by David Lodge
He closed his eye to shut out the painful vision of his house corroding and disintegrating around him. He couldn’t, of course, suppress his knowledge of what was wrong with it – of what was wrong, for instance, with the room he lay in: the long jagged crack in the ceiling that ran like a sneer from the electric light fixture to the door, the tear in the lino near the chest of drawers, the cupboard door that hung open because the catch had gone, the wallpaper that bulged in patches where the damp had detached it from the wall, so that it seemed to breathe gently in and out with the opening and shutting of the door . . . He could not suppress his knowledge of all this, but while he was snug under the blankets, with his eyes shut tight, it was all somehow less oppressive, as if it had nothing to do with him personally.
It was only when he left the protection of the warm bed that he would stagger under the combined weight of dissatisfaction with his environment and despair of ever significantly improving it. And, of course, it wasn’t just the bedroom. As he passed through the house the evidence of decay and disrepair would greet him at every turn: the dribbling tap in the bathroom, the broken banister on the staircase, the cracked window in the hall, the threadbare patch in the dining-room carpet that would be just a tiny bit bigger than yesterday. And it would be so cold, so cold. Icy draughts needling through keyholes, rattling the letter box, stirring the curtains.
And yet here, in bed, it was so warm and comfortable. The most luxuriously furnished, gas-fired centrally heated, double-glazed and insulated ideal home could not make him more warm and comfortable than he was at this moment.
His wife rattled the poker in the dining-room grate: the dull, metallic sounds were borne to every corner of the house through the water-pipes. It was the signal that breakfast was laid. From the room opposite his own Paul and Margaret, his two children, who had been playing in the cold and the gloom with the cheerful imperviousness to discomfort of the very young, issued boisterously on to the landing and thumped heavily down the stairs. The broken banister creaked menacingly. The dining-room door opened and slammed shut. From the kitchen he heard the distant clamour of cutlery and cooking utensils. He pulled the bedclothes more tightly round his head, muffling his ears and leaving only his nose and mouth free to breathe. He did not want to hear these sounds, harsh reminders of a harsh world.
When he looked beyond the immediate problem of getting up, of coping with the tiresome chores of washing, shaving, clothing and feeding his body, he saw no more inviting prospect before him: only the long walk to the bus stop through streets of houses exactly like his own, the long wait in line, the slow, juddering progress through the choked city streets, and eight hours’ drudgery in a poky office which was, like his home, all full of broken things, discoloured, faded, chipped, scratched, grimy, malfunctioning things. Things which said as plainly as the interior of his house: this is your lot; try as hard as you like, but you will never significantly improve it; count yourself lucky if you can prevent it from deteriorating more rapidly.
He tried to gird his spirits preparatory to getting up by reminding himself how fortunate he was compared to many others. He forced his mind to dwell upon the sick and the dying, those in need, those in mental anguish. But the spectacle of human misery thus conjured up merely confirmed his helpless apathy. That others were able to bear these burdens with cheerful resignation gave him no encouragement: what hope had he of emulating them if his present discontents were enough to deprive his life of joy? What comfort was it that his present dreary existence was a fragile crust over an infinitely worse abyss into which he might plunge at any moment? The fact was, he no longer had any love of life. The thought pierced him with a kind of thrill of despair. I no longer love life. There is nothing in life which gives me pleasure any more. Except this: lying in bed. And the pleasure of this is spoiled because I know that I have got to get up. Well, then, why don’t I just not get up? Because you’ve got to get up. You have a job. You have a family to support. Your wife has got up. Your children have got up. They have done their duty. Now you have to do yours. Yes, but it’s easy for them. They still love life. I don’t any more. I only love this: lying in bed.
He heard, through the wadding of bedclothes, the voice of his wife calling.
‘George.’ She called flatly, expressionlessly, ritualistically, not expecting an answer. He gave none, but turned over on to his other side, and stretched out his legs. His toes encountered an icy hot-water bottle at the foot of the bed and recoiled. He curled himself up into a foetal posture and withdrew his head completely under the bedclothes. It was warm and dark under the bedclothes, a warm dark cave. He inhaled the warm, fusty air with pleasure, and when it became dangerously deoxygenated he created cunning air-ducts in the bedclothes which admitted fresh air without light.
