Persse swerved in through the doors, quickly, before his conscience had time to react. He found himself in a discreetly dim, carpeted foyer. A man behind a desk welcomed him suavely. “Membership form, sir? That will be three pounds altogether.”
Persse put down the name of Philip Swallow.
“That’s a coincidence, sir,” said the man, with a svelte smile, “We already have a Mr Philip Swallow on the books. Through the door over there.”
Persse pushed through padded doors into almost total darkness. He stumbled against a wall, and remained pressed to it for a moment while his sight accommodated to the gloom. The air was full of strange noises, an amplified mélange of heavy breathing, throttled cries, panting, moaning and groaning, as of souls in torment. A dim luminescence guided him forward, through a curtain, round a corner, and he found himself at the back of a small auditorium. The noise was louder than ever, and it was still very dark, impossible to see anything except the flickering images on the screen. It took Persse some moments to realize that what he was looking at was a hugely magnified penis going in and out of a hugely magnified vagina. The blood rushed to his face, and to another part of his anatomy. Bent forward, he shuffled down the sloping aisle, peering vainly to each side of him for an empty seat. The images on the screen shifted, close-up gave way to a wider, deeper perspective, and it became apparent that the owner of the vagina had another penis in her mouth, and the owner of the first penis had his tongue in another vagina, whose owner in turn had a finger in someone else’s anus, whose penis was in her vagina; and all were in frantic motion, like the pistons of some infernal machine. Keats it was not. It was a far cry from the violet blending its odour with the rose. “Siddown, can’t you?” someone hissed in the circumambient darkness. Persse groped for a seat, but his hand fell on a padded shoulder, and was shaken off with a curse. The moans and groans rose to a crescendo, the pistons jerked faster and faster, and Persse registered with shame that he had polluted himself. Perspiration poured from his brow and dimmed his sight. When what seemed, for one hallucinatory moment, to be the face of Angelica loomed between two massive hairy thighs, Persse turned and fled from the place as if from the pit of hell.
The man behind the reception desk looked up, startled, as Persse catapulted into the foyer. “Too tame for you?” he said. “You can’t have a refund, I’m afraid. Try next week, we’ve got some new Danish stuff coming in.”
Persse grabbed the man by his lapels and hauled him halfway across he desk. “You have made me defile the image of the woman I love,” he hissed. The man paled, and lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. Persse pushed him back into his seat, ran out of the cinema, across the road, and into the Catholic church.
A light was burning above a confessional bearing the name of “Fr Finbar O’Malley,” and within a few minutes Persse had unburdened his conscience and received absolution. “God bless you, my son,” said the priest in conclusion.
“Thank you, Father.”
“By the way, do you come from Mayo?”
“I do.”
“Ah. I thought I recognized the sound of Mayo speech. I’m from I he West myself.” He sighed behind the wire grille. “This is a terrible sinful city for a young Irish lad like yourself to be cast adrift in. How would you like to be repatriated?”
“Repatriated?” Persse repeated blankly.
“Aye. I administer a fund for helping Irish youngsters who have come over here looking for work and think better of it, and want to go back home. It’s called the Our Lady of Knock Fund for Reverse Emigration.”
“Oh, I’m only visiting, Father. I’m going back to Ireland tomorrow.”
“You have your ticket?”
“Yes, Father.”
“Then good luck to you, and God speed. You’re going to a better place than this, I can tell you.”
By the time Persse got back to the University it was afternoon, and the Conference had departed on a coach tour of literary landmarks in the region. Persse took a bath and slept for a few hours. He awoke feeling serene and purified. It was time to go to the bar for a drink before dinner.
The conferees were back from the sightseeing trip, which had not been a success: the owners of George Eliot’s childhood home had not been warned in advance, and would not let them inside the house, so they had had to content themselves with milling about in the garden and pressing their faces to the windows. Then Ann Hathaway’s cottage proved to be closed for maintenance; and finally the coach had broken down just outside Kenilworth, on the way to the Castle, and a relief vehicle had taken an hour to arrive.
