Thinks...

by David Lodge

Ralph picks up the box of empty bottles and carries them to the dustbins at the side of the house.

  Helen finds Professor Douglass buttoning up his overcoat in the hall.

  ‘Must you go so soon?’ Helen asks him.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he says. ‘My womenfolk become uneasy if I’m out very late at night.’ It is ten-fifteen by the grandfather clock in the hall. ‘And to be frank with you, I’m not excessively fond of parties. One never finishes a conversation properly.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ says Helen.

  ‘Not that that would bother our host,’ says Douglass, putting on a pair of black kid gloves, and flexing his fingers. ‘The master of the scientific sound-bite.’ He exposes his teeth in a smile to make this seem like a genial jest. ‘Tell him and Mrs Messenger that I had to leave, would you? I couldn’t find them to say goodbye.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Goodnight, then.’

  With two clicks of the press-studs on his gloves, he is gone.

  Helen goes into the drawing room, where Laetitia Glover is having an argument with Colin Riverdale about birth control. ‘The Catholic Church has a lot to answer for,’ she says. ‘Opposing contraceptive programmes in the Third World is criminally irresponsible.’

  ‘It suits the capitalist countries of the northern hemisphere to keep populations down in the southern hemisphere,’ says Colin. ‘By raising the standard of living in the Third World in a purely material sense they create new markets for their consumer goods.’ This point silences Laetitia for a moment, because it enlists an argument she has used herself in other contexts.

  ‘I’m not just talking about poverty and malnutrition,’ says Laetitia. ‘There’s also the question of AIDS. African women need to be protected against the consequences of male promiscuity.’

  ‘It’s no use distributing condoms to African women if African men won’t use them,’ says Colin.

  Annabelle Riverdale, who is listening silently and despondently to this discussion, raises her empty glass, squints at it, and moves unsteadily towards the door, evidently bent on getting a refill. Helen follows her and catches up with her at the table in the hall. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes thanks,’ says Annabelle. ‘I just thought I’d edge away before Colin starts on the joys of periodic abstinence.’

  Helen smiles sympathetically. ‘You mean the Rhythm Method? My sister tells me it’s lots of bother and it doesn’t work anyway.’

  ‘It works for us,’ says Annabelle.

  ‘Oh, good,’ says Helen, slightly confused.

  ‘Because I take the pill as well,’ says Annabelle. She raises a forefinger and taps it against her lips. ‘Don’t tell Colin.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ says Helen, gaping a little.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ says Annabelle. ‘Where’s the nearest loo?’

  ‘Over here,’ says Helen, taking her arm and guiding her towards the downstairs cloakroom.

  Returning to the house with his empty box, Ralph encounters Helen.

  ‘Oh, hallo,’ she says. ‘Colin Riverdale has taken Annabelle home. She wasn’t feeling well.’

  ‘Oh dear. I hope she’s not pregnant again.’

  ‘She’s not.’

  Ralph looks surprised by her emphatic tone.

  ‘And Professor Douglass was looking for you,’ says Helen. ‘He had to leave.’

  ‘That’s Duggers. Always the first to arrive and the first to go. I don’t know why he bothers to come. He hates parties anyway.’

  ‘So he said.’

  ‘Did he . . . ? I haven’t opened your present yet. Shall I now?’

  ‘If you like,’ she says.

  There is a small table beside the front door where the gifts and cards have been deposited. Ralph unwraps Helen’s present, and draws the stainless steel abacus from its box. ‘Ah, what I’ve always wanted,’ he says. ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘I thought it might come in useful when the millennium bug strikes,’ says Helen.

  ‘I saw a cartoon the other day, with two ancient Romans looking at one of these,’ he says, sliding a few ball-bearings along the top wire of the abacus with his forefinger, ‘and one is saying to the other, “I’m afraid it’s going to crash when we move from BC to AD.”’

  ‘Seriously,’ says Helen. ‘Aren’t you worried? I read somewhere that on January 1st 2000 everything will stop. Planes will fall out of the sky, ships go round and round in circles, operating theatres will go dark, supermarkets will run out of food and nobody will get paid their wages or their pensions.’

