,” said Skinner. “What’s your own field, Mr McGarrigle?”

“Well, I did my research on Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot,” said Persse.

“I could have helped you with that,” Dempsey butted in. He had just come into the bar with Angelica, who was looking heart stoppingly beautiful in a kaftan of heavy wine-coloured cotton, in whose weave a dark, muted pattern of other rich colours dimly gleamed. “It would just lend itself nicely to computerization,” Dempsey continued. “All you’d have to do would he to put the texts on to tape and you could get the computer to list every word, phrase and syntactical construction that the two writers had in common. You could precisely quantify the influence of Shakespeare on T. S. Eliot.”

“But my thesis isn’t about that,” said Persse. “It’s about the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare.”

“That sounds rather Irish, if I may say so,” said Dempsey, with a loud guffaw. His little eyes looked anxiously around for support.

“Well, what I try to show,” said Persse, “is that we can’t avoid reading Shakespeare through the lens of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. I mean, who can read
Hamlet
today without thinking of Prufrock’? Who can hear the speeches of Ferdinand in
The Tempest
without being reminded of ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of
The Waste Land?
”

“I say, that sounds rather interesting,” said Skinner. “Philip, old chap, do you think I might possibly have another one of these?” Depositing his empty glass in Philip Swallow’s hand, Felix Skinner took Persse aside. “If you haven’t already made arrangements to publish your thesis, I’d be very interested to see it,” he said.

“It’s only an MA,” said Persse, his eyes watering from the smoke of Skinner’s cigarette.

“Never mind, the libraries will buy almost anything on either Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot. Having them both in the same title would be more or less irresistible. Here’s my card. Ah, thank you Philip, your very good health… Look, I’m sorry about
Hazlitt
, but I think the best thing would be to put it down to experience, and try again with a more fashionable subject.”

“But it took me eight years to write that book,” Philip Swallow said plaintively, as Skinner patted him consolingly on the shoulder, sending a cascade of grey ash down the back of his suit.

The bar was now crowded with conferees drinking as fast as they could to get themselves into an appropriate mood for the banquet. Persse squeezed his way through the crush to Angelica.

“You told me your thesis was about the influence of Shakespeare on T. S. Eliot,” she said.

“So it is,” he replied. “I turned it round on the spur of the moment, just to take that Dempsey down a peg or two.”

“Well, it’s a more interesting idea, actually.”

“I seem to have let myself in for the job of writing it up, now,” said Persse. “I like your dress, Angelica.”

“I thought it was the most medieval thing I had with me,” she said, a gleam in her dark eyes. “Though I can’t guarantee that it will actually rustle to my knees.”

The allusion pierced him with a thrill of desire, instantly shattering his “firm purpose of amendment”. He knew that nothing could prevent him from keeping watch in Angelica’s room that evening.

Persse did not intend to sit next to Angelica at dinner, for he thought it would be more in the spirit of her romantic scenario that he should view her from afar. But he didn’t want Robin Dempsey sitting next to her either, and detained him in the bar with earnest questions about structuralist linguistics while the others went off to the refectory.

“It’s quite simple, really,” said Dempsey impatiently. “According to Saussure, it’s not the relation of words to things that allows them to signify, but their relations with each other, in short, the differences between them. Cat signifies cat because it sounds different from
cot
or
fat
.”

“And the same goes for Durex and Farex and Exlax?” Persse enquired.

“It’s not the first example that springs to mind,” said Dempsey, a certain suspicion in his close-set little eyes, “but yes.”