by David Lodge
For some reason I remembered this conversation as we were going to bed tonight, and relayed it to Sally. She sniffed and said, “Isn’t it a bit late in the day for you lot to be worrying about the size of your willies?”
I said that for a really dedicated worrier it was never too late.
One thing I’ve never worried about, though, is Sally’s fidelity. We’ve had our ups and downs, of course, in nearly thirty years of marriage, but we’ve always been faithful to each other. Not for lack of opportunity, I may say, at least on my side, the entertainment world being what it is, and I daresay on hers too, though I can’t believe that she’s exposed to the same occupational temptations. Her colleagues at the Poly, or rather University as I must learn to call it now, don’t look much of an erotic turn-on to me. But that’s not the point. We’ve always been faithful to each other. How can I be sure? I just am. Sally was a virgin when I met her, nice girls usually were in those days, and I wasn’t all that experienced myself. My sexual history was a very slim volume, consisting of isolated, opportunistic couplings with garrison slags in the Army, with drunken girls at drama-school parties, and with lonely landladies in seedy theatrical digs. I don’t think I had sex with any of them more than twice, and it was always fairly quick and in the missionary position. To enjoy sex you need comfort – clean sheets, firm mattresses, warm bedrooms – and continuity. Sally and I learned about making love together, more or less from scratch. If she were to go with anyone else, something new in her behaviour, some unfamiliar adjustment of her limbs, some variation in her caresses, would tell me, I’m certain. I always have trouble with adultery stories, especially those where one partner has been betraying the other for years. How could you not know? Of course, Sally doesn’t know about Amy. But then I’m not having an affair with Amy. What am I having with her? I don’t know.
I met Amy six years ago when she was hired to help cast the first series of The People Next Door. Needless to say, she did a brilliant job. Some people in the business reckon that ninety per cent of the success of a sitcom is in the casting. As a writer I would question that, naturally, but it’s true that the best script in the world won’t work if the actors are all wrong. And the right ones are not always everybody’s obvious first choice. It was Amy’s idea, for instance, to cast Deborah Radcliffe as Priscilla, the middle-class mother – a classical actress who’d just been let go by the Royal Shakespeare, and had never done sitcom before in her life. Nobody except Amy would have thought of her for Priscilla, but she took to the part like a duck to water. Now she’s a household name and can earn five grand for a thirty-second commercial.
It’s a funny business, casting. It’s a gift, like fortune-telling or water-divining, but you also need a trained memory. Amy has a mind like a Rolodex: when you ask her advice about casting a part she goes into a kind of trance, her eyes turn up to the ceiling, and you can almost hear the fllick-flick-flick inside her head as she spools through that mental card-index where the essence of every actor and actress she has ever seen is inscribed. When Amy goes to see a show, she’s not just watching the actors perform their given roles, she’s imagining them all the time in other roles, so that by the end of the evening she’s assimilated not only their performance on the night, but also their potential for quite other performances. You might go with Amy to see Macbeth at the RSC and say to her on the way home, “Wasn’t Deborah Radcliffe a great Lady Macbeth?” and she’d say, “Mmm, I’d love to see her do Judith Bliss in Hay Fever.” I wonder sometimes whether this habit of mind doesn’t prevent her from enjoying what’s going on in front of her. Perhaps that’s what we have in common – neither of us being able to live in the present, always hankering after some phantom of perfection elsewhere.
I put this to her once. “Balls, darling,” she said. “With the greatest respect, complete cojones. You forget that every now and again I pull it off. I achieve the perfect fit between actor and role. Then I enjoy the show and nothing but the show. I live for those moments. So do you, for that matter. I mean when everything in an episode goes exactly right. You sit in front of the telly holding your breath thinking, they can’t possibly keep this up, it’s going to dip in a moment, but they do, and it doesn’t – that’s what it’s all about, n’est ce pas?”
“I can’t remember when I thought an episode was that good,” I said.
“What about the fumigation one?”
“Yes, the fumigation one was good.”
“It was bloody brilliant.”
