by David Lodge
On the last day of the year, Persse McGarrigle flew into Heathrow on a British Airways jumbo jet. Having only hand-baggage with him, his scuffed and shabby canvas grip, he was one of the first of the passengers to pass through customs and passport control. He went straight to the nearest British Airways Information desk. The girl sitting behind it was not Cheryl. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”
“You can indeed,” he said. “I’m looking for a girl called Cheryl. Cheryl Summerbee. She works for British Airways. Can you tell me where I can find her?”
“We’re not supposed to answer that sort of question,” said the girl.
“Please,” said Persse. “It’s important.” He put all a lover’s urgency into his voice.
The girl sighed. “Well, I’ll see what I can do,” she said. She pushed the buttons on her telephone and waited silently for an answer. “Oh, hallo Frank,” she said at length. “Is Cheryl Summerbee on shift this morning? Eh? What? No, I didn’t. Oh. You don’t? I see. All right, then. No, nothing. ’Bye.” She put the phone down and looked at Persse, curiously and with a certain compassion. “Apparently she got the sack yesterday,” she said.
“What!” Persse exclaimed. “Whatever for?”
The girl shrugged. “Apparently she tried to get her own back on some bolshie passenger by marking his boarding card ‘S,’ for suspected smuggler. The Excise boys did him over and he complained.”
“Where is she, then? How can I find out her address?”
“Frank said she’s gone abroad.”
“Abroad?”
“She said she was fed up with the job anyway and this was her chance to travel. She’d been saving up, apparently. That’s what Frank said.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No,” said the girl. “She didn’t. Can I help you, madam?” She turned aside to help another enquirer.
Persse walked slowly away from the Information desk and stood in front of the huge Departures flutterboard, with his hands in his pockets and his bag at his feet. New York, Ottawa, Johannesburg, Cairo, Nairobi, Moscow, Bangkok, Wellington, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Baghdad, Calcutta, Sidney… The day’s destinations filled four columns. Every few minutes the board twitched into life, and the names flickered and chattered and tumbled and rotated before his eyes, like the components of some complicated mechanical game of chance, a gigantic geographical fruit machine, until they came to rest once more. On to the surface of the board, as on to a cinema screen, he projected his memory of Cheryl’s face and figure—the blonde, shoulder-length hair, the high-stepping gait, the starry, unfocused look of her blue eyes—and he wondered where in all the small, narrow world he should begin to look for her.
NICE WORK
To Andy and Marie, in friendship and gratitude
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Perhaps I should explain, for the benefit of readers who have not been here before, that Rummidge is an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary factories, inhabited by imaginary people, which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world.
I am deeply grateful to several executives in industry, and to one in particular, who showed me around their factories and offices, and patiently answered my often naive questions, while this novel was in preparation.
Upon the midlands now the industrious muse doth fall, The shires which we the heart of England well may call.
DRAYTON: Poly-Olbion
(EPIGRAPH TO Felix Holt the Radical, BY GEORGE ELIOT)
“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, and fed by different food, and ordered by different manners…”
“You speak of—” said Egremont hesitatingly.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI: Sybil; or, the Two Nations
PART I
If you think… that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you were never more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations, reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË: PRELUDE TO Shirley
1
Monday January 13th, 1986. Victor Wilcox lies awake, in the dark bedroom, waiting for his quartz alarm clock to bleep. It is set to do this at 6:45. How long he has to wait he doesn’t know. He could easily find out by groping for the clock, lifting it to his line of vision, and pressing the button that illuminates the digital display. But he would rather not know. Supposing it is only six o’clock? Or even five? It could be five. Whatever it is, he won’t be able to get to sleep again. This has become a regular occurrence lately: lying awake in the dark, waiting for the alarm to bleep, worrying.
