“That’s a very fancy metaphor, Philip,” said Morris. “I can hardly believe you’ve never told this story before.”
“Well, actually, I did write it down,” said Philip, “for my own satisfaction. But I’ve never shown it to anybody.” He refilled their glasses. “Anyway, there we were, looking at each other. We heard a car accelerate away outside, down the hill, Simpson presumably. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said, ‘You’re trembling all over.’ She was trembling herself a little. I said I supposed it was shock. Delayed reaction. She gave me some more brandy, and swallowed some herself. I could tell that she knew it wasn’t really shock that was waking me tremble, that it was herself, her proximity, but she couldn’t quite credit her own intuition. ‘You’d better lie down,’ she said, show you the bedroom.’
“I followed her into the main bedroom. It was lit by a single bedside lamp with a purple shade. There was a large double bed, with a duvet half thrown back. She straightened it out, and plumped the pillows. I was still shaking all over. She asked me if I would like a hot water bottle. I said: ‘There’s only one thing that would stop me shaking like I his. If you would put your arms round me…
“Although it was a dim light in the room, I could see that she went very red. ‘I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t ask me.’ `Please,’ I said, and took a step towards her.
“Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have walked straight out of the room, perhaps slapped my face. But Joy just stood there. I stepped up close to her and put my arms round her. God, it was wonderful. I could feel the warmth of her breasts coming through the velour dressing-gown, and my shirt. She put her arms round me and gently clasped my back. I stopped shaking as if by magic. I had my chin on her shoulder and I was moaning and raving into her ear about how wonderful and generous and beautiful she was, and what ecstasy it was to hold her in my arms, and how I felt reconnected to the earth and the life force and all kinds of romantic nonsense. And all the time I was looking at myself reflected in the dressing-table mirror, in this weird purple light, my chin on her shoulder, my hands moving over her back, as if I were watching a film, or looking into a crystal ball. It didn’t seem possible that it was really happening. I saw my hands slide down the small of her back and cup her buttocks, bunching the skirt of her dressing-gown, and I said to the man in the mirror, silently, in my head, you’re crazy, now she’ll break away, slap your face, scream for help. But she didn’t. I saw her back arch and felt her press against me. I swayed, and staggered slightly, and as I recovered my balance I altered my position a little, and now in the mirror I could see her face, reflected in another mirror on the other side of the room, and, my God, there was an expression of total abandonment on it, her eyes were half shut and her lips were parted and she was smiling. Smiling! So I pulled back my head and kissed her, full on the lips. Her tongue went straight into my mouth like a warm eel. I pulled gently at the zip on the front of her dressing-gown and slid my hand inside. She was naked underneath it.”
Philip paused and stared into the fire. Morris discovered that he was sitting forward on the edge of his seat and that his cigar had gone out. “Yeah?” he said, fumbling for his lighter. “Then what happened?”
“I slipped the dressing-gown from her shoulders, and it crackled with static electricity as it slid off and settled at her feet. I fell on my knees and buried my face in her belly. She ran her fingers through my hair, and dug her nails into my shoulders. I lay her down on the bed and began to tear off my clothes with one hand while I kept stroking her with the other, afraid that if I once let go of her I would lose her. I had just enough presence of mind to ask if she was protected, and she nodded, without opening her eyes. Then we made love. There was nothing particularly subtle or prolonged about it, but I’ve never had an orgasm like it, before or since. I felt I was defying death, fucking my way out of the grave. She had to put her hand over my mouth, to stop me from shouting her name aloud: Joy, Joy, Joy.
