David Lodge - Small World (27 page)

“BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO TALK TO ME.”

“WHY DO YOU THINK THEY DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU?”

“BECAUSE THEY’RE AFRAID I WILL TALK TO THEM ABOUT MY RESEARCH AND THEY CAN’T STAND THAT BECAUSE I DO MORE RESEARCH THAN THE REST OF THEM PUT TOGETHER.”

“TELL ME ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH.”

Robin Dempsey types for an hour without stopping.

Persse had never been in Soho before. He was shocked, but also excited, by the blatant attempts to arouse lust made from every quarter, appealing to every sense. Striptease, peepshows, massage parlours, pornographic films, videos, books and magazines. The rhythmic beat of jungle rock throbbing from the bottom of cellar stairs. Odours of fish and garlic steaming from ventilators. Tarts and touts lounging in doorways. The word Sex blazoned everywhere—on shopfronts, bookcovers, tee-shirts, in capitals and lower case, in print, in neon, in bulbs, red, yellow, blue, vertically, horizontally, diagonally.

“Soho’s been ruined,” Ronald Frobisher was complaining. “Just one big pornographic wasteland, it is now. All the nice little Italian groceries and wine shops are getting pushed out.” He stopped on the corner of an intersection, hesitating. “You can get lost, it changes so fast. This used to be a shop selling coffee beans, I seem to remember.” Now it was a shop selling pornographic literature. Persse peered inside. Men stood facing the wall-racks, silent and thoughtful, as if they were urinating, or at prayer. “They don’t seem to be having much fun in there,” he remarked, as they moved on.

“No, well, it’s not surprising, is it? I believe they throw them out if they start wanking in the shop.” Frobisher turned down a narrow side street and stopped outside a doorway over which there was an illuminated sign: “Club Exotica.”

“Well I’m buggered,” said Frobisher. “What’s happened to the old `Lights Out’?”

“It seems to have been turned into a striptease place,” said Persse, looking at the photographs of the artistes displayed in a glass case on the wall outside: Lola, Charmaine, Mandy.

“Coming in, boys?” said a squat, swarthy man from just inside the door. “These girls will put some lead in your pencil.”

“Ribbon in my typewriter is more what I need,” said Frobisher. “What happened to the ‘Lights Out’ club which used to be here?”

“I dunno,” said the man with a shrug. “Come inside, see the show, you won’t regret it:”

“No thanks. Come on, Persse.”

“Just a minute.” Persse leaned against the wall with both hands, feeling faint. One of the pictures was unmistakably a photograph of Angelica. She was naked, swathed in chains, with her arms pinioned behind her back. Her hair streamed out behind her. Her expression was one of simulated distress and fear. A red paper disc over her pubis bore the legend, “Censored”, and a red strip across her breasts identified her as “Lily”. A. L. Pabst. Angelica Lily Pabst.

“What’s the matter, Persse?” said Frobisher. “Are you all right?”

“I want to go in here,” said Persse.

“What?”

“That’s right,” said the doorkeeper, “the young man has the right idea.”

“You don’t want to go in there, it’s just a rip-off,” said Frobisher.

“Don’t listen to him,” said the doorkeeper. “It’s only three pounds, and that includes your first drink.”

“Look, if you really want to see a strip show, let me take you somewhere with a bit of class,” said Frobisher. “I know a place in Brewer Street.”

“No,” said Persse. “It has to be this place.”

“You know something?” said the doorman. “You got good taste. Not like this old man here.”

“Who are you calling old?” Frobisher said truculently. Grumbling, he followed Persse down the steps just inside the doorway. Persse paid for them both with the change left from Frobisher’s ten pound note. “I resent paying for this sort of thing,” the writer said as they stumbled and groped their way to a vacant table. The Club Exotica was as dark as the sex cinema in Rummidge, except for a small stage where, bathed in pink light, and to the accompaniment of recorded disco music, a young woman, not Angelica, wearing only high boots with spurs, was vigorously riding a rocking horse. They sat down and ordered whisky. “I mean, if I want to see a bit of tit and bum, I only have to write it into a telly script,” said Frobisher. ” ‘With a tantalizing smile, she slowly unbuttons her blouse.’ `Her robe slides to the floor; she is wearing nothing underneath.’ That sort of thing. Then a few weeks later, I sit back in the comfort of my own home and enjoy it. This looks like the kind of corny strip show where the girls are always pretending to be doing something else.”