Worries streak towards him like enemy spaceships in one of Gary’s video games. He flinches, dodges, zaps them with instant solutions, but the assault is endless: the Avco account, the Rawlinson account, the price of pig-iron, the value of the pound, the competition from Foundrax, the incompetence of his Marketing Director, the persistent breakdowns of the core blowers, the vandalising of the toilets in the fettling shop, the pressure from his divisional boss, last month’s accounts, the quarterly forecast, the annual review…
In an effort to escape this bombardment, perhaps even to doze awhile, he twists onto his side, burrows into the warm plump body of his wife, and throws and arm round her waist. Startled, but still asleep, drugged with Valium, Marjorie swivels to face him. Their noses and foreheads bump against each other; there is a sudden flurry of limbs, an absurd pantomime struggle. Marjorie puts up her fists like a pugilist, groans and pushes him away. An object slides off the bed on her side and falls to the floor with a thump. Vic knows what it is: a book entitled Enjoy Your Menopause, which one of Marjorie’s friends at the Weight Watchers’ club has lent her, and which she has been reading in bed, without much show of conviction, and falling asleep over, for the past week or two. On retiring to bed Vic’s last action is normally to detach a book from Marjorie’s nerveless fingers, tuck her arms under the covers and turn out her bedside lamp, but he must have neglected the first of these chores last night, or perhaps Enjoy Your Menopause was concealed under the coverlet.
He rolls away from Marjorie, who, now lying on her back, begins to snore faintly. He envies her that deep unconsciousness, but cannot afford to join her in it. Once, desperate for a full night’s sleep, he had accepted her offer of a Valium, sluicing it down with his usual nightcap, and moved about the next morning like a diver walking on the seabed. He made a mistake of two percentage points in a price for steering-boxes for British Leyland before his head cleared. You shouldn’t have mixed it with whisky, Marjorie said. You don’t need both. Then I’ll stick to whisky, he said. The Valium lasts longer, she said. Too bloody long, if you ask me, he said. I lost the firm five thousand pounds this morning, thanks to you. Oh, it’s my fault, is it? she said, and her lower lip began to tremble. Then to stop her crying, anything to stop that, he had to buy her the set of antique-look brass fire-irons she had set her heart on for the lounge, to give an extra touch of authenticity to the rustic stone fireplace and the imitation-log gas fire.
Marjorie’s snores become louder. Vic gives her a rude, exasperated shove. The snoring stops but, surprisingly, she does not wake. In other rooms his three children are also asleep. Outside, a winter gale blusters against the sides of the house and swishes the branches of trees to and fro. He feels like the captain of a sleeping ship, alone at the helm, steering his oblivious crew through dangerous seas. He feels as if he is the only man awake in the entire world.
The alarm clock cheeps.
Instantly, by some perverse
chemistry of his body or nervous system, he feels tired and drowsy, reluctant to leave the warm bed. He presses the Snooze button on the clock with a practised finger and falls effortlessly asleep. Five minutes later, the alarm wakes him again, cheeping insistently like a mechanical bird. Vic sighs, hits the Off button on the clock, switches on his bedside lamp (its dimmer control turned low for Marjorie’s sake) gets out of bed and paddles through the deep pile of the bedroom carpet to the en suite bathroom, making sure the connecting door is closed before he turns on the light inside.
Vic pees, a task requiring considerable care and accuracy since the toilet bowl is low-slung and tapered in shape. He does not greatly care for the dark purplish bathroom suite (“Damson,” the estate agent’s brochure had called the shade) but it had been one of the things that attracted Marjorie when they bought the house two years ago—the bathroom, with its kidney-shaped handbasin and gold-plated taps and sunken bath and streamlined loo and bidet. And, above all, the fact that it was “en suite.” I’ve always wanted an en suite bathroom, she would say to visitors, to her friends on the phone, to, he wouldn’t be surprised, tradesmen on the doorstep or strangers she accosted in the street. You would think “en suite” was the most beautiful phrase in any language, the lengths Marjorie went to introduce it into her conversation. If they made a perfume called En Suite, she would wear it.
