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

by Lodge, David

  Robyn didn’t understand this remark of Philip Swallow’s, but she attributed the obscurity of its reference to his deafness, and was too tired at the time to try and sort it out. She went home and slept until late afternoon, and when she woke she had forgotten all about the matter. It wasn’t until she arrived at the University the following morning, and saw Vic Wilcox talking to Philip Swallow on the crowded landing outside the English Department office, that she remembered it again, with instant misgivings. Vic, standing with his hands clasped behind his back in his dark business suit and polished black leather shoes, with the students in their bright loose clothes swirling and fluttering round him, looked like a crow that had strayed into an aviary for exotic birds. Even Philip Swallow, dressed in a crumpled beige linen jacket and scuffed Hush Puppies, looked dashingly casual in comparison. Swallow, spotting Robyn, beckoned.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said. “I discovered your shadow outside your door, ‘alone and palely loitering.’ Apparently he’s been here since nine o’clock.”

  “Hallo, Robyn,” said Vic.

  Robyn ignored him. “What do you mean, my shadow?” she said to Swallow.

  “Ah, that explains it,” he said, nodding.

  “What do you mean, my shadow?” Robyn repeated, raising her voice against the surrounding babble.

  “Yes, the second stage of the Shadow Scheme. We talked about it yesterday.”

  “I didn’t know what you were referring to,” said Robyn. “And I still don’t,” she added, though she could now have made a good guess.

  Philip Swallow looked helplessly from one to the other. “But I thought Mr. Wilcox…”

  “I wrote to you about it,” Vic said to Robyn, with a hint of smugness.

  “The letter must have gone astray,” said Robyn. Across the landing, beside the Third Year noticeboard, she saw Marion Russell staring at them, as if she was trying to place Vic Wilcox.

  “Oh dear,” said Swallow. “So you weren’t expecting Mr. Wilcox this morning?”

  “No,” said Robyn, “I wasn’t expecting him any morning.”

  “Well,” said Swallow, “in the vacation—I think you were away at the time—Mr. Wilcox wrote to the VC suggesting a follow-up to the Shadow Scheme. It seems that he was so impressed by the experiment”—Swallow exposed his tombstone teeth to Vic in a complacent smile—“that he thought it should be continued, in reverse so to speak.”

  “Yes, me shadowing you, for a change,” said Vic. “After all, if the idea is to improve relations between industry and the University, it should be a two-way process. We in industry,” he said piously, “have a lot to learn too.”

  “No way,” said Robyn.

  “Jolly good,” said Swallow, rubbing his hands.

  “I said I WON’T DO IT,” Robyn shouted.

  “Why not?” Philip Swallow looked worried.

  “Mr. Wilcox knows,” said Robyn.

  “No I don’t,” said Vic.

  “It’s not fair on the students, with the examinations coming up. He’d have to sit in on my classes.”

  “I’d just be a fly on the wall,” said Vic, “I wouldn’t interfere.”

  “I really don’t think the students would object, Robyn,” said Philip Swallow. “And it’s only one day a week.”

  “One day a week?” said Robyn. “I’m surprised Mr. Wilcox can spare a whole day away from his factory. I thought he was indispensable.”

  “Things are running smoothly at the moment,” said Vic. “And I have a lot of holidays owing to me.”

  “If Mr. Wilcox is giving up his holidays to this project, I really think that…” Swallow turned his slightly bloodshot eyes appealingly in Robyn’s direction. “The VC is most enthusiastic.”

  Robyn thought of the impending UGC letter and the chance, slender as it was, that it might open the way to a permanent job for her at Rummidge. “I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?” she said.

  “Good!” said Philip Swallow, beaming with relief. “I’ll leave you in Robyn’s capable hands, then, Mr. Wilcox. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Ha, ha!” He shook hands with Vic and disappeared into the Departmental office. Robyn led Vic Wilcox along the corridor to her room.

  “I consider this an underhand trick,” she said, when they were alone.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “You’re not trying to pretend, are you, that you’re genuinely interested in finding out how University Departments of English operate?”