Ronald Frobisher’s judgment appeared to be correct. A succession of “turns” followed the rocking-horse rider, in which nudity was displayed in various incongruous contexts—a fire station, an airliner, an igloo. Sometimes there would be more than one artiste involved, and there was a young man, muscular but clearly homosexual, who occasionally combined with the girls to mime some trite story or situation, usually wielding a whip or instrument of torture. There was no sign of Angelica.

The tables were arranged in arcs facing the stage. When anyone rose to leave the front row, someone moved forward from behind to take his place.

“You want to move up?” Frobisher asked.

Persse shook his head.

“Had enough?” Frobisher enquired hopefully.

“I want to wait till the end.”

“The end? We’ll be here all night. They just keep the acts going in rotation till closing time, you know.”

“Well, we haven’t seen them all, yet,” said Persse.

The stage lights faded on the spectacle of a naked girl thrashing about like a fish in a net suspended from the flies. There was lukewarm applause from the audience. The curtains closed and from behind a faint clinking of chains carried to Persse’s ears. He sat up and leaned forward, hardly able to draw a breath.

The recorded music this time was less bland, more symphonic rock than disco, with a lot of distorted electric guitar. The curtain rose to reveal a naked girl in exactly the posture of “Lily” in the photograph outside: naked, chained to a pasteboard rock, writhing and twisting in her bonds, mouth and eyes wide with fear, long hair streaming in a current of air blowing from a wind machine in the wings. But it was not Angelica. It was the girl on the rocking horse. Persse slumped back in his seat, not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Well, we might as well wait till this act is finished,” said Frobisher. “As a matter of fact, it’s the first one that has come within a mile of turning me on. Something to do with the way those chains dig into the flesh, I think.”

Persse had to admit that the spectacle had an impact that the previous entertainment had lacked. The nudity, for once, was thematically appropriate. The lighting and sound were expressive: wave effects were projected on to the backcloth, and the sound of surf had been mixed with the guitar chords. Whoever had produced this item knew something about the Andromeda archetype, though in the end it was travestied. The young homosexual, dressed up as Perseus, or possibly St George, arrived to rescue the sacrificial virgin, but was chased off the stage by another naked girl in a dragon mask, who proved to have amorous rather than violent designs upon the captive. The lights faded on a scene of lesbian lovemaking.

“Rather neat, that,” said Frobisner, as they climbed the stairs to street level.

“Enjoy the show, boys?” said the doorkeeper.

“What happened to Lily?” Persse demanded.

“Who?”

Persse pointed at the photograph.

“Oh, you mean Lily Papps.”

Frobisher guffawed. “Good name for a stripper.”

“Is that what she calls herself?” Persse asked.

“Yeah, Lily Papps, with two pees. She left a few weeks back. We haven’t got round to doing a photo of the new girl.”

“What happened to Lily? Where can I find her?” said Persse.

The man shrugged. “Don’t ask me. These girls—they come, they go. Mind you, Lily was special. Not just a nice body—she had a brain too. You know that dragon number? Good, eh? That was her own idea.”

“Someone you know?” Frobisher enquired, as they walked away from the Club Exotica.

“It’s the girl I told you about. The one I’m looking for.” Frobisher raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell me she was a stripper.”

“She’s not really. I don’t know why she’s doing it. Money, I suppose. She’s an educated girl. She’s doing a PhD. She shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing at all.”

“Ah,” said Frobisher. “I understand. You’re going to track down this damsel and rescue her from the sordid life to which poverty has condemned her?”

“I’d like to do that,” said Persse, “for her own sake.”

“Not for your own?”

Persse hesitated. “Well, yes, I suppose so… Only it was a shock, seeing her picture in that place back there. I didn’t know, you see.” It was still hard for him to imagine the girl he remembered from the Rummidge conference, eagerly discussing structuralism, romance, the poetry of Keats, performing in a nude cabaret in some sordid Soho cellar. His soul recoiled from the idea, but after all it was not an irredeemable degradation. No doubt for Angelica, as for Bernadette, it was simply a job, a way of earning money—though why she should have to choose that way was a mystery. One day he would discover the answer. Meanwhile, he must trust Angelica, and his first impressions of her. “Yes,” he said, lengthening his stride, “I want to find her for my own sake.”

