by Lodge, David
Robyn had a comfortable childhood, growing up in a pleasant, unostentatious house with a view of the sea. She attended an excellent direct-grant grammar school (which has since gone independent, much to Robyn’s disgust) where she was Head Girl and Captain of Games and which she left with four A grades at A-Level. Though urged by the school to apply for a place at Oxbridge, she chose instead to go to Sussex University, as bright young people often did in the 1970s, because the new universities were considered exciting and innovatory places to study at. Under the umbrella of a degree course in English Literature, Robyn read Freud and Marx, Kafka and Kierkegaard, which she certainly couldn’t have done at Oxbridge. She also set about losing her virginity, and accomplished this feat without difficulty, but without much pleasure, in her first term. In her second, she was recklessly promiscuous, and in her third she met Charles.
(Robyn kicks off the duvet and gets out of bed. She stands upright in her long white cotton nightgown from Laura Ashley, scratches her bottom through the cambric, and yawns. She goes to the window, treating the rugs spread on the sanded and waxed pine floorboards as stepping-stones, pulls back the curtain, and peers out. She looks up at the grey clouds scudding across the sky, down at a vista of narrow back gardens, some neat and trim with goldfish ponds and brightly painted play equipment, others tatty and neglected, cluttered with broken appliances and discarded furniture. It is an upwardly mobile street of nineteenth-century terraced cottages, where houseproud middle-class owners rub shoulders with less tidy and less affluent working-class occupiers. A gust of wind rattles the sash window and the draught makes Robyn shiver. She has not double-glazed the house in order to preserve its architectural integrity. Clutching herself, she skips to the door from rug to rug, like a Scottish country dancer, across the landing and into the bathroom, which has smaller windows and is warmer.)
The Sussex campus, with its tastefully harmonised buildings in the modernist-Palladian style, arranged in elegant perspective at the foot of the South Downs a few miles outside Brighton, was much admired by architects, but had a somewhat disorienting effect on the young people who came to study there. Toiling up the slope from Falmer railway station, you had the Kafkaesque sensation of walking into an endlessly deep stage set where apparently three-dimensional objects turned out to be painted flats, and reality receded as fast as you pursued it. Cut off from normal social intercourse with the adult world, relieved of inhibition by the ethos of the Permissive Society, the students were apt to run wild, indulging in promiscuous sex and experimenting with drugs, or else turned melancholy mad. Robyn’s generation, coming up to university in the early 1970s, immediately after the heroic period of student politics, were oppressed by a sense of belatedness. There were no significant rights left to demand, no taboos left to break. Student demonstrations developed an ugly edge of gratuitous violence. So did student parties. In this climate, shrewd and sensitive individuals with an instinct for self-preservation looked around for a partner and pair-bonded. By living in what their parents called sin, they nailed their colours to the mast of youthful revolt, while enjoying the security and mutual support of old-fashioned matrimony. Sussex, some longhaired, denim-clad veteran of the sixties complained, was looking more and more like a housing estate for first-time buyers. It was full of couples holding hands and plastic carrier bags that were as likely to contain laundry and groceries as books and revolutionary pamphlets. One of these couples consisted of Robyn and Charles. She had looked around, and chosen him. He was clever, personable, and, she thought, probably loyal (she had not been proved wrong). It was true that he had been educated at a public school, but he managed to disguise this handicap very well.
(Robyn, her white nightdress billowing round her hips, sits on the loo and pees, mentally rehearsing the plot of Mrs. Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). Rising from the toilet, she pulls the nightdress over her head and steps into the bath, not first pulling the chain of the toilet because that would affect the temperature of the water coming through the showerhead on the end of its flexible tube, with which she now hoses herself down. She palpates her breasts as she washes, checking for lumps. She steps from the bath, stretching for a towel in one of those ungainly, intimate postures so beloved of Impressionist painters and deplored by the feminist art historians Robyn admires. She is tall and womanly in shape, slender of waist, with smallish round breasts, heavier about the hips and buttocks.)
