Jumpers (4 page)

TV VOICE
:… beautiful blue sky for the fly-past, and here they come!
(
Very loud: the jet planes scream and thunder on the sound track and scream and thunder across the
SCREEN
.
In mid-flight they are cut off
GEORGE
has turned off the TV: silence and white Screen
,
GEORGE
still moving towards the door, from the bed where the TV switch is lying
.)

GEORGE
: Are you a proverb?

DOTTY
: No, I'm a book.

GEORGE
:
The Naked and the Dead
.

DOTTY
: Stay with me!
(
The four lines have been rapid
.
GEORGE
is now at the door, ready to leave
.
DOTTY
has sat up on the bed
.)

DOTTY
: Play with me….

GEORGE
(
hesitating
): Now…?

DOTTY
: I mean
games
——
(
GEORGE
makes to leave
.)
Be nice, (
GEORGE
moves. Desperate
.) I'll let you!
(
GEORGE
leaves, shutting the door and thus revealing the corpse to the audience. He re-enters, and the corpse is obscured again
.)
*

GEORGE:
Do I say ‘My friend the late Bertrand Russell' or ‘My late friend Bertrand Russell'? They both sound funny. (
Pause
.)

DOTTY:
Probably because he wasn't your friend.

GEORGE
: Well, I don't know about that.

DOTTY
(
angrily
): He was
my
friend. If he hadn't asked me who was that bloke always hanging about, you'd never have met him.

GEORGE:
Nevertheless, I did meet him, and we talked animatedly for some time.

DOTTY:
As I recall,
you
talked animatedly for some time about language being the aniseed trail that draws the hounds of heaven when the metaphysical fox has gone to earth; he must have thought you were barmy.

GEORGE
(
hurt
): I resent that. My metaphor of the fox and the hounds was an allusion, as Russell well understood, to his Theory of Descriptions.

DOTTY:
The Theory of Descriptions was not what was on his mind that night. For one thing it was sixty years since he'd thought it up, and for another he was trying to telephone Mao Tse Tung.

GEORGE:
I was simply trying to bring his mind back to matters of universal import, and away from the day-to-day parochialism of international politics.

DOTTY
:
Universal import!
You're living in dreamland!

GEORGE:
Oh really? Well, I wouldn't have thought that trying to get the local exchange to put you through to Chairman Mao with the wine-waiter from the Pagoda Garden hanging on to the bedroom extension to interpret, showed a grasp of the real world. (
Hegoes to leave
.) Thumper! Where are you, Thumper?

DOTTY:
Georgie!—I'll let you.
(
He halts
.)

GEORGE:
I don't want to be ‘let'. Can't you see that it's an insult?
(
DOTTY
drops back on to the bed in a real despair, and perhaps a real contrition
.)

DOTTY:
Oh God… if only Archie would come.

GEORGE
(
coldly
): Is he coming
again?

DOTTY:
I don't know. Do you mind?

GEORGE:
Well, he's dropped in to see you every day this week. What am I supposed to think?

DOTTY:
I don't believe I like your tone.

GEORGE:
I have no tone. But I would like tonelessly to make the point that if he intends to visit you on a regular basis then either he should come after lunch or you should get up before it. Receiving in the bedroom is liable to get a woman talked about, unless it is an authentic salon.

DOTTY
: How dare you?—Go on, get out and write your stupid speech for your dreamland debating society! I thought for once—I mean I seriously thought I might get a little—understanding—yes, finding myself in a bit of a spot, I seriously considered trusting you—for a little panache, without a lot of pedantic questions and hadn't-we-better-inform-the-authorities, I mean we should be able to rise
above
that—but not
you
, oh no, do you wonder I turn to Archie——?
(
She lies down on the bed and pulls the cover over her
.)

GEORGE
(
reckless, committed
): I can put two and two together, you know. Putting two and two together is my
subject
. I do not leap to hasty conclusions. I do not deal in suspicion and wild surmise. I examine the data; I look for logical inferences. We have on the one hand, that is to say in bed, an attractive married woman whose relationship with her husband stops short only of the issue of a ration book; we have on the other hand daily visits by a celebrated ladies' man who rings the doorbell, is admitted by Mrs. Thing who shows him into the bedroom, whence he emerges an hour later looking more than a little complacent and crying, ‘Don't worry, I'll let myself out!'
(
He lapsed into a calm suavity
.)
Now let us see. What can we make of it all? Wife in bed, daily visits by gentlemen caller. Does anything suggest itself?

DOTTY
(
calmly):
Sounds to me he's the doctor.
(
GEORGE
is staggered
.)

GEORGE
(
pause
): Doctor?… The Vice-Chancellor?

DOTTY
(
spiritedly
): You
know
he's a bloody doctor!

GEORGE:
I know he's a qualified psychiatrist, but he doesn't practise. I mean he isn't a chap who goes around looking down people'
s throats
. His line is psychotics… manic depressives—schizos—fantasisers——
(
DOTTY
picks up her mirror and starts brushing her hair
.) (
Catching up
.) You mean you're bad again? (
Pause
.) I'm sorry…. How was I supposed to know you were…

DOTTY:
I'm all right in here.
(
Pause
.)

GEORGE:
Why did he bring you flowers? Not that there's any reason, of course, why he shouldn't bring you flowers.

DOTTY
: Quite.

GEORGE:
I mean, he's our friend, more or less. He likes you.
Do you like him?

