Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  “Oh no!” he groaned.

  “When you say a man ‘has balls,’ approvingly, it’s a metonymy, whereas if you say something is a ‘lot of balls,’ or ‘a balls-up,’ it’s a sort of metaphor. The metonymy attributes value to the testicles whereas the metaphor uses them to degrade something else.”

  “I can’t take any more of this,” said Vic. “D’you mind if I smoke? Just a plain, ordinary cigarette?”

  “If I can have Radio Three on,” said Robyn.

  …

  It was late by the time they got back to Pringle’s. Robyn’s Renault stood alone and forlorn in the middle of the deserted car park. Wilcox drew up beside it.

  “Thanks,” said Robyn. She tried to open the door, but the central locking system prevented her. Wilcox pressed a button and the locks popped open all round the car.

  “I hate that gadget,” said Robyn. “It’s a rapist’s dream.”

  “You’ve got rape on the brain,” said Wilcox. He added, without looking at her: “Come to lunch next Sunday.”

  The invitation was so unexpected, and issued so off-handedly, that she wondered whether she had heard correctly. But his next words confirmed that she had.

  “Nothing special,” he said. “Just the family.”

  “Why?” she wanted to ask, if it wouldn’t have sounded horribly rude. She had resigned herself to giving up one day a week to shadowing Wilcox, but she didn’t want to sacrifice part of her precious weekends as well. Neither would Charles.

  “I’m afraid I have someone staying with me this weekend,” she said.

  “The Sunday after, then.”

  “He stays most weekends, actually,” said Robyn.

  Wilcox looked put out, but after a moment’s hesitation he said, “Bring him too, then.”

  To which there was nothing Robyn could say except, “All right. Thank you very much.”

  …

  Vic let himself into the administration block. The solid wooden inner door was locked, as well as the glass swing doors. Only a low-wattage security light illuminated the reception lobby, making it look shabbier than ever. The office staff, including Shirley, had all gone home. So, it seemed, had the other directors.

  He always liked being alone in the building. It was a good time to work. But this evening he didn’t feel like working. He went into his office without switching on any lights, making his way by the dim illumination that filtered through the blinds from the car park. He slung the jacket of his suit over the back of his swivel chair, but instead of sitting down at the desk, he slumped into an armchair.

  Of course, she was bound to have a boyfriend, a lover, wasn’t she—an attractive, modern young woman like Robyn Penrose? It stood to reason. Why then had he been so surprised, why had he felt so… disappointed, when she mentioned the man who stayed with her at weekends? He hadn’t supposed she was a virgin, for God’s sake, not the way she talked about penises and vaginas without so much as a blush; nor that she was a lezzie, in spite of the cropped hair. But there was something about her that was different from the other women he knew—Marjorie, Sandra, Shirley and her Tracey. Dress, for instance. Whereas they dressed (or, in the case of Tracey, undressed) in a way which said, Look at me, like me, desire, marry me, Robyn Penrose turned herself out as if entirely for her own pleasure and comfort. Stylishly, mind—none of your women’s lib regulation dungarees—but without a hint of coquetry. She wasn’t forever fidgeting with her skirt or patting her hair or stealing glances at herself in every reflecting surface. She looked a man boldly in the eye, and he liked that. She was confident—arrogant at times—but she wasn’t vain. She was the most independent woman he had ever met, and this had made him think of her as somehow unattached and—it was a funny word to float into his mind, but, well, chaste.

  He recalled a painting he had seen once at the Rummidge Art Gallery, on a school outing—it must have been more than thirty years ago, but it had stuck in his memory, and arguing with Shirley the other day about nudes had revived it. A large oil painting of a Greek goddess and a lot of nymphs washing themselves in a pond in the middle of a wood, and some young chap in the foreground peeping at them from behind a bush. The goddess had just noticed the Peeping Tom, and was giving him a really filthy look, a look that seemed to come right out of the picture and subdue even the schoolboys who stared at it, usually all too ready to snigger and nudge each other at the sight of a female nude. For some reason the painting was associated in his mind with the word “chaste,” and now with Robyn Penrose. He pictured her to himself in the pose of the goddess—tall, white-limbed, indignant, setting her dogs on the intruder. There was no place in the picture for a lover or husband—the goddess needed no male protector. That was how he had thought of Robyn Penrose, too, and she had said nothing to suggest the contrary until today, which had made it all the more upsetting.

