David Lodge - Small World (2 page)

“Christ, you really are a poet, aren’t you? Look, excuse me, I think I’ll grab another sherry while there’s still time.” And Dempsey shouldered his way to the nearest waitress, leaving Persse alone.

But not alone! Miraculously, the girl had materialized at his elbow.

“Hallo, what’s your name?” she said, peering at his lapel. “I can’t read these little badges without my glasses.” Her voice was strong but melodious, slightly American in accent, but with a trace of something else he could not identify.

“Persse McGarrigle—from Limerick,” he eagerly replied. “Persse? Is that short for Percival?”

“It could be,” said Persse, “if you like.”

The girl laughed, revealing teeth that were perfectly even and perfectly white. “What do you mean, if I like?”

“It’s a variant of ‘Pearce’.” He spelled it out for her.

“Oh, like in
Finnegans Wake
! The Ballad of Persse O’Reilley.”

“Exactly so. Persse, Pearce, Pierce—I wouldn’t be surprised if they were not all related to Percival. Percival, per se, as Joyce might have said,” he added, and was rewarded with another dazzling smile.

“What about McGarrigle?”

“It’s an old Irish name that means ‘Son of Super-valour’.”

“That must take a lot of living up to.”

“I do my best,” said Persse. “And your own name…?” He inclined his head towards the magnificent bosom, appreciating, now, why Professor Swallow had appeared to be almost nuzzling it in his attempt to read the badge pinned there, for the name was not boldly printed, like everyone else’s, but written in a minute italic script. “
A. L. Pabst
,” it austerely stated. There was no indication of which university she belonged to.

“Angelica,” she volunteered.

“Angelica!” Persse exhaled rather than pronounced the syllables. “That’s a beautiful name!”

“Pabst is a bit of a let-down, though, isn’t it? Not in the same class as ‘Son of Super-valour’.”

“Would it be a German name?”

“I suppose it was originally, though Daddy is Dutch.”

“You don’t look German or Dutch.”

“No?” she smiled. “What do I look then?”

“You look Irish. You remind me of the women in the south-west of Ireland whose ancestors intermarried with the sailors of the Spanish Armada that was shipwrecked on the coast of Munster in the great storm of 1588. They have just your kind of looks.”

“What a romantic idea! It could be true, too. I have no idea where I came from originally.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m an adopted child.”

“What does the ‘L’ stand for?”

“A rather silly name. I’d rather not tell you.”

“Then why draw attention to it?”

“If you use initials in the academic world, people think you’re a man and take you more seriously.”

“No one could mistake you for a man, Angelica,” Persse said sincerely.

“I mean in correspondence. Or publications.”

“Have you published much?”

“No, not a lot. Well, nothing, yet, actually. I’m still working on my PhD. Did you say you teach at Limerick? Is it a big Department?”

“Not very big,” said Persse. “As a matter of fact, there’s only the three of us. It’s basically an agricultural college. We’ve only recently started offering a general arts degree. Do you mean to say that you don’t know who your real parents were?”

“No idea at all. I was a foundling.”

“And where were you found, if that isn’t an impertinent question?”

“It is a little intimate, considering we’ve only just met,” said Angelica. “But never mind. I was found in the toilet of a KLM Stratocruiser flying from New York to Amsterdam. I was six weeks old. Nobody knows how I got there.”

“Did Mr Pabst find you?”

“No, Daddy was an executive of KLM at the time. He and Mummy adopted me, as they had no children of their own. Have you really only three members of staff in your Department?”

“Yes. There’s Professor McCreedy—he’s Old English. And Dr Quinlan—Middle English. I’m Modern English.”

“What? All of it? From Shakespeare to…?”

“T. S. Eliot. I did my MA thesis on Shakespeare’s influence on T. S. Eliot.”

“You must be worked to death.”

“Well, we don’t have a great number of students, to tell you the truth. Not many people know we exist. Professor McCreedy believes in keeping a low profile… And yourself, Angelica, where do you teach?”

“I haven’t got a proper job at the moment.” Angelica frowned, and began to look about her a trifle distractedly, as if in search of employment, so that Persse missed the crucial word in her next sentence. “I did some part-time teaching at…” she said. “But now I’m trying to finish my doctoral dissertation.”

