by Lodge, David
“Isn’t there a chance of a reconciliation?” she asked.
“I was hoping this trip of mine would swing it. But by the way she’s been writing, her mind’s made up.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
The girl in Morte D’Arthur was singing “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” in a very passable imitation of Judy Collins. “You and Philip ever have any… problems?” he risked asking.
“Oh, no, never. Well, I say never—” She stopped, embarrassed.
He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “I know about Melanie, you know.”
“I know.” She stared at his big, brown hand, hair luxuriant on the knuckles. It looked like a bear’s paw, Désirée used to say, but Hilary didn’t flinch. “That was the first time,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Oh, I know.” She looked up at him. “I’m sorry it had to be your daughter.”
If there was a correct formula for accepting this kind of apology, Morris couldn’t think of it. He shrugged again. “And you’ve forgiven him for that?” he said.
“Oh yes. Well, I think so.”
“I wish Désirée was as understanding as you,” he sighed.
“Perhaps she has more to forgive?” she said timidly.
He grinned rakishly. “Perhaps.”
The girl vocalist had been joined by the lead and bass guitars and they were singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” in imitation of Peter, Paul and Mary. The lead guitar was the weak link in the ensemble, Morris decided. Perhaps he was Arthur. In which case the group’s name was a consummation devoutly to be wished. “Shall we move on to some other place?” he said. Now that the pubs were shut, Petronella’s was filling up with less refined customers, heavy drinkers and the odd hooker. Any minute now Morte D’Arthur would finish their set, and a rowdy disco would begin. There was a roadhouse Morris knew that had a juke box loaded exclusively with forties swing records.
“I think we should be going home,” Hilary said.
He glanced at his watch. “What’s the hurry? Mary is baby-sitting.”
“Even so. I’m getting drowsier and drowsier. I’m not used to drinking this much in an evening.”
In the Lotus, she let her head fall back against the head-restraint and closed her eyes. “It’s been a lovely evening, Morris. Thank you so much.”
“It’s my pleasure.” He leaned across and kissed her experimentally on the lips. She put her arms round his neck and responded with relaxed enjoyment. Morris decided to take her home after all.
The household was asleep when they got back, and they tiptoed around without speaking. While Hilary was laying the breakfast table ready for the next morning, Morris went to the bathroom, briskly washed his private parts and brushed his teeth, changed into clean pyjamas and silk kimono, and waited expectantly in his room until she mounted the stairs. He gave her a few minutes, then quietly crossed the landing and entered the bedroom. Hilary was sitting at the dressing-table in her slip, brushing her hair. She turned round, startled.
“What is it, Morris?”
“I thought maybe I would sleep in here tonight. Isn’t that what you had in mind?”
She shook her head, aghast. “Oh no, I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Not here. Not with all the children in the house. And Mary.”
“Where else? When else? Tomorrow I go back to O’Shea’s. The roof is fixed.”
“I know. I’m sorry Morris.”
“Come on, Hilary, let yourself go. Relax. You’re all tensed up. Let me give you a little massage.” He moved up behind her, and placed his hands on the back of her neck. He began to work his fingers into Hilary’s shoulder muscle. But she did not relax, held her head rigid and averted, so that in the mirror they resembled a tableau of a strangler and his victim. “I’m sorry, Morris, I just couldn’t,” she murmured.
“OK,” he said coldly, and left her, immobile before the mirror.
A few minutes later they met again on the landing, coming and going between their bedrooms and the bathroom. Hilary was in nightdress and dressing-gown, her face shiny with face-cream. He must have looked grim and resentful, because she put a hand on his arm as he passed.
“Morris, I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Forget it.”
“I wish I could… I wish… You’ve been so kind.” She swayed against him. He caught and kissed her, slipped his hand under her gown and was going great when a floorboard creaked somewhere nearby and she tore herself away from him and rushed back into her room. Nobody was around, of course. It was just the goddam house talking to itself as usual. Hilary said it was the central heating that caused the ancient wood to shrink and expand. Could be. There were huge gaps between the floorboards in the guestroom, through which a delicious aroma of bacon and coffee now began to percolate from the kitchen below. Morris decided it was time to get up.
