by David Lodge
Vic has eaten his two slices of toast and is on his third cup of tea and his first cigarette of the day when Marjorie shuffles into the kitchen in her dressing-gown and slippers, a scarf over her curlers, her pale round face puffy with sleep. She carries the Daily Mail, which has just been delivered.
“Smoking,” she says, in a tone at once resigned and reproachful, condensing into a single word an argument well-known to both of them. Vic grunts, the distillation of an equally familiar rejoinder. He glances at the kitchen clock.
“Shouldn’t Sandra and Gary be getting up? I won’t waste my breath on Raymond.”
“Gary doesn’t have school today. The teachers are on strike.”
“What?” he says accusingly, his anger at the teachers somehow getting displaced onto Marjorie.
“Industrial action, or whatever they call it. He brought a note home on Friday.”
“Industrial inaction, you mean. You don’t see teachers out on the picket line, in the cold and the rain, have you noticed? They’re just sitting around in their warm staff rooms, chewing the fat, while the kids are sent home to get into mischief. That’s not action. It’s not an industry, either, come to that. It’s a profession and it’s about time they started to act like professionals.”
“Well…” says Marjorie placatingly.
“What about Sandra? Is the Sixth Form College taking ‘industrial action’ too?”
“No, I’m taking her to the doctor’s.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
Marjorie yawns evasively. “Oh, nothing serious.”
“Why can’t she go on her own? A girl of seventeen should be able to go to the doctor’s without someone to hold her hand.”
“I don’t go in with her, not unless she wants me to. I just wait with her.”
Vic regards his wife suspiciously. “You’re not going shopping with her afterwards?”
Marjorie blushes. “Well, she needs a new pair of shoes…”
“You’re a fool, Marje!” Vic exclaims. “You spoil that girl something rotten. All she thinks about is clothes, shoes, hairstyles. What kind of A-Levels do you think she’s going to get?”
“I don’t know. But if she doesn’t want to go to University…”
“What does she want to do, then? What’s the latest?”
“She’s thinking of hairdressing.”
“Hairdressing!” Vic puts as much contempt into his voice as he can muster.
“Anyway, she’s a pretty girl, why shouldn’t she enjoy clothes and so on, while she’s young?”
“Why shouldn’t you enjoy dressing her up, you mean. You know you treat her like a doll, Marje, don’t you?”
Rather than answer this question, Marjorie reverts to an earlier one. “She’s been having trouble with her periods, if you must know,” she says, imputing a prurient inquisitiveness to Vic, although she is well aware that such gynaecological disclosures are the last thing he wants, especially at this hour of the morning. The pathology of women’s bodies is a source of great mystery and unease to Vic. Their bleedings and leakages, their lumps and growths, their peculiarly painful-sounding surgical operations—scraping of wombs, stripping of veins, amputation of breasts—the mere mention of such things makes him wince and cringe, and lately the menopause has added new items to the repertory: the hot flush, flooding, and something sinister called a bloat. “I expect he’ll put her on the pill,” says Marjorie, making herself a fresh pot of tea.
“What?”
“To regulate her periods. I expect Dr. Roberts will put Sandra on the pill.”
Vic grunts again, but this time his intonation is ambiguous and uncertain. He has a feeling that his womenfolk are up to something. Could the real purpose of Sandra’s visit to the doctor’s be to fix her up with contraception? With Marjorie’s approval? He knows he doesn’t approve himself. Sandra having sex? At seventeen? With whom? Not that spotty youth in the army surplus overcoat, what’s his name, Cliff, not him for God’s sake. Not with anyone. An image of his daughter in the act of love, her white knees parted, a dark shape above her, flashes unbidden into his head and fills him with rage and disgust.
He is conscious of Marjorie’s watery blue eyes scanning him speculatively over the rim of her teacup, inviting further discussion of Sandra, but he can’t face it, not this morning, not with a day’s work ahead of him. Not at any time, to be honest. Discussion of Sandra’s sex-life could easily stray into the area of his and Marjorie’s sex-life, or rather the lack of it, and he would rather not go into that. Let sleeping dogs lie. Vic compares the kitchen clock with his watch and rises from the table.
“Shall I do you a bit of bacon?” says Marjorie.