“Then, almost instantly, I fell asleep. When I woke up I was alone in the bed, naked, covered with the duvet. Sunlight was coming through the cracks in the window shutters, and I could hear a vacuum cleaner going in another room. I looked at my watch. It was 10.30. I wondered if I had just dreamed of making love to Joy, but the physical memory was too keen and specific, and my clothes were scattered round the floor where I had thrown them off the night before. I put on my shirt and trousers and went out of the bedroom, into the living-room. A little Italian woman with a scarf round her head was hoovering the carpet. She grinned at me, turned off the Hoover and said something unintelligible. Joy came into the room from the kitchen, with a little boy at her side, holding a Dinky car, who stared at me. Joy looked quite different from the night before—smarter and more poised. She seemed to have cut her hand and was wearing an Elastoplast, but otherwise she was immaculately turned out, in some kind of linen dress, and her hair was smooth and bouncy as if she had just washed it. She gave me a bright, slightly artificial smile, but avoided eye contact. ‘Oh, hallo,’ she said, ‘I was just going to wake you.’ She had phoned the airport and my plane left at 12.30. She would run me down there as soon as I was ready. Would I like some breakfast, or would I like to take a shower first? She was the complete littlish Council hostess—polite, patient, detached. She actually asked is if I’d slept well. I wondered again whether the episode with her the night before had been a wet dream, but when I saw the blue dressing-gown hanging on the back of the bathroom door, it brought the whole tiling back with a sensuous detail that just couldn’t have been imaginary. The exact shape of her nipples, blunt and cylindrical, was imprinted on the nerve-endings of my finger-tips. I remembered the unusual luxuriance of her pubic hair, and its pale gold colour, tinged with purple from the bedside lamp, and the line across her belly where her sun-tan stopped. I couldn’t have dreamed all that. But it was impossible to have any kind of intimate conversation with her, what with the cleaning woman hoovering away, and the little boy round her feet all the time. And it was obvious that she didn’t want to anyway. She bustled about the flat and chattered to the cleaning woman and the boy. Even when she drove me to the airport she brought the kid along with her, and he was a sharp little bugger, who didn’t miss much. Although he was sitting in the back, he kept leaning forward and poking his head between the two of us, as if to stop us getting intimate. It began to look as if we would part without a single reference to what had happened the night before. It was absurd. I just couldn’t make her out. I felt I had to discover what had prompted her extraordinary action. Was she some kind of nymphomaniac, who would give herself to any man who was available—was I the most recent of a long succession of British Council lecturers who had passed through that purple-lit bedroom? It even crossed my mind that Simpson was in collusion with her, that I had been a pawn in some kinky erotic game between them, that perhaps he had returned silently to the flat and hidden himself behind one of those mirrors in the bedroom. A glance at her profile at the wheel of the car was enough to make such speculations seem fantastic—she looked so normal, so wholesome, so English. What had motivated her, then? I was desperate to know.
“When we got to the airport, she said, ‘You won’t mind if I just drop you, will you?’ But she had to get out of the car to open the boot for me, and I realized that this was my only chance to say anything to her privately. ‘Aren’t we going to talk about last night?’ I said, as I lifted my bag out of the boot. ‘Oh,’ she said, with her bright hostess’s smile, ‘you mustn’t worry about disturbing our sleep. We’re used to it in this job, people arriving at all sorts of odd hours. Not usually, of course, in burning aeroplanes. I do hope you have a less eventful flight today. Goodbye, Mr Swallow.’
” ‘Mr Swallow!’ This was the woman who just a few hours before had had her legs wrapped somewhere round the back of my neck! Well, it was very clear that, whatever her motives, she wanted to pretend that nothing had happened between us the night before—that she wanted to excise the whole episode from history, cancel it,
unweave it. And that the best way I could convey my own gratitude was to play along with her. So, with great reluctance, I didn’t press for an inquest. I just allowed myself one indulgence. She’d extended her hand, and, instead of just shaking it, I pressed it to my lips. I reckoned it wouldn’t seem a particularly showy gesture in an Italian airport. She blushed, as deeply as she had blushed the night before when I asked her to put her arms round me, and the whole unbelievable tenderness of that embrace flooded back into my consciousness, and hers too, I could see. Then she went back to the front of the car, got into the driver’s seat, gave me one last look through the window, and drove away. I never saw her again.”
“Maybe you will one day,” said Morris.
Philip shook his head. “No, she’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“All three of them were killed in an air-crash the following year, in India. I saw their names in the list of passengers. There were no survivors. ‘Simpson, J. K., wife Joy and son Gerard.’ “
Morris expelled his breath in a low whistle. “Hey, that’s really sad! I didn’t think this story was going to have an unhappy ending.”