Philip Swallow woke suddenly in his hotel room in Ankara with all the symptoms of incipient diarrhoea. It was pitch dark. He groped for the lightswitch on the wall above his head and pressed it, with no result. Bulb gone, or power cut? Sweating, feverish, he tried to recall the geography of the room. His briefcase was on a dressing-table facing the end of the bed. About three yards to the right of that was the door to the bathroom. Carefully he got out of bed and, tightening his sphincter muscle, felt his way along the edge of the bed until he reached the foot of it. With his arms extended in front of him like a blind man, he searched for the dressing-table, but it was his big toe that located this piece of furniture first. Whimpering with pain, he delved in his briefcase for his makeshift toilet paper, and shuffled along the wall like a rock-climber until he came to the bathroom door. He tried the lightswitch inside without effect. A power cut, then. Sink to the left, toilet beyond it. Ah, there, thank God. He lowered himself on to the toilet seat and voided his liquefied bowels. A foul smell filled the darkness. It must have been the kebab, or, more likely, the salad that accompanied it. Still, at least he had managed to get to the loo in time, in spite of the power cut.

Philip began to wipe himself. When the lights came on of their own accord he found he was up to page five of his lecture on “The Legacy of Hazlitt.”

Two

PERSSE woke late the next morning, after a night of troubled dreams, with a dry mouth and a moderate headache. He lay on his back for some time, staring at the sprinkler nozzle, a metallic omphalos in the ceiling of his room at the YMCA, wondering what to do next. He decided to go back to the Club Exotica and make further enquiries about the whereabouts of “Lily”.

Soho seemed distinctly less sinful in the late morning sunshine. Admittedly the pornshops and the sex cinemas were already open, and had a few devout customers, but their facades and illuminated signs had a faded, shamefaced aspect. The streets and pavements were busy with people with jobs to do: dustmen collecting garbage, messengers on scooters delivering parcels, suited executives with briefcases, and young men pushing wheeled racks of ladies’ dresses. There were wholesome smells in the air, of vegetables, fresh bread and coffee. At a newsagents, Persse bought a copy of the
Guardian
and the
Times Literaty Supplement
. “LONDON LITERATI ADRIFT” said a headline on the front page of the former. “RUDYARD PARKINSON ON THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF CRITICISM” announced the cover of the latter.

By retracing the route he had taken with Ronald Frobisher the night before, Persse found the Club Exotica—only it wasn’t the Club Exotica any more. That name, in tubular glass script, lay discarded on the pavement, trailing flex. Over the door two workmen were erecting another, larger sign, “PUSSYVILLE”.

“What happened to the Exotica?” Persse asked them. One looked down at him and shrugged. The other, without looking, said, “Changed its name, dinnit?”

“Under new management?”

“I should fink so. The gaffer’s inside now.”

Persse descended the stairs and pushed through the quilted swing doors at the bottom. Inside, unshaded bulbs hanging from the ceiling cast a bleak light on stained carpet and shabby furniture. A vacuum cleaner whined among the tables. In the middle of the floor, a man in a striped suit was inspecting a young woman who was wearing only briefs and high-heeled shoes. The man carried a clipboard in his hand, and circled the girl in the manner of a used-car dealer scrutinizing a possible purchase for signs of rust. Along one wall other girls lolled in negliges, evidently awaiting the same appraisal.

“Yes?” said the man, catching sight of Persse. “Have you brought the new lights?”

“No,” said Persse, modestly averting his eyes from the half-naked young woman. “I’m looking for a girl called Lily.”

“Anybody here called Lily?” said the man.

After a moment’s silence, a girl stood up at the end of the row. “I’m Lily,” she said, with one hand on her hip, shooting a languorous glance at Persse from beneath a frizzy blonde hairdo.

“I’m afraid I don’t know you,” stammered Persse.

“You were never Lily,” said the girl next to the blonde, tugging her back into her seat. “You just fancy ‘im.” Laughter rippled along the row of seats.

“She used to perform here,” said Persse, “when it was the Club Exotica.”

“Yeah, well, this isn’t the Club Exotica any more. It’s Pussyville, and I have to find twelve topless waitresses by Monday, so if you don’t mind.” The man frowned at his clipboard.

“Who owned the Club Exotica?” Persse asked.

“Girls Unlimited,” said the man, without looking up.

“It’s in Soho Square,” said the frizzy-haired blonde.

“I know,” said Persse, “but thank you.”

Five minutes’ walk took him to Soho Square. Girls Unlimited was on the fourth floor of a building on the west side. After stating his business, he was admitted to the office of a lady called Mrs Gasgoine. The room was carpeted in red, and furnished with white filing cabinets and tubular steel chairs and tables. There was a large map of the world on the wall. Mrs Gasgoine was elegantly dressed in black, and smoking a cigarette in a holder.

“What can I do for you, Mr McGarrigle?”

“I’m looking for a girl called Lily Papps. I believe she worked for you at the Club Exotica.”

“We’ve sold our interest in the Club Exotica.”

“So I understand.”