  Upsetting? What right or reason had he to feel upset about Robyn Penrose’s private life? It’s none of your business, he told himself angrily. Business is your business. He thumped his head with his own fists as if to knock some sense into it, or the nonsense out of it. What in God’s name was he doing, the managing director of a casting and engineering company with a likely deficit this month of thirty thousand pounds, sitting in the dark, woolgathering about Greek goddesses? He should be at his desk, working on the plan to computerise stock and purchasing.

  Nevertheless he remained slumped in his armchair, thinking about Robyn Penrose, and about having her to lunch next Sunday. It had been an unpremeditated act, that had surprised himself almost as much as it had evidently surprised her. Now he regretted it. He should have taken the opportunity, when she mentioned her boyfriend, to let the matter drop. Why had he persisted—why, for God’s sake, had he invited the boyfriend too, whom he hadn’t the slightest wish to meet? He was sure to be another highbrow, without Robyn Penrose’s compensating attractions. The lunch would be a disaster: the certainty of this pierced him like a self-administered dagger-blow. It would be the first worry to rush into his head tomorrow morning, and every morning until Sunday. And his anxiety would communicate itself to Marjorie, who always got into a panic anyway when they were entertaining. She would probably drink too much sherry out of nervousness and burn the dinner or drop the plates. Then imagine her making small talk with Robyn Penrose—no, it was too painful to imagine. What would they discuss? The semiotics of loose covers? Metaphor and metonymy in wallpaper patterns? While his father entertained the boyfriend with the retail price index for 1948, and his children sneered and sulked on the sidelines in their usual fashion? The social nightmare he had conjured up so appalled him that he seriously contemplated phoning Robyn Penrose at once to cancel the invitation. He could easily invent an excuse—a forgotten engagement for next Sunday, say. But that would only be a postponement. Having pressed the invitation upon her, he would have to go through with it, and the sooner it was got over with, the better. Probably Robyn Penrose felt the same way.

  Vic literally writhed in his armchair as he projected the likely consequences of his own folly. He loosened his collar and tie, and kicked off his shoes. He felt stifled—the central heating was set far too high considering the building was empty (and even in the throes of his private anxieties he made a mental note to have the thermostat turned down at night—it could save hundreds on the energy bill). He closed his eyes. This seemed to calm him. His mind went back over the argument with Robyn Penrose in the car, about Silk Cut. She was clever, you had to admit, even if her theories were half-baked. A vagina indeed! Admittedly, some people did call it a slit sometimes. And clit of course was like slit and cut run together… Silk slit clit cut cunt… Silk Cunt… That was one she hadn’t thought of! Nice name for a packet of fags. Vic smiled faintly to himself as he dropped off.

  …

  He woke oppressed with a sense that he had made a terrible mistake about something, and immediately he remembered what it was: inviting Robyn Penrose to lunch next Sunday. At first he thought he must be in bed at fiv
e o’clock in the morning, but his clothes and his posture in the armchair soon reminded him where he was. He sat up stiffly and yawned. He glanced at his watch, pressing the button to illuminate the digital display. Nine twenty-three. He must have been asleep for nearly two hours. Marjorie would be wondering where the hell he was. Better phone her.