He found Mary Makepeace cooking breakfast for the three children in one of Hilary’s button-through overalls that scarcely met across her bulging stomach.
“What did you do to Hilary last night?” she greeted him.
“What d’you mean?”
“No sign of her this morning. You fill her up with liquor?”
“Just a couple of martinis.”
“Eggs with your bacon?”
“Uh, I’ll have two, scrambled.”
“What d’you think this is, Howard Johnson’s?”
“Yeah, and let me have a side order of golden-crisp ranch-fried potatoes.” He winked at Matthew, openmouthed over his bowl of cornflakes. The young Swallows were not used to adult repartee over the breakfast table.
“Morris, could you possibly take me to the railroad station on your way to work this morning?”
“Sure. Taking a trip somewhere?”
“You remember I told you I was going to visit my family’s grave in County Durham?”
“Isn’t that a long way from here?”
“I’ll stay overnight in Durham. Be back tomorrow.”
Morris sighed. “I shan’t be here. O’Shea has fixed his roof, so I’ll be going back to the apartment. I’m going to miss the cooking here.”
“Aren’t you scared to go back to that place?”
“Oh, well, you know what they say: a lump of frozen urine never strikes in the same place twice.”
“Hey kids, hurry up, or you’ll be late for school.” Mary put a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of Morris and he tucked in appreciatively.
“You know, Mary,” he said when the children had left the room, “your talents are wasted as an unmarried mother. Why don’t you persuade that priest of yours to become a Protestant? Then you could make an honest man of him.”
“Funny you should say that,” she replied, taking an airmail envelope from her pocket and wagging it in the air. “He just wrote to say he’s been laicized.”
“Great! He wants to marry you?”
“He wants to shack up with me anyway.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m thinking about it. I wonder what’s the matter with Hilary? There are some things I have to tell her before I leave.”
Amanda appeared at the door, arrayed in her school uniform—dark maroon blazer, white shirt and tie, grey skirt. The students of Rummidge High School for Girls wore their skirts very, very short indeed, so that they resembled mythical biform creatures like mermaids or centaurs, all prim austerity above the waist, all bare forked animal below. The bus stops in the neighbourhood were a nympholept’s paradise at this time of the morning. Amanda blushed under Morris’s scrutiny. “I’m off, Mary,” she said.
“Just run upstairs first, Mandy, and ask your mother if she’d like a cup of tea or something, would you?”
“Mummy’s not upstairs. She’s in Daddy’s study.”
“Really? I must tell her about the meal tonight.” Mary bustled out.
“I see the Bee Gees are giving a concert in town the week
after next,” Morris said to Amanda. “Shall I get tickets?”
Amanda’s eyes gleamed. “Oh, yes please!”
“Perhaps Mary will come with us, or even your mother. D’you dig the Bee Gees?” he asked Mary, who had returned.
“Can’t stand them. Amanda, you’d better be on your way. Your mother’s tied up on the telephone.”
Hilary was still on the phone when it was time for Mary to leave. She scribbled a note for Hilary while Morris backed the Lotus into the road, its exhaust booming in a deep baritone that rattled the house windows in their frames.
“What time is your train?” he asked as Mary, manoeuvering her belly with care, lowered herself into the passenger seat.
“Eight-fifty. Will we make it?”
“Sure.”
“This car wasn’t built for pregnant women, was it?”
“The seat reclines. How’s that?”
“That’s great. Mind if I practise my relaxation?”
“Go ahead.”
Almost at once they hit a tailback of rush-hour traffic in the Midland Road. A line of people waiting at a bus stop gazed curiously at Mary Makepeace practising shallow breathing in the bucket seat of the Lotus.
“What’s that all about?” Morris inquired.
“Psychoprophylaxis. Painless childbirth to you. Hilary’s teaching me.”
“You believe in it?”
“Of course. The Russians have been using it for years.”
“Only because they can’t afford anaesthetics, I’ll bet.”
“Who wants anaesthetics at the most important moment of a woman’s life?”