“Are you a client of ours?”

“Client?”

“Have you hired our girls in the past?”

“Good Lord, no! I’m just a friend of Lily’s.”

Mrs Gasgoine blew angry smoke through her nostrils. “You mean she was moonlighting with you.”

“I suppose you could say that,” replied Persse, remembering the glassy corridor in the sky at Rummidge, the snowscape under the moon, the quotations from Keats.

Mrs Gasgoine extinguished her cigarette and twisted the holder to expel the stub. It fell into her ashtray like a spent bullet case. “This isn’t a Missing Persons Bureau, Mr McGarrigle, it’s a business organization. Lily is one of our most versatile employees. She’s been transferred to another job—something that came up at short notice.”

“Where?”

“I’m not at liberty to tell you. It’s part of our contract with our girls that we don’t divulge their whereabouts to family or friends. Quite often, you see, they’re running away from some complication at home.”

“I don’t even know where her home is!” Persse protested.

“And I don’t know you from Adam, Mr McGarrigle. You could be a private investigator, for all I know. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you would like to leave me your name and address, I’ll forward it to Lily, and if she wants to, she can get in touch with you.”

Persse hesitated, doubtful whether Angelica would respond if she knew he had discovered her secret. “Thanks, but I won’t put you to that trouble,” he said at length.

Mrs Gasgoine looked as if all her suspicions were confirmed.

He left the premises of Girls Unlimited and looked for a bank at which to cash his cheque. On his way, he passed a window at the side of Foyle’s bookshop in which an assistant was arranging some rather dusty-looking copies of
Hazlitt and the Amateur Reader
by Philip Swallow, flanking a blown-up photocopy of Rudyard Parkinson’s review in the
TLS
. At the bank Persse took out most of his money in traveller’s cheques. Then he went to a branch of Thomas Cook and booked himself a flight to Amsterdam. The only thing he could think of doing now was to look for Angelica’s adoptive father.

He hadn’t been in Amsterdam three hours before he met Morris Zapp. Persse was standing on one of the curved canal bridges in the old town, puzzling over his tourist map, when the American came up and slapped him on the back.

“Percy! I didn’t know you were at the conference.”

“What conference?”

Morris Zapp indicated the large plastic disc dangling from his lapel, which had his name printed inside a circular inscription, “VIIth International Congress of Literary Semioticians”. On his other lapel was a bright enamel button which declared, “Every Decoding Is Another Encoding”. “I had it made at a customized button shop back home,” he explained. “Everybody here is crazy about it. If I’d brought a gross with me I could have made a fortune. A Jap professor offered me ten dollars for this one. But if you’re not at the Conference, what are you doing in Amsterdam?”

“A sort of holiday,” said Persse. “I won a poetry prize.” He found that he didn’t want to confide in Morris about Angelica.

“No kidding! Congratulations!”

A thought struck Persse. “Angelica isn’t at the conference by any chance?”

“Haven’t seen her, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t here. The conference only opened yesterday, and there are hundreds of people. We’re all in the Sonesta—great hotel. Where are you staying?”

“At a little pension near here.”

“It wasn’t such a big prize, then?”

“I’m trying to make it go a long way,” said Persse. “Perhaps I’ll drop in on your conference.”

“Why not? I thought I might go to this afternoon’s session myself. Meanwhile, how about some lunch? They have great Indonesian food here.”

“Good idea,” said Persse. The diversion was welcome, for he had had a discouraging morning. The Head Office of KLM had been courteous but discreet. They confirmed that a Hermann Pabst had been an executive director of the airline in the nineteen-fifties, but he had resigned in 1961 to take up a post in America, the details of which they were unable or unwilling to divulge. Persse was faced with the prospect of having to continue his search in America. He wondered how long his Ł1000 would last at this rate.

Morris Zapp seemed to have already mastered the spider’s-web layout of the Amsterdam canals and streets. He led Persse confidently past a quayside flowermarket, over bridges, down narrow alleys, along busy shopping streets. “You know something?” he said, “I really like this place. It’s flat, which means I can walk without getting pooped, it has good cigars that are very cheap, and wait till you see the nightlife.”

“I was in Soho the other night,” said Persse.

“Soho, schmoho,” said Morris Zapp. “That’s a kindergarten compared with what goes on in the
rosse buurt
.”

They emerged from a narrow street into a broad square where tables and chairs were spread in the sun outside the cafés. Morris Zapp suggested an aperitif.

“Have we time? What about the conference?” said Persse. Morris shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if we miss a few papers. The only one I want to hear is von Turpitz’s.”

“Who is he?”

Morris Zapp beckoned to a waiter. “Gin OK? It’s the vin du pays.” Persse nodded. “Two Bols,” Morris ordered, forking the air with his fingers. “Turpitz is a kraut who’s into reception theory. Years ago he wrote a book called The
Romantic Reader
—why people killed themselves after reading
Werther
or made pilgrimages to the
Nouvelle Heloise
country… Not bad, but basically trad. literary history. Then Jauss and Iser at Kostanz started to make a splash with reception theory, and von Turpitz jumped on the bandwagon.”

“Why do you want to hear him, then?”

“Just to reassure myself. He’s a sort of rival.”

“For a woman?”

“God, no. For a job.”

“I thought you were satisfied where you are.”

“Every man has his price,” said Morris Zapp. “Mine is one hundred grand a year and no duties. Have you heard of something new called the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism?”

While Morris was telling Persse about it, the waiter brought them two glasses of neat, chilled gin. “You’re supposed to drink it in one gulp,” said Morris, sniffing his glass.

“I’m your man,” said Persse, raising his own.

“Here’s to us, then,” said Morris. “May we both achieve everything we desire.”

“Amen,” said Persse.

They lunched well at an Indonesian restaurant where dark-skinned waiters in white turbans brought to their table a seemingly endless supply of spicy aromatic dishes of chicken, prawn, pork and vegetables. Morris Zapp had dined there the previous evening and appeared to have taken tuition in the menu. “This is peanut sauce,” he said, eating greedily. “This is meat stewed in coconut milk, these are pieces of barbecued sucking pig. Have a prawn cracker.”

“Will you be able to stay awake this afternoon?” Persse asked, as they heavily descended the stairs of the restaurant and made their way towards the Sonesta. The sky had clouded over, and the atmosphere had become sultry and oppressive, as if a storm was brewing.

“I aim to sleep through the first paper,” said Morris. “Just wake me up when von Turpitz appears on the rostrum. You can’t mistake him, he wears a black glove on one hand. Nobody knows why and nobody dares to ask him.”

The Sonesta was a huge modern hotel grafted on to some old buildings in the Kattengat, including a Lutheran church, in the shape of a rotunda, which had been converted into a conference hall. “I hope it’s been deconsecrated,” Persse remarked, as they came in under the huge domed ceiling. A mighty organ, built of dark wood and decorated with gilt, and a carved pulpit projecting from the wall, were the only reminders of the building’s original function.

“Reconsecrated, you mean,” said Morris Zapp. “Information is the religion of the modern world, didn’t you know that?”

Persse surveyed the rapidly filling concentric rows of seats, hoping against hope that he might see Angelica there, cool and self-possessed behind her heavy spectacles, with her stainless steel pen poised over her notebook. A man with a brown leathery face and hooded eyes bowed just perceptibly to Morris Zapp as he passed, accompanied by a sulky-looking youth in tight black trousers. “That’s Michel Tardieu,” Morris murmured. “He’s another likely contender for the UNESCO chair. The kid is supposed to be his research assistant. You can tell how good he is at research by the way he wriggles his ass.”

“Hallo, young man” Persse felt a light tap on his shoulder, and turned to find Miss Sybil Maiden standing behind him in a Paisley pattern frock, holding a folded fan in her hand.

“Why, hallo, Miss Maiden,” he greeted her. “I didn’t know you were interested in semiotics.”

“I thought I should find out what it is all about,” she replied. “One should never dismiss what one does not understand.”

“And what do you think of it so far?”

Miss Maiden, fluttered her fan. “I think it’s a lot of tosh,” she declared. “However, Amsterdam is a very charming city. Have you been to the Van Gogh museum? Those late landscapes from Arles!

The cypresses are so wonderfully phallic, the cornfields positively brimming with fertility.”

“I think we’d better sit down,” said Persse. “They seem to be starting.”

On every seat was a handout which looked at first sight like the blueprint for an electric power station, all arrows, lines and boxes, except that the boxes were labelled
tragedy, comedy, pastoral, lyric, epic
and
romance
. “A Semiotic Theory of Genre” was the title of the paper, delivered by a sweating Slav in stumbling English—with French, the official language of the conference. It was warm in the rotunda. From behind Persse came the regular swish of Miss Maiden’s fan, punctuated by an occasional snort of incredulity or contempt. Persse’s head felt as heavy as a cannonball. Every now and again, as he dozed off, it would loll forward and wake him up by a painful jerk on his neck ligaments. Eventually, he allowed his chin to sink on to his breast, and fell into a deep sleep.