by David Lodge
“What letter is that?” Robyn asked.
“The UGC is going to announce, probably some time in May, the distribution of the available funds to each university, based on an assessment of their research record and the viability of their departments. There are rumours that one or two universities will be closed down completely.”
“They wouldn’t dare!” Robyn exclaimed.
“This Government is capable of anything,” said Professor Penrose, who was a member of the SDP. “They are systematically destroying the finest university system in the world. Whatever happened to the spirit of the Robbins Report? Higher education for everyone who could benefit. Did I ever tell you,” he said, smiling reminiscently at his daughter, “that someone once asked me if we called you Robyn after the Robbins report?”
“Many times, Daddy,” said Robyn. “Needless to say I deplore the cuts, but don’t you think, in retrospect, that the way Robbins was implemented was a mistake?”
Professor Penrose laid down his knife and fork and looked at Robyn over his spectacles. “What do you mean?”
“Well, was it a good idea to build so many new universities in parks on the outskirts of cathedral cities and county towns?”
“But why shouldn’t universities be in nice places rather than nasty ones?” said Mrs. Penrose plaintively.
“Because it perpetuates the Oxbridge idea of higher education as a version of pastoral, a privileged idyll cut off from ordinary living.”
“Nonsense,” said Professor Penrose. “The new universities were carefully sited in places that, for one reason or another, had been left out of the development of higher education.”
“That would make sense if they served their own communities, but they don’t. Every autumn there’s this absurd migration of well-heeled youth going from Norwich to Brighton or from Brighton to York. And having to be accommodated in expensive halls of residence when they get there.”
“You seem to have acquired a very utilitarian view of universities, from your sojourn in Rummidge,” said Professor Penrose, who was one of the very few people Robyn knew who used the word sojourn in casual conversation. Robyn made no answer. She was well aware that she had adopted some of the arguments of Vic Wilcox, but she had no intention of mentioning him to her parents.
When they were washing up, Mrs. Penrose asked Robyn if she would like to invite Charles down for the weekend.
“We’re not seeing each other at the moment,” she said.
“Oh dear, is it off again?”
“Is what off?”
“You know what I mean, dear.”
“There was never anything ‘on,’ Mummy, if you mean, as I presume, getting married.”
“I don’t understand you young people,” Mrs. Penrose sighed unhappily. “Charles is such a nice young man, and you have such a lot in common.”
“Perhaps too much,” said Robyn.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Robyn, who had spoken without premeditation. “It’s just a bit boring when you agree about everything.”
“Basil brought a most unsuitable girl down here,” said Mrs. Penrose. “I do hope he doesn’t intend to marry her.”
“Debbie? When was that?”
“Oh, some time in February. You’ve met her, then?”
“Yes. I believe it’s all off, as you would say.”
“Oh, good, she was a frightfully common little thing, I thought.” Robyn smiled secretly.
…
Basil himself confirmed Robyn’s speculation when he came home for the Easter weekend. He was loudly pleased with himself, having just moved to a new job with a Japanese bank in the City at a greatly increased salary. “No, I’m not seeing Debbie any more,” he said, “socially or professionally. Is Charles?”
“I don’t know,” said Robyn. “I’m incommunicado at the moment, trying to finish my book.”
“What book is that?”
“It’s on the image of women in nineteenth-century fiction.”
“Does the world really need another book on nineteenth-century fiction?” said Basil.
“I don’t know, but it’s going to get one,” said Robyn. “It’s my chief hope of getting a permanent job somewhere.”
When Basil went back to London on Easter Monday evening, peace and quiet returned to the house, and Robyn resumed work on her book. She made excellent progress. It was a house that respected scholarship. No radios played. The telephone bell was muted. The cleaning lady’s vacuuming was strictly controlled. Professor Penrose worked in his study and Robyn worked in her bedroom, and Mrs. Penrose padded quietly to and fro between the two of them, bringing coffee and tea at appropriate intervals, silently setting the fresh cups down on their desks, and removing the soiled ones. To minimise distraction, Robyn denied herself her daily fix of the Guardian, and only the occasional late news on television brought her tidings of events in the great world: the American raid on Libya, riots in British prisons, violent confrontations between striking printers and police at Wapping. These public outrages and conflicts, which would normally have stirred her to indignation and perhaps action (signing a petition, joining a demonstration), hardly penetrated her absorbed concentration on the book. By the end of the vacation, it was three-quarters written in draft.
She drove back to Rummidge in buoyant mood. She felt pleased with what she had written, though she hankered for confirmation from some other person, some kindred spirit, some knowledgeable but sympathetic reader, someone like Charles. They had always relied on each other for such help. It was a pity, in the circumstances, that they were not seeing each other any more. Of course, nothing decisive or final had been said. There was no reason why she shouldn’t ring him up when she got home, and ask if he would read her draft, no reason at all. It would not even be necessary to meet, though obviously it would be more convenient if he could come over for a weekend and read the manuscript there and then. Robyn decided she would phone Charles that evening.
