by David Lodge
He sounded a little tetchy yesterday evening, not surprisingly. He’s bored, hungry, worried. And all I could do was wish him good luck. Because that’s all we believe in now: luck. Chance. Randomness. Chaos. And we know we can’t control it, so ‘wishing good luck’ to someone is a peculiarly empty gesture. Once I would have said, ‘I’ll say a prayer for you.’ Once – quite a long time ago – I would have gone into a church and lit a candle in the Lady Chapel and prayed to the Virgin Mary to intercede with her Divine Son to make Messenger’s lump go away. How bizarre that idea seems to me now – partly because of Messenger himself. He has made it impossible for me to pray for him. How he would mock me if I suggested it. I can just imagine him saying, ‘Tell me, exactly how is this prayer business supposed to work? Supposing, for the sake of argument, that there is a God, how does he decide which prayers to answer? Why would he cure my cancer, and let other poor buggers with the same condition die, not to mention the kids with leukaemia in the children’s ward? Once he starts intervening in the course of nature, how does he decide when to stop?’
I had some difficulties myself, even when I was a pious convent schoolgirl, with the notion of petitionary prayer. I used to pester the old nun, Sister Rita, who took us for Religious Instruction in the Fifth Form, with casuistical questions, like ‘What does God do if a farmer is praying for rain for his crops at the same time we’re praying for fine weather for the School Sports Day?’ Or more boldly, ‘Were German Catholics wasting their time praying for victory in the Second World War?’ ‘These things are mysteries, Helen Driscoll,’ Sister Rita would say, going a little red, ‘and will be revealed to us in the life to come.’ That kind of prayer now seems to me the purest superstition, and yet I miss it. It gave one something positive to do in threatening situations, it gave relief. I hate this state of just waiting helplessly to see how the dice will fall.
And the fact is that I can’t entirely suppress a feeling of guilt, a feeling that we brought calamity down upon ourselves by our conduct. By giving in to lust. Betraying Carrie (never mind that she’s been betraying Messenger in her turn). At bottom, let’s face it, I feel as if we have sinned, and deserve to be punished. The moment Messenger said, ‘I’ve got a lump on my liver,’ I felt a cold qualm of fear, and yet no surprise – it was as if I had been unconsciously expecting some such blow, and now it had fallen. There’s superstition for you. Messenger’s lump was probably there before we even met, but telling myself that makes no difference. The sin brought it out, nourished it, made it grow faster. That’s what my superstitious self says. I can’t stop her silly, hysterical voice, even though I try to stop my ears. I don’t like it. I’m in the worst possible plight, to still believe in sin but no longer in the possibility of absolution.
Calm down, Helen Reed. Take a grip on yourself. Examine the facts clearly. Messenger has a lump. It’s probably benign. No, cancel that, be exact, it may be benign. Nobody knows yet. If it’s benign, it can be treated, cured. Life will go on as before. The same moral problems of love and lust, fidelity and betrayal, will remain, waiting to be resolved, needing to be worked through, but having nothing to do with the state of Messenger’s liver. How silly you will feel, then, about this panic attack. If, on the other hand, the lump is a tumour . . . Yes? What then? Well that has nothing to do with love, lust, fidelity etc., either. It’s a physical condition with physical causes, which could happen to anybody – which could have happened to you, but which happened to happen to him. There is no reason to read any moral message into it.
Well, that’s all very well, but if he’s got incurable cancer he intends to take his own life before it kills him, and he wants me to be ready to help. He asked me, and I refused. Because I was shocked, frightened, horrified at the idea. Basically, I’m a coward. I lack the courage of my unbelief. So there’s nothing I can do for Messenger, except wish him luck and watch as events take their course. Watch but not pray.
