The British Museum is Falling Down

by David Lodge

  At the end of the sermon, as at the end of all the other pieces in the book, was a rhymed prayer:

  You who made us pure as children

  Keep us pure in adulthood.

  Let the beauty of creation

  Be not a snare but source of good . . .

  It was at this point that Adam had stopped reading. He tried to cheer himself up by entertaining some impure thoughts, but the circumstances were not congenial. He was locked in the room for one thing, and it made him restive. ‘You won’t mind me taking this precaution, will you?’ Mrs Rottingdean had told, rather than asked him when she left him alone with the manuscript. ‘I have to go out, and I don’t believe in taking risks with valuable literary documents.’ Valuable! No one in their senses would give two hundred and fifty pence for this garbage. One or two of Merry-marsh’s books had a certain period charm, a vein of puckish whimsy. But this . . .

  He looked at his watch: a quarter past five. If Mrs Rottingdean did not return soon he would be late for the sherry party. He went to the window and pushed experimentally at the sash, but it was stuck. In any case it was a long drop down to the area, and he had no desire to leave by that route.

  He heard footsteps in the hall and scuttled back to his seat. As the key turned in the lock he picked up the manuscript and rehearsed the polite speech in which he planned to return the manuscript to its owner and excuse himself from lingering any longer in the house. But the person who entered was not Mrs Rottingdean. It was the girl he had glimpsed in the kitchen.

  ‘Hallo,’ she said.

  ‘Hallo,’ said Adam.

  The girl leaned against the door and appraised him with a slow, sensual smile. She looked about nineteen, but was probably younger. She was pretty in a pale, neglected kind of way, and her figure, eloquently revealed by a black veenecked sweater and tight skirt, was agreeably contoured.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ she said.

  ‘You must be Virginia.’

  The girl sat down on a sofa opposite Adam and crossed her legs. ‘D’you happen to have a cigarette?’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t smoke.’ Something made him add, as if in mitigation, ‘I gave it up.’

  ‘Scared of cancer?’

  ‘No, I just couldn’t afford it.’

  ‘What did Mother tell you about me?’

  ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘She thinks I’m wild and ungovernable. What’s your name?’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘D’you think I have nice breasts, Adam?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said truthfully.

  ‘You can touch them if you like.’ She patted the sofa invitingly.

  Adam swallowed. ‘I see what your mother means.’

  Virginia giggled. ‘What did she lock you up for? She’s a great one for locking people up.’

  ‘I don’t really know. But since you’ve so kindly released me . . .’ He stood up and glanced at his watch.

  ‘Oh, don’t go!’

  ‘I’m afraid I must.’

  Virginia danced to the door, locked it on the inside, and slipped the key inside the neck of her sweater. Then she resumed her place on the sofa, tucking up her legs. Adam sat down again.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  Virginia uncoiled her legs and stretched out languorously on the sofa. ‘I’m determined to seduce you, so you might as well resign yourself.’

  ‘Please open the door,’ he begged. ‘Your mother may come back at any moment.’

  Virginia shot him an eager glance. ‘Is that your only objection?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t. For one thing, I have a wife and three children.’

  ‘Good,’ said Virginia. ‘I like experienced men.’

  Adam got up and tried the window sash again. ‘It doesn’t open,’ said Virginia. ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘You may well ask,’ said Adam. ‘Originally it was because I was interested in the writings of your great-uncle.’

  Virginia wrinkled her brow. ‘Great-uncle?’

  ‘Your mother’s Uncle Egbert.’

  ‘Oh, Egbert Merrymarsh! Mother’s lover. Did she tell you he was her uncle?’

  ‘Your mother’s what?’

  ‘Mother’s lover. He seduced her when she was twenty. That’s why she’s been so strict with me.’

  Adam laughed.

  ‘No, cross my heart, it’s true.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re the illegitimate daughter. How romantic!’

  ‘’Course not, silly. He died years before I was born.’

  Adam stood over the recumbent girl and stared into her eyes. They were like pools of black coffee, dark but transparent, and they did not waver. ‘You’re a good actress,’ he said at last. ‘If I hadn’t been reading one of Merrymarsh’s books for the last half-hour, I might have been taken in.’

  ‘What have you been reading, then?’

  He prodded the manuscript, which was lying on the floor, with his toe. ‘This. Lay Sermons and Private Prayers.’

  ‘Oh, that tripe.’

  ‘Have you read it?’

  ‘She tried to make me, once. I could show you something really interesting by him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something really interesting.’ She chuckled and wriggled her bottom in the sofa cushions.

  He turned away. ‘I’ve lost all interest in Merrymarsh anyway.’ He went to the door and tested the lock. It was firm.

  ‘Does your wife have frequent orgasms?’ said Virginia.

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘You’re blushing. Don’t you believe in the frank discussion of sex?’

  ‘If you must know,’ he said in exasperation, ‘we don’t have frequent intercourse.’

  ‘But that’s awful! Don’t you love her any more?’

  ‘We happen to be Catholics, that’s all.’

  ‘You mean you believe all that nonsense about birth control?’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe it, but I practise it. Look, are you going to let me out, or aren’t you?’