He heard very faintly his wife calling ‘George’. More sharply, imperatively this time. It meant that his family had already consumed their corn-flakes and the bacon was cooked. Now the tension began to build between the longing to stay in bed and the urgency of rising. He contracted his limbs into a tighter coil and wriggled deeper into the mattress as he waited for the third summons.
‘George!’
This meant he was now too late for breakfast – might with luck manage to swallow a cup of tea before he rushed out to catch his bus.
For what seemed like a long time, he held his breath. Then he suddenly relaxed and stretched out his limbs. He had decided. He would not get up. The secret was not to think of the consequences. Just to concentrate on the fact of staying in bed. The pleasure of it. The warmth, the comfort. He had free will. He would exercise it. He would stay in bed.
He must have dozed for a while. He was suddenly conscious of his wife in the room.
‘It’s a quarter past eight. Your breakfast’s spoiled . . . George . . . are you getting up? . . . George?’ He detected a note of fear in her voice. Suddenly the bedclothes were lifted from his face. He pulled them back, annoyed that all his cunning air-vents had been disturbed.
‘George, are you ill?’ He was tempted to say, yes, I’m ill. Then his wife would tip-toe away, and tell the children to be quiet, their father was ill. And later she would light a fire in the bedroom and bring him a tray of tempting food. But that was the cowardly course; and the deception would only earn him, at the most, a day’s respite from the life he hated. He was nourishing a grander, more heroic plan.
‘No, I’m not ill,’ he said through the bedclothes.
‘Well, get up then, you’ll be late for work.’ He did not answer, and his wife left the room. He heard her banging about irritably in the bathroom, calling to the children to come and be washed. The lavatory cistern flushed and refilled noisily, the pipes whined and hummed, the children laughed and cried. Outside in the street footsteps hurried past on the pavement, cars wheezed, reluctant to start in the cold morning air, fired and moved away. He lay quiet under the bedclothes, concentrating, contemplating. Gradually he was able to eliminate all these noises from his consciousness. The way he had chosen was a mystical way.
* * *
The first day was the most difficult. His wife thought he was being merely idle and delinquent, and tried to make him get up by refusing to bring him any food. The fast caused him no great distress, however, and he stuck to his bed all day except for discreet, unobserved visits to the bathroom. When his wife retired that night she was angry and resentful. She complained because she hadn’t been able to make the bed properly, and she held herself cold and rigid at the very edge of the mattress furthest from himself. But she was puzzled and guilty too, because he hadn’t eaten. There was a note of pleading in her voice when she hoped he would have had enough of this silly nonsense by the next morning.
The next morning was much easier. He simply went off to sleep again as soon as the alarm had stopped ringing, untroubled by guilt or anxiety. It was blissful. Just to turn over and go to sleep again, knowing you weren’t going to get up. Later, his wife brought him a breakfast tray and left it, wordlessly
, on the floor beside his bed. His children came to the door of the bedroom and stared in at him while he ate. He smiled reassuringly at them.
In the afternoon, the doctor came, summoned by his wife. He marched breezily into the room and demanded, ‘Well, now, what appears to be the trouble, Mr Barker?’ ‘No trouble, Doctor,’ he replied gently.
The doctor gave him a brief examination and concluded: ‘No reason at all why you shouldn’t get out of bed, Mr Barker.’ ‘I know there isn’t,’ he replied. ‘But I don’t want to.’
The next day it was the vicar. The vicar begged him to think of his responsibilities as a husband and father. There were times, one knew only too well, when the struggle to keep going seemed too much to bear, when the temptation simply to give in became almost irresistible . . . But that was not the true Christian spirit. ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth . . .’
‘What about contemplative monks?’ he asked. ‘What about hermits, solitaries, column-squatters?’
