David Lodge - Small World (11 page)

But when he offered me some brandy I didn’t say no. I looked around the living-worn, and felt a sudden pang of homesickness. I’d been living in hotel rooms for the past twelve days, and eating meals in restaurants. I rather enjoy that nowadays, but then I was still a bit of a novice at the foreign lecture tour, and I’d found it quite a strain. And here was a little oasis of English domesticity, where I mild relax and feel completely at home. There were toys scattered about the living-room, and English newspapers, and in the bathroom St Michael’s underwear hanging up to dry. While we were drinking the brandy, and I was telling Simpson the whole story of the plane, his wife came into the room, in her dressing-gown, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. I hadn’t met her before. Her name was Joy.”

“Ah,” murmured Morris. “You remember her first name.”

“I apologized for disturbing her. She said it didn’t matter, but she didn’t look particularly pleased. She asked me if I would like something to eat, and I suddenly realized that I was ravenously hungry. So she brought some Parma ham from the kitchen, and some cake, and a pot of tea, and we ended up having a sort of impromptu meal. I was sitting opposite Joy. She was wearing a soft blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood, and a zip that went from hem to throat. Hilary had one just like it once, and looking at Joy out of the corner of my eye was like looking at some younger, prettier version of Hilary—I mean, Hilary when she was young and pretty herself, when we were first married. Joy was, I guessed, in her early thirties, with fair wavy hair and blue eyes. A rather heavy chin, but with a wide, generous mouth, full lips. She had a trace of a northern accent, Yorkshire I thought. She did a little English teaching, conversation classes at the university, but basically saw her role as supporting her husband’s career. I daresay she made the effort to get up and be hospitable to me for his sake. Well, as we talked, and ate, and drank, I suddenly felt myself overcome with the most powerful desire for Joy.”

“I knew it,” said Morris.

“It was as if, having passed through the shadow of death, I had suddenly recovered an appetite for life that I thought I had lost for ever, since returning from America to England. In a way it was keener than anything I had ever known before. The food pierced me with its exquisite flavours, the tea was fragrant as ambrosia, and the woman sitting opposite to me seemed unbearably beautiful, all the more because she was totally unconscious of her attractions for me. Her hair was tousled and her face was pale and puffy from sleep, and she had no make-up or lipstick on, of course. She sat quietly, cradling her mug of tea in both hands, not saying much, smiling faintly at her husband’s jokes, as if she’d heard them before. I honestly think that I would have felt just the same about any woman, in that situation, at that moment, who wasn’t downright ugly. Joy just represented woman for me then. She was like Milton’s Eve, Adam’s dream—he woke and found it true, as Keats says. I suddenly thought how nice women were. How soft and kind. How lovely it would be, how natural, to go across and put my arms round her, to bury my head in her lap. All this while Simpson was telling me about the appalling standards of English-language teaching in Italian secondary schools. Eventually he glanced at his watch and said that it had gone four, and instead of going back to bed he thought he would drive to Milan while he was wide awake and rest when he got there. He was taking the Council car, he told me, so Joy would run me to the airport in theirs.”

“I know what’s coming,” said Morris, “yet I can hardly believe it.”

“He had his bag already packed, so it was only a few minutes before he was gone. We shook hands, and he wished me better luck with my flight the next day. Joy went with him to the front door of the apartment, and I heard them kiss goodbye. She came back into the living-room, looking a little shy. The blue dressing-gown was a couple of inches too long for her, and she had to hold up the skirt in front of her—it gave her a courtly, vaguely medieval air as she came back into the room. I noticed that her feet were bare. ‘I’m sure you’d like to get some sleep now,’ she said. ‘There is a second bed in Gerard’s room, but if I put you in there he might be scared when he wakes up in the morning.’ I said the sofa would be fine. ‘But Gerard gets up frightfully early, I’m afraid he’ll disturb you,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind taking our bed, I could quite easily go into his room myself.’ I said no, no; she pressed me, and said would I just give her a few moments to change the sheets, and I said I wouldn’t dream of putting her to such trouble. The thought of that bed, still warm from her body, was too much for me. I started to shake all over with the effort to stop myself from taking an irrevocable leap into moral space, pulling on the zip-tab at her throat like a parachute ripcord, and falling with her to the floor.”