  “Yes I am, I’m very interested.” He looked round the room. “Have you read all these books?”

  “When I first came to Pringle’s, you expressed utter contempt for the kind of work I do.”

  “I was prejudiced,” he said. “That’s what this shadow scheme is all about, overcoming prejudice.”

  “I think you fixed this up as an excuse to see me,” said Robyn. She hoicked her Gladstone bag onto the desk and began to unpack books, folders, essays.

  “I want to see what you do,” said Vic. “I’m willing to learn. I’ve been reading those books you mentioned, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.”

  Robyn could not resist the bait. “And what did you think of them?”

  “Jane Eyre was all right. A bit long-winded. With Wuthering Heights I kept getting in a muddle about who was who.”

  “That’s deliberate, of course,” said Robyn.

  “Is it?”

  “The same names keep cropping up in different permutations and different generations. Cathy the older is born Catherine Earnshaw and becomes Catherine Linton by marriage. Cathy the younger is born Catherine Linton, becomes Catherine Heathcliff by her first marriage to Linton Heathcliff, the son of Isabella Linton and Heathcliff, and later becomes Catherine Earnshaw by her second marriage to Hareton Earnshaw, so she ends up with the same name as her mother, Catherine Earnshaw.”

  “You should go on ‘Mastermind,’” said Vic.

  “It’s incredibly confusing, especially with all the time-shifts as well,” said Robyn. “It’s what makes Wuthering Heights such a remarkable novel for its period.”

  “I don’t see the point. More people would enjoy it if it was more straightforward.”

  “Difficulty generates meaning. It makes the reader work harder.”

  “But reading is the opposite of work,” said Vic. “It’s what you do when you come home from work, to relax.”

  “In this place,” said Robyn, “reading is work. Reading is production. And what we produce is meaning.”

  There was a knock on the door, which slowly opened to the extent of about eighteen inches. The head of Marion Russell appeared around the edge of the door like a glove puppet, goggled at Robyn and Vic, and withdrew. The door closed again, and whispering and scuffling on the other side of it were faintly audible, like the sounds of mice.

  “That’s my ten o’clock tutorial,” said Robyn.

  “Is ten o’clock when you usually start work?”

  “I never stop working,” said Robyn. “If I’m not working here, I’m working at home. This isn’t a factory, you know. We don’t clock in and out. Sit in that corner and make yourself as inconspicuous as possible.”

  “What’s this tutorial about, then?”

  “Tennyson. Here, take this.” She gave him a copy of Tennyson’s Poems, a cheap Victorian edition with sentimental illustrations that she had bought from a second-hand bookshop as a student and used for years, until Ricks’ Longman’s Annotated edition was published. She went to the door and opened it. “Right, come in,” she said, smiling encouragingly.

  …

  It was Marion Russell’s turn to start off the tutorial discussion, by reading a short paper on a topic she had chosen herself from an old exam paper; but when the students filed into the room and seated themselves round the table, she was missing.

  “Where’s Marion?” Robyn asked.

  “She’s gone to the cloakroom,” said Laura Jones, a big girl in a navy-blue track suit, who was doing Joint Honours in English and Physical
Education, and was a champion shot putter.

  “She said she didn’t feel well,” said Helen Lorimer, whose nails were painted with green nail-varnish to match her hair, and who wore plastic earrings depicting a smiling face on one ear and a frowning face on the other.

  “She gave me her essay to read out,” said Simon Bradford, a thin, eager young man, with thick-lensed spectacles and wispy beard.

  “Wait a minute,” said Robyn, “I’ll go and see what’s the matter with her. Oh, by the way—this is Mr. Wilcox, he’s observing this class as part of an Industry Year project. I suppose you all know this is Industry Year, don’t you?” They looked blankly at her. “Ask Mr. Wilcox to explain it to you,” she said, as she left the room.

  She found Marion Russell hiding in the staff women’s lavatory.

  “What’s the matter, Marion?” she said briskly. “Pre-menstrual tension?”