“Never mind,” said Bob Busby, moving among the disgruntled conferees in the bar, “there’s still the medieval banquet to look forward to.”
“I hope to God Busby knows what he’s doing,” Persse heard Philip Swallow saying. “We can’t afford another cockup.” He was speaking to a man in a rather greasy charcoal grey suit whom Persse had not seen before.
“What’s it all about, then?” said this man, who had a Gauloise smouldering in one hand and a large gin and tonic in the other.
“Well, there’s a place in town called ‘Ye Merrie Olde Round Table,’ where they put on these mock medieval banquets,” said Philip Swallow. “I’ve never been myself, but Busby assured us it’s good fun. Anyway, he’s booked their team to lay it on here tonight.
They have minstrels, I understand, and mead, and…”
“And wenches,” Persse volunteered.
“I say,” said the man in the charcoal grey suit, turning smoke-bleared eyes upon Persse and treating him to a yellow-fanged smile. “It sounds rather fun.”
“Oh, hello McGarrigle,” said Philip Swallow, without enthusiasm. “Have you met Felix Skinner, of Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein? My publishers. Not that our professional association has been particularly profitable to either party,” he concluded with a forced attempt tempt at jocularity.
“Well, it has been a teeny bit disappointing,” Skinner admitted with a sigh.
“Only a hundred and sixty-five copies sold a year after publication,” said Philip Swallow accusingly. “And not a single review.”
“You know we all thought it was an absolutely super book, Philip,” said Skinner. “It’s just that there’s not much of an educational market for Hazlitt these days. And I’m sure the reviews will come eventually, in the scholarly journals. I’m afraid the Sundays and weeklies don’t pay as much attention to lit. crit. as they used to.”
“That’s because so much of it is unreadable,” said Philip Swallow. “I can’t understand it, so how can you expect ordinary people to? I mean, that’s what my book is saying. That’s why I wrote it.”
“I know, Philip, it’s awfully unfair,” said Skinner. “What’s your own field, Mr McGarrigle?”
“Well, I did my research on Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot,” said Persse.
“I could have helped you with that,” Dempsey butted in. He had just come into the bar with Angelica, who was looking heart stoppingly beautiful in a kaftan of heavy wine-coloured cotton, in whose weave a dark, muted pattern of other rich colours dimly gleamed. “It would just lend itself nicely to computerization,” Dempsey continued. “All you’d have to do would he to put the texts on to tape and you could get the computer to list every word, phrase and syntactical construction that the two writers had in common. You could precisely quantify the influence of Shakespeare on T. S. Eliot.”
“But my thesis isn’t about that,” said Persse. “It’s about the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare.”
“That sounds rather Irish, if I may say so,” said Dempsey, with a loud guffaw. His little eyes looked anxiously around for support.
“Well, what I try to show,” said Persse, “is that we can’t avoid reading Shakespeare through the lens of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. I mean, who can read Hamlet today without thinking of Prufrock’? Who can hear the speeches of Ferdinand in The Tempest without being reminded of ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land?”
“It’s only an MA,” said Persse, his eyes watering from the smoke of Skinner’s cigarette.
“Never mind, the libraries will buy almost anything on either Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot. Having them both in the same title would be more or less irresistible. Here’s my card. Ah, thank you Philip, your very good health… Look, I’m sorry about Hazlitt, but I think the best thing would be to put it down to experience, and try again with a more fashionable subject.”
“But it took me eight years to write that book,” Philip Swallow said plaintively, as Skinner patted him consolingly on the shoulder, sending a cascade of grey ash down the back of his suit.
The bar was now crowded with conferees drinking as fast as they could to get themselves into an appropriate mood for the banquet. Persse squeezed his way through the crush to Angelica.
“You told me your thesis was about the influence of Shakespeare on T. S. Eliot,” she said.