“Ironic, too, isn’t it, when you think of how we met? At first I felt horribly guilty, as if I had somehow passed on to her a death which I had narrowly escaped myself. I convinced myself that it was just superstition. But I shall always keep a little shrine to Joy in my heart.”
“A little what?”
“A shrine,” Philip said solemnly. Morris coughed cigar smoke and let it pass. “She gave me back an appetite for life I thought I had lost for ever. It was the total unexpectedness, the gratuitousness of that giving of herself. It convinced me that life was still worth living, that I should make the most of what I had left.”
“And have you had any more adventures like that one?” Morris enquired, feeling slightly piqued at the extent to which he had been affected, first by the eroticism of Philip’s tale, then by its sad epilogue.
Philip blushed slightly. “One thing I learned from it, was never to say no to someone who asks for your body, never reject someone who freely offers you theirs.”
“I see,” said Morris drily. “Have you agreed this code with Hilary?”
“Hilary and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Some more whisky?”
“Positively the last one. I have to get up at five tomorrow.”
“And what about you, Morris?” said Philip, pouring out the whisky. “How’s your sex life these days?”
“Well, after Désirée and I split up I tried to get married again. I had various women living in, graduate students mostly, but none of them would marry me—girls these days have no principles—and I gradually lost interest in the idea. I’m living on my own right now. I jog. I watch TV. I write my books. Sometimes I go to a massage parlour in Esseph.”
“A massage parlour?” Philip looked shocked.
“They have a very nice class of girl in those places, you know. They’re not hookers. Collegeeducated. Clean, well-groomed, articulate. When I was a teenager I spent many exhausting hours trying to persuade girls like that to jerk me off in the back seat of my old man’s Chevvy. Now it’s as easy as going to the supermarket. It saves a lot of time and nervous energy.”
“But there’s no relationship!”
“Relationships kill sex, haven’t you learned that yet? The longer a relationship goes on, the less sexual excitement there is. Don’t kid yourself, Philip—do you think it would have been as great with Joy the second time, if there’d been one?”
“Yes,” said Philip. “Yes.”
“And the twenty-second time? The two hundredth time?”
“I suppose not,” Philip admitted. “Habit ruins everything in the end, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for—desire undiluted by habit.”
“The Russian Formalists had a word for it,” said Morris.
“I’m sure they did,” said Philip. “But it’s no use telling me what it was, because I’m sure to forget it.”
“Ostranenie,” said Morris. “Defamiliarization. It was what they thought literature was all about. ‘Habit devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war… Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life.’ Viktor Shklovsky.”
“Books used to satisfy me,” said Philip. “But as I get older I find they aren’t enough.”
“But you’re hitting the trail again soon, eh? Hilary tells me Turkey. What are you doing there?”
“Another British Council tour. I’m lecturing on Hazlitt.”
“Are they very interested in Hazlitt in Turkey?”
“I shouldn’t think so, but it’s the bicentenary of his birth. Or rather, it was, last year, when this trip was first mooted. It’s taken rather a long time to get off the ground… By the way, did you receive a copy of my Hazlitt book?”
“No—I was just saying to Hilary, I hadn’t even heard about it.”
Philip uttered an exclamation of annoyance. “Isn’t that typical of publishers? I specifically asked them to send you a complimentary copy. Let me give you one now.” He took from the bookcase a volume in a pale blue wrapper, scribbled a dedication inside, and handed it to Morris. It was entitled Hazlitt and the Amateur Reader. “I don’t expect you to agree with it, Morris, but if you think it has any merit at all, I’d be very grateful if you could do anything to get it reviewed somewhere. It hasn’t had a single notice, so far.”
“It doesn’t look like the sort of thing Metacriticism is interested in,” said Morris. “But I’ll see what I can do.” He riffled through the pages. “Hazlitt is kind of an unfashionable subject, isn’t he?”
