by Lodge, David
A uniformed driver from the Villa Serbelloni called soon after breakfast, and Morris exhaled a sigh of relief as the big Mercedes pulled away from Fulvia’s front porch: he couldn’t help thinking of her as a kind of sorceress within whose sphere of influence it would be dangerous to linger. Milan was socked in by cloud, but as the car approached its destination the sun came out and Alpine peaks became visible on the horizon. They skirted a lake for some miles, driving in and out of tunnels that had windows cut at intervals in the rock to give lantern-slide glimpses of blue water and green shoreline. The Villa Serbelloni proved to be a noble and luxurious house built on the sheltered slope of a promontory that divided two lakes, Como and Lecco, with magnificent views to east, south and west from its balconies and extensive gardens.
Morris was shown into a well-appointed suite on the second floor, and stepped out on to his balcony to inhale the air, scented with the perfume of various spring blossoms, and to enjoy the prospect. Down on the terrace, the other resident scholars were gathering for the pre-lunch aperitif—he had glimpsed the table laid for lunch in the dining-room on his way up: starched white napery, crystal glass, menu cards. He surveyed the scene with complacency. He felt sure he was going to enjoy his stay here. Not the least of its attractions was that it was entirely free. All you had to do, to come and stay in this idyllic retreat, pampered by servants and lavishly provided with food and drink, given every facility for reflection and creation, was to apply.
Of course, you had to be distinguished—by, for instance, having applied successfully for other, similar handouts, grants, fellowships and so on, in the past. That was the beauty of the academic life, as Morris saw it. To them that had had, more would be given. All you needed to do to get started was to write one really damned good book—which admittedly wasn’t easy when you were a young college teacher just beginning your career, struggling with a heavy teaching load on unfamiliar material, and probably with the demands of a wife and young growing family as well. But on the strength of that one damned good book you could get a grant to write a second book in more favourable circumstances; with two books you got promotion, a lighter teaching load, and courses of your own devising; you could then use your teaching as a way of doing research for your next book, which you were thus able to produce all the more quickly. This productivity made you eligible for tenure, further promotion, more generous and prestigious research grants, more relief from routine teaching and administration. In theory, it was possible to wind up being full professor while doing nothing except to be permanently absent on some kind of sabbatical grant or fellowship. Morris hadn’t quite reached that omega point, but he was working on it.
He stepped back into the cool, restful shade of his spacious room, and discovered an adjoining study. On the broad, leather-topped desk was a neat stack of mail that had been forwarded to Bellagio by arrangement. It included a cable from someone called Rodney Wainwright in Australia, whom Morris had forgotten all about, apologizing for the delay in submitting his paper for the Jerusalem conference, an enquiry from Howard Ringbaum about the same conference which had crossed with Morris’s rejection of Ringbaum’s paper, and a letter from DÉSIRÉE’s lawyers about college tuition fees for the twins. Morris dropped these communications in the waste basket and, taking a sheet of the villa’s crested notepaper from the desk drawer, typed, on the electric typewriter provided, a letter to Arthur Kingfisher, reminding him that they had been co-participants in an English Institute seminar on Symbolism some years before; saying that he had heard that he, Arthur Kingfisher, had given a brilliant keynote address to the recent Chicago conference on “The Crisis of the Sign,” and begging him, in the most flattering of terms, for the favour of an offprint or Xerox of the text of this address. Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one’s peers. Should he mention his interest in the UNESCO Chair? No, that would be premature. The time would come for the hard sell. This was just a gentle, preliminary nudge of the great man’s memory. Morris Zapp licked the envelope and sealed it with a thump of his hairy-knuckled fist. On his way to the terrace for aperitifs he dropped it into the mail box thoughtfully provided in the hall.
