David Lodge - Small World (25 page)

“Here!” cried Persse from the floor. “Hold on, I’m coming.” A gust of laughter greeted his appearance on the platform, which Persse belatedly attributed to the fact that he was still holding a bottle of Guinness in his hand.

“Congratulations,” said the chairman, handing him a cheque. “I see you have brought your inspiration with you.”

“My inspiration,” said Persse emotionally, “is a girl called Angelica.”

“And very nice too,” said the chairman, giving him a gentle push towards the steps. “And the next award…”

When Persse got back to his point of origin, he found Ronald Frobisher in angry confrontation with Rudyard Parkinson. “What would you know about literary creation anyway, Parkinson?” Frobisher was demanding. “You’re just a ponce for the Sunday papers. Once a ponce, always a ponce. I remember you poncing about the quad at All Saints—”

“Now, now, that’s enough,” said Felix Skinner, trying to interpose himself between the two men.

“Are they going to fight?” said Thelma Ringbaum excitedly. “Shut up, Thelma,” said Howard Ringbaum.

“Really Frobisher,” said Parkinson, “this sort of behaviour is bad enough in one of your novels. In real life it’s quite intolerable.” He spoke disdainfully, but backed away at the same time. “Anyway, I wasn’t the only reviewer who didn’t care for the last novel you wrote, what was it, ten years ago?”

“Eight. But you were the only one who made that crack about my old Dad, Parkinson. I’ve never forgiven you for that.” Holding an empty Guinness bottle by the neck, Frobisher made a lunge in Parkinson’s direction. Someone screamed. Felix Skinner pinned Frobisher’s arms to his sides, and Howard Ringbaum grabbed the back of his collar and pulled, throttling the novelist. Thinking that this was an unfair as well as excessive use of force, Persse laid a restraining hand upon Ringbaum. Thelma threw herself into the scuffle and kicked her husband enthusiastically on the ankle. He released Frobisher with a howl of pain, and turned indignantly upon Persse. The upshot of all this was that a few minutes later, Persse and Frobisher found themselves alone together on the Embankment, having been requested in pressing terms by the management of the
Annabel Lee
to leave the reception forthwith.

“Silly buggers,” said Frobisher, straightening his tie. “Did they really think I was going to bottle that ponce? I just wanted to give him a fright.”

“I think you succeeded,” said Persse.

“Well, I’ll just make sure,” said Frobisher, “I’ll scare the shit out of the lot of them.” He disappeared down some dank steps to a lower level of the Embankment.

It was dark now, and Persse could not see what his companion was doing. Supporting his chin on his elbows, and his elbows on the Embankment wall, he gazed across the river at the floodlit concrete slabs of the Festival Hall and the National Theatre. Empty bottles, sandwich papers, handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends and other testimony of the summer night drifted downstream, for the tide had turned. The lights of the
Annabel Lee
glanced and darted in golden reflections on the dark water. At her stern a female figure was leaning over the rail, being sick. Frobisher reappeared at Persse’s side, breathing heavily and wiping his hands on a rag.

Inside the saloon there was a buzz of excitement over the incident. “It’s like the fifties all over again,” said someone. “There was always a chance of some writer taking a poke at a critic in those days. The pub next to the Royal Court was a good place to watch.”

Rudyard Parkinson was not disposed to take the matter so lightly. “I’ll see that Frobisher is expelled from the Academy for this outrage,” he said, trembling a little. “If not, I shall resign myself.”

“Quite right,” said Felix Skinner. “Did anyone see where Gloria got to?”

“That Irish punk nearly broke my ankle,” said Howard Ringbaum. “I’m going to sue somebody for this.”

“Howard,” said Thelma, “I think the boat’s moving.”

“Shut up, Thelma.”

Very slowly the
Annabel Lee
began to drift away from the Embankment. The rope attaching the ship to the gangplank creaked with the strain, then snapped. Space appeared between the end of the gangplank and the side of the ship.

“I don’t think you should have done that,” said Persse.