When she got back to her house in Rummidge, there was a letter from Charles on the doormat, along with nine from Vic Wilcox which she threw straight into the waste-bin. She opened Charles’ letter, which was quite bulky, at once, and read it standing in the kitchen with her outdoor coat still on. Then she took off her coat and made a cup of tea and sat down and read it again.
…
My dear Robyn,
I’ve tried to phone you several times without success, and the Secretary of your Department refuses for some reason to admit that she knows where you are, so I am writing to you—which is probably the best thing to do, anyway, in the circumstances. The telephone is an unsatisfactory medium for communicating anything important, allowing neither the genuine absence of writing nor the true presence of face-to-face conversation, but only a feeble compromise. A thesis topic there, perhaps? “Telephonic communication and affective alienation in modern fiction, with special reference to Evelyn Waugh, Ford Madox Ford, Henry Green…”
But I’ve finished with thesis topics. What I have to tell you is that I have determined upon a change of career. I’m going to become a merchant banker.
“Have you done laughing?” as Alton Locke says to his readers. I am of course rather old to be making such a change, but I feel quite confident that I can make a success of it and I’m very excited by the challenge. I think it’s the first risky thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I feel a new man in consequence. I’ve got to undergo a period of training, of course, but even so I shall start at a higher salary than my present one, and after that, well, the sky’s the limit. It’s not just the money, though, that has led me to this decision, though I am rather fed up with the constant struggle to make ends meet, but a feeling that, as a university teacher, especially at a place like Suffolk, I’ve been left behind by the tide of history, stranded on the mudflats of an obsolete ideology.
You and I, Robyn, grew up in a period when the state was smart: state schools, state universities, state-subsidised arts, state welf
are, state medicine—these were things progressive, energetic people believed in. It isn’t like that any more. The Left pays lip-service to those things, but without convincing anybody, including themselves. The people who work in state institutions are depressed, demoralised, fatalistic. Witness the extraordinary meekness with which the academic establishment has accepted the cuts (has there been a single high-level resignation, as distinct from early retirements?). It’s no use blaming Thatcher, as if she was some kind of witch who has enchanted the nation. She is riding the Zeitgeist. When trade unions offer their members discount subscriptions to BUPA, the writing is on the wall for old-style socialism. What the new style will be, I don’t know, but I believe there is more chance of identifying it from the vantage-point of the City than from the University of Suffolk. The first thing that struck me about the City when I started observing Debbie at work was the sheer energy of the place, and the second was its democracy. A working-class girl like Debbie pulling down thirty-thousand-odd a year is by no means an anomalous figure. Contrary to the stereotype of the ex-public-school stockbroker, it doesn’t matter what your social background is in the City these days, as long as you’re good at your job. Money is a great leveller, upwards.
As to our universities, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are élitist where they should be egalitarian and egalitarian where they should be élitist. We admit only a tiny proportion of the age group as students and give them a very labour-intensive education (élitist), but we pretend that all universities and all university teachers are equal and must therefore have the same funding and a common payscale, with automatic tenure (egalitarian). This worked all right as long as the country was prepared to go on pumping more and more money into the system, but as soon as the money supply was reduced, universities could only balance their books by persuading people to retire early, often the very people they can least afford to lose. For those who remain the prospects are bleak: bigger classes, heavier work-loads, scant chances of promotion or of moving to a new job. You know as well as I do that, apart from the occasional chair, new appointments are always made, if they’re made at all, at the bottom of the scale. I reckon I would be stuck in Suffolk for another fifteen years, possibly for ever, if I stayed in academic life. I don’t think I could face that.
The opportunity to change direction came, curiously enough, from my developing these thoughts, or something like them, in the company of a big wheel in Debbie’s bank, at a party she took me to. I began rather fancifully to propose the idea of privatising the universities, as a solution to their financial crisis, and as a way of promoting healthy competition. Staff could buy shares in their own universities and have a financial stake in their success. I was only half serious, in fact I was half pissed, but the big wheel was rather impressed. We need men with bold ideas like that, he said, to spot new investment opportunities. That’s what started me thinking about a change of career. When I went to see the big wheel a few days later, he was very encouraging. He wants to set up a kind of strategic planning team within the bank, and the idea is that I will join it when I’ve acquired some basic experience in securities etc. I have to admit, in spite of the stuff about democracy above, that it helped that I was at Westminster, because his son is there. Also that I had Maths to A-Level.
But, you will ask, what about the ideas to which we have dedicated our lives for the last ten years, what about critical theory and all that? Well, I see no fundamental inconsistency. I regard myself as simply exchanging one semiotic system for another, the literary for the numerical, a game with high philosophical stakes for a game with high monetary stakes—but a game in each case, in which satisfaction comes ultimately from playing rather than winning, since there are no absolute winners, for the game never ends. Anyway, I have no intention of giving up reading. I don’t see why deconstruction shouldn’t be my hobby as other men have model railways or tropical fish as hobbies, and it will be easier to pursue without the anxiety of integrating it into one’s work.
