by David Lodge
I thought I had to write, although I shall be seeing you so soon, just to tell you that you really mustn’t be jealous about Mike, because honestly I never think of him at all. He was my first boyfriend, and if I’d been more experienced I’d have known that we could never get on together, and I’d have stopped the thing before it got started. In fact it never got very far, although it dragged on a long time. As far as I’m concerned, he’s gone out of my life, and I don’t particularly want to see him again. I thought I would write and get this off my chest because I think that there’s been a certain strain between us about him. I’ve noticed that once or twice when the conversation seemed to be moving in that direction, you suddenly stopped talking. So it’s perhaps a good job that we’ve had it out, and it can be forgotten. Don’t let’s talk about it any more.
I’m so looking forward to Wednesday, and of course I’m terribly excited about our holiday. I never thought Mummy and Daddy would agree, but they trust you! What do you think? I’ve bought a bikini! Well it’s not really a bikini, but it’s a two-piece, and rather daring for me. I hope you like it. Anyway, I’ll try it on for you on Wednesday night and you can tell me if you think it’s decent, I believe the Spaniards are a bit prudish …
I crumpled the letter in my fist and dropped it absently between my legs into the w.c. bowl.
After a long wrangle the Inspector said:
‘Well, all right, Corporal. It’s all against regulations, but I’ll give you five minutes. Sergeant, take him down will you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I will be alone with him, won’t I?’
‘Absolutely out of the question, Corporal. I’m permitting more than I should already.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m very grateful. All right then.’
The Visitors’ Room was a cross between a confessional and a Post Office. I sat facing the wire grille and waited for Mike. After all my efforts to see him, now I could not think what I would say. I heard footsteps approaching the door behind the grille.
I had asked the Sergeant to give Mike my name, so that time would not be wasted while he recovered from the surprise. But his face still wore an expression of astonishment as he entered the room.
‘Jon! What are you doing here? I——’
The sergeant broke in with some formula about speaking clearly and other regulations, but I scarcely heard him. I too was taken by surprise,—by Mike’s appearance. His hair was black, and he wore a heavy black moustache, like a French workman’s, which obscured his upper lip. It made him look much older. Foolishly, the first question I asked him was :
‘What happened to your hair?’
‘Dyed. But what on earth are you doing here, Jon? How did you know …?’
‘I was at the camp you raided last night. I was on guard.’
He whistled softly.
‘We knew there should have been another N.C.O. I was prowling round looking for him. My God, Jon, I might have coshed you.’
‘It would have been better for you if you had. I was watching all the time. I contacted the police at once. But I didn’t know you were one of them.’
There was a pause while Mike took it in.
‘It’s all right, Jon. You were only doing your duty.’
‘Oh fugg my duty.’
The sergeant stirred restively on his seat a few yards away. ‘I see you’ve got a couple of stripes,’ said Mike. ‘You must be getting near the end of your time mustn’t you?’
‘Yes. Tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ He was silent. What was going on behind those pale blue eyes? It was too painful to speculate.
‘Mike, I must know, if you can tell me,’—I shot a glance at the sergeant. ‘Why did you get mixed up with that lot?’
‘The Irish Republican Army?’ He rolled the syllables with ironic unction. ‘It’s a long story. They got me out of England, as you probably realized. They hid me in a convent for some time,—that’s another long story. I was sort of automatically enlisted. There wasn’t much else I could do. Funny really: out of one Army and into another. There’s not much to choose between them, I can tell you. Mind you, as long as it was just a matter of breaking into armouries, and making the Army look silly, I didn’t mind. But a few weeks ago some fools blew up a telephone booth in Armagh, and some people were hurt. That was enough for me. We made a deal, that if I helped them with this raid, they’d get me to South America. The rest you know.’
‘Your time’s up,’ said the Sergeant. Mike stood up.
‘Jon.’
‘Yes?
‘You haven’t seen Pauline lately, have you?’
‘Yes. I see her quite a lot actually.’
