Thinks...

by David Lodge

  I loved all this. I metaphorically hugged myself with glee. I love to feel connected with the great, and not so great, writers of the past by walking the ground they walked and seeing the things they saw. A lot of my London friends like to mock the heritage industry, but I’m enormously grateful that so much money and effort is expended on preserving the fabric of the past. The approach to Ledbury’s parish church, for instance, must have looked much the same to James as it did to me – not so spick and span, perhaps, in his day, and no doubt smellier – but essentially it has been preserved from modernization. As you climb the crooked, cobbled lane that leads from the High Street, with low black and white houses crowding in from each side, you can see at the top, soaring above the roofs, the steeple of St Michael and All Angels, with its ‘golden vane surveying half the shire’, as Masefield wrote (according to my guide – I don’t know much Masefield off by heart). James’s word ‘campanile’ had misled me into imagining a tower in Italian Renaissance style, something like Siena’s on a reduced scale, but of course it’s a steeple, originally Norman, with a spire that was replaced in the eighteenth century. It is, however, detached from the main body of the church, as James said, freestanding amid the green grass and weathered tombstones, and I don’t think I have seen anything quite like it elsewhere in England. The church itself is full of historical and architectural interest. The big wooden doors are pockmarked with bullet holes from the Battle of Ledbury (whatever that was, my leaflets didn’t say) and there is a small red window set above the big East Window, supposed to have been put there in the sixteenth century as a kind of substitute for the sanctuary lamp banned by Protestant Reformers (something to tell Daddy about, it’s the sort of nugget he delights in).

  After a thorough inspection of the church, and a leisurely wander among the tombstones, reading the inscriptions, I strolled back down the lane, feeling thoroughly pleased with myself, and with an appetite for lunch. The Feathers turned out to be just the ticket. Sometimes a woman on her own can feel uncomfortable eating bar food in a pub, but this place was more like a large, informal restaurant. The whole ground floor had been opened out, and most of the walls removed, but the thick vertical beams left standing like pillars, creating a large irregular space, with alcoves and bays. Logs smouldered in the big open fireplace, and there were spring flowers on every table – solid, unpolished wooden tables, with comfortable Windsor armchairs. Blackboards over the long bar listed an enticing and adventurous menu. I ordered garlic and herb tagliatelle with chilli prawns and sun-dried tomatoes, reserving the possibility of an orange truffle pot with Grand Marnier sauce for dessert. A smiling motherly waitress took my order, to which I added a large glass of the house Chardonnay. The first course, when it came, was as mouth-watering as its description promised. I could hardly believe my good fortune.

  And then it happened. I had just finished my tagliatelle and prawns; the waitress had removed my plate and taken my order for dessert. I swallowed the last mouthful of wine, settled back into the curve of the Windsor chair with a sigh of satisfaction, and idly looked up and across the floor of the restaurant. On the other side of the room, in one of the cosy-looking bays with upholstered seats, a table that had been empty when I came in, with a ‘Reserved’ card on it, was now occupied – by Carrie Messenger and Nicholas Beck.

  My first reaction was: what a delightful surprise, what a happy coincidence, to meet friends unexpectedly in this charming place. The explanation for their presence flashed into my mind at the same instant (it’s extraordinary how fast the brain works in these situations) as I recalled Carrie mentioning on my first visit to the house on Pittsville Lawn that Nicholas Beck had helped her acquire period furniture by driving her round the country to auctions and antique shops. They must be on just such an expedition today, I presumed.

  My next impulse was to go over and greet them, perhaps even to join them for a while, to share my discovery of Ledbury’s enchanting church and steeple. No doubt they were already familiar with it, but they wouldn’t know about the Henry James connection and I was eager to impress them with this little crumb of knowledge, in the way one is with cultured friends. But just as I was about to rise to my feet, Nicholas Beck took Carrie’s hand, leaned across the angle of the table, and kissed her full on the lips.