That’s what I like about Amy – she’s always pumping up my self-esteem. Sally’s style is more bracing: stop moping and get on with your life. In fact in every way they’re antithetical. Sally is a blonde, blue-eyed English rose, tall, supple, athletic. Amy is the Mediterranean type (her father was a Greek Cypriot): dark, short and buxom, with a head of frizzy black curls and eyes like raisins. She smokes, wears a lot of make-up, and never walks anywhere, let alone runs, if she can possibly avoid it. We had to run for a train once at Euston: I shot ahead and held the door open for her as she came waddling down the ramp on her high heels like a panicked duck, all her necklaces and earrings and scarves and bags and other female paraphernalia atremble, and I burst out laughing. I just couldn’t help myself. Amy asked me what was so funny as she scrambled breathlessly aboard, and when I told her she refused to speak to me for the rest of the journey. (Incidentally, I just looked up “paraphernalia” in the dictionary because I wasn’t sure I’d spelled it right, and discovered it comes from the Latin paraphema, meaning “a woman’s personal property apart from her dowry.” Interesting.)
It was one of our very few tiffs. We get on very well together as a rule, exchanging industry gossip, trading personal moans and reassurances, comparing therapies. Amy is divorced, with custody of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Zelda, who is just discovering boys and giving Amy a hard time about clothes, staying out late, going to dubious discos, etc. etc. Amy is terrified that Zelda’s going to get into sex and drugs any minute now, and distrusts her ex-husband, Saul, a theatre manager who has the kid to stay one weekend every month and who, Amy says, has no morals, or, to quote her exactly, “wouldn’t recognize a moral if it bit him on the nose.” Nevertheless she feels riven with guilt about the break-up of the marriage, fearing that Zelda will go off the rails for lack of a father-figure in the home. Amy started analysis primarily to discover what went wrong between herself and Saul. In a sense she knew that already: it was sex. Saul wanted to do things that she didn’t want to do, so eventually he found someone else to do them with. But she’s still trying to work out whether this was his fault or hers, and doesn’t seem to be any nearer a conclusion. Analysis has a way of unravelling the self: the longer you pull on the thread, the more flaws you find.
I see Amy nearly every week, when I go to London. Sometimes we go to a show, but more often than not we just spend a quiet evening together, at the flat, and/or have a bite to eat at one of the local restaurants. There’s never been any question of sex in our relationship, because Amy doesn’t really want it and I don’t really need it. I get plenty of sex at home. Sally seems full of erotic appetite these days – I think it must be the hormone replacement therapy she’s having for the menopause. Sometimes, to stimulate my own sluggish libido, I suggest something Saul wanted to do with Amy, and Sally hasn’t turned me down yet. When she asks me where I get these ideas from, I tell her magazines and books, and she’s quite satisfied. If it ever got back to Sally that I was seen out in London with Amy, it wouldn’t bother her because I don’t conceal the fact that we meet occasionally. Sally thinks it’s for professional reasons, which in part it is.
So really you would say that I’ve got it made, wouldn’t you? I’ve solved the monogamy problem, which is to say the monotony problem, without the guilt of infidelity. I have a sexy wife at home and a platonic mistress in London. What have I got to complain about? I don’t know.
It’s three-thirty. I think I’ll go back to bed and see if I can get a few hours’
kip before sparrowfart.
Wednesday 11 a.m. I did sleep for a few hours, but it wasn’t a refreshing sleep. I woke feeling knackered, like I used to be after guard duty in National Service: two hours on, four hours off, all through the night, and all through the day too, if it was a weekend. Christ, just writing that down brings it all back: snatching sleep lying on a bunk fully dressed in ankle-bruising boots and neck-chafing battledress under the glare of a naked electric light bulb, and then being roughly woken to gulp down sweetened lukewarm tea, and maybe some cold congealed eggs and baked beans, before stumbling out yawning and shivering into the night, to loiter for two hours by the barrack gates, or circle the silent shuttered huts and stores, listening to your own footsteps, watching your own shadow lengthen and shorten under the arc-lamps. Let me just concentrate for a moment on that memory, close my eyes and try and squeeze the misery out of it, so that I will appreciate my present comforts.
Tried it. No good. Doesn’t work.
