by David Lodge
This morning, however, he contented himself with a direct journey to the eighth floor. His tutorial students were already waiting, slumped against the wall beside the door of his office, yawning and scratching themselves. He greeted them and unlocked the door, which bore his name on a slip of paper pasted over the nameplate of Gordon Masters. As soon as he got inside, the communicating door opposite opened and Alice Slade inched her way apologetically into the room, clutching a large stack of files.
“Oh,” she said, “are you teaching, Professor Zapp? I wanted to ask you about these postgraduate applications.”
“Yeah, teaching till ten, Alice, OK? Why don’t you ask Rupert Sutcliffe about it?”
“Oh, all right. Sorry I disturbed you.” She backed out.
“Siddown,” he said to the students, thinking to himself that he would have to move back into Swallow’s room. On accepting the job of mediator between the Administration and the students he’d asked for secretarial assistance and an outside telephone line—requests which had been promptly and economically satisfied by moving him into the office made vacant by the abrupt departure of Gordon Masters. You could still tell from the marks on the walls where the hunting trophies had hung. Although his work as mediator was virtually finished, it hardly seemed worthwhile moving back into Swallow’s room, but in the meantime the Departmental Secretary, conditioned to refer all problems, inquiries and decisions to Masters, had begun to bring them, as though compelled by a deep-seated homing instinct, to him, Morris Zapp, although Rupert Sutcliffe was supposed to be the Acting Head of the Department. In fact Sutcliffe himself was inclined to come to Morris with oblique appeals for advice and approval, and other members of staff too.
Suddenly freed from Masters’ despotic rule after thirty years, the Rummidge English Department was stunned and frightened by its own liberty, it was going round and round in circles like a rudderless ship, no, more like a ship whose tyrannical captain had unexpectedly fallen overboard one dark night, taking with him sealed instructions about the ship’s ultimate destination. The crew kept coming out of habit to the bridge for orders, and were only too glad to take them from anyone who happened to be occupying the captain’s seat.
Admittedly it was a comfortable seat—a padded, tip-back, executive’s swivel chair—and for that reason alone Morris was reluctant to move back into Philip Swallow’s room. He leaned back into it, put his feet on the desk and lit a cigar. “Well now,” he said to the three dejected-looking students. “What are you bursting to discuss this morning?”
“Jane Austen,” mumbled the boy with the beard, shuffling some sheets of foolscap covered with evil-looking handwriting.
“Oh yeah. What was the topic?”
“I’ve done it on Jane Austen’s moral awareness.”
“That doesn’t sound like my style.”
“I couldn’t understand the title you gave me, Professor Zapp.”
“Eros and Agape in the later novels, wasn’t it? What was the problem?”
The student hung his head. Morris felt in the mood for a little display of high-powered exposition. Agape, he explained, was a feast through which the early Christians expressed their love for one another, it symbolized non-sexual, non-individualized love, it was represented in Jane Austen’s novels by social events that confirmed the solidarity of middle-class agrarian capitalist communities or welcomed new members into those communities—balls and dinner parties and sightseeing expeditions and so on. Eros was of course sexual love and was represented in Jane Austen by courtship scenes, tête-à-têtes, walking in pairs—any encounter between the heroine and the man she loved, or thought she loved. Readers of Jane Austen, he emphasized, gesturing freely with his cigar, should not be misled by the absence of overt reference to physical sexuality in her fiction into supposing that she was indifferent or hostile to it. On the contrary, she invariably came down on the side of Eros against Agape—on the side, that is, of the private communion of lovers over against the public communion of social events and gatherings which invariably caused pain and distress (think for instance of the disastrous nature of group expeditions, to Sotherton in Mansfield Park, to Box Hill in Emma, to Lyme Regis in Persuasion). Getting into his stride, Morris demonstrated that Mr. Elton was obviously implied to be impotent because there was no lead in the pencil that Harriet Smith took from him; and the moment in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth lifted the little brat Walter off Anne Elliot’s shoulders… He snatched up the text and read with feeling:
“‘… she found herself in the state of being released from him… Before she realized that Captain Wentworth had done it… he was resolutely borne away … Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles with the most disordered feelings.’ How about that?” he concluded reverently. “If that isn’t an orgasm, what is it?” He looked up into three flabbergasted faces. The internal telephone rang.
It was the Vice-Chancellor’s secretary, asking if Morris would be free to see the VC some time that morning. Was the President of the Student Council quibbling about representation on the Promotions and Appointments Committee, Morris inquired. The secretary didn’t know, but Morris was willing to take a bet he was right. He’d always been surprised by the readiness with which the Student President had waived representation on Promotions and Appointments: no doubt his militant henchmen had been leaning on him to raise the issue again. Morris smiled knowingly to himself as he scribbled an appointment for 10:30 in his desk diary. Mediating between the two sides in this dispute at Rummidge he often felt like a grandmaster of chess overlooking a match between two novices—able to predict the entire pattern of the game while they sweated over every move. To the Rummidge faculty his prescience seemed uncanny, his expertise in chairing negotiations amazing. They didn’t realize that he had seen so many campus disturbances in Euphoria that he knew the basic scenario by heart.
