by David Lodge
‘I don’t think we should go on with this conversation,’ says Helen, but without moving from her chair.
‘We could go upstairs and take off our clothes and lie down on your bed and make slow, very enjoyable love, and fall asleep in each other’s arms, and wake refreshed and renewed. Nobody else would ever know about it.’
‘No,’ Helen says. ‘I won’t.’
‘Why not? You know we’re attracted to each other. It happened that first evening we met, at the Richmonds, as soon as I set eyes on you. It’s unmistakable. That sudden feeling of buoyancy, a simple delight in the existence of this captivating other person . . . You felt it too, don’t deny it. I caught your eye several times at dinner.’
‘We can’t just do what we want without regard to other people,’ Helen says.
‘If it’s Carrie you’re referring to . . .’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘She won’t mind as long as we’re discreet.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Carrie’s not dumb. She knows most men are not one hundred per cent faithful to their wives. She knows I’m a highly sexed man. But she doesn’t check up on me. She doesn’t go through my pockets. That’s why our marriage has survived.’
‘Carrie’s my friend,’ says Helen. ‘I wouldn’t want to deceive her.’
Ralph sighed. ‘We deceive each other all the time, Helen – you know that. There are a thousand things you wouldn’t tell Carrie under any circumstances. Why make a fetish of this one?’
‘That’s the way I am. It’s probably my Catholic upbringing.’
‘But you don’t really believe all that nonsense any more. You don’t believe you’ll go to Hell just because one afternoon, after a very pleasant meal, you went upstairs with me to your bedroom and very pleasantly fucked? Do you?’
‘No, but . . .’
‘It’s no big deal, Helen. People are fucking all the time, all over the world, and a lot of them, perhaps most of them, are not married to each other. It’s just a very nice thing to do with someone you like. It’s the supremely human act, freely to fuck, not because you are on heat, or in oestrus, like an animal, but to give and receive pleasure.’
Helen stands up and begins stacking the soiled plates. ‘I’ll make coffee, and then you’d better go to your committee meeting,’ she says.
Ralph glances at his wristwatch. ‘If I’m going to the committee meeting, I’ll have to skip the coffee.’
‘As you wish,’
‘You’re sure you don’t want me to skip the committee?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘Well, I’m sorry. I think it would have been . . . memorable.’ He gets up from his chair and gathers his belongings together. ‘I’ll see you on Sunday, then.’
‘I don’t think I shall come to Horseshoes this weekend,’ Helen says.
‘But you’re expected! You’re invited. You’re . . . an institution.’
‘I’ll see,’ Helen says.
‘Thanks for the lunch.’ He extends his hand, and Helen takes it. He raises her hand to his lips and plants a kiss on her knuckles. ‘See you on Sunday,’ he says.
18
FRIDAY 21ST MARCH. Ralph has just left, after trying and failing to get me to go to bed with him. It was a close call – closer, I suspect, than he had any inkling of. If he had seen me this morning, frantically preparing for his arrival, he would have really fancied his chances.
I phoned him at about eleven o’clock this morning, asking for help in getting fixed up with Email, and he promptly invited himself to lunch. Just bread and cheese, he said. There was a heel of old Cheddar in my fridge and not much else, so I dashed over to the campus supermarket and stocked up with Stilton, Gruyère and chèvre, Ardennes pâté, salad stuff, and enough tomatoes to make soup. Then I tore round the house with the vacuum cleaner, tidied the living-room, plucked my drying underwear from the line over the bath, changed the sheets on the bed (why? because they show under the slightly-too-small duvet and looked as if they needed changing, or so I told myself, but who knows what ideas were simmering in my subconscious – and anyway, why should I suppose that he would see the inside of my bedroom? Though as it happened he insisted on a thorough tour of the accommodation as soon as he arrived, including the bathroom, which had a pair of discarded knickers on the floor that had escaped my notice.)
By this time I was sweating profusely from all the exertion, so took a shower for the second time today, and decided to wash my hair while I was about it, and changed my clothes – twice, because the skirt and blouse I first put on seemed too dressy for the occasion, especially crowned with my freshly washed hair, so I adopted a more casual look, a loose denim shirt worn outside a pair of trousers. I wanted to make a pleasing impression without sending any seductive signals. Not that he needed any encouragement. I’m quite sure he came here with every intention of trying to seduce me, and that the request to see over the house was just a pretext for learning the relevant domestic geography – casing the joint, as burglars say, or used to say in novels.
‘Seduce’ is another word that sounds terribly old-fashioned and literary now, suggestive of deflowered maidens and ruined women, of Richardson’s Pamela defending her ‘virtue’ against Mr B, but I can’t think of a better one at the moment. After all, he was trying to get me into bed and I was resisting temptation. And there’s no doubt that I was tempted. He’s the first man I’ve met since Martin died that I have felt physically attracted to – that I can imagine myself naked and entwined with, without the image seeming ridiculous or repellent. There’ve been a few occasions in the last year, literary parties and suchlike, when I’ve been chatting away to some man, and perhaps got carried away a bit by alcohol so as to seem more flirtatious than I really felt, and then I would realize with alarm that he was calculating the chances of getting off with me and I would immediately freeze up, or wave to some non-existent friend on the other side of the room and rush off to greet them, or find some other excuse . . . once I left some poor mutt, a middle-aged bookseller with yellow teeth and hairy ears, holding my wineglass while I went to the lavatory, but instead of rejoining him I took my coat from the hall and crept away and hailed a cab and rode home alone giggling guiltily to myself.