  ‘Alarmist talk and millennial fever,’ says Ralph. ‘There is a problem with some of the big old main-frame computers, but it’ll be sorted out.’

  ‘I’m rather sorry to hear you say that,’ says Helen. ‘There’s something rather poetically satisfying about the idea of modern civilization being undone by its own technology.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t much enjoy being pushed back into the Middle Ages overnight, I can tell you,’ he says. ‘By the way I looked up that Darwin reference for you: “Crying is a puzzler.”’

  ‘Oh, thanks. I’d forgotten all about it.’

  ‘It’s in my study – upstairs. Perhaps you’d like to see it? The study, I mean. Most people think it is worth the climb.’

  ‘Well, all right, thank you,’ says Helen after a moment’s hesitation.

  Carrie happens to pass from the kitchen to the dining room at this moment, carrying a large bowl of chocolate mousse, with Nicholas Beck in tow bearing a similar dish of fruit salad. ‘Just going to show Helen my study,’ Ralph says to Carrie. ‘Keep me some chocolate mousse.’

  ‘No,’ she says, without breaking step. ‘It’s first come, first served.’ Nicholas Beck gives a little smirk over his shoulder as he follows Carrie into the dining room.

  ‘Do you want to have your pudding now?’ Helen says to Ralph.

  ‘No, she’s only kidding. There’s another bowl in the fridge, I bet. Come on, we’ll avoid the feeding frenzy.’

  He leads her up two flights of stairs. ‘There are two schools of thought about studies,’ he says. ‘One is that it should be on the ground floor, so that you can keep in touch with what’s going on in the house, pop in and out easily to make the most of every scrap of spare time. The other is that it should be at the top of the house, as far away from the domestic action as possible, somewhere you retire to, where you won’t be disturbed.’

  ‘A lonely tower,’ says Helen.

  ‘Exactly. I’m a lonely tower man.’

  Ralph Messenger’s study has been constructed out of what were originally servants’ quarters, making a large room nearly half the floor area of the house, with a deep fitted carpet, extensive bookshelves, a vast desk and swivel chair, a round table with two upright chairs, a Charles Eames chaise longue, numerous reading lamps, standard lamps and spotlights, wood veneer filing cabinets, a computer tower and large-screen monitor, several other electric and electronic appliances – printer, scanner, fax machine, a combination TV-VCR, a hi-fi system – and a telescope mounted on a tripod under a skylight. All the furniture is made of cherrywood and stainless steel, and upholstered in black leather.

  ‘I wouldn’t call this a lonely tower,’ says Helen. ‘It’s a cross between a luxury bachelor pad and Mission Control.’

  Ralph chuckles. ‘It’s rather nice, isn’t it? But this is the finishing touch it’s been waiting for.’ He places the abacus on the desk-top, beside a set of brushed stainless steel cylinders welded together as a container for pens and pencils.

  ‘It matches!’ says Helen, pleased.

  ‘Yes. I assumed you’d asked Carrie’s advice.’

  ‘No, it was just chance. Or my sixth sense. But you probably don’t believe in a sixth sense.’

  He smiles. ‘No, I don’t.’ He goes across to one of the filing cabinets, pulls out a drawer on noiseless bearings, and extracts from one of the suspended files a single sheet, the photocopy of a pa
ge from Darwin’s Notebooks. ‘Here you are.’

  He puts the sheet under the reading lamp on the desk top so that they can both look at it. ‘It’s a passage from the 1838 notebook. Darwin is thirty. The voyage of the Beagle is two years behind him. He has the idea of evolution firmly by the tail. Hah, no pun intended . . . He’s convinced that man is descended from apes, but he hasn’t gone public yet – he knows all too well what an uproar it will cause. He’s been thinking about laughter – that when humans laugh they expose their canine teeth, just like baboons. He speculates that our laughter and smiling might be traced back to the way apes communicate the discovery of food to the rest of their tribe.’ Ralph underlines the quotation with his index finger as he reads aloud: ‘“This way of viewing the subject important, laughing modified barking, smiling modified laughing. Barking to tell other animals in associated kinds of good news, discovery of prey. – no doubt arising from want of assistance.” Then comes the afterthought. He can’t think what crying might be a modification of. “Crying is a puzzler.”’

