by Lodge, David
“Who, me? To your conference?”
“Sure. You could knock off a paper on the future of criticism, couldn’t you?”
“I don’t think it has much of a future,” said Philip.
“Great! It will be controversial. Bring Hilary along for the ride.”
“Hilary?” Philip looked disconcerted. “Oh, no, I don’t think she could stand the heat. Besides, I doubt if we could afford her fare. Two children at university is a bit of a drain, you know.”
“Don’t tell me, I’m bracing myself for it next fall.”
“Did Hilary put you up to suggesting this, Morris?” said Philip, looking slightly ashamed of his own question.
“Certainly not. What makes you think so?”
Philip squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s just that she’s been complaining lately that I’m away too much, neglecting the family, neglecting her.”
“And are you?”
“I suppose I am, yes. It’s the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces. It would defeat the whole object to take Hilary along with me on my academic trips.”
“What is the object?”
Philip sighed. “Who knows? It’s hard to put it into words. What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn’t last. Distraction, perhaps—distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead.”
“Jesus,” said Morris, “are you always like this after a medieval banquet?”
Philip smiled wanly and refilled their glasses. “Intensity,” he said. “Intensity of experience is what we’re looking for, I think. We know we won’t find it at home any more, but there’s always the hope that we’ll find it abroad. I found it in America in ’69.”
“With DÉSIRÉE?”
“Not just DÉSIRÉE, though she was an important part of it. It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom—and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts… and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody’s apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant garde theatre and Viet Nam.”
“That’s all over now,” said Morris. “You wouldn’t recognize the place. The kids are all into fraternities and preppy clothes and working hard to get into law school.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Philip. “How depressing.”
“But this intensity of experience, did you never find it again since you were in America?”
Philip stared into the bottom of his glass. “Once I did,” he said. “Shall I tell you the story?”
“Just let me get myself a cigar. Is this a cigarillo story or a panatella story?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never told it to anyone before.”
“I’m honoured,” said Morris. “This calls for something special.”
…
Morris left the room to fetch one of his favourite Romeo y Julietas. When he returned, he was conscious that the furniture and lighting had been rearranged in his absence. Two highbacked armchairs were inclined towards each other across the width of the hearth, where a gas fire burned low. The only other light in the room came from a standard lamp behind the chair in which Philip sat, his face in shadow. Between the two chairs was a long, low coffee table bearing the whisky bottle, water jug, glasses and an ashtray. Morris’s glass had been refilled with a generous measure.
“Is this where the narratee sits?” he enquired, taking the vacant chair. Philip, gazing absently into the fire, smiled vaguely, but made no reply. Morris rolled the cigar next to his ear and listened approvingly to the crackle of the leaves. He pierced one end of the cigar, clipped the other, and lit it, puffing vigorously. “OK,” he said, examining the tip to see that it was burning evenly. “I’m listening.”
“It happened some years ago, in Italy,” Philip began. “It was the very first lecture tour I did for the British Council. I flew out to Naples, and then worked my way up the country by train: Rome, Florence, Bologna, Padua, ending up at Genoa. It was a bit of a rush on the last day. I gave my lecture in the afternoon, and I was booked to fly home the same evening. The Council chap in Genoa, who’d been shepherding me about the place, gave me an early dinner in a restaurant, and then drove me out to the airport. There was a delay in the flight departure—a technical problem, they said, so I told him not to wait. I knew he had to get up early the next morning to drive to Milan for a meeting. That comes into the story.”
“I should hope so,” said Morris. “There should be nothing irrelevant in a good story.”
“Anyway, the British Council man, J. K. Simpson, I can’t remember his first name, a nice young chap, very friendly, enthusiastic about his job, he said, “OK, I’ll leave you then, but if the flight’s cancelled, give me a ring and I’ll get you into a hotel for the night.”
“Well, the delay went on and on, but eventually we took off, at about midnight. It was a British plane. I was sitting next to an English businessman, a salesman in woollen textiles I think he was…”
“Is that relevant?”
“Not really.”
“Never mind. Solidity of specification,” said Morris with a tolerant wave of his cigar. “It contributes to the reality effect.”