Ah, but that kind of religious witness, though possibly efficacious in its own time, was not in harmony with modern spirituality. Besides, he could hardly claim that there was anything ascetic or penitential about his particular form of retreat from the world.
‘It isn’t all roses, you know,’ he told the vicar.
And it wasn’t. After seven days, he began to get bedsores. After a fortnight, he was too weak to walk unaided to the bathroom. After four weeks he remained permanently confined to his bed, and a nurse was employed to care for his bodily needs. He wasn’t sure where the money was coming from to pay for the nurse, or indeed to maintain the house and his family. But he found that simply by not worrying about such problems, they solved themselves.
His wife had lost most of her resentment by now. Indeed he rather thought she respected him more than ever before. He was, he gathered, becoming something of a local, and even national, celebrity. One day a television camera was wheeled into his bedroom, and propped up on the pillows, holding the hand of his wife, he told his story to the viewing millions: how one cold morning he had suddenly realized that he no longer had any love of life, and his only pleasure was in lying in bed, and how he had taken the logical step of lying in bed for the rest of his life, which he did not expect to be protracted much longer, but every minute of which he was enjoying to the full.
After the television broadcast, the trickle of mail through the letter box became a deluge. His eyes were growing weak, and he relied on volunteers from the parish to help him with the correspondence.
Most of the letters pleaded with him to give life another chance, enclosing money or offers of lucrative employment. He declined the offers politely, and banked the money in his wife’s name. (She used some of it to have the house redecorated; it amused him to watch the painters clambering about the bedroom; when they whitewashed the ceiling he covered his head with a newspaper.) There was a smaller, but to him more significant number of letters sending him encouragement and congratulations. ‘Good luck to you, mate’, said one of them, ‘I’d do the same if I had the guts.’ And another, written on the notepaper of a famous university, said: ‘I deeply admire your witness to the intolerable quality of modern life and to the individual’s inalienable right to opt out of it: you are an existentialist saint.’ Though he wasn’t clear about the meaning of all these words, they pleased him. Indeed, he had never felt so happy and so fulfilled as he did now.
And now, more than ever, he thought it would be sweet to die. Though his body was washed and fed and cared for, he felt vitality slowly ebbing away from it. He longed to put on immortality. It seemed as if he had solved not only the problem of life, but the problem of death too. There were times when the ceiling above his head became the canvas for some vision such as the old painters used to draw on the roofs of chapels: he seemed to see angels and saints peering down at him from a cloudy empyrean, beckoning him to join them. His body felt strangely weightless, as if only the bedclothes restrained it from rising into the air. Levitation! or even . . . apotheosis! He fumbled with the blankets and sheets, but his limbs were weak. Then, with a supreme effort, he wrenched the bedclothes aside and flung them to the floor.
He waited, but nothing happened. He grew cold. He tried to drag the blankets back on to the bed, but the effort of throwing them off had exhausted him. He shivered. Outside it was getting dark. ‘Nurse,’ he called faintly; but there was no response. He called his wife, ‘Margaret’, but the house remained silent. His breath turned to steam on the cold air. He looked up at the ceiling, but there were no heads of angels and saints looking down: only a crack in the plaster that ran like a sneer from the door to the light fixture. And suddenly he realised what his eternity was to be. ‘Margaret! Nurse!’ he cried hoarsely. ‘I want to get up! Help me up!’
But no one came.
The Miser
After the War there was a terrible shortage of fireworks. During the War there hadn’t been any fireworks at all; but that was because of the blackout, and because the fireworks-makers were making bombs instead. When the War ended everybody said all the pre-war things, like fireworks, would come back. But they hadn’t.
Timothy’s mother said the rationing was disgraceful, and his father said they wouldn’t catch him voting Labour again, but fireworks weren’t even rationed. Rationing would have been fair, anyway, even if it was only six each, or say twelve. Twelve different ones. But there just weren’t any fireworks to be had, unless you were very lucky. Sometimes boys at school brought them in, and let off the odd banger in the bogs, for a laugh. They spoke vaguely of getting them ‘down the Docks’, or from a friend of their dad’s, or from a shop that had discovered some pre-war stock, and sold out the same day.