  As he got to his feet and moved towards the desk he was arrested by a strange, muffled sound. It was very faint, but his hearing was sharp, and the building otherwise totally quiet. It seemed to be coming from the direction of Shirley’s office. Still in his socks, he moved stealthily across the carpeted floor and through the communicating anteroom into Shirley’s office. This was dark, save for the light seeping through the blinds from the car park, and quite empty. The sound, however, was slightly more audible here. There was nothing particularly sinister about a noise at this time of night, but Vic was curious to identify it. Perhaps one of the other directors was working late after all. Or it might be the security man, though usually he only patrolled the outside of the buildings, and in any case why would he be talking or moaning to himself? For that was what the noise sounded like—indistinguishable human speech or someone moaning with pain or—

  Suddenly he knew what the sound was, and where it was coming from—from the reception lobby on the other side of the partition wall, with its painted-over windows. His eye flew to the spyhole scratched in the paint, where a spot of light shone faintly like an old penny. Quietly and carefully he placed a chair so that he could climb onto the filing cabinet immediately below the hole. Even as he did so he recalled how he had spied on Robyn Penrose on her first visit, and realized with a guilty pang why he associated her with the picture in the Rummidge Art Gallery: he himself was the Peeping Tom in the foreground. He wondered if perhaps he was dreaming and whether, when he applied his eye to the spyhole, he would see Robyn Penrose, with the robes of a classical goddess slipping from her marbly limbs, glaring indignantly back at him.

  What he actually saw, by the dim illumination of the security light, was Brian Everthorpe copulating with Shirley on the reception lobby sofa. He couldn’t see Everthorpe’s face, and the broad bum going up and down like a piston under his shirt tails between Shirley’s splayed legs could have belonged to anyone, but he recognised the sideboards and the bald spot on the top of his head. He could see Shirley’s face very clearly. Her eyes were shut and her mouth was open in a dark red O. It was Shirley who was making the noise Vic had heard. He climbed down quietly and carefully from the filing cabinet, went back into his own office and shut the connecting doors. He sat in his armchair and covered his ears.

  …

  He hadn’t been dreaming, but he went about for the next few days as if he was in a dream. Marjorie remarked on his more than usually abstracted state. So did Shirley, whose eyes he dared not meet when she came into his office the morning after he had watched her and Brian Everthorpe making love. A lot of things had clicked into place when he set eyes on that tableau, a lot of puzzles had been cleared up: why Brian Everthorpe always seemed to know so much, so quickly, about what was going on at Pringle’s, and why he had taken such a personal interest in the forwarding of Tracey’s career as a model. How long the affair had been going on he had no way of knowing, but there had been something about Shirley’s joyful abandonment that suggested it wasn’t the first time Brian Everthorpe had had her on the reception lobby sofa. They were taking an extraordinary risk doing it there; though, on reflection, if the building was empty and the inner door of the entrance locked, they were fairly safe from interruption except by the security man, and no doubt Everthorpe had squared him. They must have come into the building by the back door from a restaurant or pub after Vic himself had fallen asleep in his office, or perhaps they had been holed up in Everthorpe’s office waiting for everyone else to leave. Presumably they preferred the reception lobby to Everthorpe’s office because of the sofa. Or perhaps the greater danger of discovery there added an extra excitement to their amours.

  He had a sense of being on the edge of depths and mysteries of human behaviour he had never plumbed himself, and brooded on them with mixed feelings. He didn’t approve of what Everthorpe and Shirley were up to. He’d never had any time for hanky-panky between married folk, especially when it was mixed up with work. By rights he ought to be feeling a virtuous indignation at their adultery and considering how he could use his knowledge to get rid of the pair of them. And yet he felt no such inclination. The fact was that he was ashamed of his own part in the episode. He could tell no one, including the culprits, about what he had witnessed without evoking the ludicrous and ignoble picture of himself standing in the dark in his socks on top of the filing cabinet, squinting through a peephole in the partition wall. And beyond that consideration was another, even more painful to contemplate. In spite of the fact that they were an unglamorous pair of lovers, Brian Everthorpe fat and balding, and Shirley past her prime, with double chin and dyed hair; in spite of the incongruous setting and undignified half-undressed state in which they had coupled, Everthorpe’s trousers and underpants and Shirley’s skirt, knickers and tights tossed carelessly over the tables and chairs and copies of Engineering Today; in spite of all that, it couldn’t be denied that they had been transported by genuine passion. It was a passion Vic himself had not experienced for a very long time, and he was doubtful whether Marjorie ever had. Certainly his lovemaking had never drawn from Marjorie the cries of pleasure that had carried to his ears through a partition wall and across the space of two offices. Vic had never imagined that he would envy Brian Everthorpe anything, but he did now. He envied him the full-blooded fucking of a passionate woman, and the woman’s full-throated hurrahs. It was a kind of defeat, and with the bitter taste of it in his mouth, he had no spirit to visit retribution on Brian Everthorpe. Vic did not speak to Stuart Baxter again about letting Everthorpe go.