  ‘You’ve only got to take the key.’

  Setting his countenance grimly, he strode across the floor to the couch, and, with a gesture as brusque and clinical as he could manage, inserted his hand under Virginia’s sweater. She did not flinch, but Adam did when he discovered that she was not wearing a brassiere. He withdrew his keyless hand, going hot and cold by turns. ‘You’ve moved it,’ he accused her.

  ‘You have nice soft hands, Adam,’ she said.

  ‘Please give me the key. Aren’t you afraid of what your mother will say when she comes back and finds you locked in here with me?’

  ‘No. I have a hold over her because I know her past.’

  Adam paced about the room. If only he could trip her up in some part of this ridiculous story, he felt, he might be able to bully her into letting him out.

  ‘If that’s the case, why don’t you leave home—since you evidently don’t see eye to eye with your mother?’

  ‘She has a hold over me. She has some money in trust for me if I marry with her consent.’

  ‘From Egbert Merrymarsh?’

  ‘No, how could it be, silly? From my father. He died about ten years ago.’

  Adam sat down. She was beginning to convince him, and a treacherous pulse of excitement and curiosity began to beat again at the back of his mind. He scented a scandal that would send a gratifying shock through certain quarters of the Catholic and literary worlds.

  ‘Supposing all this about your mother’s past is true, how did you discover it?’

  ‘I found some letters from Merrymarsh to Mother. They’re very passionate. She must have been a different person.’

  ‘How old was Merrymarsh then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Quite old—about forty-five, maybe even more. Would you believe it—he was a virgin until then.’

  ‘Are these letters the “something interesting” you mention
ed just now?’

  ‘No, I meant the book.’

  ‘The book?’

  ‘Yes, there was a book—in handwriting, you know, not a proper book. One day I saw Mother burning a lot of papers in the cellar, and while her back was turned I managed to salvage the book and a bundle of letters.’

  ‘What kind of a book is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s a sort of novel, written like a journal. It’s really the story of his affair with Mother, with just the names changed. It’s hot stuff, as we used to say at school.’

  ‘Hot stuff?’

  ‘It doesn’t leave anything to the imagination,’ said Virginia, with a leer.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ said Adam. ‘Can I see the book?’

  Virginia pondered, then shook her head. ‘Not now, Mother will be back at any minute. Can you come back later tonight?’

  ‘Just a quick glance,’ he urged.

  She shook her head again. ‘No, I’ve hidden it, and it’ll take some time to get out. Besides, I’m not going to all this trouble for nothing, Adam.’ She extruded the tip of a pink, kittenish tongue and moistened her lips suggestively.

  ‘Oh,’ said Adam.

  Simultaneously they became aware of an engine throbbing in the street outside.

  ‘That’s Mother’s taxi,’ said Virginia, jumping up.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Adam, following suit.

  Virginia slipped a hand down the front of her skirt and produced the key. ‘Next time you’ll know where to look.’ She went to the door and unlocked it. ‘I’ll have to lock you in again. See you tonight.’

  ‘But how shall I manage it?’

  ‘That’s your problem, Adam.’

  He tugged at her sleeve. ‘Before you go—there’s one question I must ask you. Who are those men downstairs?’

  ‘Butchers,’ was the cryptic reply. She slipped through the door, and he heard the key turn in the lock.

  CHAPTER VIII

  . . . studious and curious persons . . .

  Users of the British Museum, as defined by the act of 1753.

  You who made us pure as children,

  Keep us pure in adulthood . . .

  ADAM, DRIVING BLIND through the fog, twisted the throttle of his scooter to try and drown the syllables which droned with maddening persistence in his head. The machine shuddered and lurched forward, adding a generous quota of fumes to the already foul atmosphere. The noise was satisfactory, but the speed perilous. He swerved violently to avoid a lorry abandoned by its driver. A little later a bone-shaking bump informed him that he had been travelling on the pavement. He overtook a line of cars following each other’s tail lights at a crawl, and exchanged startled glances with the policeman who was leading the caravan on a motorcycle.

  Let the beauty of creation

  Be not a snare but source of good.

  It was no use. He eased back the throttle and chugged at a more sedate speed down what he hoped was the Edgware Road.

  He did not admit for a moment that Merrymarsh’s imbecile prayer had any message for him. It was true that he had arranged with Mrs Rottingdean to return later that evening on the pretext that he had not finished reading the manuscript, excusing himself in the meantime by reference to the sherry party. But that had been an impulsive action, performed under the pressure of flustering circumstances. Now that he had escaped from that enchanted house of locked doors and inscrutable behaviour, he would not be fool enough to return. Or if, by any chance, he should return, he would contrive to lay his hands on the evidence of Merrymarsh’s hidden life without embarking on a hidden life of his own with Virginia.