In their second year, Robyn and Charles moved off campus and set up house in a small flat in Brighton, commuting to the University by local train. Robyn took an active part in student politics. She ran successfully for the Vice-Presidentship of the Student Union. She organized an all-night telephone counselling service for students in despair about their grades or love-lives. She spoke frequently in the Debating Society in favour of progressive causes such as abortion, animal rights, state education and nuclear disarmament. Charles led a more subdued and private life. He kept the flat tidy while Robyn was out doing good works, and always had a cup of cocoa or a bowl of soup ready for her when she returned home, tired but invariably triumphant. At the end of the first term of her third year, Robyn resigned from all her commitments in order to prepare for Finals. She and Charles worked hard and, despite the fact that they were pursuing the same course, without rivalry. In their Final Examinations, Robyn obtained a First—her marks, she was unofficially informed, were the highest ever achieved by a student in the School of European Studies in its short history—and Charles an extremely high Upper Second. Charles was not jealous. He was used to living in the shade of Robyn’s achievements. And in any case his degree was good enough to earn him, as Robyn’s did for her, a Major State Studentship to do postgraduate research. The idea of doing research and pursuing an academic career was common ground to both of them; indeed they had never considered any alternative.
They had got used to living in Brighton, and saw no reason to uproot themselves, but one of their tutors took them aside and said, “Look, this place hasn’t got a proper research library, and it’s not going to get one. Go to Oxbridge.” He had seen the writing on the wall: after the oil crisis of 1973 there wasn’t going to be enough money to keep all the universities enthusiastically created or expanded in the booming sixties in the style to which they had become accustomed. Not many people perceived this quite so soon.
(Robyn, a dressing-gown over her underclothes and slippers on her feet, descends the short dark staircase to the ground floor and goes into her narrow and extremely untidy kitchen. She lights the gas stove, and makes herself a breakfast of muesli, wholemeal toast and decaffeinated coffee. She thinks about the structure of Disraeli’s Sybil; or, the Two Nations (1845), until the sound of the Guardian dropping onto the doormat sends her scurrying to the front door.)
So Robyn and Charles went to Cambridge to do their PhDs. Intellectually it was an exciting time to be a research student in the English Faculty. New ideas imported from Paris by the more adventurous young teachers glittered like dustmotes in the Fenland air: structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics and deconstruction, new mutations and graftings of psychoanalysis and Marxism, linguistics and literary criticism. The more conservative dons viewed these ideas and their proponents with alarm, seeing in them a threat to the traditional values and methods of literary scholarship. Battle was joined, in seminars, lectures, committee meetings and the review pages of scholarly journals. It was revolution. It was civil war. Robyn threw herself enthusiastically into the struggle, on the radical side naturally. It was like the sixties all over again, in a new, more austerely intellectual key. She subscribed to the journals Poètique and Tel Quel so that she could be the first person on the Trumpington Road to know the latest thoughts of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. She forced her mind through the labyrinthine sentences of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida until her eyes were bloodshot and her head ached. She sat in lecture theatres and nodded eager agreement as the Young Turks of the Faculty demolished the idea of the author, the idea of the self, the i
dea of establishing a single, univocal meaning for a literary text. All this of course took up a great deal of time and delayed the completion of Robyn’s thesis on the nineteenth-century industrial novel, which had to be constantly revised to take the new theories into account.
Charles was not quite so committed to the new wave. He supported it, naturally—otherwise he and Robyn could hardly have continued to co-habit—but in a more detached spirit. He chose a subject for his PhD—the idea of the Sublime in Romantic poetics—which sounded reassuringly serious to the traditionalists and off-puttingly dry to the Young Turks, but which neither party knew much about, so Charles was not drawn into the front-line controversy in his own research. He delivered his dissertation on time, was awarded his doctorate, and was lucky enough to obtain a lectureship in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Suffolk, “the last new job in Romanticism this century,” as he was wont to describe it, with justifiable hyperbole.