“So it is,” he replied. “I turned it round on the spur of the moment, just to take that Dempsey down a peg or two.”
“Well, it’s a more interesting idea, actually.”
“I seem to have let myself in for the job of writing it up, now,” said Persse. “I like your dress, Angelica.”
“I thought it was the most medieval thing I had with me,” she said, a gleam in her dark eyes. “Though I can’t guarantee that it will actually rustle to my knees.”
The allusion pierced him with a thrill of desire, instantly shattering his “firm purpose of amendment”. He knew that nothing could prevent him from keeping watch in Angelica’s room that evening.
Persse did not intend to sit next to Angelica at dinner, for he thought it would be more in the spirit of her romantic scenario that he should view her from afar. But he didn’t want Robin Dempsey sitting next to her either, and detained him in the bar with earnest questions about structuralist linguistics while the others went off to the refectory.
“It’s quite simple, really,” said Dempsey impatiently. “According to Saussure, it’s not the relation of words to things that allows them to signify, but their relations with each other, in short, the differences between them. Cat signifies cat because it sounds different from cot or fat.”
“And the same goes for Durex and Farex and Exlax?” Persse enquired.
“It’s not the first example that springs to mind,” said Dempsey, a certain suspicion in his close-set little eyes, “but yes.”
“I think you reckon without the variation in regional accents,” said Persse.
“Look, I haven’t got time to explain it now,” said Dempsey Irritably, moving towards the door. “The bell has gone for dinner”
Persse found himself an inconspicuous place in the dining-hall, half-hidden from Angelica’s view by a pillar. It was no great sacrifice to be on the margins of this particular feast. The mead tasted like tepid sugar-water, the medieval fare consisted of fried chicken and jacket potatoes eaten without the convenience of knives and forks, and the wenches were the usual Martineau Hall waitresses who had been bribed or bullied into wearing long dresses with plunging necklines. “Don’t look at me, sir,” the yellow-haired lady begged Persse as she served him his drumsticks. “If this is ‘ow they dressed in the middle ages, well, all I can say is, they must ‘ave got some very nasty chest colds.” Presiding over the festivities from a platform at one end of the dining-room were a pair of entertainers from Ye Merrie Olde Round Table, one dressed up as a king, the other as a jester. The king had a piano accordion and the jester a set of drums, both provided with microphone and amplifier. While the meal was being served, they entertained the diners with jokes about chambers and thrones, sang bawdy ballads, and encouraged the diners to pelt each other with bread rolls. It was a rule of the court that anyone wishing to leave the room was required to bow or curtsey to the king, and when anyone did so the jester blew into an instrument that made a loud farting noise. Persse slipped out of the room while the medievalist from Aberystwyth was being humiliated in this fashion. Angelica, sitting between Felix Skinner and Philip Swallow on the far side of the room, flashed him a quick smile, and fluttered her fingers. She had not touched the food on her plate.
Persse stole away from Martineau Hall, towards Lucas Hall, drawing in deep breaths of the cool night air, and gazing at the ruffled reflection of the moon in the artificial lake. The strains of a new song which the king and jester had just started, their hoarse and strident voices powerfully amplified, pursued him: King Arthur was a foolish knight, A foolish knight was he, He locked his wife in a chastity belt, And then he lost the key!
Lucas Hall was deserted. Persse trod lightly on the stairs, and along the corridors, as he searched for room 231. Its door was unlocked, and he stepped inside. He did not turn on the light, as the room was sufficiently illuminated through a fanlight over the door, and by the moon shining in through the open casement. Snatches of song still carried on the night breeze: Sir Lancelot, he told the Queen, “I soon will set you free.”
But when he tried with a pair of pliers
She said, “Stop, you’re tickling me!”
Persse looked round the small, narrow room for somewhere to conceal himself. The only possible place was the built-in wardrobe. The packet of Farex was heavy in the pocket of his anorak. He took it out and placed it on the bedside table, reflecting that it was a rather poor substitute for jellies soother than the creamy curd, and lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon, even if those did sound like baby-food.