After the long years of monogamous sex with Martin it seemed unthinkable to start all over again with another, strange man. We had become so used to each other, we had aged together, we were patient of each other’s imperfections, understanding of each other’s needs, we knew each other’s preferences and proclivities and dislikes, and if it happened that on occasion he lost his erection, or I couldn’t achieve an orgasm, it didn’t matter, he didn’t let it bother him, I didn’t fake it, for we knew there would be other occasions. It takes time to build up that kind of relationship, it’s like a language that you have to learn. What would one do, face to face, naked body to naked body, with a stranger who didn’t speak it, who had another language of his own? It was no use thinking back to one’s mildly promiscuous youth for a model of how to behave. Those excited, shy, solemn, anxious, drunken couplings in college bedrooms and sordid bedsits, seem pathetically shallow in retrospect. How eager the young men were, how impatient their quivering erections, how quickly they finished, how disappointing, on the whole, one’s own sensations were, though one hardly admitted it to oneself, so tremendous was the sense of liberation, of achieved adulthood, of just knowing at last what sex was. Martin was the first man who made love to me slowly, the first to give me a proper orgasm – and the only one, to date. He had a capacity for sensuality. You could see it in his eyes when the mood was on him, and in the faint play of a smile at the corners of his mouth. I sense the same capacity in Ralph Messenger.
Yes, I was tempted – all the more because he wooed me with words, like a Renaissance poet to his coy mistress. He didn’t attempt to kiss me, though I kept thinking he might, perhaps I was half-hoping he would – perhaps he knew that I was half-hoping he would, and was deliberately disappointing me to provo
ke desire . . . But he didn’t kiss me when he came in, he didn’t make a grab at me when we were upstairs together, he didn’t suggest a move to the sofa when we had finished our lunch. He behaved like a perfect gentleman. Except that he coolly proposed that we should go upstairs and, as he put it, ‘very pleasantly fuck’. Oh dear, just writing those words down makes me wet.
Is he right? Have I pointlessly denied myself a pleasant experience – one from which I might have arisen ‘refreshed and renewed’? God knows I could do with some refreshment of that kind – my body craves to be held and stroked and comforted. Sometimes I think I’m struggling with Ralph Messenger for my soul – literally, because according to him, it doesn’t exist. Not in the sense of an immortal, essential self answerable to its creator for its actions. ‘Oh, I grant you a mortal soul. It’s just another way of describing self-consciousness.’ And self-consciousness is a fiction, an epiphenomenon of surplus brain-capacity. So why be good? Why deny oneself pleasure? ‘If there is no God, everything is permitted,’ says one of the Karamazovs. Is that true? Then why don’t we all kill, rob, rape, and deceive each other all the time? Enlightened self-interest, the materialists say – the recognition that we increase our personal chances of survival by accepting social constraints and sanctions. Civilization is based on repression, as Freud observed. But not in sex, not any more, the godless say. There is no need to pretend that sex for pleasure should be confined to monogamous marriage. True? Not if contemporary fiction is to be believed. There seems to be just as much anger, jealousy, bitterness generated by sexual infidelity as there ever was.
If I could be 100 per cent sure that Carrie would never find out, and therefore never be hurt, perhaps I would sleep with Ralph, but such mathematical certainty can never be guaranteed in human relations. And it’s not only her feelings that weigh in the balance. In a curious way I feel it would dishonour Martin’s memory, or the memory of our marriage, if my first sexual experience after his death were to be an adulterous one. If that’s irrational, even superstitious, so be it.
19
MARY HAD A little lamb . . . or should I say spectrophotometer . . . and what was that other one? Mary Mary quite contrary – no, solitary, it was Helen who was contrary, alas . . . I thought I was going to get lucky when she called me this morning and invited me to lunch . . . well I suppose technically I invited myself, but still . . . it was a kind of a come-on, please mister computer scientist can you help poor little me with my Email . . . and she phoned from home not her office . . . I’d deliberately not contacted her since the weekend. Once I saw her on campus in the distance and waved but didn’t stop, pretended I was in a hurry . . . I was waiting to see if she would make the first move, and she did . . . Appearances were promising when I arrived at her house, she’d obviously been cleaning it in my honour, everything neat and tidy like a show home, cushions plumped on the sofa, crisp clean sheets on the bed – a double I was glad to note . . . and a pair of knickers left accidentally on purpose in the bathroom . . . or so I surmised at the time, but perhaps I was wrong, maybe it was a genuine oversight. She certainly whipped them away smartly enough, I just had time to see they were a pair of plain white cotton pants, nothing like Martha’s peach satin hanky-panky kit . . . There’s no doubt she wanted to see me, but unfortunately she has scruples about fucking me . . . Pity, I really fancy her . . .
