by David Lodge
“Hi,” he said when his turn came to be attended to. “Have we met before?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” said Cheryl. “I was just admiring your hat.” She took his ticket and read the name on it: Zapp M., Prof.
Professor Zapp took off his deerstalker and held it at arm’s length. “I bought it right here in Heathrow just a few days ago,” he said. “I don’t suppose I’ll need it in Italy.” Then his expression changed from complacency to annoyance. “Goddammit, I promised to give it to young McGarrigle before I left.” He slapped the hat against his thigh, confirming this limb’s lack of firmness. “Is there anywhere I can mail a parcel from here?”
“Our Post Office is closed for alterations, but there’s another one in Terminal Two,” said Cheryl. “I presume you would like a seat in the smoking section, Professor Zapp? Window or aisle?”
“I’m easy. The question is, how am I going to wrap this hat in a parcel?”
“Leave it with me. I’ll post it for you.”
“Really? That’s very sweet of you, Cheryl.”
“All part of the service, Professor Zapp,” she smiled. He was one of those rare passengers who noticed the name badge pinned to her uniform, or, having noticed it, used it. “Just write your friend’s name and address on this label, and I’ll see to it when I go off duty.” While he was occupied with this task, she scanned the seating plan in front of her, and ran through on the computer display the list of passengers who had already checked in. About a quarter of an hour ago she had dealt with an extremely elegant Italian lady professor, of about the right age—younger, but not too young—and who spoke very good English, apart from a little trouble with her aspirates. Ah yes, here she was: MORGANA F. PROF. She had been very particular, requesting a window-seat in the smoking section as far forward as possible on the left-hand side of the plane. Cheryl didn’t mind this; she respected people who knew what they wanted, as long as they didn’t kick up a fuss if it wasn’t available. Professor Morgana had looked as if she was capable of kicking up a royal fuss, but the occasion had not arisen. Cheryl had been able to accommodate her exactly as requested, in row 10, window seat A. She now removed the sticker from seat 10B on the seat-plan in front of her, and affixed it to Professor Zapp’s boarding pass. He gave her his hat, with the label and two pound notes tucked into one of the flaps.
“I don’t think it will cost that much to send,” she said, reading the label: “Percy McGarrigle, Department of English, University College, LIMERICK, Ireland.”
“Well, if there’s any change, have a drink on me.”
As he spoke they both heard a small, muffled explosion—the sound, distinctive and unmistakable, of a bottle of duty-free liquor hitting the stone composition floor of an airport concourse and shattering inside its plastic carrier bag; also a cry of “Shit!” and a dismayed, antiphonal “Oh, Howard!” A few yards away, a man and a woman were glaring accusingly at each other across a loaded baggage trolley from which the plastic carrier bag had evidently fallen. Professor Zapp, who had turned his head to locate the origin of the fatal sound, now turned back to face Cheryl, hunching his shoulders and turning up the collar of his raincoat.
“Don’t do anything to attract that man’s attention,” he hissed.
“Why? Who is he?”
“His name is Howard Ringbaum and he is a well-known fink. Also, although he doesn’t know it yet, I have rejected a paper he submitted for a conference I’m organizing.”
“What is a fink?”
“A fink is a generally despicable person, like Howard Ringbaum.”
“What’s so awful about him? He doesn’t look so bad.”
“He’s very self-centred. He’s very mean. He’s very calculating. Like, for instance, when Thelma Ringbaum says it’s time they gave a party, Howard doesn’t just send out invitations—he calls you up and asks you whether, if he were to give a party, you would come.”
“That must be his wife with him now,” said Cheryl.
“Thelma’s all right, she’s just fink-blind,” said Professor Zapp. “No one can figure out how she can stand being married to Howard.”
Over Professor Zapp’s shoulder, Cheryl watched Howard Ringbaum gingerly pick up the plastic carrier bag by its handles. It bulged ominously at the bottom with the weight of spilled liquor. “Maybe I could filter it,” Howard Ringbaum said to his wife. As he spoke, a piece of jagged glass pierced the plastic and a spout of neat scotch poured on to his suede shoe. “Shit!” he said again.