“Unjustly neglected, in my view,” said Philip. “A very interesting man. Have you read Liber Amoris?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a lightly fictionalized account of his obsession with his landlady’s daughter. He was estranged from his wife at the time, hoping rather vainly to get a divorce. She was the archetypal pricktease. Would sit on his knee and let him feel her up, but not sleep with him or promise to marry him when he was free. It nearly drove him insane. He was totally obsessed. Then one day he saw her out with another man. End of illusion. Hazlitt shattered. I can feel for him. That girl must have—”
Philip’s voice faltered, and Morris saw him turn pale, staring at the living-room door. Following the direction of his gaze, Morris saw Hilary standing at the threshold, wearing a faded blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood and a zip that ran from throat to hem.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Then I realized I’d forgotten to tell you not to lock the front door. Matthew isn’t in yet. Are you feeling all right, Philip? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
“That dressing-gown…”
“What about it? I dug it out because my other one’s at the cleaners.”
“Oh, nothing, I thought you’d got rid of it years ago,” said Philip.
He drained his glass. “Time for bed, I think.”
Part II
AT 5 a.m., precisely, Morris Zapp is woken by the bleeping of his digital wristwatch, a sophisticated piece of miniaturized technology which can inform him, at the touch of a button, of the exact time anywhere in the world. In Cooktown, Queensland, Australia, for instance, it is 3 p.m., a fact of no interest to Morris Zapp, as he yawns and gropes for the bedside lamp switch—though as it happens, at this very moment in Cooktown, Queensland, Rodney Wainwright, of the University of North Queensland, is labouring over a paper for Morris Zapp’s Jerusalem conference on the Future of Criticism.
It is hot, very hot, this afternoon, in North Queensland; sweat makes the ballpen in Rodney Wainwright’s fingers slippery to hold, and dampens the page where the cushion of his palm rests upon it. From his desk in the study of his one-storey house here on the steamy outskirts of Cooktown, Rodney Wainwright can hear the sounds of the waves breaking on the nearby beach. There, he knows, are most of his students in English 351, “Theories of Literature from Coler
idge to Barthes”, cleaving the blue and white water or lying prone on the dazzling sand, the girls with their bikini bra straps trailing, untied for an even tan. Rodney Wainwright knows they are there because this morning, after the class broke up, they invited him to join them, grinning and nudging each other, a friendly but challenging gesture which, being decoded, meant: “OK, we’ve played your cultural game this morning—are you willing to play ours this afternoon?”
“Sorry,” he had said, “There’s nothing I’d like more, but I have this paper to write.” Now they are on the beach and he is at his desk. Later, as the sun sinks behind their backs, they will break out cans of beer and light a barbecue fire and someone will pick out a tune on a guitar. When it is quite dark there may be a proposal to go swimming in the nude—Rodney Wainwright has heard rumours that this is the usual climax to a beach party. He imagines the participation in such exercise of Sandra Dix, the buxom blonde from England who always sits in the front row of English 351 with her mouth and blouse-front perpetually agape. Then, with a sigh, he focuses his vision on the ruled foolscap before him, and re-reads what he wrote ten minutes ago.
The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism maintain its Arnoldian function of identifying the best which has been thought and said, when literary discourse itself has been decentred by deconstructing the traditional concept of the author, of authority?
Rodney Wainwright inserts a pair of inverted commas around “authority” and wills his mind to think of the next sentence. The paper must be finished soon, for Morris Zapp has asked to see a draft before accepting it for the conference, and on acceptance depends the travel grant which will enable Rodney Wainwright to fly to Europe this summer (or rather winter), to refresh his mind at the fountainhead of modern critical thought, making useful and influential contacts, adding to the little pile of scholarly honours, distinctions, achievements, that may eventually earn him a chair at Sydney or Melbourne. He does not want to grow old in Cooktown, Queensland. It is no country for old men. Even now, at thirty-eight, he stands no chance with the likes of Sandra Dix beside the bronzed and bulging heroes of the beach. The effects of twenty years’ dedication to the life of the mind are all too evident when he puts on a pair of swimming trunks, however loosely cut: beneath the large, balding, bespectacled head is a pale, pear-shaped torso, with skinny limbs attached like afterthoughts in a child’s drawing. And even if by some miracle Sandra Dix should be inclined to overlook these imperfections of the flesh in the dazzled contemplation of his mind, his wife Beverley would soon put a stop to any attempt at friendship beyond the call of tutorial duty.
David Lodge - Small World Page 10