“When I graduated at Oxford,” said Ronald Frobisher, in a tone of fireside reminiscence, “my Mam and Dad came up for the ceremony. Parkinson was a Research Fellow at the same college. He’d tutored me for a term—a pompous bastard I thought he was even then, though admittedly he’d read a lot. Anyway, we bumped into him in the quad that day, so I introduced him to Mam and Dad. My Dad was a skilled worker, sand-moulder in a foundry, he had a wonderful touch, the management grovelled to him whenever they had a tricky job to be done. Of course, Parkinson knew fuck-all about that, and cared less. To him Dad was just a stupid prole in a cloth cap and best suit, to be patronized like mad. He twittered away and Dad got more and more nervous and kept coughing to hide his nervousness. Now it so happened that he’d not long ago had all his teeth out, common enough in a middle-aged working man, have ‘em all out and be done with ‘em, was the form of preventive dentistry favoured in our neighbourhood, and his false set didn’t fit too well. To cut a long story short, he coughed the top set right out of his mouth. Caught them, too, and shoved them in his pocket. It was funny really, but Parkinson looked as if he was going to faint. Anyway, many years later I wrote a novel about a character based on my Dad—he was dead by then—and Parkinson reviewed it for one of the Sundays. He said, I remember the exact words, ‘It’s difficult to share the author’s sentimental regard for the main character. That your dentures fit badly doesn’t automatically guarantee that you are the salt of the earth.’ Now there was nothing about false teeth in the book. That was a completely private piece of spite. I’ve never forgiven Parkinson for that.”

The ship had now moved some distance downstream from its original position. Gloria lifted her white face from the rail and stared across the water as if dimly recognizing them. Frobisher waved to her and, in a puzzled, hesitant fashion, she waved back.

“I still don’t think you should have done it,” said Persse. “They might hit a bridge.”

“It’s all right,” said Frobisher, “I left one long rope tied that should hold her. I know a thing or two about boats. I used to work on narrowboats in my vacations when I was a student. The Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. Those were the days.”

Faint cries and shrieks of alarm were audible from the ship. A door burst open and light flooded onto the deck. A man shouted across the water.

“I think we should move on,” said Persse.

“Good idea,” said Frobisher. “I’ll buy you a drink. It’s only”—he checked his watch—”five to nine.” Then he clapped a hand to his brow. “Christ, I’m supposed to be doing a radio interview at nine!” He stepped into the road and waved down a passing taxi. “Bush House,” he told the driver, and bundled Persse into the vehicle. They rolled together from one side of the back seat to the other as the cab made a rapid U-turn.

“Who is interviewing you?” Persse asked.

“Somebody in Australia.”

“In Australia?”

“They can do amazing things these days, with satellites. Australian telly is going to show the serial of Any Road Further soon, so they want to do a tie-in radio interview for some arts programme.”

“I don’t think I’ve read Any Road Further,” said Persse.

“That’s not surprising. It only exists as a telly serial. What happens to Aaron Stonehouse when he becomes rich and famous and fed up, like me.” He looked at his watch again. “The Aussies have booked some studio time at the BBC. They won’t be pleased if I’m late.”

Fortunately for Ronald Frobisher, there had been some delay in getting the line open from Australia, and he was safely ensconced in the studio by the time the voice of the producer in Sydney came through, surprisingly loud and clear. Persse sat in the control room with the sound engineer, listening and watching the proceedings with some fascination. The engineer explained the set-up to him. The producer was in Sydney, the interviewer in Cooktown, Queensland. The questions went from Cooktown to Sydney by wire, and from Sydney to London by the Indian Ocean and European satellites, and Ronald Frobisher’s replies went back to Australia via the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean satellites. A short question-and-answer exchange girdled the world in about ten seconds.

Watching the headphoned Ronald Frobisher through the big glass pane that sealed off the studio from the control room, Persse admired the ease with which the writer handled this unusual discourse situation, chatting to his interlocutor, a rather dim-sounding man called Rodney Wainwright, as if he were on the other side of the table instead of on the other side of the world. Wainwright asked him if Aaron Stonehouse was still an Angry Young Man. “Still angry, not so young,” said Ronald. Was the novel dying? “Like all of us, it has been dying since the day it was born.” When did he do most of his writing? “In the ten minutes after my first morning coffee break.”

When the interview was over, Persse went out of the control room to meet him. “Well done,” he said.

“Did it seem all right?” Frobisher looked pleased with himself. The sound engineer called them back into the control room. “This is rather amusing,” he said. “Listen.”

The voices of Rodney Wainwright and his producer in Sydney, a man called Greg, were still coming from the speakers. They seemed to be old buddies.