“Oh, Howard!”
“What are we doing in this place, anyway?” he snarled. “You said it was the way out.”
“No, Howard, you said it was the way out, I just agreed.”
“Have they gone yet?” Professor Zapp muttered.
“They’re going,” said Cheryl. Observing that the passengers waiting in line behind Professor Zapp were getting restive, she brought their business to a rapid conclusion. “Here’s your boarding card, Professor Zapp. Be in the Departure Lounge half an hour before your flight time. Your baggage has been checked through to Milan. Have a pleasant journey.”
…
Thus it was that about one hour later Morris Zapp found himself sitting next to Fulvia Morgana in a British Airways Trident bound for Milan. It didn’t take them long to discover that they were both academics. While the plane was still taxiing to the runway, Morris had Philip Swallow’s book on Hazlitt out on his lap, and Fulvia Morgana her copy of Althusser’s essays. Each glanced surreptitiously at the other’s reading matter. It was as good as a masonic handshake. They met each other’s eyes.
“Morris Zapp, Euphoric State.” He extended his hand.
“Ah, yes, I ’ave ’eard you spick. Last December, in New York.”
“At the MLA? You’re not a philosopher, then?” He nodded at Lenin and Philosophy.
“No, cultural studies is my field. Fulvia Morgana, Padua. In Europe critics are much interested in Marxism. In America not so much.”
“I guess in America we’ve always been more attracted by Freud than Marx, Fulvia.” Fulvia Morgana. Morris flicked rapidly through his mental card index. It was a name he vaguely remembered having seen on the title-pages of various prestigious journals of literary theory.
“And now Derrida,” said Fulvia Morgana. “Everybody in Chicago—I ’ave just been to Chicago—was reading Derrida. America is crazy about deconstruction. Why is that?”
“Well, I’m a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It’s kind of exciting—the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.”
“Exactly! It is so narcissistic. So ’opeless.”
“What was your conference about?”
“It was called, ‘The Crisis of the Sign.’”
“Oh, yeah. I was invited but I couldn’t make it. How was it?”
Fulvia Morgana shrugged her shoulders inside her brown velvet jacket. “As usual. Many boring papers. Some interesting parties.”
“Who was there?”
“Oh, everyone you would expect. The Yale hermeneutic gang. The Johns Hopkins reader-response people. The local Chicago Aristotelians, naturally. And Arthur Kingfisher was there.”
“Really? He must be pretty old now.”
“He gave the—what do you call it—keynote address. On the first evening.”
“Any good?”
“Terrible. Everybody was waiting to see what line he would take on deconstruction. Would ’e be for it or against it? Would ’e follow the premises of ’is own early structuralist work to its logical conclusion, or would ’e recoil into a defence of traditional humanist scholarship?” Fulvia Morgana spoke as though she were quoting from some report of the conference that she had already drafted.
“Let me try and guess,” said Morris.
“You would be wasting your time,” said Fulvia Morgana, unfastening her seat belt and smoothing her velvet knickerbockers over her knees. The plane had taken off in the course of this conversation, though Morris had hardly
noticed. “’E said, on the one hand this, on the other hand that. ’E talked all around the subject. ’E waffled and wandered. ’E repeated things ’e said twenty, thirty years ago, and said better. It was embarrassing, I am telling you. In spite of all, they gave ’im a standing ovation.”
“Well, he’s a great man. Was a great man, anyway. A king among literary theorists. I think that to many people he kind of personifies the whole profession of academic literary studies.”
“Then I must say that the profession is in a very un’ealthy condition,” said Fulvia. “What are you reading—a book on ’Azlitt?”
“It’s by a British friend of mine,” said Morris. “He gave it to me just yesterday. It’s not the sort of thing I usually go for.” He felt anxious to dissociate himself from Philip’s quaintly old-fashioned subject, and equally archaic approach to it.
