by David Lodge
There was sex, of course, but in recent years this had played a steadily diminishing role in the Swallow marriage. It had never been quite the same (had anything?) after their extended American honeymoon. In America, for instance, Hilary had tended to emit a high-pitched cry at the moment of climax which Philip found deeply exciting; but on their first night in Rummidge, as they were making up their bed in the flat they had rented in a clumsily converted old house, some unknown person had coughed lightly but very audibly in the adjoining room, and from that time onwards, though they moved in due course to better-insulated accommodation, Hilary’s orgasms (if such they were) were marked by nothing more dramatic than a hissing sigh, rather like the sound of air escaping from a Lilo.
In the course of their married life in Rummidge, Hilary had never refused his advances, but she never positively invited them either. She accepted his embrace with the same calm, slightly preoccupied amiability with which she prepared his breakfasts and ironed his shirts. Gradually, over the years, Philip’s own interest in the physical side of marriage declined, but he persuaded himself that this was only normal.
The sudden eruption of the Sexual Revolution in the mid-sixties had, it is true, unsettled him a little. The Sunday paper he had taken since first going up to the University, an earnest, closely printed journal bursting with book reviews and excerpts from statesmen’s memoirs, broke out abruptly in a rash of nipples and coloured photographs of après-sex leisurewear; his girl tutees suddenly began to dress like prostitutes, with skirts so short that he was able to distinguish them, when their names escaped him, by the colour of their knickers; it became uncomfortable to read contemporary novels at home in case one of the children should glance over his shoulder. Films and television conveyed the same message: that other people were having sex more often and more variously than he was.
Or were they? There had always been, notoriously, more adulteries in fiction than in fact, and no doubt the same applied to orgasms. Looking around at the faces of his colleagues in the Senior Common Room he felt reassured: not a Lineament of Gratified Desire to be seen. There were, of course, the students—everyone knew they had lots of sex. As a tutor he saw mostly the disadvantages: it tired them out, distracted them from their work; they got pregnant and missed their examinations, or they went on the Pill and suffered side-effects. But he envied them the world of thrilling possibility in which they moved, a world of exposed limbs, sex manuals on railway bookstalls, erotic music and frontal nudity on stage and screen. His own adolescence seemed a poor cramped thing in comparison, limited, as far as satisfying curiosity and desire went, to the more risqué Penguin Classics and the last waltz at College Hops when they dimmed the lights and you might hold your partner, encased in yards of slippery taffeta, close enough to feel the bas-relief of her suspenders against your thighs.
That was something he did envy the young—their style of dancing, though he never betrayed the fact to a soul. Under the pretence of indulging his children, and with an expression carefully adjusted to express amused contempt, he watched Top of the Pops and similar TV programmes with a painful mingling of pleasure and regret. How enchanting, those flashing thighs and twitching buttocks, lolling heads and bouncing breasts; how deliciously mindless, liberating, it all was! And how infinitely sad the dancing of his own youth appeared in retrospect, those stiff-jointed, robot-like fox-trots and quicksteps, at which he had been so inept. This new dancing looked easy: no fear of making a mistake, of stepping on your partner’s feet or steering her like a dodgem car into another robot-couple. It must be easy, he felt in his bones he could do it, but of course it was too late now, just as it was too late to comb his hair forward or wear Paisley shirts or persuade Hilary to experiment with new sexual postures.
In short, if Philip Swallow felt sensually underprivileged, it was in a strictly elegaic spirit. It never occurred to him that there was still time to rush into the Dionysian horde. It never occurred to him to be unfaithful to Hilary with one of the nubile young women who swarmed in the corridors of the Rummidge English Department. Such ideas, that is, never occurred to his conscious, English self. His unconscious may have been otherwise occupied; and perhaps, deep, deep down, there is, at the root of his present jubilation, the anticipation of sexual adventure. If this is the case, however, no rumour of it has reached Philip’s ego. At this moment the most licentious project he has in mind is to spend his very next Sunday in bed, smoking, reading the newspapers and watching television.
