David Lodge - Small World (28 page)

Persse woke with a start from a dream in which he was delivering a paper about the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare from a pulpit in a chapel shaped like the inside of a jumbo jet. What had woken him was a thunderclap. The sky was dark behind the high windows of the rotunda, and the lights had been switched on. Rain drummed on the roof. He yawned and rubbed his eyes. On the rostrum, a man with a pale face and a skullcap of blond hair was speaking into the microphone in Germanically accented English, biting off the consonants and spitting them out as if they were pips, gesturing occasionally with a black-gloved hand. Persse shook his head in the manner of a swimmer clearing his ears of water. Although visually he had woken up, his dream seemed to be continuing on the audio channel. He pinched himself, and felt the sensation. He pinched Morris Zapp, snoozing beside him.

“Lay off, Fulvia,” Morris Zapp mumbled. Then, opening his eyes, he sat up. “Ah, yeah, that’s von Turpitz. How long’s he been speaking?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been asleep myself.”

“Is his stuff any good?”

“I think it’s very good,” said Persse. Morris Zapp looked glum. “But then,” Persse continued, “I’m biased. I wrote it.”

“Huh?” Morris Zapp gaped.

Lightning flickered outside the windows and the lights inside the auditorium went out. There was a gasp of surprise and consternation from the audience, immediately drowned by a tremendous thunderclap overhead which made them all jump with fright. The lights came on again. Von Turpitz continued to read his paper in the same relentlessly precise accent, without pause or hesitation. He had evidently been speaking for some time, because he reached the end of his discourse about ten minutes later. He squared off the pages of his script, bowed stiffly to the chairman, and sat down to polite applause. The chairman invited questions. Persse stood up. The chairman smiled and nodded.

“I’d like to ask the speaker,” said Persse, “if he recently read a draft outline of a book about the influence of T. S. Eliot on the modern reading of Shakespeare, submitted by me to the publishers Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein, of London.”

The chairman looked puzzled. Von Turpitz looked stunned.

“Would you repeat the question, please?” the chairman asked.

Persse repeated it. A sussuration of whispered comment and speculation passed like a breeze around the auditorium. Von Turpitz leaned across to the chairman and said something into his ear. The chairman nodded, and bent forward to address Persse through the microphone. His identification disc dangled from his lapel like a medal. “May I ask, sir, whether you are an officially registered member of the Conference?”

“Well, no, I’m not…” said Persse.

“Then I’m afraid your question is out of order,” said the chairman. Von Turpitz busied himself with his papers, as though this procedural wrangle had nothing to do with him.

“That’s not fair!” Persse protested. “I have reason to think that Professor von Turpitz has plagiarized part of his paper from an unpublished manuscript of my own.”

“I’m sorry,” said the chairman. “I cannot accept a question from someone who is not a member of the Conference.”

“Well I’m a member,” said Morris Zapp, rising to his feet beside Persse, “so let me ask it: did Professor von Turpitz read McGarrigle’s manuscript for Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein, or did he not?”

There was mild uproar in the auditorium. Cries of “Shame!”

“Point of order, Mr Chairman!”

“Answer!” and “Let him speak!” with equivalent ejaculations in various other languages, could be distinguished in a general babble of conversation. The chairman looked helplessly at von Turpitz, who seized the microphone, delivered an angry speech in German, pointing a black finger menacingly at Persse and Morris Zapp, and then stalked off the platform.

“What did he say?” Morris demanded.

Persse shrugged. “I don’t speak German.”

“He said he wasn’t going to stay here and be insulted,” said Miss Maiden from behind them, “but he looked distinctly guilty to me. You were quite right to stand up for yourself against the Black Hand, young man.”

“Yeah, this is going to get around,” said Morris Zapp, rubbing his hands together. “This is not going to help von Turpitz’s reputation one little bit. Come on, Percy, I’ll buy you another Bols.”

Morris’s jubilation did not, however, last for long. In the bar he spotted a folded copy of the
Times Literary Supplement
sticking out of Persse’s jacket pocket. “Is that the latest issue?” he asked. “Mind if I take a look at it?”

“I shouldn’t if I were you,” said Persse, who had read it on the plane to Amsterdam.

“Why not?”