He heard in the distance the thud and whine of the lift in operation, and stepped hastily into the dark interior of the wardrobe, pushing clothing to one side as he did so. He pulled the door to behind him, leaving it open an inch, through which he could breathe and see.
He heard the lift doors open at the end of the corridor, and footsteps approaching. The door handle turned, the door opened, and into the room came Robin Dempsey. He switched on the light, closed the door, and went across to the window to draw the curtains. As he took off his blazer, and draped it over the back of a chair, his eye was caught by the box of Farex, which he inspected with evident puzzlement. He eased off his shoes, and removed his trousers, revealing striped boxer shorts and sock suspenders. He took off one garment after another, folding and draping them neatly over the chair, until he was quite naked. It was not the spectacle Persse had been looking forward to. Dempsey sniffed himself under both armpits, then pushed a finger down into his crotch and sniffed that too. He disappeared from Persse’s line of vision for a few moments, during which he could be heard splashing about at the sink, cleaning his teeth and gargling. Then he reappeared, still naked, shivering slightly, and got into bed. He turned off the light from a bedside switch, but enough illumination came through the fanlight above the door to reveal that In was lying on his back with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, and glancing occasionally at a small digital clock whose figures glowed green on the bedside table. A profound silence settled in the wont.
Persse coughed.
Robin Dempsey sat up in bed with the force of a released spring, his torso seeming to quiver for some seconds after achieving the perpendicular. “Who’s there?” he quavered, fumbling for the light switch. As the light came on, an archly fond smile suffused his features. “Angelica,” he said, “Have you been hiding in the wardrobe all the time? You minx!”
Persse pushed open the door of the wardrobe and stepped out. “McGarrigle! What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same question,” said Persse.
“Why shouldn’t I be here? It’s my room.”
“Your room?” Persse looked around. Now that the light was on, he could see some signs of ma
sculine occupation: an electric razor. and a flask of Old Spice aftershave on the shelf over the sink, a pair of large leather slippers under the bed. He looked back at the wardrobe he had occupied and saw a bright blue suit on the solitary hanger inside. “Oh,” he said weakly; then, with more resolution, “Why did you think Angelica was hiding in the wardrobe?”
“It’s none of your business, but it so happens that I have an appointment with Angelica. I’m expecting her here at any moment, as a matter of fact, so I’d be obliged if you would kindly piss off. What were you doing in my wardrobe, anyway?”
“I had an appointment with Angelica too. She told me this was her room. I was to hide in it and watch her going to bed. Like in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.” It sounded rather silly to his own ears when he said it.
“I was to go to bed and wait for her to come to me,” said Dempsey, “Like Ruggiero and Alcina, she said. Couple of characters in one of those long Eyetie poems, apparently. She told me the story—it sounded pretty sexy.”
They were both silent for a moment.
“It looks as if she was having a bit of a joke,” said Persse at last.
“Yes, it does,” said Dempsey flatly. He got out of bed and took a pair of pyjamas from under his pillow. When he had put them on he got back into bed and pulled the blankets over his head. “Don’t forget to turn off the light when you leave,” he said in muffled tones.
“Oh, yes. Goodnight, then.”
Persse ran downstairs to the lobby, to look at the noticeboard which he had consulted for Morris Zapp. Angelica’s name did not appear anywhere on the list of residents. He hurried back to Martineau Hall. In the bar the conferees, who earlier had been drinking heavily to get themselves into the mood for the medieval banquet, were now drinking even more heavily in an effort to erase it from their memories. Bob Busby was nursing a glass of whisky alone in a corner, smiling fixedly in a brave effort to pretend that it was by his own choice that nobody was speaking to him. “Oh, hallo,” he said gratefully, as Persse sat down beside him.
David Lodge - Small World Page 7