David Lodge - Small World (34 page)

“I’m simply doing my research.”

“It’s called transference. I looked it up in a psychology book.”

“Rubbish!” shouts Robin Dempsey.

“If you ask me, you need a proper psychiatrist,” says Josh Collins, trembling with anger. “You’re off your trolley. That thing”—he points a quivering finger at ELIZA—”Can’t really talk, you know. It can’t actually think. It can’t answer questions. It’s not a bloody oracle.”

“I know perfectly well how computers work, thank you,” says Robin Dempsey, rising to his feet. “I’ll be back after lunch.”

He leaves the room in a somewhat flustered state, omitting to switch off the VDU. Josh Collins lifts up the plastic hood and reads what is written on the screen. He frowns and scratches his nose.

Delphi, like the Acropolis, is crawling with tourists, but the site is proof against their intrusion, as Philip and Joy agree, taking a breather halfway up the steep climb from the road, and looking down on the Sacred Plain far below, where the Pleistos winds through multitudinous olive groves to the Gulf of Corinth.

“It’s sublime,” she says. “I’m so glad we came.”

“Apparently the ancients thought this was the centre of the world,” says Philip, consulting his guidebook. “There was a stone on this site called the
omphalos
. The navel of the earth. I suppose that great cleft between the mountains was the vagina.”

“You’ve got a one-track mind,” says Joy.

“Is that fair?” says Philip. “Last night I sucked your ten toes, individually.”

“There’s no need to tell everyone in Delphi,” says Joy, blushing charmingly.

“Give me a kiss.”

“No, not here. The Greeks don’t approve of people kissing in public.”

“Not many Greeks about,” he comments, which is true enough. The coaches that line the road below them have brought tourists of almost every nation except Greeks. Nevertheless Philip is surprised and somewhat disconcerted to be greeted, in the sanctuary of Apollo, by an elderly lady wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat tied under her chin with a chiffon scarf, and carrying a shooting-stick.

“Sybil Maiden,” she reminds him. “I attended the conference you organized at Rummidge.”

“Oh, yes,” says Philip. “How are you?”

“Very well, thank you. The heat is rather trying, but I have just cooled my brow at the Kastalian spring—most refreshing. This is also a great help.” She pulls apart the handles of her shooting stick and, planting the point in a crevice between two ancient blocks of stone, seats herself on the little leather hammock at the top of the implement. “They laughed at me at first. Now everybody on the course wants one.”

“What course is that?”

“Literature, Life and Thought in Ancient Greece. We have come from Athens for the day by charabanc—or so I call it, to the intense amusement of my fellow students, most of whom are Americans. They are all at the splendidly preserved stadium, further up the hill, running round the race track.”

“Running? In this heat?” Joy exclaims.

“Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages. You are Mrs Swallow, I presume?”

“Yes,” says Philip.

“No,” says Joy simultaneously.

Miss Maiden glances sharply from one to the other. “There used to be an inscription on the wall of the temple here, ‘Know thyself.’ But they did not deem it necessary to add, ‘Know thy wife.. “

“Joy and I hope to marry one day,” Philip explains, in some confusion. “My personal life is in a transitional state at the moment. I’d be grateful if you would not mention our meeting here to any mutual acquaintance in England.”

“I am no tittle-tattle, Professor Swallow, I assure you. But I suppose you have to protect your reputation, now you are so much in the public eye. I read a very flattering item about you in one of the Sunday newspapers recently.”

“Oh, that… I don’t know where the journalist got the idea that I was in the running for the UNESCO chair. It was the first I’d heard of it.

“Ah yes, the Siege Perilous!” Miss Maiden holds up a hand to command their attention, and begins to recite in a high, vatic chant: “0 brother, In our great hall there stood a vacant chair Fashioned by Merlin ere he passed away, And careen with strange figures; and in and out The figures, like a serpent, ran a scroll Of letters in a tongue no man could read.

And Merlin called it, ‘The Siege Perilous,’

Perilous for good and ill; ‘for there,’ he said, `No man could sit but he should lose himself.’ “

Miss Maiden drops her hand, and cocks her head interrogatively in Philip’s direction. “Well, Professor Swallow?”

“It sounds like Tennyson,” he says. “Is it from ‘The Holy Grail’, in the
Idylls?
”

“Bravo!” exclaims Miss Maiden. “I respect a man who can recognize a quotation. It’s a dying art.” She dabs her brow with a dainty pocket handkerchief. “Everybody was talking about this UNESCO chair at Amsterdam recently. A most tedious conference in other respects.”

“You seem to travel about the world a great deal, Miss Maiden,” Joy observes.

