David Lodge - Small World (43 page)

The sun blazes down out of a cloudless blue sky on the brown, barren landscape. Even inside the air-conditioned bus it is warm. When they step down onto the parking lot of a bathing station on the shore of the Dead Sea, the heat is like the breath of a furnace. They change into their swimming costumes and float—it is impossible to swim—in a dense liquid—you could hardly call it water—the temperature and consistency of soup, so highly seasoned with chemicals that it burns your tongue and throat if you happen to swallow a drop. Afterwards, they are urged by their guide, Sam Singerman, the resident Israeli professor, to cover themselves with the black mud on the beach, which allegedly has health-giving properties; but of the party only Philip and Joy, followed by Morris Zapp and Thelma Ringbaum, have the nerve to do so, daubing each other hilariously with handfuls of the black goo, which dries rapidly in the sun so that they resemble naked aborigines. They rinse the mud off under the shower heads at the back of the beach and Rodney Wainwright follows them into the hot spring baths, which are so agreeable that they keep the others waiting in the bus while they dry and change, a delay for which Thelma Ringbaum is bitterly reproached by her husband.

Masada is, if it is possible, even hotter. After lunch in the inevitable cafeteria, a form of catering that Israel seems to have made its own, they take the cable car up to the ruined fortifications on the heights where the Jewish army of Eleazar committed collective suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in 73 A.D. “I’d rather commit suicide myself than come up here again,” remarks an irreverent visitor, passing into the cable car that Rodney is leaving. The air is certainly no cooler up here—the cable car seems only to have brought them closer to the sun, which beats down relentlessly on the rock and rubble. The tourists stagger about in the heat, barely able to lift their cameras to eye level, looking for scraps of shade behind broken escarpments. Philip Swallow and Joy, hand-in-hand, descend some steps carved in the rock, which curve round the western face of the mountain to a little observation platform that is out of the sun. As they stand at the parapet, looking out over an immense panorama of stony hills and waterless valleys, Philip slides his arm round Joy’s waist. My God, even in this heat he’s still thinking about sex, Rodney says to himself, wiping the perspiration from his face with his rolled-up shirt sleeve. Then Philip Swallow happens to turn in his direction and frowns.

“Enjoying yourself?” he says in a distinctly challenging tone. “What? Eh?” says Rodney Wainwright, startled. He has hardly exchanged a word with the Englishman all the conference. “Having a good look? Or should I say, wank?”

“Philip,” Joy murmurs protestingly.

Rodney feels himself blushing hectically. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he blusters.

“I’m just about sick and tired of being followed about by you wherever we go,” says Philip Swallow.

Joy makes to move off, but Philip detains her, tightening his grip around her waist. “No,” he says, “I want to have it out with Mr Wainwright. You told me yourself he spied on you at the hotel the other day.”

“I know,” says Joy, “but I hate scenes.”

“It’s the heat,” says Rodney to Joy, tapping his own forehead illustratively. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“I bloody well do know,” says Philip Swallow. “I’m saying you’re some kind of pervert. A voyeur.”

“‘Ullo, our Dad!”

They all turn round to face a bronzed young man wearing jeans, tee-shirt and a gold stud in one ear, who has approached them by the staircase on the far side of the platform. Now it is Philip Swallow’s turn to look embarrassed. He springs apart from Joy as if he had been burned. “Matthew!” he exclaims. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“Working in a kibbutz further up the Jordan,” says the young man. “I hitched out here as soon as I finished me A-Levels, didn’t I?”

“Oh yes,” says Philip, “it comes back to me now.”

“Haven’t been quite with it this summer, have you, Dad?” says the young man, looking curiously at Joy.

“Won’t you introduce me, Philip?” she says.

“What? Oh, yes, of course,” says Philip Swallow, plainly flustered. “This is my son, Matthew. This is, er, Mrs Simpson, she’s at the conference I’m attending.”

“Oh, uh,” says Matthew.

Joy extends her hand. “How d’you do, Matthew?”

“Perhaps you would like to go back to the cable car with Mr Wainwright, Mrs Simpson,” says Philip Swallow quickly. “While I catch up with my son’s news.”

Joy Simpson looks stunned, as if she had received an unexpected slap in the face. She stares at Philip Swallow, opens her mouth to speak, closes it again, and walks away in silence, followed by Rodney Wainwright grinning insanely to himself. He catches her up at the top of the steps. “Do you want to look in at the Museum or go straight back down?” he says.