When I was fifteen I read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, surreptitiously because I was fairly sure Daddy wouldn’t think it was suitable. In fact of course it was the perfect book for a devout Catholic adolescent girl just beginning to be aware of her own sexuality. The allusions to the adulterous couple’s passionate love-making, specially Sarah’s capacity for orgasm, her ‘strange cries of abandonment’, intrigued and excited me, while her subsequent journey of spiritual discovery inspired me. For months I fantasized myself as Sarah, enjoying ecstatic carnal intercourse (rather vague in detail) with Bendrix, then promising to God to give him up if he wasn’t killed in the bomb blast, and then keeping my promise at the cost of my own earthly happiness, dying of a bad cold and ascending to eternal bliss at the end, leaving behind a little trail of miracles to trouble my lover’s unbelief. Goodness how I cried over that book! How I yearned to be like Sarah when I grew up, to experience everything, and atone for my sins in a grand heroic gesture of self-sacrifice. Now I find myself in much her situation, but without her faith.
It’s 11 p.m. Messenger hasn’t called. I’m going to bed.
WEDNESDAY 28TH MAY. Messenger phoned me this morning as soon as he got to his office. I was waiting for the call, but the ring still made me jump, and I dropped the receiver in my nervousness as I picked it up. The results of the tests turned out to be inconclusive. The colonoscopy showed nothing abnormal, which is good, but the scan showed a ‘cyst-like mass’ about ten centimetres in diameter in the right lobe of the liver. I got out my tape measure just now, and ten centimetres seems frighteningly big. It’s not causing any obstruction, which apparently explains why he’s not feeling any pain, but Messenger said Henderson appeared to be a bit puzzled by it. ‘He almost seemed disappointed that it wasn’t a secondary from colonic cancer, which is what he’d suspected.’ Henderson wants him to have a liver biopsy, to establish for sure whether it’s a primary cancer or something else. He proposed referring him to a liver surgeon in Bristol, but apparently Carrie has taken the matter in hand. It seems she doesn’t have any faith in Henderson, so she’s at this very moment on the phone to anybody and everybody she can think of to try and find out who is the top liver man in the country. Messenger seems content to leave it to her.
I’m left with a feeling of anticlimax. I’d assumed that the results of yesterday’s tests would be clear-cut, and lying awake in the early hours of this morning, turning it all over in my mind, I decided that if the news was bad I would tell Messenger that after all he could count on my help, whatever it was he wanted me to do. It seemed to me that if that undertaking was what he wanted of me, then I should give it; and the fact that I dreaded the possible consequences would make it, in a peculiar and perverse way, an act of generosity, of love, a Sarah-like gesture. I tried to put myself in his place, to imagine myself as him, learning that he had terminal cancer, and I thought I understood why he would want to anticipate the inevitable. For Christians suffering has some point and purpose – it can be ‘offered up’, it can be a way of ‘making a good death’, as the nuns used to say. And there are people who cling on to life even in the direst straits just because they don’t believe there is another one, for whom every sunrise and sunset, every moment spent with their loved ones, is precious, whatever state they are in. But not Messenger. I couldn’t picture him slowly declining, withering, wasting away, first on sticks, then in a wheelchair, then finally in a bed, with tubes and catheters and God knows what attached to him. There’s something Roman about Messenger’s character, as well as his profile: he’s a fighter, but if defeat is inevitable, he would rather fall on his sword than be paraded in chains. I could see that, and so I decided, whatever it cost me, I would do whatever he wanted me to do.
Having screwed my resolution up to this point, I awaited his call with dread. When he told me the results were ambiguous I felt some relief that the news wasn’t worse, but also disappointment that it wasn’t better. The suspense continues. Of course I said nothing about my private agonizing, and the conclusion I had come to. I just commiserated with him
for the continuing uncertainty. He said that fortunately he had plenty of other things on his plate to occupy him. He asked if I had seen today’s issue of On Campus. Apparently he has a letter in the paper. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that I wouldn’t have gone out of the house until getting his call. He also told me that the BBC are sending a TV crew to film the conference, for use in a documentary about Artificial Intelligence. He’s delighted by this development, because of the publicity for the Centre, but it only increases my misgivings about speaking at the end of the conference. I wish I’d never agreed to it, now.