(Robyn scans the front-page headline of the Guardian, “LAWSON DRAWN INTO FRAY OVER WESTLAND,” but does not linger over the text beneath. It is enough for her to know that things are going badly for Mrs. Thatcher and the Tory party; the details of the Westland affair do not engage her interest. She turns at once to the Women’s page, where there is a Posy Simmonds strip cartoon adroitly satirising middle-aged, middle-class liberals, an article on the iniquities of the Unborn Children (Protection) Bill, and a report on the struggle for women’s liberation in Portugal. These she reads with the kind of pure, trance-like attention that she used to give, as a child, to the stories of Enid Blyton. A column entitled “Bulletin” informs her that Marilyn French will be discussing her new book, Beyond Power: Women, Men and Morals, at a public meeting to be held later in the week in London, and it crosses Robyn’s mind, not for the first time, that it is a pity she lives so far from the metropolis where such exciting events are always happening. This thought reminds her of why she is living in Rummidge, namely her job, and makes her guiltily aware that time is passing. She puts her soiled breakfast things in the sink, already crammed with the relics of last night’s supper, and hurries upstairs.)
Charles’ success in landing a job provoked in Robyn the first twinge of jealousy, the first spasm of pique, to mar their relationship. She had grown used to being the dominant partner, the teachers’ favourite, the Victrix Ludorum. Her grant had expired, and she was still some way off completing her PhD dissertation. However, she had her sights fixed on higher things than the University of Suffolk, a new “plateglass” university with a reputation for student vandalism. Her supervisor and other friends in the Faculty encouraged her to think that she would get an appointment at Cambridge eventually if she could hang on. She hung on for two years, existing on fees for supervising undergraduates and an allowance from her father. She finished, at last, her thesis, and was awarded her PhD. She competed successfully for a post-doctoral research fellowship at one of the less fashionable women’s colleges. It was for three years only, but it was a promising stepping-stone to a proper appointment. She got a contract to turn her thesis on the Industrial Novel into a book, and settled enthusiastically to the task. Her personal life did not change much. Charles continued to live with her in Cambridge, commuting by car to Ipswich to teach his classes, and staying there for a night or two each week.
Then, in 1981, all hell broke loose in the Cambridge English Faculty. An extremely public row about the denial of tenure to a young lecturer associated with the progressive party opened old wounds and inflicted new ones on this always thin-skinned community. Long-standing friendships were broken, new enmities established. Insults and libel suits were exchanged. Robyn was almost ill with excitement and outrage. For a few weeks the controversy featured in the national and even international press, up-market newspapers carrying spicy stories about the leading protagonists and confused attempts to explain the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism to the man on the Clapham omnibus. To Robyn it seemed that critical theory had at last moved to its rightful place, centre-stage, in the theatre of history, and she was ready to play her part in the drama. She put her name down to speak in the great debate about the state of the English Faculty that was held in the University Senate; and in the Cambridge University Reporter for 18th February, 1981, occupying a column and half of small print, sandwiched between contributions from two of the University’s most distinguished professors, you may find Robyn’s impassioned plea for a radical theorisation of the syllabus.
