by David Lodge
“That’s wonderfully kind of you,” said Persse. “If you’re quite sure I’m not interfering with your work.”
“It’s my lunch break,” said Cheryl, who walked with a curious high-stepping gait, lifting her knees high and planting her feet down daintily and deliberately, like a circus pony. She gave an impression of energetic movement without actually covering much ground, but her style of walking made her shoulder-length blonde hair and other parts of her anatomy bounce about in a pleasing manner. She had a slight squint which gave her blue eyes a starry, unfocused look that was attractive rather than otherwise. She was carrying a shopping bag of bright plastic-coated canvas, from the top of which protruded a romantic novelette entitled Love Scene, and a deerstalker of yellowish brown tweed with a bold red check which looked familiar to Persse. “It’s not my hat,” Cheryl explained, when he remarked upon it. “A passenger left it with me this morning, to mail to a friend of his.”
“It wasn’t a Professor Zapp, by any chance?”
Cheryl stopped in mid-stride, one foot poised above the pavement. “How did you know?” she said wonderingly.
“He’s a friend of mine. Who were you to send the hat to?”
“Percy McGarrigle, Limerick.”
“Then I can save you the trouble,” said Persse. “For I’m the very man.” He took from his jacket pocket the white cardboard identification disc issued to him at the Rummidge Conference, and presented it for Cheryl’s inspection.
“Well,” she said. “There’s a coincidence.” She took the hat from her bag and, holding it by the flaps, placed it with a certain ceremony on his head. “A perfect fit,” she smiled. “Like Cinderella’s slipper.” She tucked the label addressed in Morris Zapp’s hand in Persse’s breast pocket, and it seemed to him, inexplicably, that she gave a quick poulterer’s pinch to his pectoral muscles as she did so. She held up two pound notes. “Your American professor friend told me to buy a drink with the change. Now there’s enough for two drinks and a couple of sandwiches.”
Persse hesitated. “I’d love to join you, Cheryl,” he said, “but I must find that chapel.” This was only part of the reason. A sense of loyalty to Angelica, in spite of the trick she had played on him the night before, also restrained him from accepting Cheryl’s invitation.
“Oh, yes,” said Cheryl, “I was forgetting the chapel.” She conducted him another fifty yards, then pointed out the shape of a large wooden crucifix in the middle distance. “There you are.”
“Thanks a million,” he said, and watched with admiration and regret as she pranced away.
Apart from the plain wooden cross, the chapel resembled, from outside, an air raid shelter rather than a place of worship. Behind a low wall of liver-coloured brick, all that was visible was a domed roof built of the same material, and an entrance with steps leading underground. At the bottom of the stairs there was a small vestibule with a table displaying devotional literature, and an office door leading off. On the wall was a small green baize noticeboard on which visitors to the chapel had pinned various prayers and petitions written on scraps of paper. “May our son have a safe journey and return home soon.” “God save the Russian Orthodox Church.” “Lord, look with favour on Thy servants Mark and Marianne, as they go to sow Thy seed in the mission fields.” “Lord, please let me get my luggage back (lost in Nairobi).” The chapel itself had been scooped out of the earth in a fan-shape, with the altar at the narrowest point, and a low ceiling, studded with recessed lights, that curved to meet the floor; so that to sit in one of the front pews was rather like taking one’s place in the forward passenger cabin of a wide-bodied jet, and one would not have been surprised to see a No Smoking—Fasten Safety Belts sign light up above the altar, and a stewardess rather than an usher patrolling the aisle.
There was a small side chapel, where, much to Persse’s surprise and pleasure, a red sanctuary lamp was flickering beside a tabernacle fixed to the wall, indicating that the Blessed Sacrament was reserved. Here he said a simple but sincere prayer, for the recovery of Angelica and of his own purity of heart (for he interpreted her flight as a punishment for his lust). Feeling calmed and fortified, he rose to his feet. It occurred to him that he might leave a written petition of his own on the noticeboard. He wrote, on a page torn from a small notebook, “Dear God, let me find Angelica.” He wrote her name on a separate line, in the trailing continuous script he had used to inscribe it in the snow at Rummidge. If it was God’s will, she might pass this way, recognize his hand, relent, and get in touch with him.