“I can find my own way back, thank you very much,” she says coldly, standing aside to let him pass.

Philip Swallow seems to go into shock after this episode. As the party boards the bus to return home he complains in Rodney Wainwright’s hearing of feeling feverish, and spends the entire journey with his eyes closed and an expression of suffering on his face, but Joy is silent and unsympathetic, sitting beside him with her own eyes inscrutable behind dark glasses. In the evening Philip does not come down to join the others, who, showered and changed into clean clothes, are gathering in the lobby to go off to a barbecue in Sam Singerman’s garden. Rodney hears Joy telling Morris Zapp that Philip has a temperature. “Heat stroke, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he says, “It sure was hot as hell out there. Too bad he’ll miss the barbecue. You wanna come on your own?”

“Why not?” says Joy. Morris Zapp catches Rodney Wainwright’s eye as he hovers a few yards away. “You coming, Wainwright?” Rodney gives a sickly grin: “No, I think I’ll stay in and look over my paper for tomorrow.”

All two and three-quarter pages of it, he thinks bitterly, going off to the elevator, Schadenfreude at Philip Swallow’s discomfiture and indisposition overshadowed by his own approaching ordeal. Tonight is the night. Make or break. Finish the paper or bust. He lets himself into his room and turns on the desk lamp. He takes out his three dog-eared, sweat-stained pages of typescript and reads them through for the ninety-fourth time. They are good pages. The prolegomena moves smoothly, confidently, to define the point at issue. “The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism…” Then there is nothing: blank page, white space—or a black hole which seems to have swallowed up his capacity for constructive thought.

The trouble is that Rodney Wainwright’s imaginative projection of himself stepping up to the lectern the next morning with only two and three-quarter pages of typescript to last him for fifty minutes, is so vivid, so particular in every psychosomatic symptom of terror, that it hypnotizes him, it paralyses thought, it renders him less capable than ever of continuing with the composition of his paper. He sees himself pausing at the end of his two and three-quarter pages, taking a sip of water, looking at his audience, their faces upturned patiently, expectantly, curiously, restlessly, impatiently, angrily, pityingly…

In desperation, he helps himself to an extravagantly priced miniature bottle of whisky from the refrigerator in his room, and thus stimulated, begins to write something, anything, using a blue ballpen and sheets of Hilton notepaper. Fuelled by more miniatures, of gin, vodka, and cognac, his hand flies across the page with a will of its own. He begins to feel more optimistic. He chuckles to himself, twisting the tops off miniatures of Benedictine, Cointreau, Drambuie, with one hand, while the other writes on. He hears Joy Simpson return from the barbecue and let herself into the next door room. He breaks off from composition for a moment to press his ear against the party wall. Silence. “No shagging tonight, eh, sport?” he shouts hilariously at the wall, as he staggers back to his desk, and snatches up a fresh sheet of paper.

Rodney Wainwright wakes in the morning to find his throbbing head reposing on top of the desk amid a litter of empty miniatures and sheets of paper covered with illegible gibberish. He sweeps the bottles and the paper into the waste basket. He showers, shaves, and dresses carefully, in his lightweight suit, a clean shirt, and tie. Then he kneels down beside his bed and prays. It is the only resource left to him now. He needs a miracle: the inspiration to extemporize a lecture on the Future of Criticism for forty-five of the fifty minutes allocated to him. Rodney Wainwright, never a deeply religious man, who has not in fact raised his mind and heart to God since he was nine, kneels in the holy city of Jerusalem, and prays, diplomatically, to Jehovah, Allah and Jesus Christ, to save him from disgrace and ruin.

The lecture is due to begin at 9.30. At 9.25, Rodney presents himself in the conference room. Outwardly he appears calm. The only sign of the stress within is that he cannot stop smiling. People remark on how cheerful he looks. He shakes his head and smiles, smiles. His cheek muscles are aching from the strain, but he cannot relax them. Morris Zapp, who is to chair his lecture, is anxiously conferring with Joy Simpson. Philip Swallow is apparently worse—his temperature won’t go down, he has pains in his joints, and is gasping for breath. She has called a doctor to see him. Morris Zapp nods sympathetically, frowning, concerned. Rodney, overhearing this intelligence, beams at them both. They stare back at him. “I’m going back to our room to see if the doctor has come,” says Joy.

“Right, let’s get this show on the road,” says Morris to Rodney.