“Well, it contains a rather unfriendly review of a book of yours. By Rudyard Parkinson.”

“That asshole? The day I get a good review from him, I’ll know I’m washed up. Let me see.” Morris almost snatched the journal from Persse and, with trembling fingers, flicked through the pages until he located Parkinson’s review. “But this is all about Philip Swallow’s book,” he said, frowning, as he ran his eyes up and down the columns of print.

“The bit about you is at the end,” Persse said. “You’re not going to like it.”

Morris Zapp didn’t like it. When he had finished reading the review, he was silent for a few moments, pale and breathing heavily. “It’s a limey plot,” he said at length. “Parkinson is pushing his own claim to the UNESCO chair under cover of praising Philip Swallow’s pathetic little book on Hazlitt.”

“Do you think so?” said Persse.

“Of course—look at the title: The English School of Criticism.’ He should have called it ‘The English School of Genteel Crap.’ May I borrow this?” he concluded, standing up and stuffing the TLS into his pocket.

“Sure—but where are you going?”

“I’m gonna look over my paper for tomorrow morning—see if I can work in some cracks against Parkinson.”

“I didn’t know you were giving a paper.”

“How else could I claim my conference expenses? It’s the same paper that I gave at Rummidge, slightly adapted. It’s a wonderfully adaptable paper. I aim to give it all over Europe this summer. You want to take a stroll round the town tonight?”

“All right,” Persse said. They made arrangements to meet. As soon as Morris Zapp had disappeared, the lean leathery figure of Michel Tardieu slid into the vacant space beside Persse in the curved, upholstered bar alcove.

“A most dramatic intervention,” he said, after introducing himself. “Do I infer that you are a specialist in the work of T. S. Eliot?”

“That’s right,” said Persse. “I did my Master’s dissertation on him.”

“You may be interested, then, in a conference some Swiss friends of mine are organizing this summer.”

“I’m not sure what my movements will be this summer,” said Persse.

“I expect to attend this conference myself,” said Michel Tardieu, putting his hand on Persse’s knee beneath the table.

“I’m looking for a girl, you see,” said Persse.

“Ah,” shrugged Tardieu, removing his hand. “
C’est la vie, c’est la narration
. Each of us is a subject in search of an object. Have you by any chance seen a young man in a black velvet suit?”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t,” said Persse. “If you will excuse me, I have to go now.”

Outside the Sonesta the sky was blue again, and the late-afternoon sun shone on a rinsed and gleaming city. Persse took a canal ride in one of the sleek Plexiglass-covered tourist launches that slid through the narrow waterways and threaded the bridges at what seemed reckless speed, almost grazing each other as they passed in opposite directions, crackling commentaries in four languages from their loudspeakers. Once he glimpsed a girl walking across a bridge a hundred yards ahead who, from that distance, looked like Angelica, but this, he knew, was a mirage produced by his own desire. When the boat reached the bridge, the girl had disappeared.

Later that evening, when the canals were long black mirrors laid flat between the trees and the streetlamps, Morris conducted Persse on a stroll around the red light district, a maze of little streets near the Nieuwemarkt. It was, as Morris had promised, a far more extraordinary and shocking spectacle than anything Soho offered, and almost too much for an innocent young man from County Mayo to comprehend. In each brightly lit window sat a prostitute, dressed for her trade in some slinky gown or filmy neglige, boldly eyeing the passersby for possible custom. These were veritably streets of sin, the objects of men’s lust being frankly displayed like goods in a shop window. You had only to step inside and settle the price, and the woman would draw thick heavy curtains across the casement and satisfy your desire. Two things prevented this traffic in female flesh from seeming simply sordid. The first was that the interiors of the houses were spotlessly clean, and furnished in a cosy petit-bourgeois style, with upholstered chairs, embroidered antimacassars, potted plants, and immaculate linen turned down on the bed that could usually he glimpsed at the rear. The second thing was that all the women were young and attractive, and in many cases were passing the time in the homely occupation of knitting.

“Why do they do it?” Persse wondered aloud to Morris Zapp. “They look such nice girls. They could be married and raising families instead of selling themselves like this.” He did not like to catch the women’s eyes, not so much because he feared falling under the spell of their allure as because he felt slightly ashamed to be observing their self-exposure while remaining safely wrapped in his own virtue.