Timothy and Drakey and Woppy had searched all over the neighbourhood for such a shop. Once they did find a place advertising fireworks, but when the man brought them out they were all the same kind, bangers. You couldn’t have a proper Guy Fawkes Night with just bangers. Besides, they weren’t one of the proper makes, like Wells, Standard or Payne’s. They were called ‘Whizzo’, and had a suspiciously home-made look about them. They cost tenpence each, which was a shocking price to charge for bangers. In the end they bought two each and, with only three weeks to go before November the Fifth, that was still their total stock.
One day Timothy’s mother set his heart leaping when she came in from shopping and announced that she had got some fireworks for him. But when she produced them they were only the sparkler things that you held in your hand – little kids’ stuff. He’d been so sulky that in the end his mother wouldn’t let him have the sparklers, which he rather regretted afterwards.
None of them, not even Drakey, who was the oldest, had a clear memory of Guy Fawkes Night before the War. But they all remembered VJ Night, when there was a bonfire on the bomb-site in the middle of the street where the flying-bomb had fallen, and the sky was gaudy with rockets, and a man from one of the houses at the end of the street had produced two whole boxes of super fireworks, saying he’d saved them for six years for this night. The next morning Timothy had roamed the bomb-site and collected all the charred cases as, in previous years, he had collected shrapnel. That was when he had first learned the haunting names – ‘Chrysanthemum Fire’, ‘Roman Candle’, ‘Volcano’, ‘Silver Rain’, ‘Torpedo’, ‘Moonraker’ – beside which the ‘Whizzo Banger’ struck a false and unconvincing note.
One Saturday afternoon Timothy, Drakey and Woppy wandered far from their home ground, searching for fireworks. The best kind of shop was the kind that sold newspapers, sweets, tobacco and a few toys. They found several new ones, but had no luck. Some of the shops even had notices in the window: ‘No Fireworks’.
‘If they had any,’ said Drakey bitterly, ‘I bet they wouldn’t sell them. They’d keep them for their own kids.’
‘Let’s go home,’ said Woppy. ‘I’m tired.’
On the way home they played ‘The Lost Platoon’, a game based on a serial story in Drakey’s weekly comic. Drake
y was Sergeant McCabe, the leader of the platoon, Timothy was Corporal Kemp, the quiet, clever one, and Woppy was ‘Butch’ Baker, the strong but rather stupid private. The platoon was cut off behind enemy lines and the game consisted in avoiding the observation of Germans. Germans were anyone who happened to be passing.
‘Armoured vehicles approaching,’ said Timothy.
Drakey led them into the driveway of a private golf course. They lay in some long grass while two women with prams passed on the pavement. Timothy glanced idly round him, and sat up sharply.
‘Look!’ he breathed, scarcely able to believe such luck. About thirty yards away, on some rough ground screened from the road by the golf-club fence, was a ramshackle wooden shed. Leaning against one wall was a notice, crudely painted on a wooden board. ‘Fireworks for Sale’, it said.
Slowly they got to their feet and, with silent, wondering looks at each other, approached the shed. The door was open, and inside an old man was sitting at a table, reading a newspaper and smoking a pipe. A faded notice over his head said: ‘Smoking Prohibited’. He looked up and took the pipe out of his mouth.
‘Yes?’ he said.
Timothy looked for help to Drakey and Woppy, but they were just gaping at the man and at the dusty boxes piled on the floor.
‘Er . . . you haven’t any fireworks, have you?’ Timothy ventured at last.
‘Yes, I’ve got a few left, son. Want to buy some?’
The fireworks were sold loose, not in pre-packed boxes, which suited them perfectly. They took a long time over their selection, and it was dark by the time they had spent all their money. On the way home they stopped under each lamp-post to open their paper bags and reassure themselves that their treasure was real. The whole episode had been like a dream, or a fairy tale, and Timothy was afraid that at any moment the fireworks would dissolve.