“Where were we?” he said.
“Persuasion…”
“Oh, yeah.”
The telephone rang again. “An outside call for you,” said Alice Slade.
“Alice,” Morris sighed. “Please don’t put any calls through until this class is over.”
“Sorry. Shall I ask her to call back?”
“Who is it?”
“Mrs. Swallow.”
“Put her on.”
“Morris?” Hilary’s voice sounded trembly.
“Hi.”
“Are you teaching or something?”
“No, no, not really.” He covered the mouthpiece with one hand and said to the students, “Just read through that scene in Persuasion will you and try to analyse how it builds up to a climax. In every sense of the word.” He leered at them encouragingly, and resumed his conversation with Hilary. “What’s new?”
“I just wanted to apologize for last night.”
“Honey, it’s me that should apologize,” said Morris, taken by surprise.
“No, I behaved like a silly young girl. Leading you on and then backing away in a panic. After all, it’s nothing to make a fuss about, is it?”
“No, no.” Morris swung round in his chair to turn his back on the students, and spoke in a low voice. “What isn’t?”
“Anyway, I haven’t had such a nice evening for years.”
“Let’s do it again. Soon.”
“Could you bear it?”
“Sure. Delighted.”
“Lovely.”
There was a pause, in which he could hear Hilary breathing.
“Is that OK, then?” he asked.
“Yes. Morris…”
“Yeah?”
“Are you going back to your flat today?”
“Yeah. I’ll come round to pick up my bag this evening.”
“I was going to say, you could stay another night if you wanted to.”
“Well…”
“Mary’s away tonight. Sometimes I get scared in the night, in the house on my own.”
&n
bsp; “Sure. I’ll stay.”
“You’re sure it’s no trouble?”
“No, no. That’s fine.”
“All right. See you this evening, then.” She hung up abruptly. Morris swung round in his chair to replace the receiver and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“Shall I read my paper or not?” said the bearded student, with a trace of impatience.
“What? Oh, yeah. Read it. Read it.”
While the boy drawled on about Jane Austen’s moral awareness, Morris pondered the implications of Hilary’s surprising call. Could she possibly mean what he thought she meant? He found it difficult to concentrate on the paper, and was relieved when the clock in the campanile struck ten. As the students shuffled out through the door, Rupert Sutcliffe shuffled in, a tall, stooped, melancholy figure, with ill-fitting glasses that kept slipping to the end of his nose. Sutcliffe was the Department Romantics man, but he was short on joy, and being made Acting Head on Masters’ departure hadn’t apparently raised his spirits.
“Oh, Zapp. Could you spare a minute?”
“Can we discuss it over a cup of coffee?”
“I’m afraid not. Not in the Senior Common Room. It’s a rather delicate matter.” He closed the door conspiratorially behind him and tip-toed towards Morris. “These postgraduate applications—” He placed a stack of files (the same that Alice Slade had brought in earlier) on to Morris’s desk. “We’ve got to decide which ones to put forward for approval by the Faculty Committee.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, one of them is from Hilary Swallow. Swallow’s wife, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I’m one of her referees.”
“God bless my soul, are you really? I hadn’t noticed. You know all about it then?”
“Well, something. What’s the problem? She was halfway through a Master’s course when she got married and quit. Now her kids are growing up and she’d like to get back into research.”
“That’s all very well, but it puts us in a rather awkward position. I mean, the wife of a colleague…”
He was a bachelor, Sutcliffe, a genuine old-fashioned bachelor, as distinct from being gay or hip—and women scared him to death. The two on the Department staff he treated as honorary men. If his colleagues had to have wives, he intimated, the least they could do was to keep them at home in decent obscurity. “I think Swallow might at least have discussed the matter with us before letting his wife make a formal application,” he sighed.
“I don’t think he knows anything about it,” said Morris carelessly.
Sutcliffe’s glasses nearly jumped off his nose. “You mean—she’s deceiving him?”
“No, no. She wants to be considered on her own merits, without any favouritism.”
Sutcliffe looked doubtful. “That’s all very well,” he grumbled. “But who’s to supervise her, if she does come?”
“I think she was rather hoping you would, Rupert,” Morris said mischievously.
“God forbid!” Sutcliffe picked up the files and made for the door, as if fearing that Hilary might jump out of a cupboard at him and demand a supervision. He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “By the way, will you be coming to the Departmental Meeting this morning?”
“Can’t be sure, Rupert,” said Morris, rising from his executive’s chair and shrugging on his jacket. “I have an appointment with the VC at ten thirty.”