“What is it on?” Persse asked.

Angelica turned her peat-dark eyes upon him. “Romance,” she said.

At that moment a gong sounded to announce dinner, and there was a general surge towards the exit in the course of which Persse got separated from Angelica. To his chagrin, he found himself obliged to sit between two medievalists, one from Oxford and one from Aberystwyth, who, leaning back at dangerous angles on their chairs, conducted an animated discussion about Chaucerian metrics behind his back, while he bent forward over his roast shoe-leather and cast longing looks up to the other end of the table, where Philip Swallow and Robin Dempsey were vying to entertain Angelica Pabst.

“If you are looking for the gravy, young man, it’s right under your nose.”

This observation came from an elderly lady sitting opposite Persse. Though her tone was sharp, her face was friendly, and she allowed herself a smile of complicity when Persse expressed his opinion that the beef was beyond the help of gravy. She wore a black silk dress of antique design and her white hair was neatly retained in a snood decorated with tiny beads of jet. Her name badge identified her as Miss Sybil Maiden, of Girton College, Cambridge. “Retired many years ago,” she explained. “But I still attend these conferences whenever I can. It helps to keep me young.”

Persse enquired about her scholarly interests.

“I suppose you would call me a folklorist,” she said. “I was a pupil of Jessie Weston’s. What is your own line of research?”

“I did my Master’s thesis on Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot.”

“Then you are no doubt familiar with Miss Weston’s book, From
Ritual to Romance
, on which Mr Eliot drew for much of the imagery and allusion in
The Waste Land?
”

“Indeed I am,” said Persse.

“She argued,” Miss Maiden continued, not at all deterred by this answer, “that the quest for the Holy Grail, associated with the Arthurian knights, was only superficially a Christian legend, and that its true meaning was to be sought in pagan fertility ritual. If Mr Eliot had taken her discoveries to heart, we might have been spared the maudlin religiosity of his later poetry.”

“Well,” said Persse placatingly, “I suppose everyone is looking for his own Grail. For Eliot it was religious faith, but for another it might be fame, or the love of a good woman.”

“Would you mind passing the gravy?” said the Oxford medievalist. Persse obliged.

“It all comes down to sex, in the end,” Miss Maiden declared firmly. “The life force endlessly renewing itself.” She fixed the gravy boat in the Oxford medievalist’s hand with a beady eye. “The Grail cup, for instance, is a female symbol of great antiquity and universal occurrence.” (The Oxford medievalist seemed to have second thoughts about helping himself to gravy.) “And the Grail spear, supposed to be the one that pierced the side of Christ, is obviously phallic.
The Waste Land
is really all about Eliot’s fears of impotence and sterility.”

“I’ve heard that theory before,” said Persse, “but I feel it’s too simple.”

“I quite agree,” said the Oxford medievalist. “This business of phallic symbolism is a lot of rot.” He stabbed the air with his knife to emphasize the point.

Preoccupied with this discussion, Persse failed to observe when Angelica left the dining-room. He looked for her in the bar, but she was not to be found there, or anywhere else that evening. Persse went to bed early, and tossed restlessly on his narrow, lumpy mattress, listening to the plumbing whining in the walls, footfalls in the corridor outside his room, and the sounds of doors slamming and engines starting in the car park beneath his window. Once he thought he heard the voice of Angelica calling “Goodnight,” but by the time he got to the window there was nothing to be seen except the fading embers of a departing car’s rear lights. Before he got back into bed he switched on the lamp above his sink, and stared critically at his reflection in the mirror. He saw a white, round, freckled face, snub nose, pale blue eyes, and a mop of red curly hair. “I wouldn’t say you were handsome, exactly,” he murmured. “But I’ve seen uglier mugs.”

Angelica was not present at the first formal session of the conference the next morning, which was one reason why Persse muttered “April is the cruellest month” under his breath as he sat in the lecture-room. Other reasons included the continuing cold, damp weather, which had not been anticipated by the Rummidge heating engineers, the inedibility of the bacon and tomatoes served at breakfast that morning, and the tedium of the paper to which he was listening. It was being given by the Oxford medievalist and was on the subject of Chaucerian metrics. He had heard the substance of it already, last night at dinner, and it did not improve on reacquaintance.