‘How is she?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘Give her my … best wishes. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to write. It was too risky. Perhaps I’ll write now.’
‘Come along,’ said the sergeant.
‘I shouldn’t do that, Mike. It might upset her.’
He looked at me for a moment, then said gently:
‘All right, Jon. You know best.’
‘I’ll write and explain,’ I exclaimed desperately, as the sergeant took him away. ‘I’ll come and see you again.’
As the door closed he lifted his hand in a gesture of …
… of what? Reassurance? Dismissal? Benediction? Would I ever know?
I leaned from the corridor window, and took my last look at Badmore. The guard’s whistle blew, and the wooden platform of the halt began to slide backwards. A mile away the huts of the camp clung to the side of a hill. Behind them, tanks crawled like sleepy bugs over the moors.
A train had carried me into the Army, and a train was bearing me away. In the compartments behind me tweedy middle-aged travellers listlessly turned the pages of their magazines, yawned, nibbled chocolate, checked the progress of the train by their watches. For them it was a dull, unimportant journey to London. How could they know how momentous it was to me, how strange it felt to be travelling at all on a Wednesday morning, wearing civilian clothes …
But I had no enthusiasm to pursue these ideas. I had looked forward to this journey for two years, but I could not conceal from myself that I was not enjoying it; and the reason was not hard to seek. Reassurance? Dismissal? Benediction?
The train gathered speed. I thrust my head into the blast, and looked back along the foreshortened line of carriages. The camp was still visible, low, black and ugly in the August sunshine. Beyond, the spires of the county town came into view. Beneath them my friend was immured.
‘Ginger, you’re barmy,’ I murmured into the slipstream, which tore the syllables from my lips, carried them away with a paper bag that fluttered from a distant window. The train had reached a bend, and the curving carriages elbowed Badmore and the town out of sight. I withdrew my head into the corridor.
My friend. ‘No, not what you might call a friend, sir.’ For what friendship could exist between two people whose temperaments and destinies were so opposed? My temperament was prudence and my destiny success, as surely as Mike’s were foolhardiness and failure. The Army had revealed our disparity with the precision of litmus.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said an obsequious voice.
I pressed back to allow the restaurant-car attendant to pass. ‘Morning coffee now being served!’ he called out.
Mike still retained the knack of draining the sap of my own self-satisfaction: I had no zest for the journey, and the successful life that awaited me at the terminus seemed as heavy a sentence as that which awaited Mike. But I checked myself: was that not a mere sentimental hyperbole? For success was bound to be more pleasant than detention in a military prison. My own philosophy barred me from expiation. Even the wild idea of renouncing Pauline had to be rejected as soon as it occurred; for Pauline wanted me, not Mike. And one could not blame her. Mike was no hero, he was barmy, and there was no place for him. The most that could be said for him was that he was ‘innocent’, as they called barmy people once; and if the
supernatural paraphernalia of his faith turned out to be true, and we found ourselves standing together at the bar of judgment, I knew who would blink and squint most in that dazzling light. If that happened, would Mike feel the same discomfort on my account as I did on his? Was Lazarus distressed because he could not moisten the parched tongue of Dives with a single drop of water?
Questions, questions … one could not forbear to ask them, tossing the pennies in the air, crying ‘Heads’ or ‘Tails’; but they all fell behind a wall that could only be climbed in one direction. Meanwhile there was the coffee to be sipped in the quaint Edwardian comfort of the Pullman car, the cigarette to be savoured as the familiar landmarks between London and Badmore flashed past in the preferred order, Pauline to be greeted with an easy kiss at Waterloo, the mild dissipations of a Mediterranean holiday to be enjoyed, another degree to be acquired, a middle-class wedding to be arranged, a semidetached house to be purchased, a carefully-planned family to be raised …
Before taking a seat in the restaurant car, I went to the w.c. and flushed Henry’s parting gift down the plug.