“We were sitting towards the rear of the aircraft, just behind the wing. He had the window seat, and I was next to him. About ten minutes out of Genoa, they were just getting ready to serve drinks, you could hear the clink of bottles from the back of the plane, when this salesman chap turned away from the window, and tapped me on the arm and said, ‘Excuse me, but would you mind having a look out there. Is it my imagination or is that engine on fire?’ So I leaned across him and looked out of the window. It was dark of course, but I could see flames sort of licking round the engine. Well, I’d never looked closely at a jet engine at night before, for all I knew that was always the effect they gave. I mean you might expect to see a kind of fiery glow coming out of the engine at night. On the other hand, these were definitely flames, and they weren’t just coming out of the hole at the back. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ I said. ‘It certainly doesn’t look quite right.’ ‘Do you think we should tell somebody?’ he said. ‘Well, they must have seen it for themselves, mustn’t they?’ I said. The fact was, neither of us wanted to look a fool by suggesting that something was wrong, and then being told that it wasn’t. Fortunately a chap on the other side of the aisle noticed that we were exercised about something, and came across to have a look for himself. ‘Christ!’ he said, and pushed the button to call the stewardess. I think he was probably some sort of engineer. The stewardess came by with the drinks trolley at that moment. ‘If it’s a drink you want, you’ll have to wait your turn,’ she said. The cabin staff were a bit snappish because of the long delay. ‘Does the captain know that his starboard engine is on fire?’ said the engineer. She gaped at him, squinted out of the window, then ran up the aisle, pushing her trolley in front of her, like a nursemaid running with a pram. A minute later and a man in uniform, the second pilot I suppose, came down the aisle, looking worried and carrying a big torch, which he shone out of the window at the engine. It was on fire all right. He ran back to the cockpit. Very soon the plane banked and headed back to Genoa. The Captain came on the PA to say that we
would be making an emergency landing because of a technical problem, and that we should be prepared to leave the aircraft by the emergency exits. Then somebody else told us exactly what to do. I must say he sounded remarkably cool, calm and collected.”
“It was a cassette,” said Morris. “They have these prerecorded cassettes for all contingencies. I was in a Jumbo, once, going over the Rockies, and a stewardess put on the emergency ditching tape by mistake. We were having lunch at the time, I remember, a perfect sunny day at 30,000 feet, when this voice suddenly said, ‘We are obliged to make an emergency landing on water. Do not panic if you are unable to swim. The rescue services have been advised of our intentions.’ People froze with their forks halfway to their mouths. Then all hell let loose until they sorted it out.”
“There was a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth in our plane—quite a lot of the passengers were Italian, and you know what they’re like—they don’t hide their feelings. Then the pilot put the plane into a terrifying dive to put the fire out.”
“Jesus!” said Morris Zapp.
“He was thoughtful enough to explain first what he was going to do, but only in English, so all the Italians thought we were going to crash into the sea and started to scream and weep and cross themselves. But the dive worked—it put the fire out. Then we had to circle over the sea for about twenty minutes, jettisoning fuel, before we tried to land back at Genoa. It was a very long twenty minutes.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Frankly, I thought they were going to be my last twenty minutes.”
“What did you think about?”
“I thought, how stupid. I thought, how unfair. I suppose I prayed. I imagined Hilary and the children hearing about the crash on the radio when they woke up the next morning, and I felt bad about that. I thought about surviving but being terribly crippled. I tried to remember the terms of the British Council’s insurance policy for lecturers on Specialist Tours—so much for an arm, so much for a leg below the knee, so much for a leg above the knee. I tried not to think about being burned to death.
“Landing at Genoa is a pretty hairy experience at the best of times. I don’t know if you know it, but there’s this great high promontory that sticks out into the sea. Planes approaching from the north have to make a U-turn round it, and then come in between it and the mountains, over the city and the docks. And we were doing it at night with one engine kaput. The airport was on full emergency alert, of course, but being a small airport, in Italy, that didn’t amount to much. As we hit the ground, I could see the fire trucks with their lights flashing, racing towards us. As soon as the plane stopped, the cabin crew opened the emergency exits and we all slid out down those inflatable chute things. The trouble was they couldn’t open the emergency exit nearest to us, me and the wool man, because it gave on to the wing with the duff engine. So we were the last out of the plane. I remember thinking it was rather unfair, because if it hadn’t been for us the whole thing might have blown up in mid-air.