  It was a lover’s kiss. There was no doubt in my mind about that. Immediately my brain went into turbodrive again (it must be because of my conversations with Ralph that I have begun to picture my own thought processes in the language of engineering) scanning possibilities, resolving contradictions, revising assumptions, making deductions. The unavoidable inferences were that Nicholas Beck was neither celibate nor homosexual, as Jasper Richmond had confidently informed me, and that Carrie was no more faithful to Ralph than he to her.

  What to do now?

  What I wanted to do was to flee at once, before they saw me. But could I recall the waitress, cancel my pudding and settle my bill, without drawing attention to myself? As I hesitated, Carrie, who had gently detached her crescent lips from Nicholas’s, but kept her head close to his for a moment, now turned away, leaned back in her seat, and surveyed the restaurant, with a complacent amorous smile still lingering on her face. The smile faded abruptly, like a light being switched off, as she caught sight of me staring at her from the other side of the room.

  Oh, it was so like the scene in The Ambassadors where Lambert Strether, at the riverside inn in the country outside Paris, identifies what he at first took to be a pair of anonymous young lovers in a rowing boat as Chad Newsome and Mme de Vionnet, and realizes that their relationship, which he has believed and staunchly declared to be platonic, is after all an illicit sexual liaison. There was the same momentary dismay and confusion on both sides, quickly covered up by good manners and quick improvisation. Carrie recovered her smile almost at once, though it was a very different and distinctly forced one that she beamed at me, as she mimed surprise and pleasure and waved to me to join them. I waved and smiled back with, I’m sure, equally obvious artificiality, like Strether ‘agitating his hat and stick’ on the riverbank. Nicholas had by this time turned his eyes sharply in my direction as Carrie murmured something to him. To spare his, and my own, embarrassment, I ducked my head and groped under my chair for my handbag. Then I got up and walked across to their table, placing one foot in front of the other as carefully as a model on a catwalk.

  By the time I reached them, Nicholas had recovered his composure. He rose from the table, greeted me suavely and offered me a seat. Carrie and I exchanged a kiss on both cheeks – curious, that, because we never did so before, but it was an instinctive mutual gesture, which, if I try to analyse it, was designed to draw the erotic charge from the kiss I had just witnessed: to place it, as it were, in a code of purely social behaviour, as if we were theatrical types who went around embracing each other at every opportunity.

  Well, we performed well enough in the scene that followed, feigning joy and astonishment at the coincidence of our meeting in the quaint little town. I asked if they were on the antique trail, and Carrie quickly took the cue, describing just the sort of chest of drawers she was in search of, while I burbled enthusiastically about the church and trotted out my Henry James anecdote. Mercifully, our ordeal was not as extended as that of the characters in The Ambassadors, obliged to dine together in strained conviviality, and then return to Paris by train together, to preserve the fiction that Strether’s friends were only out for the day, when they had clearly planned to spend the night in some rustic love-nest. Whether Carrie and Nicholas Beck had booked a bedroom in the Feathers for the afternoon, I have no idea, and didn’t linger to ascertain. When the waitress brought their first course, I made a move to return to my table, but Carrie insisted on my eating my pudding with them. But I skipped coffee, and departed as soon as I decently could. I hurried to my car, and skedaddled out of Ledbury as fast as my wheels would carry me. I drove straight back to the campus, quite forgetting my intention to visit Tewkesbury Abbey, rep
laying the scene in the restaurant in my mind and giggling aloud in a mildly hysterical fashion from time to time.

  For there was something funny as well as shocking about what I had inadvertently discovered. Adultery, as one knows, can be a subject for both comedy and tragedy in literature, from a Feydeau farce at one end of the spectrum to Anna Karenina at the other, and the same is true in life, depending on the context and your point of view. I certainly hadn’t seen anything amusing in Martin’s betrayal of me with Sandra Pickering. But the idea of Ralph Messenger, of all people, being cuckolded by Nicholas Beck, of all people, was irresistibly comic. Had Beck, I wondered, deliberately encouraged the rumour that he was a celibate homosexual? What a wonderful cover story – it was as good as Horner’s putative impotence in The Country Wife. Perhaps he was swiving all the wives on campus under the noses of their husbands. But common sense reasserted itself. I recalled a number of little incidents which suggested a proper affaire that had been going for some little while. Carrie’s car parked outside Nicholas Beck’s town house in Lansdown Crescent on that February afternoon when I ran into her in Cheltenham. The strange little complacent smirk on Nicholas’s face as he crossed the flagged hall behind Carrie, carrying a pudding dish for her at Ralph’s party. And the casual recurrent dropping of his name, in her conversation, as a connoisseur. Perhaps they had fallen in love on one of their antique-foraging excursions – in any case that pursuit had provided a wonderful alibi for their disappearing together for hours on end. What a set! I thought to myself, shaking my head over the steering wheel.