  “That man,” said Marion Russell. “He was the one at the factory, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s he doing here? Has he come to complain?”

  “No, of course not. He’s here to observe the tutorial.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s too complicated to explain now. Come along, we’re all waiting for you.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too embarrassing. He’s seen me in my knickers and stuff.”

  “He won’t recognise you.”

  “Course he will.”

  “No he won’t. You look entirely different.” Marion Russell was wearing harem pants and an outsize teeshirt with Bob Geldof’s face imprinted on it like the face of Christ on Veronica’s napkin.

  “What did you do your paper on?”

  “The struggle between optimism and pessimism in Tennyson’s verse,” said Marion Russell.

  “Come on, then, let’s hear it.”

  If Vic had been explaining Industry Year to the other three students, he had been very brief, for the room was silent when Robyn returned with Marion Russell. Vic was frowning at his copy of Tennyson, and the students were watching him as rabbits watch a stoat. He looked up as Marion came in, but, as Robyn had predicted, his eyes signalled no flicker of recognition.

  Marion began reading her paper in a low monotone. All went well until she observed that the line from “Locksley Hall,” “Let the great world spin for ever, down the ringing grooves of change,” reflected the confidence of the Victorian Railway Age. Vic raised his hand.

  “Yes, Mr. Wilcox?” Robyn’s tone and regard were as discouraging as she could make them.

  “He must have been thinking of trams, not trains,” said Vic. “Train wheels don’t run in grooves.”

  Simon Bradford gave an abrupt, high-pitched laugh; then, on meeting Robyn’s eye, looked as if he wished he hadn’t.

  “D’you find that suggestion amusing, Simon?” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “trams. They’re not very poetic, are they?”

  “It said the Railway Age in this book I read,” said Marion.

  “What book, Marion?” said Robyn.

  “Some critical book. I can’t remember which one, now,” said Marion, riffling randomly through a sheaf of notes.

  “Always acknowledge secondary sources,” said Robyn. “Actually, it’s quite an interesting, if trivial, point. When he wrote the poem, Tennyson was under the impression that railway trains ran in grooves.” She read out the footnote from her Longman’s Annotated edition: “‘When I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830 I thought that the wheels ran in a groove. It was a black night, and there was such a vast crowd round the train at the station that we could not see the wheels. Then I made this line.’”

  It was Vic’s turn to laugh. “Well, he didn’t make it very well, did he?”

  “So, what’s the answer?” said Laura, a rather literal-minded girl who wrote down everything Robyn said in tutorials. “Is it a train or a tram?”

  “Both or either,” said Robyn. “It doesn’t really matter. Go on, Marion.”

  “Hang about,” said Vic. “You can’t have it both ways. ‘Grooves’ is a whadyoucallit, metonymy, right?”

  The students were visibly impressed as he brought out this technical term. Robyn herself was rather touched that he had remembered it, and it was almost with regret that she corrected him.

  “No,” said Robyn. “It’s a metaphor. ‘The grooves of change’ is a metaphor. The world moving through time is compared to something moving along a metal track.”

  “But the grooves tell you what kind of track.”

  “True,” Robyn conceded. “It’s metonymy inside a metaphor. Or to be precise, a synecdoche: part for whole.”

  “But if I have a picture of grooves in my head, I can’t think of a train. It has to be a tram.”

  “What do the rest of you think?” said Robyn. “Helen?”

  Helen Lorimer reluctantly raised her eyes to meet Robyn’s. “Well, if Tennyson thought he was describing a train, then it’s a train I s’pose,” she said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Simon Bradford. “That’s the Intentional Fallacy.” He glanced at Robyn for approval. Simon Bradford had attended one of her seminars in Critical Theory the previous year. Helen Lorimer, who hadn’t, and who had plainly never heard of the Intentional Fallacy, looked despondent, like the earring on her left ear.

  There was a brief silence, during which all looked expectantly at Robyn.