Vic shakes the last drops from his penis, taking care not to sprinkle the shaggy pink nylon fitted carpet, and flushes the toilet. The house has four toilets, a cause of concern to Vic’s father. FOUR toilets? he said, when first shown over the house. Did I count right? What’s the matter, Dad? Vic teased. Afraid the water table will go down if we flush them all at once? No, but what if they start metering water, eh? Then you’ll be in trouble. Vic tried to argue that it didn’t make any difference how many toilets you had, it was the number of times you flushed them that mattered, but his father was convinced that having so many toilets was an incitement to unnecessary peeing, therefore to excessive flushing.
He could be right, at that. At Gran’s house, a back-to-back in Easton with an outside toilet, you didn’t go unless you really had to, especially in the winter. Their own house in those days, a step up the social ladder from Gran’s, had its own indoor toilet, a dark narrow room off the half-landing that always niffed a bit, however much Sanilav and Dettol his mother poured into the bowl. He remembered vividly that yellowish ceramic bowl with the trademark “Challenger,” the big varnished wooden seat that was always pleasantly warm to the bum, and a long chain dangling from the high cistern with a sponge-rubber ball, slightly perished, on the end of it. He used to practise heading, flicking the ball from wall to wall, as he sat there, a constipated schoolboy. His mother complained of the marks on the distemper. Now he is the proud owner of four toilets—damson, avocado, sunflower and white, all centrally heated. Probably as good an index of success as any.
He steps onto the bathroom scales. Ten stone two ounces. Quite enough for a man only five feet five and a half inches tall. Some say—Vic has overheard them saying it—that he tries to compensate for his short stature by his aggressive manner. Well, let them. If it wasn’t for a bit of aggression, he wouldn’t be where he is now. Though how long he will stay there is far from certain. Vic frowns in the mirror above the handbasin, thinking again of last month’s accounts, the quarterly forecast, the annual review… He runs hot water into the dark purple bowl, lathers his face with shaving foam from an aerosol can, and begins to scrape his jaw with a safety razor, using a Wilkinson’s Sword blade. Vic believes fervently in buying British, and has frequent rows with his eldest son, Raymond, who favours a disposable plastic razor manufactured in France. Not that this is the only bone of contention between them, no, not by a long chalk. The principal constraint on the number of their disagreements is, indeed, the comparative rarity of their encounters, Raymond invariably being asleep when Vic leaves for work and out when he returns home.
Vic wipes the tidemark of foam from his cheeks and fingers the shaven flesh appraisingly. Dark brown eyes stare back at him. Who am I?
He grips the washbasin, leans forward on locked arms, and scans the square face, pale under a forelock of lank brown hair, flecked with grey, the two vertical furrows in the brow like a clip holding the blunt nose in place, the straight-ruled line of the mouth, the squared-off jaw. You know who you are: it’s all on file at Division.
Wilcox: Victor Eugene. Date of Birth: 19 Oct. 1940. Place of Birth: Easton, Rummidge, England. Education: Endwell Road Primary School, Easton; Easton Grammar School for Boys; Rummidge College of Advanced Technology. MI Mech. Eng. 1964. Marital Status: married (to Marjorie Florence Coleman, 1964). Children: Raymond (b. 1966), Sandra (b. 1969), Gary (b. 1972). Career: 1962–64, apprentice, Vanguard Engineering; 1964–66, Junior Production Engineer, Vanguard Engineering; 1966–70, Senior Engineer, Vanguard Engineering; 1970–74 Production Manager, Vanguard Engineering; 1974–78, Manufacturing Manager, Lewis & Arbuckle Ltd; 1978–80, Manufacturing Director, Rumcol Castings; 1980–85, Managing Director, Rumcol Castings. Present Position: Managing Director, J. Pringle & Sons Casting & General Engineering.
That’s who I am.
Vic grimaces at his own reflection, as if to say: come off it, no identity crises, please. Somebody has to earn a living in this family.