So instead of love in the afternoon I had three hours of crucifying boredom at the Senate working party on interfaculty modular compatibility, meaning we’re supposed to come up with a formula to ensure that a course in say the School of Community Studies requires as much work and deserves the same weight as a course in say Electrical Engineering, so that the University can put its new degree in Interdisciplinary Studies on the market . . . our Pick ‘n’ Mix degree as the Registrar likes to refer to it, which is supposed to give us a competitive edge in the annual applications bazaar and save the University’s fortunes . . . Market research has apparently established that there’s an unfilled niche for a degree course that would allow the student to combine courses across the whole university curriculum, nuclear physics with soap-opera analysis, molecular biology with medieval mystery plays . . . I daresay it looks quite enticing on paper, especially the glossy, colour-illustrated paper of the University’s brochure, but some of these subjects are harder than others and most of them can’t be studied properly in isolation, but I didn’t make myself any friends this afternoon by pointing this out . . .
It’s 5.30 on Friday 21st March and I’m in my office killing time till I meet Carrie at six for a quick bite in the Arts Centre Café before a concert we’re going to . . . Haydn and Mozart, I think . . . Carrie booked the tickets . . . a waste of time, really . . . I like listening to music as background, while I’m doing something else, but not sitting in a concert hall . . . After a few bars, I’m away, daydreaming, free-associating . . . no doubt I don’t know enough about music, but I wonder how many people actually think music when they’re listening to it . . . very few I bet . . . Imagine if you could put a wire into every brain in a concert hall and watch the scan patterns – would they all be the same? I very much doubt it . . . and if you could actually download the semantic contents of their brain activity digitally and decode them and print them out, five hundred people all listening to the same piece of music, I bet you’d get five hundred totally different totally unique thought streams as wild and incoherent and surprising as dreams . . . all kinds of thoughts, trivial, serious, erotic . . . did I lock the back door I like that woman’s scarf the lead violin’s nose is dripping he must have a cold I’ve got a bit of indigestion mustn’t fart I like this bit it’s on that CD she gave me last Christmas I must remember to buy her a birthday card that cellist something very sexy about a woman playing the cello right up between her thighs why does the conductor keep flicking the hair out of his eyes why doesn’t he get himself a fucking haircut I need one myself actually must make an appointment that travel agency next door where shall we go next year not Majorca again what about Portugal and so on and so on . . . Hmm, not bad that, but I cheated of course . . . I’m dictating this straight on to the computer via Voicemaster so am able to correct and revise as I go . . . it took me quite a while to put that little sequence together . . . Like Virginia Woolf . . .
Interesting that Helen keeps a journal . . . I’d give anything to see what’s in it . . . Suppose I offered to swap mine for hers, hah! there’s an idea . . . my secret thoughts for hers . . . would she be tempted, I wonder? Of course it would put a definitive stop to any hopes of bedding her, once she’d read my lurid memoirs . . . Or on the other hand perhaps not, you never know, she might be turned on by them . . . And who knows if her own journal isn’t equally sexy? I would find out anyway if she really fancies me or not, and how strong her principles are . . . No this is silly, I wouldn’t dare show this stuff to anybody . . . though on the other hand . . . if I had her own journal, there’s bound to be something compromising in it . . . there would be a kind of guarantee of confidentiality in the act of exchange . . . the threat of tit-for-tat . . . mutually assured destruction . . . no . . . too risky . . . anyway she wouldn’t do it . . . Would she?
20
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Email
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 9:08:31
* * *
helen, hi, just checking that your email is working ok. have you had a reply from your daughter?
we missed you at horseshoes yesterday. i hope you’re getting over that cold. it must have come on quitesuddenly – you looked fine on friday. many thanks for the lunch.
best wishes, ralph,
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Email
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 10:31:13
* * *
Dear Ralph,
Thank you very much for your kind enquiry. Yes I’ve heard from Lucy and we’ve already exchanged tw
o long letters. It’s marvellous to be effortlessly in touch with her like this. Many thanks for helping me to get ‘wired’ (is that the phrase?)
My cold is improving, thanks.
Best wishes, Helen
P.S. What does the ‘H’ stand for?
From: R.H. [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: dark secret
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 10:50:10
* * *
helen,
herbert i’m afraid, a dark secret i do my best to conceal, but the uni payrollinsists on full intials and email addresses are based on that. it was my dads name. what does M stand for?
‘wired’ is cool but you’re going to have to loosen up your prose style for email. speed is the essence for instance dont bother with caps because they take up time unnecessarily, two keystrokes instead of one and dont bother correcting typos.
since your cold is improving, what about lunch tomorrow? staff house at 12.45?
ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Tuesday
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 12:17:11
* * *
Dear Ralph,
Thanks, but I have a seminar on Tuesday afternoons, and I like to have a quiet hour to myself immediately before it.
I can’t lose a lifetime’s habit of correct spelling and punctuation, I’m afraid. ‘M’ stands for Mary.
Best wishes, Helen
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: M, lunch
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 12:40:03
* * *
ah that explains your emotional identification with Mary the colour scientist.