  The scene in the lobby replayed itself again and again in his head like a film—not one of the carefully edited and soft-focused bedroom scenes you saw on late-night television, but more like the peep-show he had watched once in a sordid booth in Soho in a moment of furtive curiosity, feeding 50p pieces into the machine to keep the flickering jerking naked figures in motion. Again and again he saw Brian Everthorpe’s heaving buttocks, Shirley’s splayed white knees, her red lips rounded in that O of pleasure, her long painted nails digging into Everthorpe’s shoulders so hard Vic could see the indentations—though it was difficult in retrospect to distinguish what he had witnessed from what his overheated imagination had reconstructed. Sometimes he wondered whether he hadn’t been dreaming after all, whether the whole episode wasn’t a fantasy that had passed through his head as he dozed in his office armchair. He made a surreptitious examination of the reception lobby sofa, looking for corroborating evidence. He observed a few stains that could have been either semen or milky coffee, and discovered a crinkly black filament that might have been a pubic hair or a fibre from the upholstery, before a curious glance from one of the receptionists moved him on.

  …

  The approach of Sunday and its lunch did nothing to calm his state of mind. He badgered Marjorie continually about the menu, requesting a lamb joint rather than beef because it wouldn’t suffer so much if she overcooked it, and requiring her to specify exactly what vegetables she proposed to serve. He expressed a preference for apple crumble for dessert rather than the less reliable lemon meringue pie which was Marjorie’s other staple pudding. And he insisted on having a starter.

  “We never have a starter,” said Marjorie.

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “What’s got into you, Vic? Anybody would think the Queen was coming.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Marjorie. Starters are quite normal.”

  “In restaurants they may be. Not at home.”

  “In Robyn Penrose’s home,” said Vic, “they’d have a starter. I’d take a bet on it.”

  “If she’s as stuck up as that—”

  “
She’s not stuck up at all.”

  “I thought you didn’t like her, anyway. You complained enough.”

  “That was at the beginning. We got off on the wrong foot.”

  “So you do like her, then?”

  “She’s all right. I don’t like her or dislike her.”

  “Why invite her to lunch, then? Why make all this fuss?”

  Vic was silent for a moment. “Because she’s interesting, that’s why,” he said at length. “You can have an intelligent conversation with her. I thought it would make a change. I’m sick to death of our Sunday lunches, with the children squabbling and Dad wittering on about the cost of living and—” He cut short an unkind reflection on Marjorie’s conversational accomplishments, and concluded limply, “I just thought it would make a change.”

  Marjorie, who had a cold, blew her nose. “What d’you want, then?”

  “Eh?”

  “For your precious starter.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a cook.”

  “And I’m not a starter cook.”

  “You don’t have to cook starters. They can be raw, can’t they? Have melon.”

  “You can’t get melon at this time of year.”

  “Well, something else then. Smoked salmon.”

  “Smoked salmon! Do you know what it costs?”

  “You don’t usually care how much anything costs.”

  “You do, though. And so does your Dad.”

  Vic contemplated his father’s likely comments on the price of smoked salmon, and withdrew the suggestion. “Avocado pear,” he said, remembering that Robyn had seemed to enjoy this at the restaurant near Manchester. “You just cut it in half, take out the stone and fill the hole with oil and vinegar.”

  “Your Dad won’t like it,” said Marjorie.

  “He needn’t eat it, then,” said Vic impatiently. He began to worry about the wine. It would have to be red to go with the lamb, of course, but should he get some white to go with the avocado and if so how dry should it be? Vic was no wine connoisseur, but he had somehow convinced himself that Robyn’s boyfriend was, and would sneer at his choices.