Bliss! No need to get up for the family breakfast, wash the car, mow the lawn and perform the other duties of the secular British Sabbath. No need, above all, to go for a walk on Sunday afternoon. No need to rouse himself, heavy with Sunday lunch, from his armchair, to help Hilary collect and dress their querulous children, to try and find some new, pointless destination for a drive or to trudge out to one of the local parks, where other little knots of people wander listlessly, like lost souls in hell, blown by the gritty wind amid whirlpools of litter and dead leaves, past creaking swings and deserted football pitches, stagnant ponds and artificial lakes where rowing boats are chained up, by Sabbatarian decree, as if to emphasize the impossibility of escape. La nausée, Rummidge-style. Well, no more of that for six months.
Philip stubs out his cigarette, and lights another. Pipes are not permitted in the aircraft.
He checks his watch. Less than halfway to go now. There is a communal stirring in the cabin. He looks round attentively, anxious not to miss a cue. People are putting on the little plastic headphones that were lying, in transparent envelopes, on each seat when they boarded the plane. At the front of the tourist compartment a stewardess is fiddling with a piece of tubular apparatus. How delightful, they are going to have a film, or rather, movie. There is an extra charge: Philip pays it gladly. A withered old lady across the aisle shows him how to plug in his headphones which are, he discovers, already providing aural entertainment on three channels: Bartok, Muzak and some children’s twaddle. Culturally conditioned to choose the Bartok, he switches, after a few minutes, to the Muzak, a cool, rippling rendition of, what is it, “These Foolish Things” … ?
…
Meanwhile, back in the other Boeing, Morris Zapp has just discovered what it is that’s bugging him about his flight. The realization is a delayed consequence of walking the length of the aircraft to the toilet, and strikes him, like a slow-burn gag in a movie-comedy, just as he is concluding his business there. On his way back he verifies his suspicion, covertly scrutinizing every row of seats until he reaches his own at the front of the aircraft. He sinks down heavily and, as is his wont when thinking hard, crosses his legs and plays a complex percussion solo with his fingernails on the sole of his right shoe.
Every passenger on the plane except himself is a woman.
What is he supposed to make of that? The odds against such a ratio turning up by chance must be astronomical. Improvidence at work again. What kind of a chance is he going to stand if there’s an emergency, women and children first, himself a hundred and fifty-sixth in the line for the lifeboats?
“Pardon me.”
It’s the bespectacled blonde in the next seat. She holds a magazine open on her lap, index finger pressed to the page as if marking her place.
“May I ask your opinion on a question of etiquette?”
He grins, squinting at the magazine. “Don’t tell me Ramparts is running an etiquette column?”
“If a lady sees a man with his fly open, should she tell him?”
“Definitely.”
“Your fly’s open, mister,” says the girl, and recommences reading her copy of Ramparts, holding it up to screen her face as Morris hastily adjusts his dress.
“Say,” he continues conversationally (for Morris Zapp does not believe in allowing socially disadvantageous situations to cool and set), “Say, have you noticed anything funny about this plane?”
“Funny?”
“About the passengers.”
The magazine is lowered,
the swollen spectacles turned slowly in his direction. “Only you, I guess.”
“You figured it out too!” he exclaims. “It only just struck me. Right between the eyes. While I was in the john … That’s why … Thanks for telling me, by the way.” He gestures towards his crotch.
“Be my guest,” says the girl. “How come you’re on this charter anyway?”
“One of my students sold me her ticket.”
“Now all is clear,” says the girl. “I figured you couldn’t be needing an abortion.”
BOINNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG! The penny drops thunderously inside Morris Zapp’s head. He steals a glance over the back of his seat. A hundred and fifty-five women ranked in various attitudes—some sleeping, some knitting, some staring out of the windows, all (it strikes him now) unnaturally silent, self-absorbed, depressed. Some eyes meet his, and he flinches from their murderous glint. He turns back queasily to the blonde, gestures weakly over his shoulder with his thumb, whispers hoarsely: “You mean all those women … ?”
She nods.