DOTTY:
He's all right in his way.

GEORGE:
What way is that?

DOTTY:
Oh, you know.

GEORGE
: No. What does he do?

DOTTY
: He's a doctor.
(
Pause
.)
He keeps my spirits up.

GEORGE:
Does he? That's… good.

DOTTY:
I won't see him any more, if you like. (
Turns to him
.) I'll see you. If you like.
(
GEORGE
examines the new tone, and decides the moment is genuine
.)

GEORGE
(
softening
): Oh, Dotty…. The first day you walked into my class… I thought, ‘
That's
better!'… It was a wet day… your hair was wet… and I thought, ‘The hyacinth girl'… and ‘How my hair is growing thin'.

DOTTY
: And I thought, ‘I'll sit quiet and they won't find out I'm stupid'… and ‘What a modest way with lovely words', and ‘How his hair is growing thin'.

GEORGE:
And you started to sit nearer the front.

DOTTY
: You didn't look any younger.

GEORGE
(
pang
): And then you fell among theatricals.

DOTTY:
But it was still all right.

GEORGE:
Oh yes, for a time. And then again, it wasn't. And then again, it sometimes is, even now, when all else fails you.

DOTTY
(
going to him
): George, I'm in a bit of a spot.

GEORGE:
What?

DOTTY
(
touching him
): Promise not to be stuffy.

GEORGE
(
responding to the touch
): We'll be unstuffy together… if you like.

DOTTY
(
touching his face
): You haven't shaved. You look awful.

GEORGE:
I'll shave then… if you like.

DOTTY:
All right… I feel a bit starved.

GEORGE
: So do I.

DOTTY:
Food, I meant…

GEORGE:
Afterwards.

DOTTY
: Before.

GEORGE
(
moving away
): On second thoughts…

DOTTY:
Haven't you invented God
yet?

GEORGE:
Nearly; I'm having him typed out.
(
She restrains him from leaving
.)

DOTTY
: Please…. Shave.

GEORGE
(
pause
): All right.
(
The jets come back, screaming over the house
.
GEORGE
stares out of thefrench window
.
DOTTY
looks up at the ceiling
.)
A parade!

DOTTY
: A parade!

GEORGE:
Oh yes, the Radical Liberals…. It seems in dubious taste…. Soldiers… fighter planes…. After all, it was a general election, not a
coup d'état
.

DOTTY:
It's funny you should say that.

GEORGE:
Why?

DOTTY:
Archie says it was a
coup d'état
not a general election.

GEORGE:
Glib nonsense. It is unthinkable that the Radical Liberal Party could manipulate the democratic process.

DOTTY:
Democracy is all in the head.

GEORGE:
And anyway, you can't get away with that sort of thing. Everything comes out in the wash, sooner or later.

DOTTY:
Then God help me and the Government.

GEORGE:
Furthermore, I had a vote.

DOTTY:
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting, Archie says.

GEORGE
(
angrily
): Archie this, Archie that! Just for today I don't want to know anything about anything remotely to do with Archie! (
He moves away
.) I'm going to shave.

DOTTY
: You may as well grow a beard.

GEORGE
(
to the goldfish
): Good morning! (
to
DOTTY
.) His water needs changing.
(
GEORGE
disappears into the Bathroom but reappears almost immediately, with a can of shaving foam. He applies the foam to his face, giving himself a white beard
.)
What did you mean, God help you and the Government?

DOTTY
(
suddenly merry and mischievous
): I only mentioned God reflexively (
and sees him
), old man, not as a true invocation.

GEORGE
(
with asperity
): Whenever you are like this I always think how unjust it is that so many people must have looked at us and said, ‘What on earth made
her
marry
him
?'
(
He disappears back into the Bathroom
.)

DOTTY
(
still merry
): And yet, Professor, one can't help wondering at the persistence of the reflex, the universal constant unthinking appeal to the non-existent God who is presumed dead. Perhaps he's only missing in action, shot down behind the thin yellow lines of advancing Rad-Libs and getting himself together to go BOO!
(
He returns holding his razor
.)

GEORGE:
Have you been shaving your legs?

DOTTY:
And so our tutorials descended, from the metaphysical to the merely physical… not so much down to earth as down to the carpet, do you remember?
(
New tone
.
GEORGE
,
half foamed, bibbed, sits on the bed
.)
That was the year of ‘The Concept of Knowledge', your masterpiece, and the last decent title left after Ryle bagged ‘The Concept of Mind' and Archie bagged ‘The Problem of Mind' and Ayer bagged ‘The Problem of Knowledge'—and ‘The Concept of Knowledge' might have made you if
you had written it, but we were still on the carpet when an American with an Italian name working in Melbourne bagged it for a rather bad book which sold four copies in London, three to unknown purchasers and the fourth to yourself. He'd stolen a march while you were still comparing knowledge in the sense of having-experience-of, with knowledge in the sense of being-acquainted-with, and knowledge in the sense of inferring facts with knowledge in the sense of comprehending truths, and all the time as you got more and more acquainted with, though no more comprehending of, the symbolic patterns on my Persian carpet, it was knowing in the biblical sense of screwing that you were learning about and maybe there's a book in you yet——
(
GEORGE
throws down his bib
.)
—or did you mean about me and the government?
(
As she crosses to pick up the goldfish bowl
.
GEORGE
stops and turns, with dignity
.)