…
Robin Dempsey went back to Darlington in a thoroughly demoralized state of mind. After the humiliation of Angelica’s practical joke (his cheeks still burned, all four of them, whenever he thought of that Irish bumpkin observing his preparations for bed from inside the wardrobe) another day of frustration and aggravation had followed. The conference business meeting, chaired by Philip Swallow, somewhat flustered and breathless from a late arrival, had rejected his own offer to hold next year’s conference at Darlington, and voted in favour of Cambridge instead. Then, when he called later in the morning at his former home to take his two younger children out for the day, he overheard them complaining that they didn’t want to go. Janet had ensured that they accompanied him in the end, but only, she made clear to Robin, so that she and her boyfriend, Scott, an ageing flowerchild who still affected denim and long hair at the age of thirty-five, could go to bed together in the afternoon. Scott was a freelance photographer, seldom in employment, and one of Robin Dempsey’s many grudges against his ex-wife was that she was spending part of the maintenance money he paid her on keeping this good-for-nothing layabout in cigarettes and lenses.
Jennifer, sixteen, and Alex, fourteen, sulkily escorted him to the City Centre, where they declined the offer of a visit to the Art Gallery or Science Museum in favour of looking through endless racks of records and clothing in the Shopping Centre boutiques. They cheered up somewhat when Robin bought them a pair of jeans and an LP each, and even condescended to talk to him over the hamburgers and chips which they demanded for lunch. This conversation did not, however, improve his spirits, consisting as it did mainly of allusions to musicians he had never heard of, and enthusiastic tributes to Scott, who evidently had.
So the day wore on. The hamburgers, coming on top of the medieval banquet, made him flatulent, and the drive back to Darlington uncomfortable. He arrived home at dusk. His small modern town house, newspapers and junk mail drifted up behind the front door, seemed chilly and unwelcoming. He walked from room to room, turning on radio, TV, electric fires, to try and dispel his loneliness and depression, but to no avail. Instead of unpacking, he got back into his Golf and drove down to the University’s Computer Centre.
As he had expected, Josh Collins, the Senior Lecturer in Computing, was still there, alone in the brightly-lit prefabricated building, working on a program. Some people claimed that Josh Collins never went home, that he had no home, but dossed down at night on the floor between his humming, blinking, clicking machines.
“Hallo, Josh, what’s new?” said Robin with forced joviality.
Josh looked up from a long scroll of data printout. “Eliza’s arrived,” he said.
“Really? That’s great!” said Robin Dempsey. It was just the diversion he needed.
ELIZA, so named after the heroine of Pygmalion, was a program designed to enable computers to talk, that is, to conduct coherent conversations in standard English with human users, by means of a visual display. The conversations had to be of a contextually specific type, with well-defined rules and goals, in which the computer could take an essentially prompting and questioning role, programmed with a repertoire of possible responses to cues likely to appear in the context. The psychiatrist-patient interview was considered ideal for this purpose, being one of the most regulated discourse situations, and had accordingly been adopted as the model for ELIZA. The experiment was of considerable interest to linguisticians researching into the systematic aspects of verbal interaction.
“Let me try it out,” said Robin.
“OK,” said Josh. “Use that terminal in the corner. When I give you the nod, write in ‘Hallo.’”
Robin Dempsey seated himself at a console consisting of a typewriter keyboard and visual displ
ay screen. Josh took a large spool of tape into the glass-partitioned section of the room where the mainframe computer was situated, and soon nodded to Robin to indicate that ELIZA was on line.
“HALLO,” Robin typed on the keyboard.
“HALLO, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?” replied ELIZA, the printed words appearing instantly on the VDU.
“I’M FEELING TERRIBLE,” Robin replied.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT PRECISELY?”
“I’M FEELING DEPRESSED.”
“WHY DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DEPRESSED?”
“BECAUSE I’M LONELY.”
“DO YOU LIVE WITH YOUR FAMILY?”
“NO.”
“DO YOU HAVE ANY FRIENDS?”
“NOT REALLY.”
“WHY IS THAT?”
Robin Dempsey paused for some considerable time before he typed in his reply: “I DON’T KNOW.”
“DO YOU REALLY NOT KNOW OR ARE YOU JUST AVOIDING THE QUESTION?”
Robin Dempsey flushed and typed rapidly: “I USED TO HAVE FRIENDS ONCE.”