  What a world, I think now, more sombrely, as I read this through again. What a world of secret infidelities. Martin with Sandra Pickering, Carrie with Nicholas, Ralph with Marianne – and with me if he’d had his way. Even little Annabelle Riverdale is deceiving her husband with a packet of pills (not that I blame her). How many more deceptions shall I uncover? Is everybody I know cheating? Am I the only one with scruples and principles, as outmoded and inconvenient as Victorian crinolines? Am I missing something? I’m determined, anyway, not to let this episode make me feel guilty, make me feel uncomfortable. I thought about inventing another cold or other excuse for not going to Horseshoes on Sunday, but have decided to carry on as arranged.

  25

  ‘EVERYBODY WHO LIVES around here sneers at Bourton-on-the Water,’ Emily says to Helen. ‘But I kinda like it.’ Helen is at the wheel of her car, following Ralph Messenger’s big Mercedes estate which has Carrie and the other children on board. Emily is riding with Helen in case she should get separated and lost in the narrow high-banked country lanes between Horseshoes and Bourton.

  ‘Why do they sneer?’ Helen asks.

  ‘Oh, ’cos it’s a touristy kinda place. It has like lots of tea-gardens and souvenir shops and stuff. A model village. Birds in cages. You get busloads of Americans and Japanese there in the summer. But it’s real pretty. The river goes right through the middle.’

  ‘What’s the name of the river?’ says Helen.

  ‘Uh . . . I forget,’ says Emily.

  ‘The Windrush,’ says Carrie.

  ‘What a wonderful name for a river!’ Helen exclaims. She and the Messengers have parked their cars and joined a little cluster of people gathered beside the river in the centre of the village. The Windrush flows, clear and sparkling, between brick-trimmed banks, with lawns and gardens on one side and the main street on the other, tumbling over a series of shallow waterfalls and passing under a number of ornamental footbridges, until it broadens out and slows down in the meadows outside the village. ‘It’s charming,’ says Helen. ‘And perfect for the Duck Race, I should say.’

  ‘Marianne was lucky to get permission to do it here,’ says Jasper. ‘But she knows a few people on the parish council.’

  ‘Why would they turn her down?’ says Laetitia Glover. ‘It’s just Bourton’s kind of thing.’

  ‘Where does the race start from?’ asks Reginald Glover, perhaps to divert attention from this somewhat ungracious remark.

  ‘At the far end of the village,’ says Jasper, pointing upstream. ‘Marianne is up there. There are hordes of day-trippers clamouring to buy tickets. Unfortunately it’s illegal to sell them in a public place.’

  ‘Come along,’ says Colin Riverdale to his wife and infant children. ‘We don’t want to miss the start.’ He puts one child on his shoulders, seizes another by the hand, and sets off, followed by Annabelle pushing a baby buggy. Helen and the Messengers and the Glovers follow at a more leisurely pace.

  The friends and acquaintances of the Richmonds, especially from the Faculty of Humanities, have turned out loyally to support Marianne’s enterprise, and, as Jasper reported, there is also quite a crowd of casual Sunday afternoon visitors at the starting line, grateful for the unexpected diversion. Some of them, disappointed in the quest to buy tickets, make a donation to Marianne’s charity anyway. She is glowing with self-satisfaction – it is clear the event is already a success. Oliver is beside himself with excitement. ‘Hallo, Helen Reed,’ he says. ‘What number have you got?’

  Helen looks at her ticket. ‘Forty-eight.’

  ‘I’ve got fourteen,’ says Oliver. He goes round asking everybody he knows what numbers they have.