“Désirée wanted the hospital to put her out for the whole goddam nine months.”
“She was brainwashed, if you’ll pardon the expression. The medical profession has succeeded in persuading women that pregnancy is a kind of illness that only doctors know how to cure.”
“What does O’Shea think about it all?”
“He just believes in old-fashioned pain.”
“That figures. You know, Mary, I can’t understand why you put yourself in that guy’s hands. He looks like the kind of doctor who used to take bullets out of gangsters in old ‘B’ pictures.”
“It’s the system here. You have to register with a local doctor to get referred to the hospital. O’Shea was the only doctor I knew.”
“I don’t like to think of him examining you… I mean, he has dirt under his fingernails!”
“Oh, he leaves that kind of thing to the hospital. He only gave me a pre-natal once and it seemed to embarrass hell out of him. He fixed his eyes on this hideous picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall and kept muttering under his breath like he was praying.”
Morris laughed. “That’s O’Shea.”
“It was a kind of spooky occasion all round. There was this nurse of his—”
“Nurse?”
“A black-haired girl with no teeth—”
“That’s no nurse, that’s Bernadette, the Irish slavey.”
“Well, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform.”
“A con trick. O’Shea is just saving money.”
“Anyway, she kept glowering at me from out of the corner of the room like a wild animal. I don’t know, perhaps she was smiling at me and it just looked like a snarl.”
“She wasn’t smiling, Mary. I should keep out of Bernadette’s way if I were you. She’s jealous.”
“Jealous of me?”
“She thinks I knocked you up.”
“Good Lord!”
“Don’t sound so surprised. I’m perfectly capable of it. What time did you say your train was? Eight-fifty?”
“That’s right.”
“We’re going to have to break the law a little bit.”
“Take it easy, Morris. It’s not that important.”
The traffic appeared to be backed up for nearly a mile from the intersection with the Inner Ring. Morris pulled out and varoomed down the wrong side of the road, scandalized drivers honking protest in his wake. Just before he reached the Inner Ring an invalid carriage, as they were called (more like euthanasia on wheels, he would have said, a frontwheel blowout in one of those crazy boxed-in tricycles and you were a goner) handily stalled and gave him space to get the Lotus back into line.
“How about that?” he said elatedly. But unfortunately a cop on traffic duty had observed the manner of Morris’s arrival. He came across, unbuttoning his tunic pocket.
“Oh dear,” said Mary Makepeace. “Now you’re going to get a ticket.”
“Would you mind going back into that quick-breathing routine?”
The policeman had to bend almost double to peer into the car. Morris gestured with his thumb at Mary Makepeace panting for all she was worth, her eyes closed and her tongue hanging out like a dog’s, hands clasping her belly. “Emergency, officer. This young lady’s going to have a baby.”
“Oh,” said the cop. “Well, all right, but drive more carefully or you’ll both end up in hospital.” Smiling at his own joke, he held up the traffic for them to proceed against the lights. Morris waved his thanks. He got Mary Makepeace to the station with five minutes to spare.
…
Driving back to the University, Morris took the newly opened section of the Inner Ring, an exhilarating complex of tunnels and flyovers that was part of the proposed Grand Prix circuit. He leaned back in the bucket seat and drove with straight, extended arms in the style of a professional racing driver. In the longest tunnel, safe from police observation, he put his foot down and heard with satisfaction the din of the Lotus’s exhaust reverberating from the walls. He came out of the tunnel like a bullet, into a long canted curve elevated above roof level. From here you got a panorama of the whole city and the sun came out at that moment, shining like floodlighting on the pale concrete façades of the recent construction work, tower blocks and freeways, throwing them into relief against the sombre mass of nineteenth-century slums and decayed factories. Seen from this perspective, it looked as though the seeds of a whole twentieth-century city had been planted under the ground a long time ago and were now beginning to shoot up into the light, bursting through the caked, exhausted topsoil of Victorian architecture. Morris found it an oddly stirring sight, for the city that was springing up was unmistakably American in style—indeed that was what the local blimps were always beefing about—and he had the strange feeling of having stumbled upon a new American frontier in the most unexpected place.