“That’s unfortunate. I was hoping you would chair the meeting. We’ve got to discuss next session’s lecture programme, and there’s bound to be a lot of disagreement. They will argue so, since Masters left…”
He drifted out. Morris followed him and was locking the door of his office when Bob Busby came running down the corridor, money and keys jingling in his pockets.
“Morris!” he panted. “Glad I caught you. You’re coming to the meeting?”
Morris explained that he probably wouldn’t be able to make it. Busby looked glum. “That’s too bad. Sutcliffe will take the chair, and he’s hopeless. I’m afraid Dempsey is going to try and force through some proposal about compulsory linguistics.”
“Is that bad?”
Busby stared. “Well, of course it’s bad. I thought from the way you tore into Dempsey’s paper at the staff seminar…”
“I was attacking his paper, not his discipline. I have nothing against linguistics as such.”
“Well, for practical purposes Dempsey is linguistics around here,” said Busby. “Compulsory linguistics means compulsory Dempsey for the students and I don’t think even they deserve that.”
“You may have something there, Bob,” said Morris. He had ambivalent feelings about Robin Dempsey. In one sense he was the nearest thing the Department had to a recognizable professional academic. He was industrious, ambitious and hard-headed. He had no quirks or crotchets. He was, apart from being necessarily less brilliant, very much what Morris himself had been at the same age, and indeed had made some overtures of friendship, or at least collusion, with Morris in the course of his visit. Morris, however, had found these advances surprisingly resistible. He did not feel inclined to join Dempsey in patronizing the rest of the Rummidge faculty. Even if they were in many respects a bunch of freaks, he found them easy to get along with. Never in his academic career had he felt less threatened than in the last five months. “Look, Bob,” he said. “I’ve got an appointment with the VC.”
“Yes, I must be on my way, too,” said Busby. He jog-trotted off in the direction of the Senior Common Room. “Get to the meeting if you can!” he shouted over his shoulder. Morris had no intention of attending the meeting if he could possibly avoid it. Staff meetings at Rummidge had been bad enough under Masters’ whimsically despotic regime. Since his departure they made the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party seem like a paradigm of positive decision-making.
He stepped with a lithe, well-timed movement into the paternoster and subsided gently to the ground floor. As he emerged into the bright air (another sunny spell was in progress) the clock in the campanile struck the half hour and he accelerated his pace. It was as well he did so, for another tile sprang from the wall above his head with a resounding crack like a bullet ricocheting and scattered in fragments just behind him. This isn’t even funny any more, he thought looking up at the façade of the building, now beginning to look like a gigantic crossword puzzle. Before long somebody was going to get seriously killed and sue the University for a million dollars. He made a mental note to mention it to the Vice-Chancellor.
…
“Ah, Zapp! Awfully good of you to drop in,” the Vice-Chancellor murmured, half-rising from his desk as Morris was ushered in. Morris waded through the deep-pile carpeting and shook the hand limply extended to him. Stewart Stroud was a tall, powerfully built man who affected a manner of extreme languor and debility. He seldom spoke above a whisper, and moved about with the caution of an elderly invalid. Now he sank back into his chair as if the effort of rising and shaking hands had exhausted him. “Do pull up a chair, old man,” he said.
“Cigarette?” He made a feeble attempt to push a wooden cigarette box across his desk in Morris’s direction.
“I’ll have a cigar, if you don’t mind. Will you join me?”
“No, no, no.” The VC smiled and shook his head wearily. “I want to ask your advice concerning one or two little problems.” He propped his elbows on the arms of his chair and, by interlacing his fingers, formed a shelf on which to rest his chin.
“Promotions and Appointments?” Morris queried.
The shelf collapsed, and the VC’s jaw sagged momentarily. “How did you know?”
“I guessed the students wouldn’t let you get away with excluding them from that committee.”
Stroud’s face cleared. “Oh, it’s nothing to do with the students, dear fellow.” He permitted himself an almost vigorous gesture of dismissal. “All that unpleasantness is over and done with, thanks to you. No, this is something exclusively concerning academic staff, and absolutely confidential. I have here”—he
nodded at a manilla file reposing on his otherwise immaculate desk—“a list of nominations from the various Faculties for Senior Lectureships, due to come before the Promotions and Appointments Committee this afternoon. There are two names from the English Department. Robin Dempsey, whom you probably know, and your opposite number, now in Euphoria.”
“Philip Swallow?”
“Precisely. The problem is that we have fewer Senior Lectureships to play with than we thought, and one of these men will have to be unlucky. The question is, which one? Who is the more deserving? I’d like to have your opinion, Zapp. I’d really value your opinion on this ticklish question.” Stroud slumped back in his seat and closed his eyes in fatigue after this uncharacteristically long speech. “Do have a look at the file, old chap, if that would help,” he murmured.