  “It’s an aporia,” said Robyn. “A kind of accidental aporia, a figure of undecidable ambiguity, irresolvable contradiction. We know Tennyson intended an allusion to railways, and, as Helen said, we can’t erase that knowledge.” (At this flattering paraphrase of her argument, Helen Lorimer’s expression brightened, resembling her right earring.) “But we also know that railway trains don’t run in grooves, and nothing that does run in grooves seems metaphorically adequate to the theme. As Simon said, trams aren’t very poetic. So the reader’s mind is continually baffled in its efforts to make sense of the line.”

  “You mean, it’s a duff line?” said Vic.

  “On the contrary,” said Robyn, “I think it’s one of the few good ones in the poem.”

  “If there’s a question about the Railway Age in Finals,” said Laura Jones, “can we quote it?”

  “Yes, Laura,” said Robyn patiently. “As long as you show you’re aware of the aporia.”

  “How d’you spell that?”

  Robyn wrote the word with a coloured felt-tip on the whiteboard screwed to the wall of her office. “Aporia. In classical rhetoric it means real or pretended uncertainty about the subject under discussion. Deconstructionists today use it to refer to more radical kinds of contradiction or subversion of logic or defeat of the reader’s expectation in a text. You could say that it’s deconstruction’s favourite trope. Hillis Miller compares it to following a mountain path and then finding that it gives out, leaving you stranded on a ledge, unable to go back or forwards. It actually derives from a Greek word meaning ‘a pathless path.’ Go on, Marion.”

  A few minutes later, Vic, evidently encouraged by the success of his intervention over “grooves,” put up his hand again. Marion had been arguing, reasonably enough, that Tennyson was stronger on emotions than on ideas, and had quoted in support the lyrical outburst of the lover in Maud, “Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat night has flown.”

  “Yes, Mr. Wilcox?” said Robyn, frowning.

  “That’s a song,” said Vic. “‘Come into the garden Maud.’ My grandad used to sing it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, the bloke in the poem is singing a song to his girl, a well-known song. It makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

  “Tennyson wrote ‘Come into the garden, Maud,’ as a poem,” said Robyn. “Somebody else set it to music later.”

  “Oh,” said Vic. “My mistake. Or is it an aporia?”

  “No, it’s a mistake,” said Robyn. “I must ask you not to interru
pt any more, please, or Marion will never finish her paper.”

  Vic lapsed into a hurt silence. He stirred restlessly in his seat, he sighed impatiently to himself from time to time in a way that made the students stall nervously in the middle of what they were saying, he licked his fingers to turn the pages of his book, and flexed it so violently in his hands that the spine cracked noisily, but he didn’t actually interrupt again. After a while he seemed to lose interest in the discussion and to be browsing in the Tennyson on his own account. When the tutorial was over and the students had left, he asked Robyn if he could borrow it.

  “Of course. Why, though?”

  “Well, I thought if I have a read of it, I might have a better idea of what’s going on next week.”

  “Oh, but we’re not doing Tennyson next week. It’s Daniel Deronda, I think.”

  “You mean, you’ve finished with Tennyson? That’s it?”

  “As far as this group is concerned, yes.”

  “But you never told them whether he was optimistic or pessimistic.”

  “I don’t tell them what to think,” said Robyn.

  “Then how are they supposed to learn the right answers?”

  “There are no right answers to questions like that. There are only interpretations.”

  “What’s the point of it, then?” he said. “What’s the point of sitting around discussing books all day, if you’re no wiser at the end of it?”

  “Oh, you’re wiser,” said Robyn. “What you learn is that language is an infinitely more devious and slippery medium than you had supposed.”

  “That’s good for you?”

  “Very good for you,” she said, tidying the books and papers on her desk. “Do you want to borrow Daniel Deronda for next week?”

  “What did he write?”

  “He’s not a he, he’s a book. By George Eliot.”

  “Good writer, is he, this Eliot bloke?”

  “He was a she, actually. You see how slippery language is. But, yes, very good. D’you want to swap Daniel Deronda for the Tennyson?”

  “I’ll take them both,” he said. “There’s some good stuff in here.” He opened the Tennyson, and read aloud, tracing the lines with his blunt forefinger:

  “Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine,