David Lodge - Small World (21 page)

Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast To feel for ever its soft fall and swell Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender taken breath And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

But no, cancel that last bit about dying. Poor old Keats was at his last gasp when he wrote that—he knew he had no chance of getting his head down on Fanny Brawne’s ripening breast, having hardly any lungs left in his own. But he, Persse McGarrigle, has no intention of dying yet awhile. Living for ever is more the ticket, especially if he can find Angelica.

So musing, Persse fell peacefully asleep.

Part III

WHEN Persse finally got back to his Department at University College Limerick, there were two letters from London waiting for him. He could tell at a glance that neither was from Angelica—the envelopes were too official-looking, the typing of his name and address too professional—but their contents were not without interest. One was from Felix Skinner, reminding him that Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein would be very interested to see Persse’s thesis on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare. The other was from the Royal Academy of Literature, informing him that he had been awarded a prize of Ł1000 under the Maud Fitzsimmons Bequest for the Encouragement of Anglo-Irish Poetry. Persse had sent in a sheaf of manuscript poems for this prize six months before, and had forgotten all about it. He whooped and threw the letter into the air. Catching it as it floated to the ground, he read the second paragraph, which stated that the prize, together with a number of other awards administered by the Academy, would be presented at a reception, which it was hoped Mr McGarrigle would be able to attend, to be held in three weeks’ time on the
Annabel Lee
, Charing Cross Embankment.

Persse went to see his Head of Department, Professor Liam McCreedy, and asked if he could take a sabbatical in the coming term.

“A sabbatical? This is a rather sudden request, Persse,” said McCreedy, peering at him from behind his usual battlements of books. Instead of using a desk, the Professor sat at an immense table, almost entirely covered with tottering piles of scholarly tomes—dictionaries, concordances and Old English texts—with just a small area in front of him cleared for writing. The visitor seated on the other side of these fortifications was placed at a considerable disadvantage in any discussion by not always being able to see his interlocutor. “I don’t think you’ve been here long enough to qualify for a sabbatical,” McCreedy said doubtfully.

“Well, leave of absence, then. I don’t need any pay. I’ve just won a thousand-pound prize for my poetry,” said Persse, in the general direction of a variorum edition of
The Battle of Maldon
; but Professor McCreedy’s head bobbed up at the other end of the table, above Skeat’s
Dialect Dictionary
.

“Have you, now?” he exclaimed. “Well, hearty congratulations. That puts a rather different complexion on the matter. Er, what would you be wanting to be doing during this leave, exactly?”

“I want to study structuralism, sir,” said Persse.

This announcement sent the Professor diving for cover again, into some slit trench deep in the publications of the Early English Text Society, from which his voice emerged muffled and plaintive. “Well, I don’t know that we can manage the modern literature course without you, Mr McGarrigle.”

“There are no lectures in the summer term,” Persse pointed out, “because all the students are swotting for their examinations.”

“Ah, but that’s just it!” said McCreedy triumphantly, taking aim from behind Kloeber’s
Beowulf
. “Who will mark the Modern Literature papers?”

“I’ll come back and do that for you,” Persse offered. It was not a very onerous commitment, since there were only five students in the course.

“Well, all right, I’ll see what I can do,” sighed McCreedy.

Persse went back to his digs near the Limerick gasworks and drafted a two-thousand word outline of a book about the influence of T. S. Eliot on modern readings of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers, which he typed up and sent off to Felix Skinner with a covering note saying that he would prefer not to submit the original thesis at this stage, since it needed a lot of revision before it would be suitable for publication.

Morris Zapp took his departure from Milan as soon as he decently could, if “decent” was a word that could be applied to the Morgana menage, which he ventured to doubt. The troilism party had not been a success. As soon as it became evident that he was expected to fool around with Ernesto as well as Fulvia, Morris had made his excuses and left the mirrored bedchamber. He also took the precaution of locking the door of the guest bedroom behind him. When he rose the next morning, Ernesto, evidently an autostrada addict, had already left to drive back to Rome, and Fulvia, coolly polite across the coffee and croissants, made no allusion to the events of the previous night, so that Morris began to wonder whether he had dreamed the whole episode; but the sting of the various superficial flesh wounds Fulvia’s long nails had inflicted on his chest and shoulders convinced him otherwise.