Fulvia Morgana leaned over and peered at the name on the dust jacket. “Philip Swallow. I know ’im. ’E came to Padua to give a lecture some years before.”
“Right! He was telling me about his trip to Italy last night. It was very eventful.”
“’Ow was that?”
“Oh, his plane caught fire on the way home—had to turn back and make an emergency landing. But he was OK.”
“’Is lecture was not very eventful, I must say. It was very boring.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t surprise me. He’s a nice guy, Philip, but he doesn’t exactly set your pulse racing with intellectual excitement.”
“What is the book like?”
“Well, listen to this, it will give you the flavour.” Morris read aloud a passage he had marked in Philip’s book: “‘He is the most learned man who knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to be brought to the test of experience, and that, having been handed down through the greatest number of intermediate stages, is the most full of uncertainty, difficulties and contradictions.’”
“Very interesting,” said Fulvia Morgana. “Is that Philip Swallow?”
“No, that’s Hazlitt.”
“You surprise me. It sounds very modern. ‘Uncertainties, difficulties, contradictions.’ ’Azlitt was obviously a man ahead of his time. That is a remarkable attack on bourgeois empiricism.”
“I think it was meant to be ironic,” said Morris gently. “It comes from an essay called ‘The Ignorance of the Learned.’”
Fulvia Morgana pouted. “Ooh, the English and their ironies! You never know where you are with them.”
The arrival of the drinks trolley at this point was a happy distraction. Morris requested scotch on the rocks and Fulvia a Bloody Mary. Their conversation turned back to the topic of the Chicago conference.
“Everybody was talking about this UNESCO chair,” said Fulvia. “Be’ind their ’ands, naturally.”
“What chair is that?” Morris felt a sudden stab of anxiety, cutting through the warm glow imparted by the whisky and the agreeable happenstance of striking up acquaintance with this glamorous colleague. “I haven’t heard anything about a UNESCO chair.”
“Don’t worry, it’s not been advertised yet,” said Fulvia, with a smile. Morris attempted a light dismissive laugh, but it sounded forced to his own ears. “It’s supposed to be a chair of Literary Criticism, endowed by UNESCO. It’s just a rumour, actually. I expect Arthur Kingfisher started it. They say ’e is the chief assessor.”
“And what else,” said Morris, with studied casualness, “do they say about this chair?”
He did not really have to wait for her reply to know that here, at last, was a prize worthy of his ambition. The UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism! That had to carry the highest salary in the profession. Fulvia confirmed his intuition: $100,000 a year was being talked about. “Tax-free, of course, like all UNESCO salaries.” Duties? Virtually non-existent. The chair was not to be connected with any particular institution, to avoid favouring any particular country. It was a purely conceptual chair (except for the stipend) to be occupied wherever the successful candidate wished to reside. He would have an office and secretarial staff at the Paris headquarters, but no obligation to use it. He would be encouraged to fly around the world at UNESCO’s expense, attending conferences and meeting the international community of scholars, but entirely at his own discretion. He would have no students to teach, no papers to grade, no committees to chair. He would be paid simply to think—to think and, if the mood took him, to write. A roomful of secretaries at the Place Fontenoy would wait patiently beside their word-processors, ready to type, duplicate, collate, staple and distribute to every point of the compass his latest reflections on the ontology of the literary text, the therapeutic value of poetry, the nature of metaphor, or the relationship between synchronic and diachronic literary studies. Morris Zapp felt dizzy at the thought, not merely of the wealth and privilege the chair would confer on the man who occupied it, but also of the envy it would arouse in the breasts of those who did not.
“Will he have the job for life, or for a limited tenure?” Morris asked.
“I think she will be appointed for three years, on secondment from ’er own university.”
“She?” Morris repeated, alarmed. Had Julia Kristeva or Christine Brooke-Rose already been lined up for the job? “Why do you say, ‘she’?”