But one thing was for sure, they had a long way to catch up in music on radio. The clock in the campanile was striking nine and one godawful disc jockey was handing over to another on Radio One as he swept through the main gates of the University. The security man saluted smartly: since his success in ending the sit-in Morris had become a well-known and respected man-about-campus, and the orange Lotus made him instantly identifiable. There was, naturally, no difficulty in finding parking space this early in the morning. The Rummidge faculty liked to complain about timetable clashes, but the real problem was their reluctance to teach before ten o’clock in the morning or after four in the afternoon or in the lunch period or on Wednesday afternoons or any time at weekends. That scarcely left them time to open their mail, let alone teach. Unaware of this gentlemanly tradition, Morris had fixed one of his tutorials at nine am, much to the disgust of the students concerned, and it was to meet this group that he now stepped out to his office—not with excessive haste, for they were invariably late.
The English Department had changed its quarters since his arrival at Rummidge. It was now situated on the eighth floor of a newly built hexagonal block, one of those he had surveyed from the Inner Ring. The changeover had taken place in the Easter vacation amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Oy, oy, Exodus was nothing in comparison. With a characteristically whacky, yet somehow endearing tenderness for individual liberty over logic and efficiency, the Administration had allowed each faculty member to decide which items of furniture he would like transferred from his old accommodati
on to the new, and which he would like replaced. The resulting permutations were totally confusing to the men carrying out the work and innumerable errors were made. For days two caravans of porters could be seen tottering from one building to the other, carrying almost as many tables, chairs and filing cabinets out of the new one as they carried into it. For a new building, the Hexagon had already acquired quite a mythology. It was built on a prefabricated principle and confidence in the soundness of the structure had been undermined by hastily issued restrictions on the weight of books each faculty member was allowed on his bookshelves. The more conscientious members of staff were to be observed in the first weeks of their occupation resentfully weighing their books on kitchen or bathroom scales and adding up long columns of figures on pieces of paper. There were also restrictions on the number of persons allowed into each office and classroom, and it was alleged that the windows on the West side were sealed up because if all the occupants of those rooms were to lean out at the same time the building would fall over. The exterior had been faced with glazed ceramic tiles guaranteed to resist the corrosion of the Rummidge atmosphere for five hundred years, but they had been attached with an inferior adhesive material and were already beginning to fall off here and there. Notices bearing the motto “Beware of Falling Tiles” decorated the approach to the new building. These warnings were not superfluous: a tile fell in fragments at Morris’s feet just as he mounted the steps at the entrance.
All in all, it was hardly surprising that the move was the subject of bitter complaint by members of the English Department; but there was one feature of the new building that entirely redeemed it in Morris’s eyes at least. This was a type of elevator which he had never seen before, quaintly named a paternoster, that consisted of an endless belt of open compartments moving up and down two shafts. The movement was slower, naturally, than that of a normal elevator, since the belt never stopped and one had to step into it while it was moving, but the system eliminated all tedious waiting. It also imparted to the ordinary, quotidian action of taking an elevator a certain existential edge of drama, for one had to time one’s leap into and out of the moving compartment with finesse and positive commitment. Indeed for the elderly and infirm the paternoster constituted a formidable challenge, and most of them preferred to labour up and down the staircase. Admittedly the notice pasted beside the red-painted Emergency device on every floor did not inspire confidence: “In case of emergency, pull the red lever downwards. Do not attempt to free persons trapped in the paternoster or its machinery. The maintenance staff will attend to malfunctions at the earliest possible opportunity.” One day there would be a conventional elevator as well, but as yet it wasn’t in operation. Morris didn’t complain: he loved the paternoster. Perhaps it was a throwback to his childhood delight in fairground carousels and suchlike; but he also found it a profoundly poetic machine, especially if one stayed on for the round trip, disappearing into darkness at the top and bottom and rising or dropping into the light again, perpetual motion readily symbolizing all systems and cosmologies based on the principle of eternal recurrence, vegetation myths, death and rebirth archetypes, cyclic theories of history, metempsychosis and Northrop Frye’s theory of literary modes.