A uniformed driver from the Villa Serbelloni called soon after breakfast, and Morris exhaled a sigh of relief as the big Mercedes pulled away from Fulvia’s front porch: he couldn’t help thinking of her as a kind of sorceress within whose sphere of influence it would be dangerous to linger. Milan was socked in by cloud, but as the car approached its destination the sun came out and Alpine peaks became visible on the horizon. They skirted a lake for some miles, driving in and out of tunnels that had windows cut at intervals in the rock to give lantern-slide glimpses of blue water and green shoreline. The Villa Serbelloni proved to be a noble and luxurious house built on the sheltered slope of a promontory that divided two lakes, Como and Lecco, with magnificent views to east, south and west from its balconies and extensive gardens.

Morris was shown into a well-appointed suite on the second floor, and stepped out on to his balcony to inhale the air, scented with the perfume of various spring blossoms, and to enjoy the prospect. Down on the terrace, the other resident scholars were gathering for the pre-lunch aperitif—he had glimpsed the table laid for lunch in the dining-room on his way up: starched white napery, crystal glass, menu cards. He surveyed the scene with complacency. He felt sure he was going to enjoy his stay here. Not the least of its attractions was that it was entirely free. All you had to do, to come and stay in this idyllic retreat, pampered by servants and lavishly provided with food and drink, given every facility for reflection and creation, was to apply.

Of course, you had to be distinguished—by, for instance, having applied successfully for other, similar handouts, grants, fellowships and so on, in the past. That was the beauty of the academic life, as Morris saw it. To them that had had, more would be given. All you needed to do to get started was to write one really damned good book—which admittedly wasn’t easy when you were a young college teacher just beginning your career, struggling with a heavy teaching load on unfamiliar material, and probably with the demands of a wife and young growing family as well. But on the strength of that one damned good book you could get a grant to write a second book in more favourable circumstances; with two books you got promotion, a lighter teaching load, and courses of your own devising; you could then use your teaching as a way of doing research for your next book, which you were thus able to produce all the more quickly. This productivity made you eligible for tenure, further promotion, more generous and prestigious research grants, more relief from routine teaching and administration. In theory, it was possible to wind up being full professor while doing nothing except to be permanently absent on some kind of sabbatical grant or fellowship. Morris hadn’t quite reached that omega point, but he was working on it.

He stepped back into the cool, restful shade of his spacious room, and discovered an adjoining study. On the broad, leather-topped desk was a neat stack of mail that had been forwarded to Bellagio by arrangement. It included a cable from someone called Rodney Wainwright in Australia, whom Morris had forgotten all about, apologizing for the delay in submitting his paper for the Jerusalem conference, an enquiry from Howard Ringbaum about the same conference which had crossed with Morris’s rejection of Ringbaum’s paper, and a letter from Desiree’s lawyers about college tuition fees for the twins. Morris dropped these communications in the waste basket and, taking a sheet of the villa’s crested notepaper from the desk drawer, typed, on the electric typewriter provided, a letter to Arthur Kingfisher, reminding him that they had been co-participants in an English Institute seminar on Symbolism some years before; saying that he had heard that he, Arthur Kingfisher, had given a brilliant keynote address to the recent Chicago conference on “The Crisis of the Sign”, and begging him, in the most flattering of terms, for the favour of an offprint or Xerox of the text of this address. Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flatten) of one’s peers. Should he mention his interest in the UNESCO Chair? No, that would be premature. The time would come for the hard sell. This was just a gentle, preliminary nudge of the great man’s memory. Morris Zapp licked the envelope and sealed it with a thump of his hairy-knuckled fist. On his way to the terrace for aperitifs he dropped it into the mail box thoughtfully provided in the hall.