“Why do you say ‘e’?”
Morris relaxed and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Touché! Someone who was once married to a best-selling feminist novelist shouldn’t walk into that kind of trap.”
“’Oo is that?”
“She writes under the name of DÉSIRÉE Byrd.”
“Oh yes, Giorni Difficili. I ’ave read it.” She looked at Morris with new interest. “It is autobiographical?”
“In part,” said Morris. “This UNESCO chair—would you be tempted by it yourself?”
“No,” said Fulvia emphatically.
Morris didn’t believe her.
…
As Morris Zapp and Fulvia Morgana addressed themselves to a light lunch served 30,000 feet above south-eastern France, Persse McGarrigle arrived at Heathrow by the Underground railway. With Angelica gone, there had been nothing to detain him at Rummidge, so he had skipped the Business Meeting which constituted the last formal session of the Conference and taken the train to London. He was hoping to get a cheap standby seat on the afternoon flight to Shannon, since his conference grant had been based on rail/sea travel and would not cover the normal economy air fare. The Aer Lingus desk in Terminal Two took his name and asked him to come back at 2:30. While he was hesitating about what to do in the intervening couple of hours, the concourse was temporarily immobilized by a hundred or more Muslim pilgrims, with “Saracen Tours” on their luggage, who turned to face Mecca and prostrated themselves in prayer. Two cleaners leaning on their brooms within earshot of Persse viewed this spectacle with disgust.
“Bloody Pakis,” said one. “If they must say their bloody prayers, why don’t they go and do it in the bloody chapel?”
“No use to them, is it?” said his companion, who seemed a shade less bigotted. “Need a mosque, don’t they?”
“Oh yerse!” said the first man sarcastically. “That’s all we need in ’Eathrow, a bloody mosque.”
“I’m not sayin’” we ought to ’ave one,” said the second man patiently, “I’m just sayin’” that a Christian chapel wouldn’t be no use to ’em. Them bein’ in-fid-els.” He seemed to derive great satisfaction from the pronunciation of this word.
“I s’pose you think we ought to ’ave a synagogue an’ a ’Indoo temple too, an’ a totem pole for Red Indians to dance around? What they doin’ ’ere, anyway? They should be in Terminal Free if they’re goin’ to bloody Mecca.”
“Did I hear you say there was a chapel in this airport?” Persse cut in.
“Well, I know there is one,” said the more indignant of the two men. “Near Lorst Property, innit, Fred?”
“Nah, near
the Control Tower,” said Fred. “Go dahn the subway towards Terminal Free, then follow the signs to the Bus Station. Go right to the end of the bus station and then sorter bear left, then right. Yer can’t miss it.”
Persse did, however, miss it, more than once. He traipsed up and down stairs and escalators, along moving walkways, through tunnels, over bridges. Like the city centre of Rummidge, Heathrow discouraged direct, horizontal movement. Pedestrians about and about must go, by devious and labyrinthine ways. Once he saw a sign “To St. George’s Chapel,” and eagerly followed its direction, but it led him to the airport laundry. He asked several officials the way, and received confusing and contradictory advice. He was tempted to give up the quest, for his feet were aching, and his grip dragged ever more heavily on his arm, but he persevered. The spectacle of the Muslim pilgrims at prayer had reminded him of the sorry state of his own soul, and though he did not expect to find a Catholic priest in attendance at the chapel to hear his confession, he felt an urge to make an act of contrition in some consecrated place before entrusting himself to the air.
When he found himself outside Terminal Two for the third time he almost despaired, but seeing a young woman in the livery of British Airways ground staff approaching, he accosted her, promising himself that this would be his last attempt.
“St. George’s Chapel? It’s near the Control Tower,” she said.
“That’s what they all tell me, but I’ve been searching high and low this last half hour, and the devil take me if I can find it.”
“I’ll show you, if you like,” said the young woman cheerfully. A small plastic badge on her lapel identified her as “Cheryl Summerbee.”