He shrugs on his dressing-gown, which hangs from a hook on the bathroom door, switches off the light, and softly re-enters the dimly lit bedroom. Marjorie has, however, been woken by the sound of plumbing.
“Is that you?” she says drowsily; then, without waiting for an answer, “I’ll be down in a minute.”
“Don’t hurry,” says Vic. Don’t bother would be more honest, for he prefers to have the kitchen to himself in the early morning, to prepare his own simple breakfast and enjoy the first cigarette of the day undisturbed. Marjorie, however, feels that she must put in an appearance downstairs, however token, before he leaves for work, and there is a sense in which Vic understands and approves of this gesture. His own mother was always first up in the mornings, to see husband and son off to work or college, and continued the habit almost till the day she died.
As Vic descends the stairs, a high-pitched electronic squeal rises from below. The pressure of his foot on a wired pad under the staircarpet has triggered the burglar alarm, which Raymond, amazingly, must have remembered to set after coming in at God knows what hour last night. Vic goes to the console beside the front door and punches in the numerical code that disarms the apparatus. He has fifteen seconds to do this, before the squeal turns into a screech and the alarm bell on the outside wall starts yammering. All the houses in the neighbourhood have these alarms, and Vic admits that they are necessary, with burglaries increasing in frequency and boldness all the time, but the system they inherited from the previous owners of the house, with its magnetic contacts, infra-red scanners, pressure pads and panic buttons, is in his opinion over-elaborate. It takes about five minutes to set it up before you retire to bed, and if you come back downstairs for something you have to cancel it and start all over again. The sufferings of the rich, Raymond sneered when Vic was complaining of this one day—Raymond, who despises his parents’ affluence while continuing to enjoy its comforts and conveniences, such as rent-free centrally heated accommodation, constant hot water, free laundry service, use of mother’s car, use of TV, video recorder, stereo system, etcetera etcetera. Vic feels his blood pressure rising at the thought of his eldest son, who dropped out of university four months ago and has not been usefully occupied since, now swaddled in a duvet upstairs, naked except for a single gold earring, sleeping off last night’s booze. Vic shakes his head irritably to rid his mind of the image.
He opens the inner front door that leads to the enclosed porch and glances at the doormat. Empty. The newspaper boy is late, or perhaps there is no paper today because of a strike. An infra-red scanner winks its inflamed eye at him as he goes into the lounge in search of reading matter. The floor and furniture are
littered with the dismembered carcasses of the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times. He picks up the Business Section of the Times and takes it into the kitchen. While the kettle is boiling he scans the front page. A headline catches his eye: “LAWSON COUNTS THE COST AS TAX HOPES FADE.”
Nigel Lawson, the Chancellor, is this weekend closeted with his Treasury team assessing the danger to his economic strategy from last week’s rise in interest rates, and the sharp rise in unemployment.
So what else is new?
The kettle boils. Vic makes a pot of strong tea, puts two slices of white bread in the toaster, and opens the louvres of the venetian blinds on the kitchen window to peer into the garden. A grey, blustery morning, with no frost. Squirrels bound across the lawn like balls of fluff blown by the wind. Magpies strut from flowerbed to flowerbed, greedily devouring the grubs that he turned up in yesterday’s gardening. Blackbirds, sparrows, robins, and other birds whose names Vic doesn’t know, skip and hop about at a discreet distance from the magpies. All these creatures seem very much at home in Vic’s garden, although it is only two miles from the city centre. One morning not long ago he saw a fox walking past this same window. Vic tapped on the pane. The fox stopped and turned his head to look at Vic for a moment, as if to say, Yes? and then proceeded calmly on his way, his brush swaying in the air behind him. It is Vic’s impression that English wildlife is getting streetwise, moving from the country into the city where the living is easier—where there are no traps, pesticides, hunters and sportsmen, but plenty of well-stocked garbage bins, and housewives like Marjorie, softhearted or softheaded enough to throw their scraps into the garden, creating animal soup-kitchens. Nature is joining the human race and going on the dole.