“When are you coming to Sydney, then, Rod?”

“I don’t know, Greg. I’m pretty tied up here. Got a conference paper to write.”

“Time we had some beers together, sport, and checked out the talent on Bondi beach.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, Greg, the talent is not so bad up here in Queensland.”

“I bet the girls don’t go topless.”

There was a pause. “Well, only by private arrangement.”

Greg chortled. “You should see Bondi these days, on a fine Sunday. It’d make your eyes pop out of your head.”

The sound engineer smiled at Persse and Ronald. “Sydney have forgotten to close down the line,” he said. “They don’t realize that we can still hear them.”

“Can they hear us?” said Persse.

“No, not unless I switch this mike on.”

“You mean we’re eavesdropping from twelve thousand miles away?” said Persse. “That’s a queer thought.”

“Ssh!” hissed Ronald Frobisher, holding up a finger. The conversation in Australia had turned to another topic—himself.

“I didn’t like his last one,” Rodney Wainwright was saying. “And that was, what, eight years ago?”

“More than eight,” Greg agreed. “You think he’s washed up?”

“I’m sure he is,” said Rodney Wainwright. “He had absolutely nothing to say about postmodernism. He didn’t seem to even understand the question.”

Ronald Frobisher bent to switch on the sound engineer’s mike, “You can stick your question about postmodernism up your arse, Wainwright,” he said.

There was a stunned silence from the antipodes. Then, “Who said that?” Rodney Wainwright quavered.

“Jesus,” said Greg.

“Jesus?”

“I mean, Jesus, the fucking line is still open,” said Greg.

Two thousand miles away, in Turkey, it has been dark for some hours. The little row of terraced houses outside Ankara looks to Akbil Borak, as he bumps towards it in his Deux Chevaux along the service road from the main highway, rather like a ship, with lights shining from its cabin windows, moored on the edge of the dark immensity that is the central Anatolian plain. He stops the car, kills the engine, and climbs stiffly out. It has been a long day.

In the kitchen Oya has left him a little snack and black tea in a thermos. Having eaten well that evening, at the University’s expense, he leaves the snack, but drinks the tea. Then he goes upstairs, treading softly on the narrow stairs so as not to wake Ahmed. “Is that you, Akbil?” Oya sleepily enquires from the bedroom. Akbil murmurs a reassuring reply, and goes into Ahmed’s room, to gaze fondly at his sleeping son, and tuck a dangling arm under the blankets. Then he goes to the bathroom. Then he gets into bed and makes love to Oya.

Akbil Borak has sex with his wife almost every night, ordinarily (that is, when he is not having to sit up over the collected works of William Hazlitt). In Turkey, this past winter, there have been few other pleasures to indulge in. It is also, he believes, good for the health. Tonight, since he is tired, their congress is brief and straightforward. Akbil soon rolls off Oya with a sigh of satisfaction, and pulls the quilt up over his shoulders.

“Don’t go to sleep, Akbil,” Oya complains. “I want to hear about your day. Did Professor Swallow arrive safely?”

“Yes, the plane was only a little late. I went with Mr Custer in the British Council car to meet him.”

“What is he like?”

“Tall, thin, stooping. He has a fine silver beard.”

“Is he a nice man?”

“I think so. A little nervous. Eccentric, you might say. He had a vest hanging out of his raincoat pocket.”

“A vest?”

“A white undervest. Perhaps he took it off in the plane because he was too hot, I don’t know. He fell down outside the airport.”

“Oh dear! Had he been drinking on the airplane?”

“No, he put his foot in a pothole. You know how bad the roads are since the winter. This hole must have been half a metre deep, right outside the terminal building. I felt ashamed. We really have no idea how to make roads in this country.”

“Is Professor Swallow married?”

“Yes, he has three children. But he did not seem interested in talking about them,” said Akbil sleepily.

Oya pinched him. “Then what happened? After he fell down?”

“We picked him up, Mr Custer and I, and dusted him down and drove him into Ankara. He was rather nervous on the drive, he kept ducking down behind the back of the driver’s seat. You know that the highway to the airport is only paved on one side for certain stretches, so traffic moving in both directions uses the same side of the road. I suppose it is a bit alarming if you are not used to it.”

“Then what happened?”