To be honest, I have had my doubts for some time about the pedagogic application of poststructuralist theory, doubts that I’ve suppressed, as a priest, I imagine, suppresses his theological doubts, hiding them away one by one until one day there is no space left in which to hide them and he finally admits to himself and to the world that he has lost his faith. There was a moment when we were talking in your house a couple of months ago, and you were putting the case against teaching poststructuralism as a kind of Devil’s Advocate—do you remember? You wanted reassurance—your factory manager friend had got you rattled—so I told you what you wanted to hear, but it was a close thing. You were articulating so many of my own doubts that I nearly “came out” there and then.
Poststructuralist theory is a very intriguing philosophical game for very clever players. But the irony of teaching it to young people who have read almost nothing except their GCE set texts and Adrian Mole, who know almost nothing about the Bible or classical mythology, who cannot recognise an ill-formed sentence, or recite poetry with any sense of rhythm—the irony of teaching them about the arbitrariness of the signifier in week three of their first year becomes in the end too painful to bear…
So, I’ve resigned from Suffolk—taken severance, actually, they’re desperate to lose staff, so I have a nice lump sum of £30,000 which I confidently expect to enhance by at least 25 per cent in the equity market by the end of the year. I’m moving in with Debbie, so living expenses will be modest. I hope you and I can still be friends. I shall always think of you with the greatest admiration and affection. Good luck in the future—if anyone deserves a tenured university job, it’s you, Robyn.
Love, Charles
“You shit,” Robyn said aloud, when she had finished reading the letter. “You utter shit.” But the “utter” was a hyperbole. There were things in this letter which struck a nerve of reluctant assent, mixed up with things she found false and obnoxious. ’Twas all a muddle.
…
Meanwhile, Vic Wilcox was having a hard time, nursing his unrequited love. The weekdays were not so bad, when he could distract himself with work. He pushed on faster than ever with the rationalisation programme at Pringle’s, harried his managers mercilessly, chaired endless meetings, doubled the frequency of his surprise swoops on the shop floor. You could almost hear the effect of all this pressure when you pushed through the door into the machine shop: more decibels clashing to a brisker rhythm. In the foundry, they started clearing a space for the new core blower, and Vic made this the occasion for a full-scale good housekeeping campaign. Under his personal supervision, the debris of years was swept away.
But there was a limit to the number of hours even Vic could work. There were still too many left over—driving to and from work, at home in the evenings and at weekends, and, above all, lying awake in the early morning in the darkened bedroom—when he couldn’t keep his thoughts from Robyn Penrose and their night of love (for so he persisted in regarding it). There is no need to record these thoughts in detail. They were for the most part repetitive and predictable: a mixture of erotic fantasy and erotic reminiscence, wish-fulfilment and self-pity, accompanied by snatches of Jennifer Rush. But they made him more than usually silent and abstracted around the house. He was subject to fits of absent-mindedness. In the kitchen he washed up cups that had just been cleaned and dried. He would go to the garage for a tool and, when he got there, would have forgotten what he wanted it for. One morning he drove halfway to West Wallsbury, dimly registering that the traffic was unusually light, before he remembered that it was a Sunday morning and he was supposed to be picking up his father. One evening he went upstairs to change his trousers and proceeded mechanically to take off all his clothes and put on his pyjamas. It was only when he was about to get into bed that he snapped out of his reverie. Marjorie came into the room at this moment and stared at him. “What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m having an early night,” he improvised, turning back the bedclothes.
“B
ut it’s only half-past eight!”
“I’m tired.”
“You must be ill. Shall I call the doctor?”
“No, I’m just tired.” He got into bed and closed his eyes to shut out Marjorie’s worried frown.
“Vic, is there anything wrong?” she said. “Any trouble at work?”
“No,” he said. “Work is fine. The factory is on song. We’ll make a profit this month.”
“Well, what’s the matter then? You’re not yourself. You’ve not been yourself since you went to Germany. D’you think you caught a bug or something?”
“No,” said Vic. “I haven’t got a bug.” He had not told Marjorie that Robyn had accompanied him to Frankfurt.
“I’ll get you an aspirin.”
Vic heard her moving about the room, drawing the curtains, and telling Raymond to turn down his hi-fi because his father wasn’t feeling well. To save a lot of argument, he swallowed the aspirin and, shortly afterwards, fell asleep. At three in the morning he was wide awake. With hours to go before the alarm, he played blue movies in his head featuring himself and Robyn Penrose, and crept guiltily to the en suite bathroom to seek a schoolboy’s relief.
…
“Marjorie’s worried about you,” his father said the following Sunday evening, when Vic was driving him home after tea.
Vic feigned surprise. “Why?”
“She says you’re not yourself. No more you are.”
“I’m fine,” said Vic. “When was this?”