“That’s a very fancy metaphor, Philip,” said Morris. “I can hardly believe you’ve never told this story before.”

“Well, actually, I did write it down,” said Philip, “for my own satisfaction. But I’ve never shown it to anybody.” He refilled their glasses. “Anyway, there we were, looking at each other. We heard a car accelerate away outside, down the hill, Simpson presumably. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said, ‘You’re trembling all over.’ She was trembling herself a little. I said I supposed it was shock. Delayed reaction. She gave me some more brandy, and swallowed some herself. I could tell that she knew it wasn’t really shock that was waking me tremble, that it was herself, her proximity, but she couldn’t quite credit her own intuition. ‘You’d better lie down,’ she said, show you the bedroom.’

“I followed her into the main bedroom. It was lit by a single bedside lamp with a purple shade. There was a large double bed, with a duvet half thrown back. She straightened it out, and plumped the pillows. I was still shaking all over. She asked me if I would like a hot water bottle. I said: ‘There’s only one thing that would stop me shaking like I his. If you would put your arms round me…

“Although it was a dim light in the room, I could see that she went very red. ‘I can’t do that,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t ask me.’ `Please,’ I said, and took a step towards her.

“Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have walked straight out of the room, perhaps slapped my face. But Joy just stood there. I stepped up close to her and put my arms round her. God, it was wonderful. I could feel the warmth of her breasts coming through the velour dressing-gown, and my shirt. She put her arms round me and gently clasped my back. I stopped shaking as if by magic. I had my chin on her shoulder and I was moaning and raving into her ear about how wonderful and generous and beautiful she was, and what ecstasy it was to hold her in my arms, and how I felt reconnected to the earth and the life force and all kinds of romantic nonsense. And all the time I was looking at myself reflected in the dressing-table mirror, in this weird purple light, my chin on her shoulder, my hands moving over her back, as if I were watching a film, or looking into a crystal ball. It didn’t seem possible that it was really happening. I saw my hands slide down the small of her back and cup her buttocks, bunching the skirt of her dressing-gown, and I said to the man in the mirror, silently, in my head, you’re crazy, now she’ll break away, slap your face, scream for help. But she didn’t. I saw her back arch and felt her press against me. I swayed, and staggered slightly, and as I recovered my balance I altered my position a little, and now in the mirror I could see her face, reflected in another mirror on the other side of the room, and, my God, there was an expression of total abandonment on it, her eyes were half shut and her lips were parted and she was smiling. Smiling! So I pulled back my head and kissed her, full on the lips. Her tongue went straight into my mouth like a warm eel. I pulled gently at the zip on the front of her dressing-gown and slid my hand inside. She was naked underneath it.”

Philip paused and stared into the fire. Morris discovered that he was sitting forward on the edge of his seat and that his cigar had gone out. “Yeah?” he said, fumbling for his lighter. “Then what happened?”

“I slipped the dressing-gown from her shoulders, and it crackled with static electricity as it slid off and settled at her feet. I fell on my knees and buried my face in her belly. She ran her fingers through my hair, and dug her nails into my shoulders. I lay her down on the bed and began to tear off my clothes with one hand while I kept stroking her with the other, afraid that if I once let go of her I would lose her. I had just enough presence of mind to ask if she was protected, and she nodded, without opening her eyes. Then we made love. There was nothing particularly subtle or prolonged about it, but I’ve never had an orgasm like it, before or since. I felt I was defying death, fucking my way out of the grave. She had to put her hand over my mouth, to stop me from shouting her name aloud: Joy, Joy, Joy.