EPILOGUE
I REMEMBER REVISING that penultimate paragraph, that vision of my future with its curious mixture of smugness and guilt, a few hours before Pauline shattered it beyond repair with the news that she was pregnant. That was about two months after our return from Majorca, two months spent in absorbed contemplation and revision of my story. Curious, how intricately that story is woven into the texture of my life,—not only in the experiences it records, but in itself. Michael, for instance, sitting on his pot beside me as I write, owes his existence to it in a way.
Almost as soon as we arrived in Majorca, Pauline was stricken with severe food poisoning, and confined to bed for several days. Three times a day I visited her darkened room, where she lay beneath a single sheet, looking wan and grey, her hair streaky with perspiration. She confided, with a feeble attempt at coquetry, that she had nothing on beneath the sheet, but I found myself unmoved by the information. Between these visits to the sick-room I was left to my own devices. I did not enjoy myself very much. The diversions of the beach soon palled: I am not a good swimmer, and a rash exposure of my white body to the sun resulted in a painful sun-burn. It was too hot to walk for long, and in order to sit down in the shade it seemed necessary to buy an unwanted drink at a café. Pauline spoke a little Spanish, but I had none; and I found my inability to communicate a constant embarrassment and irritation.
I tried to will myself into enjoying the long-awaited holiday by reminding myself that I was free; but I felt less at ease in the glaring gaudy, hedonistic resort than I had been in the Army. The dusty offices of Badmore, the gloomy huts of Catterick, tugged at my thoughts with a strength like nostalgia. And at the core of my uneasiness was of course Mike, silently reproaching me from his cell in the county gaol.
I had postponed telling Pauline about Mike, fearing that it might spoil our holiday. It became more and more difficult to tell her as the days passed, though the pressure of my unshared thoughts on the subject increased at a swifter rate. On the fourth day I bought a notebook and began to write. I covered fifty pages and completely forgot to visit Pauline at the usual hour.
She emerged from her sick-room to find a very different escort from the one who had brought her to Majorca; or rather, no escort at all. I told her vaguely that I was writing a novel about National Service, and at first she was impressed and intrigued. But when I declined to answer her inquiries, and more particularly when she realized that the book took precedence over her and her entertainment, she displayed a natural resentment. She was panting to make up for the lost days of her holiday, and though I obediently followed her from pension to beach, and from beach to café, the soiled, dog-eared notebook always accompanied us, arousing as much venomous jealousy in Pauline as if it had been another woman.
‘I don’t know why you bothered to come on holiday with me,’ she would complain sulkily. ‘Why didn’t you stay at home with your old book?’
On such occasions I would relent, put aside my manuscript, and cajole her back into a good humour by taking a boat trip or fooling around in the tepid water. But before long I would relapse into abstracted silence, as some detail I had been searching for came welling up from the memory, and my fingers would be itching to curl themselves round a pen again. Poor Pauline! What a rotten holiday she had,—and the last Continental holiday she’ll have for a long time too. On our last evening in Majorca she burst into tears and said it was the worst holiday she had ever had, and I don’t think she was exaggerating.
It happened that I had just brought the book to a tentative conclusion that very afternoon, and was experiencing that euphoric state of relaxation and relief which follows literary creation: the intelligence and imagination are exhausted, but the other faculties and senses awaken, and one feels benevolent to the rest of the world. I took Pauline to a sort of night-club and blued the remainder of my pesetas on the best dinner and champagne that the place could provide. I even shuffled round the floor in a tipsy imitation of the other couples, and became demonstratively amorous as we walked back to the pension along the beach, where palm-trees, moonlight and gentle waves belatedly exerted the romantic charm about which I had heard and read so much. Pauline, demoralized and disarmed by my erratic behaviour, responded with starved eagerness, and I ended the night in her bed. There, after much effort and with little pleasure, I succeeded in rupturing her hymen, and planted in her the sperm which became the small boy now emitting such an offensive odour at my feet. Afterwards as we lay together, sticky, limp and dissatisfied, I chain-smoked and told her all about Mike. I left her silently weeping; but whether this was because of Mike, or the loss of her maidenhead, or just physical pain, I did not discover.