“WHEN WAS THAT?”
“BEFORE I WAS MARRIED.”
“YOU DIDN’T TELL ME YOU WERE MARRIED.”
“I’M DIVORCED.”
“TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DIVORCE.”
Robin Dempsey typed rapidly for fifteen minutes without stopping, until he became aware of Josh Collins, hovering at his shoulder. “Yes?” he said coldly, screening the VDU from Josh’s view.
“You OK, Robin?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Interesting?”
“Very.”
“Can I read the printout?”
“No,” said Robin Dempsey, “you can’t.”
…
Felix Skinner skimmed through Persse’s outline and thought it distinctly promising. “But before we give him a contract, we need a reader’s report,” he said. “Who shall we send it to?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Skinner, I’m sure,” said Gloria, his secretary, crossing her legs and patting her wavy, honey-coloured hair. She waited patiently with her pencil poised above her notepad. She had only been Felix Skinner’s personal secretary for a couple of months, but already she was used to her boss’s habit of thinking aloud by asking her questions that she hadn’t a clue how to answer.
Felix Skinner bared his yellow fangs, noting, not for the first time, what a very shapely pair of legs Gloria possessed. “What about Philip Swallow?” he proposed.
“All right,” said Gloria. “Is his address on file?”
“On second thoughts,” said Felix, holding up a cautionary finger, “perhaps not. I have a feeling he was a teeny weeny bit jealous of my interest in young McGarrigle, the other day. He might be prejudiced.”
Gloria yawned daintily, and picked a speck of fluff from the front of her jumper. Felix lit a fresh Gauloise from the stub smouldering between his fingers and admired the contours of the jumper. “I tell you what!” he exclaimed triumphantly, “Rudyard Parkinson.”
“I know the name,” said Gloria gamely. “Isn’t he at Cambridge?”
“Oxford. My old tutor, actually. Shall we phone him first?”
“Well, perhaps you’d better, Mr. Skinner.”
“Wise counsel,” said Felix Skinner, reaching for the telephone. When he had dialled he leaned back in his swivel chair and treated Gloria to another canine grin. “You know, Gloria, I think it’s time you called me Felix.”
“Oh, Mr. Skinner…” Gloria blushed with pleasure. “Thank you.”
Felix got through to Rudyard Parkinson quite quickly. (He was supervising a postgraduate, but the porter at All Saints had instructions to put all long-distance calls straight through to the Professor’s room even if he was engaged. Long-distance calls usually meant books to review.) Parkinson declined, however, to take on the assessment of Persse McGarrigle’s proposal. “Sorry, old man, got rather a lot on my plate at the moment,” he said. “They’re giving me an honorary degree in Vancouver next week. It didn’t really sink in, when I accepted, that I’d actually have to go there to collect it.”
“I say, what a bore,” said Felix Skinner sympathetically. “Could you suggest anyone else? It’s sort of about the modern reception of Shakespeare and Co. being influenced by T. S. Eliot.”
“Reception? That rings a bell. Oh yes, I had a letter yesterday about a conference on something like that. A hun called von Turpitz. Know him?”
“Yes, we published a translation of his last book, actually.”
“I should try him.”
“Good idea,” said Felix Skinner. “I should have thought of him myself.”
He rang off and dictated a letter to Siegfried von Turpitz asking for his opinion of Persse McGarrigle’s outline and offering him a fee of £25 or £50 worth of books from Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein’s current list. “Enclose a copy of our catalogue with that, will you Gloria, and of course a Xerox of McGarrigle’s typescript.” He stubbed out his cigarette and glanced at his watch. “I feel quite fagged after all that effort. Am I having lunch with anybody today?”
“I don’t think so,” said Gloria, consulting his diary. “No.”
“Then would you care to join me for a little Italian nosh and a glass or two of vino at a trattoria I know in Covent Garden?”
“That would be very nice… Felix,” said Gloria complacently.