I’m writing this on my laptop on the train to London. First class, naturally. Definition of a well-off man: somebody who pays for a first-class ticket out of his own pocket. It’s tax-deductible of course, but still … Most of my fellow passengers in this carriage are on expenses. Businessmen with digital-lock briefcases and mobile phones, and businesswomen with wide-shouldered jackets and bulging filofaxes. The odd retired county type in tweeds. I’m wearing a suit myself today in honour of the Groucho, but sometimes, when I’m in jeans and leather jacket, with my tramp’s haircut falling over the back of the collar, people glance suspiciously at me as if they think I’m in the wrong part of the train. Not the conductors, though – they know me. I travel up and down a lot on this line.
Don’t get the idea that I’m an enthusiast for British Rail’s Inter-City service to London. Au contraire, as Amy would say (she likes to pepper her conversation with foreign phrases). There are a lot of things I don’t like about it. For instance: I don’t like the smell of the bacon and tomato rolls that pollute the air of the carriage every time somebody brings one back from the buffet car and opens the little polystyrene box they micro-wave them in. I don’t like the brake linings on the wheels of the Pullman rolling stock which when warm emit sulphurous-smelling fumes, allegedly harmless to health, that creep into the carriages and mingle with the smell of bacon and tomato rolls. I don’t like the taste of the bacon and tomato rolls when I am foolish enough to buy one for myself, somehow suppressing the memory of how naff it was last time. I don’t like the fact that if you ask at the buffet for a cup of coffee you will be given a giant-sized plastic beaker of the stuff unless you ask for a small (i.e., normal) size. I don’t like the way the train rocks from side to side when it picks up any kind of speed, causing the coffee to slop over the sides of the plastic beaker as you raise it to your lips, scalding your fingers and dripping onto your lap. I don’t like the fact that if the air-conditioning fails, as it not infrequently does, you can’t ventilate the carriage because the windows are sealed. I don’t like the way that, not infrequently, but never when the air-conditioning has failed, the automatic sliding doors at each end of the coach jam in the open position, and cannot be closed manually, or if they can be closed, slowly open again of their own accord, or are opened by passing passengers who leave them open assuming that they will close automatically, obliging you either to leap up every few minutes to close the doors or sit in a permanent draught. I don’t like the catches in the WC compartments designed to hold the toilet seats in an upright position, which are spring-loaded, but often loose or broken, so that when you are in mid-pee, holding on to a grab handle with one hand and aiming your todger with the other, the seat, dislodged from the upright position by the violent motion of the train, will suddenly fall forwards, breaking the stream of urine and causing it to spatter your trousers. I don’t like the way the train always races at top speed along the section of the track that runs beside the M1, overtaking all the cars and lorries in order to advertise the superiority of rail travel, and then a few minutes later comes to a halt in a field near Rugby because of a signalling failure.
Ow! Ouch! Yaroo! Sudden stab of pain in the knee, for no discernible reason.
Sally said the other day that it was my thorn in the flesh. I wondered where the phrase came from and went to look it up. (I do a lot of looking up – it’s how I compensate for my lousy education. My study is full of reference books, I buy them compulsively.) I discovered that it was from Saint Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the fleshy the messenger of Satan to buffet me …” I came back into the kitchen with the Bible, rather pleased with myself, and read the verse out to Sally. She stared at me and said, “But that’s what I just told you,” and I realized I’d had one of my absent-minded spells, and while I was wondering where the phrase came from she had been telling me. “Oh, yes, I know you said it was St Paul,” I lied. “But what’s the application to my knee? The text seems a bit obscure.” “That’s the point,” she said. “Nobody knows what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was. It’s a mystery. Like your knee.” She knows a lot about religion, does Sally, much more than I do. Her father was a vicar.