Persse did not immediately approach the noticeboard with his petition, since a young woman was standing before it in the act of pinning one of her own to the green baize. Even with her back to him she presented an incongruous figure in this setting: jet-black hair elaborately curled and coiffed, a short white imitation-fur jacket, the tightest of tight red needlecord trousers, and high-heeled gold sandals. Having fixed her prayer to the noticeboard, she stood immobile before it for a moment, then took from her handbag a silk scarf decorated with dice and roulette wheels, which she threw over her head. As she turned and tottered past him on her high heels into the chapel, Persse glimpsed a pale, pretty face which he vaguely felt he had seen before, perhaps in the course of his peregrinations around Heathrow that morning. As he pinned his petition to the noticeboard, he could not resist glancing at the rectangle of pink card he had seen the girl place there:
Please God, don’t let my father or my mother worry themselves to death about me and don’t let them find out what I am doing now or any of the workpeople on the farm or the other girls at the hotel God please.
Persse levered the card from the noticeboard with his thumbnail, turned it over and read what was printed on the other side:
GIRLS UNLIMITED
Hostesses Escorts Masseuses Artistes
An International Agency. Headquarters: Soho Sq.,
LONDON, W.I. Tel: 012 4268 Telegrams CLIMAX London.
Persse replaced the card on the noticeboard as he had found it, and went back into the chapel. The girl was kneeling in the back row, her face bowed, her heavily mascaraed eyelids lowered. Persse sat down in the corresponding pew on the other side of the central aisle, and studied her profile. After a few minutes the girl crossed herself, stood up and stepped into the aisle. Persse followed suit and accosted her:
“Is it Bernadette McGarrigle?”
He caught her in his arms as she fainted away.
…
As Morris Zapp and Fulvia Morgana flew over the Alps, dissecting the later work of Roland Barthes and enjoying a second cup of coffee, the municipal employees of Milan called a lightning strike in support of two clerks in the tax department dismissed for alleged corruption (according to the senior management they had been exempting their families from property taxes, according to the union they were being victimized for not exempting the senior management from property taxes). The British Airways Trident landed, therefore, in the midst of civic chaos. Most of the airport staff were refusing to work, and the passengers had to recover their baggage from a heap underneath the aircraft’s belly, and carry it themselves across the tarmac to the terminal building. The queues for customs and passport control were long and unruly.
“’Ow are you travelling to Bellagio?” Fulvia asked Morris, as they stood in line.
“The villa said they would send a car to meet me. Is it far?”
“Not so far. You must visit us in Milano during your stay.”
“That would be very nice, Fulvia. Is your husband an academic too?”
“Yes, ’e is Professor of Italian Renaissance Literature at Rome.”
Morris pondered this for a moment or two. “He works in Rome. You work in Padua. Yet you live in Milan?”
“The communications are good. You can fly several times a day between Milan and Rome, and there is an autostrada to Padua. Besides, Milan is the true capital of Italy. Rome is sleepy, lazy, provincial.”
“What about Padua?”
&n
bsp; Fulvia Morgana looked at him as if suspecting irony. “Nobody lives in Padua,” she said simply.
They got through customs with surprising speed. Something about Fulvia’s elegant, authoritative mien, or maybe her velvet knickerbockers, attracted an official as though by magnetism, and soon they were free of the sweating, milling, impatient throng. On the other side of passport control, however, was another sweating, milling impatient throng, of meeters and greeters. Some held up cards with names printed on them, but none of the names was Zapp.
“Don’t let me keep you, Fulvia,” said Morris, unhappily. “If nobody shows I guess I can take a bus.”