Morris shrugged. “Maybe they’re planning to settle down later. When they’ve made their pile.”

“But who would marry a… girl who had done that for a living?”

Morris moved ahead of Persse on the narrow, crowded pavement, and tossed his reply back over his shoulder. “Perhaps he wouldn’t know.”

The streets were becoming increasingly crowded by pedestrians, most of whom seemed to be window-shopping tourists like themselves, rather than serious customers. There were even couples, courting or married, to be seen amid the throng, walking arm-in-arm, grinning and nudging each other, deriving a cheap erotic thrill from the ambience of sexual licence. For some reason this depressed Persse more than any other component of the scene, and made him feel sorrier for the girls in the windows.

And then he saw her, in a house with a low red door and the number 13 painted on it. Angelica. There was no question that it was Angelica. She was sitting in the little parlour, not at the window, but on a chaise-longue beside a standard lamp with a rose-coloured shade, and she was painting her nails with nail-varnish, concentrating so intently on the task that she did not look up as he stood on the pavement and stared in through the window, thunderstruck. Her long dark hair was loose about her shoulders and she wore a black dress of some shiny material cut low across her bosom. The nail varnish was scarlet. When she extended her hand to examine the effect under the lamp it looked as though she had dipped her fingers in fresh blood.

Persse walked on in a daze. He felt as though he were drowning, fighting for breath. He cannoned blindly into other, protesting pedestrians, stumbled over a kerb, heard a squeal of brakes, and found himself sprawled over the bonnet of a car whose driver, leaning out of the window, was shouting angrily at him in Dutch or German.

“‘Tis pity she’s a whore,” Persse said to the driver.

“Percy, what the hell are you doing?” said Morris Zapp, materializing out of the crowd that was observing this incident with mild interest. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” He took Persse’s arm and steered him back to the pavement. “Are you OK? What d’you want to do?”

“I’d rather be on my own for a while, if you don’t mind,” Persse said.

“Ah ha! You saw something that took your fancy in one of those windows back there, huh? Well, I don’t blame you, Percy, you’re only young once. Just do me a favour, if the girl offers you a condom, forget the Pope, wear it for my sake, OK? I’d hate to be the occasion of your getting the clap. I think I’ll go back to the hotel. Ciao.”

Morris Zapp squeezed Persse’s bicep and waddled away. Persse retraced his steps, rapidly, purposefully. Morris had put an idea into his head, a way of relieving his feelings of bitterness, betrayal, disgust. He would burst into that cosy, rose-tinted little parlour and demand “How much?” How much did the elusive maiden he had wooed and pursued along the paths and corridors of Rummidge, without winning so much as a kiss, how much did she charge for opening her legs to a paying customer? Was there a discount for an old friend, for a poet, for a paid-up member of the Association of University Teachers? Rehearsing these sarcasms in his head, imagining Angelica starting up from the chaise-longue, white-faced, aghast, clutching at her heart, he pushed his way through the shuffling crowds of voyeurs until he found himself outside the house with the red door. Its curtains were drawn.

Persse felt physically sick. He leaned against the wall and dug his nails into the hard gritty surface. A group of British youths passed, four abreast, yelling a football song, dribbling an empty beer can before them. One caught Persse a glancing blow with his shoulder, but Persse made no protest. He felt numb, blank, not even anger was left.

The chanting of the English yobbos faded as they turned a corner and the street became momentarily quiet and empty. After a few minutes the red door opened and closed again behind a young man who stood for a moment, adjusting his tight black trousers. Persse recognized him as the companion of Michel Tardieu. He looked furtively to left and right, then sauntered off. Light fell across the pavement as the curtains were drawn back inside the front room. Persse moved out of the shadows and looked in. A pretty Eurasian girl in a white petticoat smiled at him encouragingly. Persse gaped at her. He examined the door of the house: red, and with number 13 painted on it. He had made no mistake. He returned to the window. The same girl smiled again, and with a sweep of her eyes and a tilt of her head invited him to enter. When he did so, she greeted him with a smile and some unintelligible words of Dutch.

“Excuse me,” he said.