  Yet, he had to acknowledge, it was a novel and not altogether disagreeable experience to have a nubile young woman throw herself at him with such wanton abandon. Before he had met Barbara, Adam’s sexual experience had stopped short at holding the sticky hands of convent girls in the cinema, and perhaps coaxing from them afterwards a single tight-lipped kiss. The physical side of his long courtship of Barbara had been a tortured, intense affair of endless debate and limited action, an extended and nerve-racking exercise in erotic brinkmanship, marked by occasional skirmishes that were never, in the end, allowed to develop into major conflagrations. When they finally married they were clumsy, inexperienced lovers, and by the time they got the hang of it and began to enjoy themselves Barbara was six months pregnant. Ever since, pregnancy, actual or fearfully anticipated, had been a familiar attendant on their love-making. Adam had long resigned himself to this fate. The experience of unbridled sexuality, the casual, unpremeditated copulation unembarrassed by emotional ties or practical consequences—the kind of thing that happened, he understood, between strangers at wild student parties, or to youthful electricians summoned to suburban villas on warm spring afternoons—this was not for him. He knew it only at second hand, passed to him in fragments of overheard conversation in bar or barrack room. I tell you she had her belt and stockings off before I could close the door . . .! ‘What’s the matter?’ she says. ‘Nothing,’ I says, ‘I’m just looking for me screwdriver.’ ‘I bet you’re good at screwing,’ she says . . Now, it seemed, he had only to stretch out his hand to take such a plum for himself.

  A precise tactile memory of Virginia’s bare breast disturbed him with its sudden force, and he gripped the handlebars tightly. He tried to drive away temptation by thinking about Barbara; but she rose up in his imagination encumbered by children, a thermometer jutting from her mouth, a distracted frown wrinkling her brow.

  You who made us pure as children . . .

  He knew now why he couldn’t get that wretched doggerel out of his mind: its rhythm exactly synchronised with the new knock that had developed in his engine.

  The sherry party was in full swing by the time Adam arrived. Usually, on such occasions, the staff began drifting away just as the first ice began to melt; but tonight everyone seemed to have decided that in view of the fog it was pointless trying to get home in the rush-hour, so one might as well make a night of it. The single, fortunate, exception to this rule had been the bar-steward, who had departed leaving behind him a generous quantity of filled glasses. Adam, who had seldom felt so grievously in need of a drink, made a beeline for this inviting display.

  The post-graduate sherry party was a regular feature of the first term of the academic year, designed to introduce students to staff and to each other. For many it was hail and farewell, since the Department did not have the resources to mount a proper graduate programme, and in any case espoused the traditional belief that research was a lonely and eremitic occupation, a test of character rather than learning, which might be vitiated by excessive human contact. As if they sensed this the new post-graduates, particularly those from overseas, roamed the floor eagerly accosting the senior guests, resolved to cram a whole year’s sociability into one brief evening, As he left the bar with his first sherry, Adam was snapped up by a cruising Indian.

  ‘Good evening. My name is Alibai.’

  ‘Hallo. Mine’s Appleby,’ said Adam. Mr Alibai extended his hand and Adam shook it.

  ‘How do you do,’ said Mr Alibai.

  ‘How do you do,’ said Adam, who knew what was expected of him.

  ‘You are a Professor at the University?’

  ‘No, I’m a post-graduate.’

  ‘I also. I am to write a thesis on Shani Hodder. You are acquainted with her work?’

  ‘No, who is she?’

  Mr Alibai looked dejected. ‘I have not met a single person who has heard of Shani Hodder.’

  ‘That happens to all of us,’ said Adam. ‘Have another sherry?’

  ‘No thank you. I do not drink alcohol, and the fruit juices give the diarrhoea.’

  ‘Well, excuse me. I’m terribly thirsty.’ Adam pushed his was back to the bar. He drank two more dry sherries very quickly. His stomach, which was empty, made a noise like old plumbing. He looked around for food, but could only find a plate thinly covered with the crumbs of potato chips. These he ate greedily, picking them u
p on the moistened tips of his fingers. At the other side of the room he saw Camel, who waved. Adam gave him a cold stare and turned his back. He found himself face to face with a bald-headed man in a pale striped suit.

  ‘What do you think of anus?’ said the man.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The novelist, Kingsley Anus,’ said the man impatiently.

  ‘Oh, yes. I like his work. There are times when I think I belong to him more than to any of the others.’

  ‘Please?’ said the man, frowning.

  ‘Well, you see, I have this theory,’ Adam, who had just thought of it, said expansively. ‘Has it ever occurred to you how novelists are using up experience at a dangerous rate? No, I see it hasn’t. Well, then, consider that before the novel emerged as the dominant literary form, narrative literature dealt only with the extraordinary or the allegorical—with kings and queens, giants and dragons, sublime virtue and diabolic evil. There was no risk of confusing that sort of thing with life, of course. But as soon as the novel got going, you might pick up a book at any time and read about an ordinary chap called Joe Smith doing just the sort of things you did yourself. Now, I know what you’re going to say—you’re going to say that the novelist still has to invent a lot. But that’s just the point: there’ve been such a fantastic number of novels written in the last couple of centuries that they’ve just about exhausted the possibilities of life. So all of us, you see, are really enacting events that have already been written about in some novel or other. Of course, most people don’t realise this—they fondly imagine that their little lives are unique . . . Just as well, too, because when you do tumble to it, the effect is very disturbing.’