“The buses will be on strike,” said Fulvia. “Do you have a phone number for the villa?”
Morris gave her the letter confirming that he would be met. “But this says you are arriving last Saturday, at Malpensa—the other airport,” she observed.
“Yeah, well I changed my plans, to take in Rummidge. I wrote them about it.”
“I don’t suppose they received your letter,” she said. “The postal service here is a national disgrace. If I have a really urgent letter for the States I drive to Switzerland to mail it. Look after the bags.” She had spied an empty phone booth, and swooped down on it, snatching the prize from under the nose of an infuriated businessman. Moments later she returned to confirm her guess. “As I thought, they ’ave not received your letter.”
“Oh, shit,” said Morris. “What shall I do?”
“It is all arranged,” said Fulvia. “You will spend tonight with us, and tomorrow the villa will send a car to our ’ouse.”
“Well, that’s very kind of you,” said Morris.
“Wait outside the doors with the luggage,” said Fulvia, “and I will bring the car.”
Morris stood guard over their bags, basking in the warm spring sunshine, and casting a connoisseur’s eye over the more interesting automobiles that drew up outside the terminal to collect or deposit passengers. A bronze-coloured Maserati coupé which until now he had seen only in magazines, priced at something over $50,000, drew his attention, but it was some moments before he realized that Fulvia was seated at the wheel behind its tinted glass and beckoning him urgently to get in. As they swept through the airport gates, she appeared to shake her fist at the pickets, but when they smiled broadly and responded with the same gesture, Morris realized that it was one of solidarity with the workers’ cause.
“There’s something I must ask you, Fulvia,” said Morris Zapp, as he sipped Scotch on the rocks poured from a crystal decanter brought on a silver tray by a black-uniformed, white-aproned maid to the first-floor drawing-room of the magnificent eighteenth-century house just off the Villa Napoleone, which they had reached after a drive so terrifyingly fast that the streets and boulevards of Milan were just a pale grey blur in his memory. “It may sound naive, and even rude, but I can’t suppress it any longer.”
Fulvia arched her eyebrows above her formidable nose. They had both rested, showered, and changed, she into a long, loose flowing robe of fine white wool, which made her look more than ever like a Roman empress. They faced each other, sunk deep in soft, yielding, hide-covered armchairs, across a Persian rug laid on the honey-coloured waxed wooden floor. Morris looked around the spacious room, in which a few choice items of antique furniture had been tastfully integrated with the finest specimens of modern Italian design, and whose off-white walls bore, he had ascertained by close-range inspection, original paintings by Chagall, Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. “I just want to know,” said Morris Zapp, “how you manage to reconcile living like a millionaire with being a Marxist.”
Fulvia, who was smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, waved it dismissively in the air. “A very American question, if I may say so, Morris. Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege”—here Fulvia spread her hands in a modest proprietorial gesture which implied that she and her husband enjoyed a standard of living only a notch or two higher than that of, say, a Puerto Rican family living on welfare in the Bowery—“we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not by the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ’istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role that we know ’ow to perform with a certain dignity. Whereas to be poor with dignity, poor as our Italian peasants are poor, is something not easily learned, something bred in the bone, through generations.” Fulvia spoke rapidly and fluently, as though quoting something she and her husband had had occasion to say more than once. “Besides,” she added, “by being rich we are able to ’elp those ’oo are taking more positive action.”
“Who are they?”
“Oh, various groups,” Fulvia said vaguely, as the telephone began to ring. She swept across the room, her white robe billowing out behind her, to answer it; and conducted a conversation in rapid Italian of which Morris understood nothing except an occasional caro and, once, the mention of his own name. Fulvia replaced the receiver and returned more deliberately to her seat. “My ’usband,” she said, “’E is delayed in Rome because of the strike. Milan airport is closed. ’E will not return tonight.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Morris.