“No, I’ve finished.”
“You ought to have a cooked breakfast, these cold mornings.”
“I haven’t time.”
“Why don’t we get a microwave? I could cook you a bit of bacon in seconds with a microwave.”
“Did you know,” says Vic, “that ninety-six per cent of the world’s microwave ovens are made in Japan, Taiwan or Korea?”
“Everybody we know has got one,” says Marjorie.
“Exactly,” says Vic.
Marjorie looks unhappily at Vic, uncertain of his drift. “I thought I might price some this morning,” she says. “After Sandra’s shoes.”
“Where would you put it?” Vic enquires, looking round at the kitchen surfaces already cluttered with numerous electrical appliances—toaster, kettle, coffee-maker, food-processor, electric wok, chip-fryer, waffle-maker…
“I thought we could put the electric wok away. We never use it. A microwave would be more useful.”
“Well, all right, price them but don’t buy. I can get one cheaper through the trade.”
Marjorie brightens. She smiles, and two dimples appear in her pasty cheeks, still shiny from last night’s application of face cream. It was her dimples that first attracted Vic to Marjorie twenty-five years ago, when she worked in the typing pool at Vanguard. These days they appear infrequently, but the prospect of a shopping expedition is one of the few things that are guaranteed to bring them out.
“Just don’t expect me to eat anything cooked in it,” he says.
Marjorie’s dimples fade abruptly, like the sun going behind a cloud.
“Why not?”
“It’s not proper cooking, is it? My mother would turn in her grave.”
Vic takes the Daily Mail with him to the lavatory, the one at the back of the house, next to the tradesmen’s entrance, with a plain white suite, intended for the use of charladies, gardeners and workmen. By tacit agreement, Vic customarily moves his bowels in here, while Marjorie uses the guest cloakroom off the front hall, so that the atmosphere of the en suite bathroom remains unpolluted.
Vic smokes a second cigarette as he sits at stool, and scans the Daily Mail. Westland and Heseltine are still making the headlines. STOP THE NO. 10 WHISPERS. MAGGIE’S BID TO COOL OFF BATTLE. He flicks through the inside pages. MURDOCH FACING UNION CLASH. THE IMAM’S CALL TO PRAYER MAKES THE VICAR TALK OF BEDLAM. HEARTACHE AHEAD FOR THE BRIDE WHO MARRIED TWICE. WE’RE IN THE SUPER-LEAGUE OF NATIONS. Hang about.
Britain is back in the Super-League of top industrial nations, it is claimed today. Only Germany, Holland, Japan and Switzerland can now match us for economic growth, price stability and strong balance of payments, says Dr. David Lomax, the Natwest’s economic adviser.
“Match” presumably means “beat.” And since when was Holland an industrial superpower? Even so, it must be all balls, a mirage massaged from statistics. You only have to drive through the West Midlands to see that if we are in the Super-League of top industrial nations, somebody must be moving the goalposts. Vic is all in favour of backing Britain, but there are times when the Mail’s windy chauvinism gets on his tits. He takes a drag on his cigarette and taps the ash between his legs, hearing a faint hiss as it hits the water. 100 M.P.G. FAMILY CAR LOOKING GOOD IN TESTS.
Trials have been started by British Leyland of their re
volutionary lightweight aluminium engine for a world-beating family car capable of 100 miles per gallon.
When was the last time we were supposed to have a world-beating aluminium engine? The Hillman Imp, right? Where are they now, the Hillman Imps of yesteryear? In the scrapyards, every one, or nearly. And the Linwood plant a graveyard, grass growing between the assembly lines, corrugated-iron roofs flapping in the wind. A car that nobody wanted to buy, built on a site chosen for political not commercial reasons, hundreds of miles from its component suppliers. He turns to the City Pages. HOW TO GET UP A HEAD OF ESTEEM.
What has been designated Industry Year has got off to a predictably silly start. Various bodies in Manufacturing Industry are working themselves into one of their regular lathers about the supposed low social esteem bestowed upon engineers and engineering.
Vic reads this article with mixed feelings. Industry Year is certainly a lot of balls. On the other hand, the idea that society undervalues its engineers is not.