“Holy mackerel!” (Zapp, his stock of blasphemy and obscenity threadbare from everyday use, tends to fall back on such quaintly genteel oaths in moments of great stress.)
“Pardon my asking,” says the blonde, “but I’m curious. Did you buy the whole package—round trip, surgeon’s fee, five days’ nursing with private room and excursion to Stratford-upon-Avon?”
“What has Stratford-upon-Avon got to do with it, for Chrissake?”
“It’s supposed to give you a lift afterwards. You get to see a play.”
“All’s Well That Ends Well?” he snaps back, quick as a flash. But the jest conceals a deep unease. Of course he has heard of these package tours operating from States where legal abortions are difficult to obtain, and taking advantage of Britain’s permissive new law. In casual conversation he would have shrugged it off as a simple instance of the law of supply and demand, perhaps with a quip about the limeys finally licking their balance of payments problem. No prude, no reactionary, Morris Zapp. He has gone down on many a poll as favouring the repeal of Euphoria’s abortion laws (likewise its laws against fornication, masturbation, adultery, sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus and sexual congress in which the female adopts the superior position: Euphoria had been first settled by a peculiarly narrow-minded Puritanical sect whose taboos retained a fossilized existence in the State legal code, one that rigorously enforced would have entailed the incarceration of ninety per cent of its present citizens). But it is a different matter to find oneself trapped in an airplane with a hundred and fifty-five women actually drawing the wages of sin. The thought of their one hundred and fifty-five doomed stowaways sends cold shivers roller-coasting down his curved spine, and a sudden vibration in the aircraft, as it runs into the turbulence recently experienced by Philip Swallow, leaves him quaking with fear.
For Morris Zapp is a twentieth-century counterpart of Swift’s Nominal Christian—the Nominal Atheist. Underneath that tough exterior of the free-thinking Jew (exactly the kind T. S. Eliot thought an organic community could well do without) there is a core of old-fashioned Judaeo-Christian fear-of-the-Lord. If the Apollo astronauts had reported finding a message carved in gigantic letters on the backside of the moon, “Reports of My death are greatly exaggerated,” it would not have surprised Morris Zapp unduly, merely confirmed his deepest misgivings. At this moment he feels painfully vulnerable to divine retribution. He can’t believe that Improvidence, old Nobodaddy, is going to sit placidly in the sky while abortion shuttle-services buzz right under his nose, polluting the stratosphere and giving the Recording Angel writer’s cramp, no sir, one of these days he is going to swat one of those planes right out the sky, and why not this one?
Zapp succumbs to self-pity. Why should he suffer with all these careless callous women? He has knocked up a girl only once in his life, and he made an honest woman of her (she divorced him three years later, but that’s another story, one indictment at a time, please). It’s a frame-up. All the doing of the little bitch who had sold him her ticket, less than half-price, he couldn’t resist the bargain but wondered at the time at her generosity since only a week before he’d refused to raise her course-grade from a C to a B. She must have missed her period, rushed to book a seat on the Abortion Express, had a negative pregnancy test and thought to herself, I know what I’ll do, Professor Zapp is going to Europe, I’ll sell him my ticket, then the plane might be struck by a thunderbolt. A fine reward for trying to preserve academic standards.
He becomes aware that the girl in the next seat is studying him with interest. “You’re a college teacher?” she asks.
“Yeah, Euphoric State.”
“Really! What d’you teach? I’m majoring in Anthropology at Euphoria College.”
“Euphoria College? Isn’t that the Catholic school in Esseph?”
“Right.”
“Then what are you doing on this plane?” he hisses, all his roused moral indignation and superstitious fear focused on this kooky blonde. If even the Catholics are jumping on to the abortion bandwagon, what hope is there for the human race?
“I’m an Underground Catholic,” she says seriously. “I’m not hung up on dogma. I’m very far out.”
Her eyes, behind the huge spectacles, are clear and untroubled. Morris Zapp experiences a rush of missionary zeal to the head. He will do a good deed, instruct this innocent in the difference between good and evil, talk her out of her wicked intent. One brand plucked from the burning should be enough to assure him of a happy landing. He leans forward earnestly.