  ‘“Sunt lacrimae rerum,”’ says Helen.

  ‘My Latin’s a tad rusty,’ Ralph says.

  ‘“There are tears of things.” Virgil. It’s almost untranslatable, but one knows what he means. Something like, “Crying is a puzzler.”’

  ‘Actually laughter is a puzzler too,’ says Ralph. ‘Darwin’s explanation doesn’t really cut it.’

  ‘Could you design a robot that would laugh at another robot’s jokes?’ Helen asks.

  ‘It would be a challenge,’ says Ralph. ‘But I don’t see why not.’

  ‘I don’t believe a machine could ever feel amused,’ says Helen. ‘Or happy, or sad – or bored.’

  ‘Bored?’ Ralph smiles, as if he had never considered this possibility, or impossibility, before.

  ‘Yes. If my Toshiba laptop were a human being it would be bored stiff because I only use it to do word-processing. I don’t suppose I use even ten per cent of its brainpower. But the computer doesn’t mind.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ says Ralph. ‘That’s why computers are so liberating for mankind. We can abolish boredom! Why would you want to reproduce it artificially? Is boredom an essential feature of human nature?’

  ‘Well, I think perhaps it is. Happiness and sadness are, anyway. I want to see a robot that can laugh and cry and sulk before I believe it’s conscious.’

  ‘You may not have to wait long. Computers are evolving at incredible speed.’

  ‘I know, I heard you on the radio the other day.’

  ‘Did you?’ Ralph looks pleased. ‘Well, it’s true. Your little laptop probably has as much memory as the University’s first main-frame. A megabyte of memory cost half a million in those days. Now it costs about two pounds.’

  ‘But you don’t need megabytes of memory to get a joke,’ says Helen. ‘Even an infant can recognize something that’s funny. Ever played “Peep-bo” with a baby?’

  ‘True,’ Ralph says. ‘But I was thinking of identifying the logical structure of events perceived as funny, so you could build that into the architecture. Suppose one got a computer to crunch millions of jokes instead of numbers? It might discover the mechanism behind laughter. Did I tell you what a very fetching dress that is you’re wearing?’

  ‘No,’ says Helen, ‘but thank you. Shouldn’t we rejoin the party?’

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘Would you like to take this with you?’ He folds the sheet and slips it into an envelope.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says as she takes it from him.

  ‘Well, thanks for the abacus. Do I get a kiss as well?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Helen, after a momentary pause.

  ‘Didn’t you enjoy it last time?’

  Helen seems unwilling to answer this question. ‘I don’t want to have an affair with you, Ralph,’ she says at length.

  He opens his eyes wide, spreads his hands, and grins. ‘Hey, who said anything about an affair? All I had in mind was a friendly kiss.’

  ‘Really?’ She looks him challengingly in the eye. ‘Are you telling me that it has never crossed your mind that you would like to go further than that?’

  He stares at her for a moment, mouth open a little, then laughs. ‘Well, sure. But men think that all the time about the women they meet, attractive women. It doesn’t mean they intend to do anything about it.’

  ‘Isn’t kissing doing something about it?’

  ‘Not necessarily. There are all kinds of kisses. Some are passionate, some are . . . just friendly.’ He smiles. ‘The qualia of kissing are infinitely various.’

  ‘Well, you should know,’ she says. ‘You seem to do a lot of research.’

  Ralph stops smiling. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Come on. Tell me.’

  Helen looks away and then back at Ralph. ‘I happened to see you kissing Marianne Richmond at their dinner party . . . through the kitchen window . . . I wandered out into the back yard by mistake. I wasn’t spying.’

  ‘I’m not having an affair with Marianne,’ says Ralph.

  ‘It’s really none of my business,’ says Helen. ‘I wish I hadn’t mentioned it. Shall we go down?’

  ‘We were just fooling around. It was a game we used to play, a kind of dare-game. But it’s over now.’

  ‘As I say, it’s none of my business.’ She moves towards the door. ‘I’m going down now.’

  ‘Hang on.’ He turns off the desk lamp and a standard lamp. ‘I hope this doesn’t mean we can’t be friends any more,’ he says.

  ‘No, on the contrary. It’s to ensure that I can go on being friends with both of you.’