“Why?” said Fulvia Morgana, with a smile as faint and enigmatic as the Mona Lisa’s.
…
“Won’t you go back home, Bernadette? Your Mammy is destroyed with worrying about you, and your Daddy too.”
Bernadette shook her head vigorously, and lit a cigarette, fumbling nervously with the lighter and chipping her scarlet nail polish in the process. “I cannot go home,” she said in a voice which, though hoarse from too many cigarettes and, no doubt, strong drinks, still retained the lilting accent of County Sligo. “I can never go home again.” She did not raise her eyes, under their long, mascara-clogged lashes, to meet Persse’s, but shaped the tip of her cigarette in the green moulded plastic ashtray on the white moulded plastic table in the Terminal Two snackbar. A ham salad, of which she had eaten barely two mouthfuls, was on a plate before her. Cutting up his own food, Persse studied her face and figure, and wondered that he had traced in them, as she passed him in the chapel, the lineaments of Bernadette as he had last seen her: on a family outing to the strand at Ross’s Point, one summer when they were both thirteen or fourteen, shy and tongue-tied with each other. He remembered her as a slim, wild tomboy, with tangled black hair and a gap-toothed smile, running into the surf with her best frock tucked up, and being scolded by her mother for getting it soaked with spray. “Why can you not?” he gently pressed her.
“Because I have a child and no husband, is why.”
“Ah,” said Persse. He knew the mores of the West of Ireland well enough not to discount the gravity of this obstacle. “So you did have the baby?”
“Is that what they think, then?” Bernadette flashed at him, looking up to meet his eye. “That I had it brought off?”
Persse blushed. “Well, your uncle Milo…”
“Uncle Milo? That auld scheymer!” The memory of Dr. O’Shea seemed to bring the brogue flooding back into her speech, like saliva into the mouth or adrenalin into the bloodstream. “What the divil does he have to do with it?”
“Well, it was through him that I found out about your trouble, just the day before yesterday. In Rummidge.”
“Been up there, have you? I haven’t been near the place in years. God, but that was a terrible gloomy old house in, what was it, Gittings Road, that you had to lug the vacuum up three flights of stairs and you could break your neck it was so dark on the landings because himself was too mean to put proper bulbs into the lights…” Bernadette shook her head and snorted cigarette smoke th
rough her nostrils. “A slave I was there—working in the hotel in Sligo was a rest cure in comparison. The only mortal creature who was kind to me was a lodger they had on the top floor, an American professor. He used to let me watch his colour telly and read his dirty books.” Bernadette chuckled reminiscently, displaying teeth that were white, even, and presumably false. “Playboy and Penthouse and that sort of stuff. Pictures of girls naked as God made them, bold as brass and letting their names be printed underneath. It was a real eye-opener to an innocent young girl from County Sligo, I can tell you.” Bernadette glanced slyly at Persse to see if she was embarrassing him. “One day my Uncle Milo caught me lookin’ at them, and beat the livin’ daylights out of me.”
“Where is your child now?” Persse asked.
“He’s with foster parents,” said Bernadette. “In London.”
“Then you could go back home on your own?”
“And abandon Fergus?”
“Well, for a short visit.”
“No thank you. I know too well what it would be like. The looks from behind the curtains in the windows. The starin’ and whisperin’ after mass on a Sunday morning.”
“So what are your plans for the future?”
“To save enough money to retire, buy a little business—a boutique maybe—and have Fergus back to bring him up myself.”
“Retire from what, Bernadette?”
“I’m in the entertainment business,” she said vaguely. She glanced at her wristwatch. “I must go soon.”
“First, give me your address.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have one. I travel about a lot in my work.”
“I suppose Girls Unlimited would forward a letter?”
She paled under her makeup. “How do you know about that?” Then the penny dropped. “You shouldn’t read other people’s private prayers,” she said indignantly. “Or what’s written on the other side of them.”