It is 7:40 when Vic emerges from the lavatory. The tempo of his actions begins to accelerate. He strides through the kitchen, where Marjorie is listlessly loading his soiled breakfast things into the dishwasher, and runs up the stairs. Back in the en suite bathroom, he briskly cleans his teeth and brushes his hair. He goes into the bedroom and puts on a clean white shirt and a suit. He has six business suits, which he wears in daily rotation. He used to think five was enough, but acquired an additional one after Raymond wisecracked, “If that’s the charcoal grey worsted, it must be Tuesday.” Today it is the turn of the navy blue pinstripe. He selects a tie diagonally striped in dark tones of red, blue and grey. He levers his feet into a pair of highly polished black calf Oxfords. A frayed lace snaps under too vigorous a tug, and he curses. He rummages in the back of his wardrobe for an old black shoe with a suitable lace and uncovers a cardboard box containing a brand-new clock radio, made in Hong Kong, sealed in a transparent plastic envelope and nestling in a polystyrene mould. Vic sighs and grimaces. Such discoveries are not uncommon at this time of year. Marjorie has a habit of buying Christmas presents early, hiding them away like a squirrel, and then forgetting all about them.
When he comes downstairs again, she is hovering in the hall.
“Who was the clock radio for, then?”
“What?”
“I found a brand-new clock radio at the back of the wardrobe.”
Marjorie covers her mouth with her hand. “Sst! I knew I’d got something for your Dad.”
“Didn’t we give him a Christmas present, then?”
“Of course we did. You remember, you rushed out on Christmas Eve and got him that electric blanket… Never mind, it will do for next year.”
“Hasn’t he already got a clock radio? Didn’t we give him one a few years ago?”
“Did we?” says Marjorie vaguely. “Perhaps one of the boys would like it, then.”
“What they need is a clock with a bomb attached to it, not a radio,” says Vic, patting his pockets, checking for wallet, diary, keyring, calculator, cigarettes and lighter.
Marjorie helps him on with his camelhair overcoat, a garment she persuaded him to buy against his better judgment, for it hangs well below his knees and, he thinks, accentuates his short stature, as well as making him look like a prosperous bookie. “When will you be home?” she enquires.
“I don’t know. You’d better keep my dinner warm.”
“Don’t be too late.”
She closes her eyes and tilts her face towards him. He brushes her lips with his, then jerks his head in the direction of the first floor. “Get that idle shower out of bed.”
“They need sleep when they’re growing, Vic.”
“Raymond’s not growing, for Christ’s sake. He stopped growing years ago, unless he’s growing a beer belly, which wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Well, Gary’s still growing.”
“Make sure he does some homework today.”
“Yes, dear.”
Vic is quite sure she has no intention of carrying out his instructions. If she hadn’t arranged to take Sandra to the doctor’s Marjorie would probably go back to bed herself, now, with a cup of tea and the Daily Mail. A few weeks before, he’d returned home soon after getting to work because he’d left some important papers behind, and found the house totally silent, all three children and their mother sound asleep at 9:30 in the morning. No wonder the country is going to the dogs.
Vic passes through the glazed porch and out into the open air. The cold wind ruffles his hair and makes him flinch for a moment, but it is refreshing after the stale warmth of the house, and he takes a deep breath or two on his way to the garage. As he approaches the garage door it swings open as if by magic—in fact by electricity, activated by a remote-control device in Vic’s pocket—a feat that never fails to give him a deep, childlike pleasure. Inside, the gleaming dark blue Jaguar V12, Registration Number VIC 100, waits beside Marjorie’s silver Metro. He backs the car out, shutting the garage door with another touch on the remote control. Marjorie has now appeared at the lounge window, clutching her dressing-gown across her bosom with one hand and waving timidly with the other. Vic smiles conciliatingly, puts the automatic gear lever into Drive, and glides away.