“Then, almost instantly, I fell asleep. When I woke up I was alone in the bed, naked, covered with the duvet. Sunlight was coming through the cracks in the window shutters, and I could hear a vacuum cleaner going in another room. I looked at my watch. It was 10.30. I wondered if I had just dreamed of making love to Joy, but the physical memory was too keen and specific, and my clothes were scattered round the floor where I had thrown them off the night before. I put on my shirt and trousers and went out of the bedroom, into the living-room. A little Italian woman with a scarf round her head was hoovering the carpet. She grinned at me, turned off the Hoover and said something unintelligible. Joy came into the room from the kitchen, with a little boy at her side, holding a Dinky car, who stared at me. Joy looked quite different from the night before—smarter and more poised. She seemed to have cut her hand and was wearing an Elastoplast, but otherwise she was immaculately turned out, in some kind of linen dress, and her hair was smooth and bouncy as if she had just washed it. She gave me a bright, slightly artificial smile, but avoided eye contact. ‘Oh, hallo,’ she said, ‘I was just going to wake you.’ She had phoned the airport and my plane left at 12.30. She would run me down there as soon as I was ready. Would I like some breakfast, or would I like to take a shower first? She was the complete littlish Council hostess—polite, patient, detached. She actually asked is if I’d slept well. I wondered again whether the episode with her the night before had been a wet dream, but when I saw the blue dressing-gown hanging on the back of the bathroom door, it brought the whole tiling back with a sensuous detail that just couldn’t have been imaginary. The exact shape of her nipples, blunt and cylindrical, was imprinted on the nerve-endings of my finger-tips. I remembered the unusual luxuriance of her pubic hair, and its pale gold colour, tinged with purple from the bedside lamp, and the line across her belly where her sun-tan stopped. I couldn’t have dreamed all that. But it was impossible to have any kind of intimate conversation with her, what with the cleaning woman hoovering away, and the little boy round her feet all the time. And it was obvious that she didn’t want to anyway. She bustled about the flat and chattered to the cleaning woman and the boy. Even when she drove me to the airport she brought the kid along with her, and he was a sharp little bugger, who didn’t miss much. Although he was sitting in the back, he kept leaning forward and poking his head between the two of us, as if to stop us getting intimate. It began to look as if we would part without a single reference to what had happened the night before. It was absurd. I just couldn’t make her out. I felt I had to discover what had prompted her extraordinary action. Was she some kind of nymphomaniac, who would give herself to any man who was available—was I the most recent of a long succession of British Council lecturers who had passed through that purple-lit bedroom? It even crossed my mind that Simpson was in collusion with her, that I had been a pawn in some kinky erotic game between them, that perhaps he had returned silently to the flat and hidden himself behind one of those mirrors in the bedroom. A glance at her profile at the wheel of the car was enough to make such speculations seem fantastic—she looked so normal, so wholesome, so English. What had motivated her, then? I was desperate to know.

“When we got to the airport, she said, ‘You won’t mind if I just drop you, will you?’ But she had to get out of the car to open the boot for me, and I realized that this was my only chance to say anything to her privately. ‘Aren’t we going to talk about last night?’ I said, as I lifted my bag out of the boot. ‘Oh,’ she said, with her bright hostess’s smile, ‘you mustn’t worry about disturbing our sleep. We’re used to it in this job, people arriving at all sorts of odd hours. Not usually, of course, in burning aeroplanes. I do hope you have a less eventful flight today. Goodbye, Mr Swallow.’

” ‘Mr Swallow!’ This was the woman who just a few hours before had had her legs wrapped somewhere round the back of my neck! Well, it was very clear that, whatever her motives, she wanted to pretend that nothing had happened between us the night before—that she wanted to excise the whole episode from history, cancel it, unweave it. And that the best way I could convey my own gratitude was to play along with her. So, with great reluctance, I didn’t press for an inquest. I just allowed myself one indulgence. She’d extended her hand, and, instead of just shaking it, I pressed it to my lips. I reckoned it wouldn’t seem a particularly showy gesture in an Italian airport. She blushed, as deeply as she had blushed the night before when I asked her to put her arms round me, and the whole unbelievable tenderness of that embrace flooded back into my consciousness, and hers too, I could see. Then she went back to the front of the car, got into the driver’s seat, gave me one last look through the window, and drove away. I never saw her again.”

“Maybe you will one day,” said Morris.

Philip shook his head. “No, she’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“All three of them were killed in an air-crash the following year, in India. I saw their names in the list of passengers. There were no survivors. ‘Simpson, J. K., wife Joy and son Gerard.’ “

Morris expelled his breath in a low whistle. “Hey, that’s really sad! I didn’t think this story was going to have an unhappy ending.”