The next morning she had rallied, and I was the unhappy one, brooding on the possible consequences of the previous night, and cursing the impulse that had deprived me of the security of Henry’s parting gift. But Pauline said that the date was all right; and once back in England I became immersed in the revision of my book, an occupation which pushed Pauline, and all thoughts of the future, to the rim of my mind.
Pauline’s announcement that she was pregnant induced in me what most people would call a nervous breakdown, and some perhaps a spiritual crisis. The neurotic symptoms I developed were, I realize now, merely defensive mechanisms designed to postpone action. The only possible course of action was to abandon my postgraduate research, marry Pauline, and get a job. I did not want to do any of these things. Then Mike’s long-delayed trial came up.
My relationship with Mike had been a fuse laid in the bed-rock of my self-complacency, which had been smouldering for two years, occasionally disturbing me as I sniffed its acrid smoke. Now it detonated, and with explosive force the possibility presented itself to me, for the first time in my life, of doing something positive and unselfish. Looking at Mike in the dock, gaunt and wild-eyed, as he listened to the judge’s ominous summing-up, I wondered despairingly what would become of him. Whatever sentence he received, it would no doubt be lengthened by many insubordinations. Perhaps he would even try to escape again. He would never find rest or peace. Because he was barmy. Then my idea came to me, and I smiled broadly at him. He must have thought I was barmy at that moment.
I married Pauline hastily—a quiet, off-white wedding at her parish church,—and as soon as I discovered which prison Mike had been sent to, we moved down here and rented this narrow cottage. The local secondary modern was glad to take me on, since teachers are not attracted to this damp, isolated place, where the local industry is a prison. On the first Sunday of every month for the past three years, I have visited Mike—except for one or two occasions recently, when I managed to persuade Mrs Brady to resume relations with her black-sheep son. Mr Brady, who is secretly rather proud of his son’s criminal record, had made the long journey from Hastings a few times before, to visit Mike with me; but when he brought his wife I had to yield up my place, as only two visit
ors are allowed. I was strangely miserable on those two Sundays when I missed seeing Mike.
Crash! Another plate has bit the stone flags in the scullery. Being pregnant again makes Pauline clumsy, but she’s nervous too at the prospect of entertaining Mike to lunch. For she has not seen him for nearly five years. She always made the baby the excuse for not accompanying me to the prison; but her reasons must surely lie deeper. Perhaps she thinks Mike is still in love with her. But I cannot very well tell her that he is not, still less that he is unlikely to fall in love again when he sees her as she is now. Another crash! But then I’m nervous too. I began and abandoned three books this morning before I unearthed this manuscript from a drawer. In only twenty minutes Mike will be standing outside the prison gates in his cheap new suit, inhaling the sweet smell of freedom. He didn’t want me to meet him.
I hope Mike will agree to stay with us for a while. He has been the focal point of my life for so long that I am curiously jealous of the rest of the world with whom he will shortly resume contact. Also I feel a certain panic when I reflect that he will no longer need my support. It is not a question of what he will do without me, but of what I will do without him. Now he is free, and I am shackled,—by a wife and family I do not greatly love, and by a career that I find no more than tolerable.
I had always assumed that we would move back to London when my ‘mission’ was completed, and that I would pick up my research on the justly neglected eighteenth-century antiquarian and bibliographer whom I chose as my thesis topic. But now I am not so sure. It seems to me that the decision which I must make now is at least as important as the one that brought me here three years ago. The effort of combining a full-time teaching job with part-time research would be merely another excuse (Mike’s welfare is the current one) for fulfilling no more than the statutory requirements of a husband and father. Pauline, absorbed and distracted by maternity, does not seem aware of any lack in our marriage, but she will be eventually. I must forestall her. Somehow I must learn to love her. And it seems to me that it will be easier to do so here, than in London.