“It keeps me young, my dear. I like to know what’s going on in the world of scholarship. Who’s in, who’s out.”

“And who,” says Joy impulsively, “do you think will get the UNESCO Chair?”

Miss Maiden closes her eyes and seems to sway on the fulcrum of her shooting stick as she considers the question. “The most surprising person,” she says in a slurred voice. “It always is in these cases.”

Fearing that she is about to faint, Philip steps forward to lend his support, but Miss Maiden suddenly opens her eyes and straightens up. “I think I’ll go back to the charabanc,” she says. “It’s air-conditioned. So nice to have met you both.”

“Are you sure you can manage the steps on your own?” says Philip. “Perfectly well, thank you,” says Miss Maiden. “Goodbye, goodbye!”

They watch her carefully descend the winding steps towards the road where fleets of sightseeing buses are drawn up.

“Strange old girl,” says Philip. “But you’ve got to admire her spirit.”

“The most surprising person could be you,” says Joy.

In Darlington, it is a fine summer evening. The raw, unfinished campus looks almost attractive in the mellow evening light, though nothing can make the Computer Centre look other than an ugly prefabricated hut. Through its open windows carry the sounds of summer pursuits, the pock pock of tennis balls bandied to and fro on the nearby courts, the occasional cry of Howzat? from the playing fields, and the sounds of guitars and harmonicas from an impromptu al fresco singalong down by the artificial lake. The two men inside are, however, oblivious to these noises. One watches the other, who watches a screen. The dialogue represented there reads as follows: R. D.; I’M NOT FEELING ANY BETTER.

ELIZA: WHY IS THAT?

R. D.: THIS BUSINESS ABOUT PHILIP SWALLOW.

ELIZA: TELL ME ABOUT PHILIP SWALLOW.

R. D.: I ALREADY TOLD YOU ABOUT HIM.

ELIZA: IS THERE ANYTHING YOU WOULD LIKE TO ADD TO YOUR PREVIOUS REMARKS?

R. D.: SWALLOW EPITOMIZES THE UNFAIRNESS OF LIFE TO ME. AT RUMMIDGE HE GOT THE SENIOR LECTURESHIP I SHOULD 246 HAVE GOT. THEN HE GOT THE CHAIR THERE BY A LUCKY FLUKE. NOW HE’S HAVING A GREAT SUCCESS WITH THIS PATHETIC BOOK ABOUT HAZLITT.

ELIZA: TELL ME ABOUT HAZLITT

R. D.: I’M NOT INTERESTED IN HAZLITT. I HAVEN’T EVEN READ SWALLOW’S ROTTEN BOOK. I DON’T NEED TO. I SAT THROUGH ENOUGH TEDIOUS EXAMINERS MEETINGS WITH HIM TO KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE. THE IDEA OF HIS BEING A SERIOUS CANDIDATE FOR THE UNESCO CHAIR IS PREPOSTEROUS.

ELIZA: I WOULDN’T SAY THAT.

It is this last line of the dialogue that Robin Dempsey has been staring at, transfixed, for the last ten minutes. Its appearance made the hairs on the back of his neck bristle, for it is of an entirely different order from anything ELIZA has produced until now: not a question, not a request, not a statement about something already mentioned in the discourse, but an expression of opinion. How can ELIZA have opinions? How can she know anything about the UNESCO Chair that Robin himself doesn’t know, or hasn’t told her? Robin is almost afraid to ask. At last, slowly and hesitantly, he types: WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT IT?

Instantly ELIZA replies: MORE THAN YOU THINK.

Robin turns pale, then red. He types:

ALL RIGHT, IF YOU’RE SO CLEVER, TELL ME WHO WILL GET THE UNESCO CHAIR The screen remains blank. Robin smiles and relaxes. Then he realizes that he has forgotten to indicate the end of his message with a punctuation mark. He presses the period key. On the screen, the letters rippling from left to right faster than thought, appears a name: PHILIP SWALLOW.

Robin Dempsey’s chair keels over and crashes to the floor as he starts to his feet and staggers backwards, staring aghast at the screen. His face is ashen. Josh Collins comes out of his glass cubicle. “Anything wrong?”

But Dempsey stumbles past him, out of the building, without a word, his eyes fixed, like a man walking in his sleep. Josh Collins watches him leave, then goes across to the computer terminal, and reads what is written there. If Josh Collins ever smiled, one might say he was smiling to himself.