7.30 P.M. I tried to distract myself with work this afternoon, writing up the assessments of the students in the MA course for next week’s Examiners’ Meeting. It seems incredible that we are already in the last teaching week of the semester. I received the External Examiner’s report today. He’s Austin Osgood, a poet and short story writer who runs a similar course at Lincoln University. I met him once at Hay-on-Wye, and didn’t take to him greatly. He has a loud, boisterous laugh which seems at odds with his rather calculating too-close-together eyes. But he was very complimentary about the students’ work, giving them all good marks, nothing under B+. When I sent him the manuscripts I asked him to look particularly carefully at Sandra Pickering’s, without explaining why of course. Rather to my surprise he gave her A(–), one of the highest marks. Well, at least she won’t have any grounds to complain of personal bias. To give her her due, I think she’s made an effort to make Burnt less embarrassing to me. In the two chapters she’s written over the last few weeks the story has taken a fresh turn and the Alastair character has been replaced by a new love interest for the heroine. Tomorrow is my last meeting with the group. I can’t tell them their results, but I shall intimate that everybody has passed creditably, and I’m giving a little party for them afterwards. I wish I felt more in the mood for it.
I bought a copy of On Campus this afternoon and read Messenger’s letter about his Centre’s links with the MoD. It’s a clever letter, as one would expect, though not very prominently printed. The front-page story was all about a threatened rise in student rents. It seems that the University was going to announce the increases in the vacation, when nobody is around, but the paper got hold of the plan. The Union is up in arms, and calling for a demonstration before the end of the semester. Quite like the old days.
FRIDAY 30TH MAY. Messenger is on his way to London to see the best liver man in the country, and my own liver can’t be in brilliant shape this morning. I have a bad hangover.
Yesterday was a very full day. I spent the morning preparing food for the party, then had lunch with Messenger. I phoned him up and complained that I hadn’t seen him for nearly a week. He hesitated, said he was terribly busy, but agreed in the end. We acted out a little charade of meeting by chance in Staff House, and ate in the waitress service canteen. As it happened we had the same table by the window as at our first lunch, months ago. I told him how I had seen him approaching that day, and loitered in the lobby beside the awful landscape paintings, hoping he would notice me, and pretended to be surprised when he accosted me. He smiled at this confession, but he seemed a bit put out. I think he assumes he always takes the initiative in affairs of this kind, and it disconcerted him to discover that a woman was working her wiles on him without his being aware of it. He looked a little thinner than usual, I thought, no doubt because of his diet in hospital. He had fried fish for lunch, carefully removing the batter and leaving it on the side of his plate, with broccoli and no chips.
He told me Carrie had been on the phone for hours, being passed from one medical friend’s friend to another, in a chain that stretched all the way to California and back, and finally established that the best liver surgeon in England was a man called Halib. Somehow Carrie bullied or bribed or charmed Mr Halib into seeing Messenger in his Harley Street rooms tomorrow morning. They’re going up on the early train, and will get back just about in time for the opening of the Conference. I said it sounded like a gruelling schedule and he said he much preferred it to sitting around in hospital. ‘Though I daresay I shall have more of that in due course,’ he added with a grimace.
The lunch was a short one because both of us had things to do in the afternoon, and frustrating, because it was all so public. We had to make it look like a casual social encounter, talk lightly about matters of life and death, or find other topics to talk about. Messenger enquired about Lucy, and I told him I had just had an Email from her saying she was flying home at the end of June. Paul is going to Mexico before he comes home. He’s also discovered that I’m wired, and has actually started writing letters to me. Messenger asked me if I ever used the Internet, and I said not much, I could never seem to find anything I wanted. I told him one of my students – it was Gil Baverstock – had informed me there was a website at a liberal arts college in Wyoming dedicated to my work, but when I entered ‘Helen Reed’ in the Alta Vista Search box it came up with one million three hundred thousand pages. I tried one at random and it turned out to be a young lady offering ‘up-skirt’ photos of herself with no panties on. Messenger laughed and said there were ways of limiting the search which he would show me. He asked me if I had downloaded any of the pictures, and I said no. He asked me if had ever looked at porn on the Internet and I said certainly not. He said not many people knew that everything you downloaded from the Internet was stored on your hard disk for ever. I said, ‘Like the recording angel writing down your sins?’ and he said, ‘Exactly. The recording angel is a hard disk.’