(Robyn straightens the sheet on the bed, shakes and spreads the duvet. She sits at her dressing-table and vigorously brushes her hair, a mop of copper-coloured curls, natural curls, as tight and springy as coiled steel. Some would say her hair is her finest feature, though Robyn herself secretly hankers after something more muted and malleable, hair that could be groomed and styled according to mood—drawn back in a severe bun like Simone de Beauvoir’s, or allowed to fall to the shoulders in a Pre-Raphaelite cloud. As it is, there is not much she can do with her curls except, every now and again, crop them brutally short just to demonstrate how inadequately they represent her character. Her face is comely enough to take short hair, though perfectionists might say that the grey-green eyes are a little close-set, and the nose and chin are a centimetre longer than Robyn herself would have wished. Now she rubs moisturiser into her facial skin as protection against the raw wintry air outside, coats her lips with lip-salve, and brushes some green eyeshadow on her eyelids, pondering shifts of point of view in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854). Her simple cosmetic operations completed, she dresses herself in opaque green tights, a wide brown tweed skirt and a thick sweater loosely knitted in muted shades of orange, green and brown. Robyn generally favours loose dark clothes, made of natural fibres, that do not make her body into an object of sexual attention. The way they are cut also disguises her smallish breasts and widish hips while making the most of her height: thus are ideology and vanity equally satisfied. She contemplates her image in the long looking-glass by the window, and decides that the effect is a little too sombre. She rummages in her jewellery box where brooches, necklaces and earrings are jumbled together with enamel lapel badges expressing support for various radical causes—Support the Miners, Crusade for Jobs, Legalise Pot, A Woman’s Right To Choose—and selects a silver brooch in which the CND symbol and the Yin sign are artfully entwined. She pins it to her bosom. She takes from the bottom of her wardrobe a pair of calf-length fashion boots in dark brown leather and sits on the edge of the bed to pull them on.)
When the dust settled in Cambridge, however, it seemed that the party of reaction had triumphed. A University committee charged to investigate the case of the young lecturer determined that there had been no administrative malpractice. The man himself departed to take up a more remunerative and prestigious post elsewhere, and his friends and supporters fell silent, or retired, or resigned and took jobs in America. One of the latter group, somewhat the worse for drink at his farewell party, advised Robyn to get out of Cambridge too. “This place is finished,” he said, meaning that Cambridge would be a less interesting place for his own absence from it. “Anyway, you’ll never get a job here, Robyn. You’re a marked woman.”
Robyn decided she would not put this gloomy prediction to further test. Her research fellowship was coming to an end, and she could not bear the prospect of “hanging on” for another year as a freelance supervisor of undergraduates, sponging on her parents. She began to look for a university job outside Cambridge.
But there were no jobs. While Robyn had been preoccupied with the issues of contemporary literary theory and its repercussions on the Cambridge English Faculty, the Conservative Government of Mrs. Thatcher, elected in 1979 with a mandate to cut public spending, had set about decimating the national system of higher education. Universities everywhere were in disarray, faced with swingeing cuts in their funding. Required to reduce their academic staff by anything up to 20 per cent, they responded by persuading as many people as possible
to take early retirement and freezing all vacancies. Robyn considered herself lucky to get a job for one term at one of the London colleges, deputising for a woman lecturer on maternity leave. There followed an awful period of nearly a year when she was unemployed, searching the back pages of the Times Higher Educational Supplement in vain every week for lectureships in nineteenth-century English Literature.
The previously unthinkable prospect of a non-academic career now began to be thought—with fear, dismay and bewilderment on Robyn’s part. Of course she was aware, cognitively, that there was a life outside universities, but she knew nothing about it, nor did Charles, or her parents. Her younger brother, Basil, in his final year of Modern Greats at Oxford, spoke of going into the City when he graduated, but Robyn considered this was just talk, designed to ward off hubris about his forthcoming examinations, or an Oedipal teasing of his academic father. When she tried to imagine herself working in an office or a bank, her mind soon went blank, like a cinema screen when the projector breaks down or the film snaps. There was always schoolteaching, of course, but that would entail the tiresome business of acquiring a Postgraduate Certificate of Education, or else working in the independent sector, to which she had ideological objections. In any case, teaching English literature to schoolchildren would only remind her daily of the superior satisfactions of teaching it to young adults.
Then, in 1984, just when Robyn was beginning to despair, the job at Rummidge came up. Professor Philip Swallow, Head of the English Department at Rummidge University, had been elected Dean of the Arts Faculty for a three-year term; and since the duties of this office, added to his Departmental responsibilities, drastically reduced his contribution to undergraduate teaching, he was by tradition allowed to appoint a temporary lecturer, at the lower end of the salary scale, as what was quaintly termed “Dean’s Relief.” Thus a three-year lectureship in English Literature was advertised, Robyn applied, was interviewed along with four other equally desperate and highly qualified candidates, and was appointed.