Robin Dempsey went back to Darlington in a thoroughly demoralized state of mind. After the humiliation of Angelica’s practical joke (his cheeks still burned, all four of them, whenever he thought of that Irish bumpkin observing his preparations for bed from inside the wardrobe) another day of frustration and aggravation had followed. The conference business meeting, chaired by Philip Swallow, somewhat flustered and breathless from a late arrival, had rejected his own offer to hold next year’s conference at Darlington, and voted in favour of Cambridge instead. Then, when he called later in themorning at his former home to take his two younger children out for the day, he overheard them complaining that they didn’t want to go. Janet had ensured that they accompanied him in the end, but only, she made clear to Robin, so that she and her boyfriend, Scott, an ageing flowerchild who still affected denim and long hair at the age of thirty-five, could go to bed together in the afternoon. Scott was a freelance photographer, seldom in employment, and one of Robin Dempsey’s many grudges against his ex-wife was that she was spending part of the maintenance money he paid her on keeping this good-for-nothing layabout in cigarettes and lenses.

Jennifer, sixteen, and Alex, fourteen, sulkily escorted him to the City Centre, where they declined the offer of a visit to the Art Gallery or Science Museum in favour of looking through endless racks of records and clothing in the Shopping Centre boutiques. They cheered up somewhat when Robin bought them a pair of jeans and an LP each, and even condescended to talk to him over the hamburgers and chips which they demanded for lunch. This conversation did not, however, improve his spirits, consisting as it did mainly of allusions to musicians he had never heard of, and enthusiastic tributes to Scott, who evidently had.

So the day wore on. The hamburgers, coming on top of the medieval banquet, made him flatulent, and the drive back to Darlington uncomfortable. He arrived home at dusk. His small modern town house, newspapers and junk mail drifted up behind the front door, seemed chilly and unwelcoming. He walked from room to room, turning on radio, TV, electric fires, to try and dispel his loneliness and depression, but to no avail. Instead of unpacking, he got back into his Golf and drove down to the University’s Computer Centre.

As he had expected, Josh Collins, the Senior Lecturer in Computing, was still there, alone in the brightly-lit prefabricated building, working on a program. Some people claimed that Josh Collins never went home, that he had no home, but dossed down at night on the floor between his humming, blinking, clicking machines.

“Hallo, Josh, what’s new?” said Robin with forced joviality.

Josh looked up from a long scroll of data printout. “Eliza’s arrived,” he said.

“Really? That’s great!” said Robin Dempsey. It was just the diversion he needed.

ELIZA, so named after the heroine of
Pygmalion
, was a program designed to enable computers to talk, that is, to conduct coherent conversations in standard English with human users, by means of a visual display. The conversations had to be of a contextually specific type, with well-defined rules and goals, in which the computer could take an essentially prompting and questioning role, programmed with a repertoire of possible responses to cues likely to appear in the context. The psychiatrist-patient interview was considered ideal for this purpose, being one of the most regulated discourse situations, and had accordingly been adopted as the model for ELIZA. The experiment was of considerable interest to linguisticians researching into the systematic aspects of verbal interaction.

“Let me try it out,” said Robin.

“OK,” said Josh. “Use that terminal in the corner. When I give you the nod, write in ‘Ha1105.”

Robin Dempsey seated himself at a console consisting of a typewriter keyboard and visual display screen. Josh took a large spool of tape into the glass-partitioned section of the room where the mainframe computer was situated, and soon nodded to Robin to indicate that ELIZA was on line.

“HALLO,” Robin typed on the keyboard.

“HALLO, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?” replied ELIZA, the printed words appearing instantly on the VDU.

“I’M FEELING TERRIBLE,” Robin replied.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT PRECISELY?”

“I’M FEELING DEPRESSED.”

“WHY DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DEPRESSED?”

“BECAUSE I’M LONELY.”

“DO YOU LIVE WITH YOUR FAMILY?”

“NO.”

“DO YOU HAVE ANY FRIENDS?”

“NOT REALLY.”

“WHY IS THAT?”

Robin Dempsey paused for some considerable time before he typed in his reply: “I DON’T KNOW.”

“DO YOU REALLY NOT KNOW OR ARE YOU JUST AVOIDING THE QUESTION?”

Robin Dempsey flushed and typed rapidly: “I USED TO HAVE FRIENDS ONCE.”

“WHEN WAS THAT?”

“BEFORE I WAS MARRIED.”

“YOU DIDN’T TELL ME YOU WERE MARRIED.”

“I’M DIVORCED.”

“TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DIVORCE.”

Robin Dempsey typed rapidly for fifteen minutes without stopping, until he became aware of Josh Collins, hovering at his shoulder. “Yes?” he said coldly, screening the VDU from Josh’s view.