  About a hundred ducks – identical yellow plastic bathtoys with numbers painted on them – are contained in a large net held over the parapet of a bridge by a team of Boy Scouts. At a signal from Marianne, they release the ducks into the water with a splash, and a cheer goes up from the spectators, most of whom walk along the footpath beside the river, keeping pace with the progress of the ducks. Some of the children run ahead, and line the parapet of the next bridge to watch the ducks pass underneath. At first these move in a congealed yellow mass, but they quickly separate and become strung out in separate clusters, small groups, pairs and solitary individuals. By the halfway mark one duck is twenty yards clear of all the rest.

  ‘It’s surprising,’ Helen comments, walking beside Ralph, ‘considering they’re all identical, and they all started at more or less the same time.’

  ‘Yes, it would make a good illustration of chaos theory,’ says Ralph.

  ‘Ah, I know about that,’ says Helen. ‘Professor Douglass told me.’

  ‘Did he?’ Ralph sounds surprised. ‘When?’

  ‘At your birthday party. It’s the butterfly effect. So many variables.’

  ‘Very good,’ says Ralph. ‘Especially at the beginning, with all the ducks knocking into each other at random. And then the river is full of currents, eddies, variations of windspeed across the water. That little duck,’ he says, pointing to the leader, ‘has had all the lucky breaks.’

  ‘So far,’ says Helen.

  ‘True,’ says Ralph. ‘He could get caught in a whirlpool further along, or some obstruction under a bridge. But that’s the only thing that will stop him winning now: a catastrophe.’

  ‘Just like the great duck race of life,’ Helen says.

  Oliver Richmond is racing up and down the footpath in a state of high excitement. Helen calls to him, ‘What’s the number of the leader, Oliver?’

  ‘Seventy-three,’ says Oliver, slowing his pace to walk beside them.

  ‘Not mine, alas,’ says Helen.

  ‘Nor mine,’ says Ralph, looking at his bunch of five tickets.

  ‘And forty-two is second and nine is third and eighty-two is fourth and twenty-four is fifth,’ says Oliver, without faltering. ‘My duck is fourteen, it’s twenty-seventh.’

  ‘You should be a horse race commentator, Oliver,’ Ralph says jocularly.

  Oliver looks at Ralph. ‘You’re Ralph Messenger,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Ralph.

  ‘Have you got a Sainsbury’s Reward card?’

  Ralph looks disconcerted. ‘I think perhaps my wife has.’

  ‘What number is it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ says Ralph.

  ‘My Mum has a Sainsbury’s Reward card. It’s number six three four one seven four double
oh one eight six five one two three nine double seven oh.’

  ‘Very good,’ Ralph says.

  Oliver runs off. Ralph stares thoughtfully after him.

  ‘How does he do it?’ Helen wonders.

  ‘Autistic people often have these unusual specialized abilities,’ says Ralph. ‘Idiots savants, they used to be called before the days of political correctness.’

  ‘Computers are a bit like that, aren’t they?’ says Helen.

  Many ducks come to grief in various ways – getting trapped under the waterfalls, bumping against the piers of the bridges, or snagging in the reeds where the river broadens out. They are fished out of the water by the Boy Scouts wielding nets on long bamboo poles, and eliminated from the race. The majority, however, float on, bobbing and spinning in the water, past the real ducks paddling in the stream, who turn their backs on the interlopers and disdain to notice them. The eldest Riverdale child, trying to free a yellow duck caught in an overhanging branch, falls into the river and has to be rescued by his father, who gets his shoes and trouser bottoms soaked in the process and takes the whole family home in high dudgeon. Duck number seventy-three steadily increases its lead and sails serenely past the winning post at the village limits, a whole minute ahead of its closest competitor. The owner of the lucky number turns out to be Professor Douglass, whom Jasper Richmond trapped in Staff House one day and persuaded to buy a ticket.

  ‘What a shame that he isn’t here,’ Helen says.

  ‘Oh it’s not Duggers’ sort of thing,’ says Ralph. ‘He’s a reclusive bugger. I don’t know why he came to my party. He doesn’t approve of me.’