“Anyway, we got out all right, ran like hell to a bus they had waiting, and were taken to the terminal. The fire engines smothered the plane in foam. While they were getting our baggage out of the plane I telephoned the British Council chap. I suppose I wanted to express my relief at having survived by telling somebody. It was queer to think that Hilary and the children were asleep in England, not knowing that I’d had a narrow escape from death. I didn’t want to wake Hilary up with a call and give her a pointless retrospective fright. But I felt I had to tell someone. Also, I wanted to get out of the airport. A lot of the Italian passengers were in hysterics, kissing the ground and weeping and crossing themselves and so on. It was obvious that we shouldn’t be flying out till the next morning and that it was going to take hours to sort out our accommodation for the night. And Simpson had told me to phone him if there was any problem, so although it was by now well past one o’clock, I did. As soon as he grasped what had happened, he said he’d come straight out to the airport. So about half an hour later, he picked me up and drove me into the city to find a hotel. We tried a few, but no luck—either they were shut up for the night or they were full, there was a trade fair on in Genoa that week. So he said, look, why don’t you come home with me, we haven’t got a guest bedroom, I’m afraid, but there’s a kind of put-u-up in the living-room. So he took me home to his apartment, in a modern block, halfway up the mountain that overlooks the city and the sea. I felt extraordinarily calm and wide-awake, I was rather impressed by my own sangfroid, as a matter of fact. But when he offered me some brandy I didn’t say no. I looked around the living-room, and felt a sudden pang of homesickness. I’d been living in hotel rooms for the past twelve days, and eating meals in restaurants. I rather enjoy that nowadays, but then I was still a bit of a novice at the foreign lecture tour, and I’d found it quite a strain. And here was a little oasis of English domesticity, where I could relax and feel completely at home. There were toys scattered about the living-room, and English newspapers, and in the bathroom St. Michael’s underwear hanging up to dry. While we were drinking the brandy, and I was telling Simpson the whole story of the plane, his wife came into the room, in her dressing-gown, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. I hadn’t met her before. Her name was Joy.”
“Ah,” murmured Morris. “You remember her first name.”
“I apologized for disturbing her. She said it didn’t matter, but she didn’t look particularly pleased. She asked me if I would like something to eat, and I suddenly realized that I was ravenously hungry. So she brought some Parma ham from the kitchen, and some cake, and a pot of tea, and we ended up having a sort of impromptu meal. I was sitting opposite Joy. She was wearing a soft blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood, and a zip that went from hem to throat. Hilary had one just like it once, and looking at Joy out of the corner of my eye was like looking at some younger, prettier version of Hilary—I mean, Hilary when she was young and pretty herself, when we were first married. Joy was, I guessed, in her early thirties, with fair wavy hair and blue eyes. A rather heavy chin, but with a wide, generous mouth, full lips. She had a trace of a northern accent, Yorkshire I thought. She did a little English teaching, conversation classes at the university, but basically saw her rôle as supporting her husband’s career. I daresay she made the effort to get up and be hospitable to me for his sake. Well, as we talked, and ate, and drank, I suddenly felt myself overcome with the most powerful desire for Joy.”
“I knew it,” said Morris.
“It was as if, having passed through the shadow of death, I had suddenly recovered an appetite for life that I thought I had lost for ever, since returning from America to England. In a way it was keener than anything I had ever known before. The food pierced me with its exquisite flavours, the tea was fragrant as ambrosia, and the woman sitting opposite to me seemed unbearably beautiful, all the more because she was totally unconscious of her attractions for me. Her hair was tousled and her face was pale and puffy from sleep, and she had no make-up or lipstick on, of course. She sat quietly, cradling her mug of tea in both hands, not saying much, smiling faintly at her husband’s jokes, as if she’d heard them before. I honestly think that I would have felt just the same about any woman, in that situation, at that moment, who wasn’t downright ugly. Joy just represented woman for me then. She was like Milton’s Eve, Adam’s dream—he woke and found it true, as Keats says. I suddenly thought how nice women were. How soft and kind. How lovely it would be, how natural, to go across and put my arms round her, to bury my head in her lap. All this while Simpson was telling me about the appalling standards of English-language teaching in Italian secondary schools. Eventually he glanced at his watch and said that it had gone four, and instead of going back to bed he thought he would drive to Milan while he was wide awake and rest when he got there. He was taking the Council car, he told me, so Joy would run me to the airport in theirs.”
“I know what’s coming,” said Morris, “yet I can hardly believe it.”
&nbs
p; “He had his bag already packed, so it was only a few minutes before he was gone. We shook hands, and he wished me better luck with my flight the next day. Joy went with him to the front door of the apartment, and I heard them kiss goodbye. She came back into the living-room, looking a little shy. The blue dressing-gown was a couple of inches too long for her, and she had to hold up the skirt in front of her—it gave her a courtly, vaguely medieval air as she came back into the room. I noticed that her feet were bare. ‘I’m sure you’d like to get some sleep now,’ she said. ‘There is a second bed in Gerard’s room, but if I put you in there he might be scared when he wakes up in the morning.’ I said the sofa would be fine. ‘But Gerard gets up frightfully early, I’m afraid he’ll disturb you,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind taking our bed, I could quite easily go into his room myself.’ I said no, no; she pressed me, and said would I just give her a few moments to change the sheets, and I said I wouldn’t dream of putting her to such trouble. The thought of that bed, still warm from her body, was too much for me. I started to shake all over with the effort to stop myself from taking an irrevocable leap into moral space, pulling on the zip-tab at her throat like a parachute ripcord, and falling with her to the floor.”
“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 making me tremble, that it was herself, her proximity, but she couldn’t quite credit her own intuition. ‘You’d better lie down,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you the bedroom.’