Persse yawned and shifted his weight from one buttock to another in his seat at the back of the lecture-room. He could not see the faces of many of his colleagues, but as far as could be judged from their postures, most of them were as disengaged from the discourse as himself. Some were leaning back as far as their seats allowed, staring vacantly at the ceiling, others were slumped forwards onto the desks that separated each row, resting their chins on folded arms, and others again were sprawled sideways over two or three seats, with their legs crossed and arms dangling limply to the floor. In the third row a man was surreptitiously doing The Times crossword, and at least three people appeared to be asleep. Someone, a student presumably, had carved into the surface of the desk at which Persse sat, cutting deep into the wood with the force of a man driven to the limits of endurance, the word “BORING”. Another had scratched the message, “Swallow is a wanker.” Persse saw no reason to dissent from either of these judgments.

Suddenly, though, there were signs of animation in the audience. The speaker was commencing his peroration, and had made reference to something called “structuralism”.

“Of course, to our friends across the Channel,” he said, with a slight curl of his lip, “everything I have been saying will seem vanity and illusion. To the structuralists, metre, like language itself, is merely a system of differences. The idea that there might be anything inherently expressive or mimetic in patterns of stress would be anathema…”

Some, probably the majority, of the audience, smiled and nodded and nudged each other. Others frowned, bit their lips and began making rapid notes. The question session, chaired by the Aberystwyth medievalist, was lively.

There followed a break for coffee, which was served in a small common-room not far away. Persse was delighted to find Angelica already ensconced here, fetchingly dressed in a roll-neck jumper, tweed skirt and high leather boots. Her cheeks had a healthy glow. She had been for a walk. “I slept through breakfast,” she explained, “and I was too late for the lecture.”

“You didn’t miss much,” said Persse. “Both were indigestible. What happened to you last night? I looked all over for you.”

“Oh, Professor Swallow asked some people back to his house for a drink.”

“You’re a friend of his, then, are you?”

“No. Well, not really. I’ve never met him before, if that’s what you mean. But he is very friendly.”

“Hmmph,” said Persse.

“What was the paper about, this morning?” Angelica asked.

“It was supposed to be about Chaucer’s metre, but the discussion was mostly about structuralism.”

Angelica looked annoyed. “Oh, what a nuisance that I missed it. I’m very interested in structuralism.”

“What is it, exactly?”

Angelica laughed.

“No, I’m serious,” said Persse. “What is structuralism? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?”

Angelica looked puzzled, and wary of having her leg pulled. “But you must know something about it, Persse. You must have heard of it, even in… Where did you do your graduate work?”

“University College Dublin. But I wasn’t there much of the time. I had TB, you see. They were very decent about it, let me work on my dissertation in the sanatorium. I had a visit from my supervisor occasionally, but mostly I worked on my own. Then before that, I did my BA at Galway. We never heard anything about structuralism there. Then after I got my Master’s degree, I went home to work on the farm for two years. My people are farmers, in county Mayo.”

“Did you mean to be a farmer yourself?”

“No, it was to get my strength back, after the TB. The doctors said an open-air life was the thing.”

“And did you—get your strength back?”

“Oh yes, I’m sound as a bell, now.” He struck himself vigorously on the chest. “Then I got the job at Limerick.”

“You were lucky. Jobs are hard to find these days.”

“I was lucky,” Persse agreed. “Indeed I was. I found out afterwards that I was called to the interview by mistake. They really meant to interview another fellow called McGarrigle—some highflying prize scholar from Trinity. But the letter was addressed to me—someone slipped up in the Registry—and they were too embarrassed to retract the invitation.”

“Well, you made the most of the lucky break,” said Angelica. “They could have appointed one of the other candidates.”

“Well, that was another piece of luck,” said Persse. “There were no other candidates—not called for interview anyway. They were quite sure they wanted to appoint this McGarrigle fellow, and they were after saving train fares. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I’ve never been in what you might call the swim, intellectually speaking. That’s why I’ve come to this conference. To improve myself. To find out what’s going on in the great world of ideas. Who’s in, who’s out, and all that. So tell me about structuralism.”