True to form, the train has stopped, for no apparent reason, amid empty fields. In the sudden hush the remarks of a man in shirtsleeves across the aisle speaking into his cellphone about a contract for warehouse shelving are annoyingly intrusive. I would really prefer to drive to London, but the traffic is impossible once you get off the M1, not to mention on the M1, and parking in the West End is such a hassle that it’s really not worth the effort. So I drive the car to Rummidge Expo station, which is only fifteen minutes from home, and leave it in the car park there. I’m always a little bit apprehensive on the return journey in case I find somebody has scratched it, or even nicked it, though it has all the latest alarms and security systems. It’s a wonderful vehicle, with a 24-valve three-litre V6 engine, automatic transmission, power steering, cruise control, air-conditioning, ABS brakes, six-speaker audio system, electric tilt-and-slide sunroof and every other gadget you can imagine. It goes like the wind, smooth and incredibly quiet. It’s the silent effortless power that intoxicates me. I never was one for noisy brrrm brmmm sports cars, and I never did understand the British obsession with manual gear-changing. Is it a substitute for sex, I wonder, that endless fondling of the knob on the end of the gear lever, that perpetual pumping of the clutch pedal? They say that you don’t get the same acceleration in the middle range with an automatic, but there’s quite enough if your engine is as powerful as the one in my car. It’s also incredibly, heartstoppingly beautiful.
I fell in love with it at first sight, parked outside the showroom, low and streamlined, sculpted out of what looked like mist with the sun shining through it, a very very pale silvery grey, with a pearly lustre. I kept finding reasons to drive past the showroom so that I could look at it again, and each time I felt a pang of desire. I daresay a lot of other people driving past felt the same way, but unlike them I knew I could walk into the showroom and buy the car without even having to think if I could afford it. But I hesitated and hung back. Why? Because, when I couldn’t afford a car like that, I disapproved of cars like that: fast, flash, energy-wasteful – and Japanese. I always said I’d never buy a Japanese car, not so much out of economic patriotism (I used to drive Fords which usually turned out to have been made in Belgium or Germany) as for emotional reasons. I’m old enough to remember World War Two, and I had an uncle who died as a POW working on the Siamese railway. I thought something bad would happen to me if I bought this car, or that at the very least I would feel guilty and miserable driving it. And yet I coveted it. It became one of my “things” – things I can’t decide, can’t forget, can’t leave alone. Things I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about.
I bought all the motoring magazines hoping that I would find some damning criticism of the car that would enable me to dec
ide against it. No go. Some of the road-test reports were a bit condescending – “bland”, “docile”, even “inscrutable”, were some of the epithets they used – but you could tell that nobody could find anything wrong with it. I hardly slept at all for a week, stewing it over. Can you believe it? While war raged in Yugoslavia, thousands died daily of AIDS in Africa, bombs exploded in Northern Ireland and the unemployment figures rose inexorably in Britain, I could think of nothing except whether or not to buy this car.
I began to get on Sally’s nerves. “For God’s sake, go and have a test drive, and if you like the car, buy it,” she said. (She drives an Escort herself, changes it every three years after a two-minute telephone conversation with her dealer, and never gives another thought to the matter.) So I had a test-drive. And of course I liked the car. I loved the car. I was utterly seduced and enraptured by the car. But I told the salesman I would think about it. “What is there to think about?” Sally demanded, when I came home. “You like the car, you can afford the car, why not buy the car?” I said I would sleep on it. Which meant, of course, that I lay awake all night worrying about it. In the morning at breakfast I announced that I had reached a decision. “Oh yes?” said Sally, without raising her eyes from the newspaper. “What is it?” “I’ve decided against,” I said. “However irrational my scruples may be, I’ll never be free from them, so I’d better not buy it.” “OK,” said Sally. “What will you buy instead?” “I don’t really need to buy anything,” I said. “My present car is good for another year or two.” “Fine,” said Sally. But she sounded disappointed. I began to worry again whether I’d made the right decision.
A couple of days later, I drove past the showroom and the car was missing. I went in and buttonholed the salesman. I practically dragged him from his seat by the lapels, like people do in movies. Someone else had bought my car! I couldn’t believe it. I felt as if my bride had been abducted on our wedding eve. I said I wanted the car. I had to have the car. The salesman said he could get me another one in two or three weeks, but when he checked on his computer there wasn’t an exactly similar model in the same colour in the country. It’s not one of those Japanese manufacturers that have set up factories in Britain – they import from Japan under the quota system. He said there was one in a container ship somewhere on the high seas, but delivery would take a couple of months. To cut a long story short, I ended up paying £ 1000 over the list price to gazump the chap who had just bought my car.