Now begins the best half-hour of the day, the drive to work. In fact it is not quite half-an-hour—the journey usually takes twenty-four minutes, but Vic wishes it were longer. It is an interval of peace between the irritations of home and the anxieties of work, a time of pure sensation, total control, effortless superiority. For the Jaguar is superior to every other car on the road, Vic is convinced of that. When Midland Amalgamated headhunted him for the MD’s job at Pringle’s they offered him a Rover 3500 Vanden Plas, but Vic stuck out for the Jaguar, a car normally reserved for divisional chairmen, and to his great satisfaction he had got one, even though it wasn’t quite new. It had to be a British car, of course, since Pringle’s did so much business with the local automotive industry—not that Vic has ever driven a foreign car: foreign cars are anathema to him, their sudden invasion of British roads in the 1970s marked the beginning of the region’s economic ruin in his view—but he has to admit that you don’t have a lot of choice in British cars when it comes to matching the top-of-the-range Mercedes and BMWs. In fact the Jag is just about the only one that can really wipe the smiles off their drivers’ faces, unless you’re talking Rolls-Royce or Bentley.
He pauses at the T-junction where Avondale Road meets Barton Road, on which the rush-hour traffic is already beginning to thicken. The driver of a Ford Transit van, though he has priority, hangs back respectfully to let Vic filter left. Vic nods his thanks, turns left, then right again, picking his way through the broad, tree-lined residential streets with practised ease. He is skirting the University, whose tall redbrick clock-tower is occasionally visible above trees and rooftops. Though he lives on its doorstep, so to speak, Vic has never been inside the place. He knows it chiefly as a source of seasonal traffic jams about which Marjorie sometimes complains (the University day begins too late and finishes too early to inconvenience Vic himself) and of distractingly pretty girls about whose safety he worries, seeing them walking to and fro between their halls of residence and the Students’ Union in the evenings. With its massive architecture and landscaped grounds, guarded at every entrance by watchful security staff, the University seems to Vic rather like a small city-state, an academic Vatican, from which he keeps his distance, both intimidated by and disapproving of its air of privileged detachment from the vulgar, bustling industrial city in which it is embedded. His own alma mater, situated a few miles away, was a very different kind of institution, a dingy tower block, crammed with machinery and lab benches, overlooking a railway marshalling yard and a roundabout on the inner ring road. In his day a College of Advanced Technology, it has since grown in size and been raised to the status of a university, but without putting on any airs and graces. And quite right too. If you make college too comfortable nobody will ever want to leave it t
o do proper work.
Vic leaves the residential area around the University and filters into the traffic moving sluggishly along the London Road in the direction of the City Centre. This is the slowest part of his morning journey, but the Jaguar, whispering along in automatic, takes the strain. Vic selects a cassette and slots it into the four-speaker stereo system. The voice of Carly Simon fills the interior of the car. Vic’s taste in music is narrow but keen. He favours female vocalists, slow tempos, lush arrangements of tuneful melodies in the jazz-soul idiom. Carly Simon, Dusty Springfield, Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Randy Crawford and, more recently, Sade and Jennifer Rush. The subtle inflexions of these voices, honeyed or slightly hoarse, moaning and whispering of women’s love, its joys and disappointments, soothe his nerves and relax his limbs. He would of course never dream of playing these tapes on the music centre at home, risking the derision of his children. It is a very private pleasure, a kind of musical masturbation, all part of the ritual of the drive to work. He would enjoy it more, though, if he were not obliged to read at the same time, in the rear windows of other cars, crude reminders of a more basic sexuality. YOUNG FARMERS DO IT IN THEIR WELLIES. WATER SKIERS DO IT STANDING UP. HOOT IF YOU HAD IT LAST NIGHT. It, it, it. Vic’s knuckles are white as he grips the steering wheel. Why should decent people have to put up with this crap? There ought to be a law.
Now Vic has reached the last traffic lights before the system of tunnels and flyovers that will conduct him without further interruption through the centre of the city. A red Toyota Celica draws up beside him, then inches forward as its driver rides his clutch, evidently intending a quick getaway. The lights turn to amber and the Toyota darts forward, revealing, wouldn’t you know it, a legend in its rear window, HANG GLIDERS DO IT IN MID AIR. Vic waits law-abidingly for the green light, then presses the accelerator hard. The Jaguar surges forward, catches the Toyota in two seconds, and sweeps effortlessly past—Carly Simon, by happy coincidence, hitting a thrilling crescendo at the very same moment. Vic glances in his rear-view mirror and smiles thinly. Teach him to buy a Jap car.