…
“Cheek!” Rudyard Parkinson exclaimed, putting down the telephone receiver. The postgraduate he was supervising, not sure whether he was being addressed or not, made no comment. “Why should he think I would want to read some totally unknown bog-Irishman’s ramblings? Some of one’s former students do rather presume on the relationship.” The postgraduate, who had taken his first degree at Newcastle and whose initial awe of Parkinson was rapidly turning into disillusionment, tried to arrange his features in some appropriate expression of sympathy and concern. “Now, where were we?” said Rudyard Parkinson. “Yeats’s death wish…”
“Keats’s death wish.”
“Ah, yes, I beg your pardon,” Rudyard Parkinson stroked his muttonchop whiskers and gazed out of his window at the cupola on top of the Sheldonian and, further off, the spire of St. Mary’s Church. “Tell me, if you were flying to Vancouver would you go by British Airways or Air Canada?”
“I’m not much of an expert on air travel,” said the young man. “A charter flight to Majorca is about the limit of my experience.”
“Majorca? Ah yes, I remember visiting Robert Graves there once. Did you happen to meet him?”
“No,” said the postgraduate. “It was a package holiday. Robert Graves wasn’t included.”
Rudyard Parkinson glanced at the young man with momentary suspicion. Was it possible that callow Newcastle could be capable of irony—and at his expense? The youth’s impassive countenance reassured him. Parkinson turned back to face the window. “I thought I’d be patriotic and go British Airways,” he said. “I hope I’ve done the wise thing.”
…
Oxford was still in vacation as far as the undergraduates were concerned, but at Rummidge it was the first day of the summer term, and a fine one. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky on the Library steps and the grass quadrangle. Philip Swallow stood at the window of his office and surveyed the scene with a mixture of pleasure, envy and unfocused lust. A warm afternoon always brought out the girls in their summer dresses, like bulbs forcing their way through the turf and abruptly flowering in a blaze of colour. All over the lawns they were strewn, in attitudes of abandonment, straps down and skirts hitched up to tan their winter-pale limbs. The boys lounged in clusters, eyeing the girls, or pranced between them, stripped to their jeans, skimming frisbees with an ostentatious display of muscle and skill. Here and there pair-bonding had already occurred, and youthful couples sunned themselves clasped in each other’s arms, or wrestled playfully in a thinly disguised mime of copulation. Books and ringbinders lay neglected on the greensward. The compulsion of spring had laid its irresistible spell upon these you
ng bodies. The musk of their mutual attraction was almost visible, like pollen, in the atmosphere.
Right under Philip’s window, a girl of great beauty, dressed simply but ravishingly in a sleeveless cotton shift, clasped the hands of a tall, athletic young man in tee-shirt and jeans. They held hands at arm’s length and gazed raptly into each other’s eyes, unable, it seemed, to tear themselves apart to attend whatever lecture or lab session called. Philip couldn’t blame them. They made a handsome couple, glowing with health and the consciousness of their own good looks, trembling on the threshold of erotic bliss. “More happy love,” Philip murmured behind his dusty windowpane.
“More happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting and for ever young.”
Unlike the lovers on the Grecian Urn, however, these ones did eventually kiss: a long and passionate embrace that lifted the girl on to the tips of her toes, and that Philip felt vicariously down to the very roots of his being.
He turned away from the window, disturbed and slightly ashamed. There was no point in getting all worked up by the Rummidge rites of spring. He had forsworn sexual interest in students ever since the unfortunate affair of Sandra Dix—Rummidge students, anyway. He had to rely on his trips abroad for amorous adventure. He didn’t know quite what to expect of Turkey, straddling the line between Europe and Asia. Would the women be liberated and available, or locked up in purdah? The telephone rang.
“Digby Soames here, British Council. It’s about your lectures in Turkey.”
“Oh yes. Didn’t I give you the titles? There’s ‘The Legacy of Hazlitt’ and ‘Jane Austen’s Little Bit of Ivory’—that’s a quotation from—”
“Yes, I know,” Soames interrupted. “The trouble is, the Turks don’t want it.”
“Don’t want it?” Philip felt slightly winded.