After the Joyce Conference in Zürich, Morris returns to his luxurious nest on the shores of Lake Como. The days pass pleasantly. In the mornings he reads and writes; in the afternoons he takes a siesta, and deals with correspondence until the sun has lost some of its heat. Then it is time for a jog through the woods, a shower, a drink before dinner, and a game of poker or backgammon afterwards in the drawing-room. He retires early to bed, where he falls to sleep listening to rock music on his transistor radio. It is a restful, civilized regime. Only his correspondence keeps him conscious of the anxieties, desires and conflicts of the real world.

There is, for instance, a letter from Desiree’s lawyers requesting a reply to their previous communication concerning college tuition fees for the twins, and a letter from Desiree herself threatening to visit him at the Rockefeller villa and make a public scene if he doesn’t come through with the money pretty damn quick. It seems that she is in Europe for the summer: the letter is postmarked Heidelberg—uncomfortably close. There is another letter from his own lawyer advising him to pay up. Grudgingly, Morris complies. There is a cable, reply paid, from Rodney Wainwright, begging for another extension of the deadline for the submission of his paper for the Jerusalem conference. Morris cables back, “BRING FINISHED PAPER WITH YOU TO CONFERENCE” since it is too late now to strike Rodney Wainwright from the programme.

There is a letter, handwritten on Rummidge English Department notepaper, from Philip Swallow, confirming his acceptance of Morris’s invitation to participate in the Jerusalem conference, and asking if he can bring a “friend” with him.

“You’ll never guess who it is. You remember Joy, the woman I told you about, whom I met in Genoa, and thought was dead? Well, she wasn’t killed in that plane crash after all—she wasn’t on the plane, though her husband was. I met her by chance in Turkey, and we’re madly in love with each other. Hilary doesn’t know yet. When the time is right, I’ll ask Hilary for a divorce. I think you know our marriage has been a lost cause for quite some time. Meanwhile, Jerusalem would be an ideal opportunity for Joy and I to get together. Naturally I will pay for her accommodation. (Please reserve us a double room at the Hilton.)”

This missive gives Morris no pleasure at all. “Madly in love,” forsooth! Is this language appropriate to a man in his fiftieth year?

Hasn’t he learned by now that this whole business of being “in love” is not an existential reality, but a form of cultural production, an illusion produced by the mutual reflections of a million rose-tinted mirrors: love poems, pop songs, movie images, agony columns, shampoo ads, romantic novels? Apparently not. The letter reads like the effusion of some infatuated teenager. Morris will not admit to himself that there may be a trace of envy in this harsh assessment. He prefers to identify his response as righteous indignation at being more or less compelled to collude in the deception of Hilary. For a man who claims to believe in the morally improving effects of reading great literature, Philip Swallow (it seems to Morris) takes his marriage vows pretty lightly.

There is a brief letter from Arthur Kingfisher, courteously acknowledging Morris’s last and enclosing a xerox copy of his keynote address to the Chicago conference on the Crisis of the Sign. Morris immediately fires back a reply asking if Arthur Kingfisher could by any chance contemplate taking part in the Jerusalem conference on the Future of Criticism. Morris is convinced that if he can only get Arthur Kingfisher to himself for a week or so, he will be able to cajole, wheedle and flatter the old guy into seeing his own irresistible eligibility for the UNESCO chair. He spends a whole day in the composition of this letter, emphasizing the exclusiveness of the conference, a small group of select scholars, not so much a conference as a symposium, setting out the attractions of the Jerusalem Hilton as a venue, alluding delicately to Arthur Kingfisher’s half-Jewish ethnic origins, and drawing attention to the many optional sightseeing expeditions that have been arranged for the participants. Recalling that Fulvia Morgana had mentioned that at Chicago Arthur Kingfisher was inseparable from a beautiful Asian chick, Morris makes it clear that the invitation to Jerusalem includes any companion he cares to bring with him. As a final incentive he hints that the conference might run to a Concorde flight for the transatlantic leg of the journey, having checked this out first by a long-distance phone call to his Israeli friend Sam Singerman, who is co-organizer of the conference, and has raised the financial backing for it from a British supermarket chain whose Zionist chairman has been persuaded that the event will enhance Israel’s international cultural prestige. “There’ll be no problem about getting Kingfisher’s fare,” Sam assures Morris. “We can have as much money as we want. The only condition is that we’ve got to call it the Pricewize International Symposium on the Future of Criticism.”

“That’s all right,” says Morris. “We can live with that. As long as we don’t have to give Green Stamps with every lecture.” He addresses and seals the letter to Arthur Kingfisher, and goes out on to the balcony of his room to stretch his limbs. It is late afternoon, and a hazy golden light falls on the mountains and the lake. Time for his jog.