While we were having coffee, we heard a hubbub outside, faint at first and then growing louder, and finally a long procession of students appeared, chanting and wielding banners. They marched round and round Staff House. On the top floor members of the University Court – a body composed of the great and the good of the county, local businessmen, etc., which has a largely symbolic role in the structure of the University’s government – were being entertained to lunch by the VC, and the students had seized the opportunity to protest against the threatened rent increases. I remarked that this issue seemed to have arisen rather luckily for Messenger, since it had clearly distracted attention from the matter of the honorary degree for the Ministry of Defence man. ‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘I leaked the new rent tariffs to the student rag.’ I gawped at him. ‘How did you know about them?’ I said. ‘Keep your voice down,’ he said. ‘I’m on the Senate Ways and Means committee.’ I suppose I must have looked a little shocked, because he added, ‘Somebody leaked the Centre’s links with the MoD. When your enemies play dirty you have to do the same.’ ‘Who are they?’ I said. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but they’re out of touch. Students these days are more concerned about what hurts their pockets than about principles.’
We parted on the steps of Staff House – without a kiss, of course, without even touching. I thought he might have murmured, ‘I love you,’ or something of the sort, since no one was within earshot, but he didn’t, so I didn’t either. Though I fear I do love this man – fear, because I don’t see much prospect of happiness in it. I walked to the Humanities Tower to take my last workshop with the MA group, and made an effort to put Messenger out of my mind for the rest of the day.
To celebrate the end of the course, I had asked each student to read from their work for not more than ten minutes, and there was to be no discussion after the readings, only applause. This went off very well. Sandra Pickering read a passage diplomatically chosen from her first chapter. Then we adjourned to Maisonette Row, where I had prepared dips and salads and quiches and a good supply of wine and beer. It was a fine evening and I opened the sliding window of the living-room which gives on to a little paved patio, jollied up for the occasion by a garden table and chairs and parasol borrowed from my next-door neighbours. I’d invited Ross and Jackie to join us for a drink, but was rather relieved when they excused themselves because they were going kayaking on the lake. The party was very much a rite of passage for the student
s. They had very sweetly clubbed together to buy me a present, a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, 2nd Series, Hogarth Press 1932, with Vanessa Bell’s jacket, only slightly torn, which was not only very generous of them but very thoughtfully chosen. I must have mentioned to one of them that I own a Vanessa Bell lithograph. Simon Bellamy presented the gift with a very witty speech in which he complimented me as a teacher in the styles of ten different writers from Alexander Pope to J.D. Salinger, sending up my penchant for setting fiendishly difficult imitation exercises. I made a rather tearful speech in reply and told them what a wonderful and talented group of people they were and how I was looking forward to reading the reviews of their first books and following their glittering careers. We had all had rather a lot to drink by then, and after the speeches we had more. It was one of those balmy summer nights, so rare in England, when you can sit outside after nightfall without feeling damp or chilly. The students carried out extra chairs and cushions and sat round in a circle. Bob Drayton had brought along his acoustic guitar and plucked away quietly in the darkness, occasionally breaking into folksong in a very pleasant tenor voice. Somebody circulated a joint or two. It was a highly successful party, but I despaired of ever getting them to leave, so began clearing up the soiled plates and stacking them in the kitchenette by way of a hint. Sandra Pickering lent me a hand, slightly to my surprise, and then said she was going. ‘Thanks for the party,’ she said. ‘And thanks for the course.’ ‘Do you think you learned anything from it?’ I said. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, without elaborating. ‘I’m sorry you had to find out about Martin from me,’ she added, ‘but it was fate.’ ‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ I said. We shook hands rather formally. ‘Good luck with Burnt,’ I said hypocritically. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘What about you? Are you writing anything?’ ‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘I’ve been too busy with you lot.’ ‘Don’t leave it too long,’ she said. I thought this was a bit presumptuous of her and I suppose my expression showed it. She said, ‘That’s the most important thing I learned from the course. You have to go on writing, no matter what.’ And with that, she left.