Rodney sits grinning at the audience while Morris Zapp introduces him. Still smiling broadly, he takes his three typewritten pages to the lectern, smooths them down and squares them off. With lips curled in an expression of barely suppressed mirth, he begins to speak. The audience, inferring from his countenance that his discourse is supposed to be witty, titter politely. Rodney turns over to page three, and glimpses the abyss of white space at the foot of it. His smile stretches a millimetre wider.

At that moment there is a disturbance at the back of the room. Rodney Wainwright glances up from his script: Joy Simpson has returned, and is in whispered consultation with Sam Singerman in the back row. Other heads in their vicinity are turned, and talking to each other, wearing worried expressions. Rodney Wainwright falters in his delivery, goes back to the beginning of the sentence—his last sentence. “The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism…”

The hum of conversation in the audience swells. A few people are leaving the room. Rodney stops and looks enquiringly at Morris Zapp, who frowns and raps on the table with his pen.

“Could we please have some quiet in the audience so that Dr Wainwright can continue with his paper?”

Sam Singerman stands up in the back row. “I’m sorry, Morris, but we’ve had some rather disturbing information. It seems that Philip Swallow has suspected Legionnaire’s Disease.”

Somewhere in the audience a woman screams and faints. Everyone else is on their feet, pale, aghast, tightlipped with fear, or shouting for attention. Legionnaire’s Disease! That dreaded and mysterious plague, still not fully understood by the medical profession, that struck down a congress of the American Legion at the Bellevue Stratford hotel in Philadelphia three years ago, killing one in six of its victims. It is what every conferee these days secretly fears, it is the VD of conference-going, the wages of sin, retribution for all that travelling away from home and duty, staying in swanky hotels, ego-tripping, partying, generally overindulging. Legionnaire’s Disease!

“I don’t know about anyone else,” says Howard Ringbaum, in the front row, “but I’m checking out of this hotel right now. Come on, Thelma.”

Thelma Ringbaum does not stir, but everybody else does—indeed there is something of a stampede to the exit. Morris turns to Rodney and spreads his hands apologetically. “It looks like we’ll have to abandon the lecture. I’m very sorry.”

“It can’t be helped,” says Rodney Wainwright, who has at last been able to stop smiling.

“It must be really disappointing, after all the work you’ve put into it.

“Oh well,” says Rodney, with a philosophical shrug of his shoulders.

“We could try and fix another time later today,” says Morris Zapp, taking out a fat cigar and lighting it, “but somehow I think this is curtains for the conference.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” says Rodney, slipping his three typewritten sheets back into their file cover.

Thelma Ringbaum comes up to the platform. “Do you think it’s really Legionnaire’s Disease, Morris?” she asks anxiously.

“No, I think that it’s heat-stroke and the doctor’s being paid by the Sheraton,” says Morris Zapp. Thelma Ringbaum stares at him in wonder, then giggles. “Oh, Morris,” she says, “You make a joke of everything. But aren’t you a teeny bit worried?”

“A man who has been through what I’ve been through recently has no room left for fear,” says Morris Zapp, with a flourish of his cigar.

This doesn’t seem to be true of the rest of the conferees, however. Within an hour, most of them are in the hotel lobby with their bags packed, waiting for a bus that has been hired to take them to Tel Aviv, where they will catch their return flights. Rodney Wainwright mingles with the throng, receiving their condolences for having had his lecture interrupted. “Oh well,” he says, shrugging his shoulders philosophically. “What about Philip?” he overhears Morris Zapp asking Joy Simpson, who also has her bags packed. “Who’s going to look after him?”

“I can’t risk staying,” she says. “I have to think of my children.”

“You’re just abandoning him?” says Morris Zapp, his eyebrows arched above his cigar.

“No, I phoned his wife. She’s flying out by the next plane.” Morris Zapp’s eyebrows arch even higher. “Hilary? Was that a good idea?”

“It was Philip’s idea,” says Joy Simpson. “He asked me to phone her. So I did.”

Morris Zapp carefully inspects the end of his cigar. “I see,” he says at length.

Immediately, there is another diversion (it is only eleven a. m., but already it is easily the most eventful day of Rodney Wainwright’s life). A tall, athletic young man, with a mop of red, curly hair, a round freckled face and a snub nose peeling from sunburn, wearing dusty blue jeans and carrying a canvas sports bag, comes into the Hilton lobby under the disapproving stare of the doorman, and greets Morris Zapp.