“Listen, kid, let me give some fatherly advice. Don’t do it. You’ll never forgive yourself. Have the baby. Get it adopted—no sweat, the adoption agencies are screaming for new stock. Maybe the father will want to marry you when he sees the kid—they often do, you know.”
“He can’t.”
“Married already, huh?” Morris Zapp shakes his head over the depravity of his sex.
“No, he’s a priest.”
Zapp bows his head, buries his face in his hands.
“You feeling all right?”
“Just a twinge of morning-sickness,” he mumbles through his fingers. He looks up. “This priest, is he paying for your trip out of parish funds? Did he take a special collection or something?”
“He doesn’t know anything about it.”
“You haven’t told him you’re pregnant?”
“I don’t want him to have to choose between me and his vows.”
“Has he any vows left?”
“Poverty, chastity and obedience,” says the girl thoughtfully. “Well, I guess he’s still poor.”
“So who is paying for this trip?”
“I work nights on South Strand.”
“One of those topless places?”
“No, record store. As a matter of fact I worked my first year through college as a topless dancer. But then I realized how exploitative it was, so I quit.”
“They charge a lot in those joints, huh?”
“I mean exploiting me, not the customers,” the girl replies, a shade contemptuously. “It was when I got interested in Women’s Liberation.”
“Women’s Liberation? What’s that?” says Morris Zapp, not liking the sound of it at all. “I never heard of it.” (Few people have on this first day of 1969.)
“You will, Professor, you will,” says the girl.
…
Meanwhile, Philip Swallow has also struck up conversation with a fellow passenger.
The movie over (it was a Western, the noisy sound track had given him a headache, and he watched the final gun-battle with his headphones tuned to Muzak), he finds that some of his joie de vivre has evaporated. He is beginning to weary of sitting still, he fidgets in his seat in an effort to find some untried disposition of his limbs, the muffled din of the jet engines is getting on his nerves, and looking out of the window still gives him vertigo. He tries to read a courtesy copy of Time, but can’t concentrate. What he really needs is a nice
cup of tea—it is mid-afternoon by his watch—but when he plucks up courage to ask a passing stewardess she replies curtly that they will be serving breakfast in an hour’s time. He has had one breakfast already that day and doesn’t particularly want another one, but of course it’s a matter of the time change. In Euphoria now it’s, what, seven or eight hours earlier than in London, or is it later? Do you add or subtract? Is it still the day he left on, or tomorrow already? Or yesterday? Let’s see, the sun comes up in the east … He frowns with mental effort, but the sums won’t make sense.
“Well, blow me down!”
Philip blinks up at the young man who has stopped in the aisle. His appearance is striking. He wears wide-bottomed suede trousers, and a kind of oversize homespun fringed jerkin hanging to his knees over a pink and yellow candy-striped shirt. His wavy, reddish hair falls to his shoulders and he has a bandit moustache of slightly darker hue. On his jerkin, arranged in three neat rows like military medals, are a dozen or more lapel buttons in psychedelic colours.
“You remember me, dontcha, Mr. Swallow?”
“Well …” Philip racks his brains. There is something vaguely familiar, but … Then the youth’s left eye suddenly shoots disconcertingly sideways, as if catching sight of an engine falling off the wing, and Philip remembers.
“Boon! Good Lord, I didn’t recognize … You’ve, er, changed.”
Boon chuckles delightedly. “Fantastic! Don’t tell me you’re on your way to Euphoric State?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I am.”
“Great! Me too.”
“You?”
“Dontcha remember writing a reference for me?”
“A great many references, Boon.”
“Yeah, well, it’s like a fruit machine, y’know, you got to keep pulling the old lever. Never say die. Then, Bingo! Anybody sitting next to you? No? I’ll join you in a sec. Got to have a slash. Don’t run away.” He resumes his interrupted journey to the toilet, almost colliding with a stewardess coming in the opposite direction. Boon steadies her with a firm, two-handed gesture. “Sorry, darling,” Philip hears him say, and she flashes him an indulgent smile. Still the same old Boon!