  ‘Oh good.’ He joins her at the door. ‘Er, you haven’t . . . you wouldn’t . . . say anything to Carrie about . . . ?’ She gives him a slightly contemptuous look. ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  Helen walks out of the room. Ralph turns out the remaining lights from the master switch by the door, and closes it behind him. The roar of conversation rises to meet them as they descend the staircase.

  14

  MONDAY 17TH MARCH. Another weekend has passed in thrall to the Messengers.

  It had been agreed that I would stay the night after the party on Saturday, so that I could drink without worrying about driving myself home. I felt a little self-conscious, standing beside Ralph and Carrie in the hall and saying goodbye to the last departing guests, as if I were a member of the family – but that is what I seem to have become. ‘Adopted’, was Jasper Richmond’s word. I was somewhat disturbed by his remarks, but he’s a rather malicious gossip, and probably everything he says should be taken with a pinch of salt. If Carrie is being nice to me just to keep tabs on Ralph, it seems a risky strategy. He’s already managed to kiss me once, and would have done again on Saturday night if I’d let him.

  After the final stragglers had gone, I helped collect the soiled plates and glasses from various rooms on the ground floor, and to stack them in the kitchen ready for the domestic help, who was coming in next morning specially to attend to them. Carrie made the three of us (the children had long ago retired to their bedrooms to watch TV or sleep) a delicious nightcap, a Mexican drink of hot chocolate with brandy and a touch of chilli in it, and we sat round the kitchen table sipping this concoction and discussing the highlights of the party before we retired to bed.

  The guest bedroom still smelled faintly of the mingled perfumes of the evening’s female guests. I opened the window to air it before I went to bed. And I locked the door. Why? Did I think Ralph might try to sneak into my bed in the middle of the night? An absurd idea of course; and yet, as I entertained it, tossing and turning under the duvet (something in the Mexican drink seemed to be acting as a stimulant rather than a soporific), I wondered what I would do if I had left the door unlocked and he did sneak in. Supposing Carrie took a pill and was sound asleep, and he crept out of their bedroom and into my room and slipped under the covers – would I scream and struggle? Bring Carrie and the children running from t
heir bedrooms? Denounce Ralph in a scene of excruciating embarrassment, and leave by taxi in the middle of the night? No, I wouldn’t. So what would I have done? Protested and remonstrated in whispers? ‘Are you mad? Get out of my bed at once or I’ll, I’ll, I’ll . . .’ What? ‘I’ll never speak to you again.’ A feeble threat. So what – do I let him have his way? Of course not – and yet I had to ask myself whether this train of thought wasn’t a variation on the famous female rape fantasy the pop psychologists tell us about, the desire to abandon oneself to sex without having to take moral responsibility for it. Why else was I imagining this scenario? I’m not going to have an affair with Ralph Messenger because I don’t wish to be a party to adultery, not because I don’t find him attractive. I do find him attractive, alas.

  Mulling wakefully over our conversation in his study, I regretted (and still regret) that I spoke so bluntly: ‘I don’t want to have an affair with you, Ralph.’ He had the grace to admit that some such thought had crossed his mind. But now he knows that it has crossed my mind too, something I would rather have kept to myself. And then I stupidly blurted out that I’d seen him kissing Marianne Richmond – it must have been all the wine I had drunk that loosened my tongue and dissolved my usual discretion. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I wished I could suck them back in and swallow them. He looked really rattled, then angry, before he recovered his usual poise.

  Recalling all that when I woke the next morning, I felt some uneasiness about meeting him and Carrie at breakfast, and took my time washing and dressing. Fortunately I’d brought a pair of jeans and a sweater with me, so I didn’t have to appear in my new party frock among the comfortably deshabillés Messengers. Carrie was still in her dressing gown, her hair tousled and her face shiny with moisturiser, and Ralph was wearing a CAL TECH tee-shirt and a pair of tracksuit trousers. The children who were up were still in pyjamas. They were eating waffles with maple syrup – apparently an established Sunday morning treat – at the long kitchen table. Ralph greeted me cheerily, without a hint of embarrassment, and Carrie poured me freshly squeezed orange juice and coffee.