Thinks...

by David Lodge

  The strain of keeping these two lives going at once is almost intolerable. I long for bed-time, when I can put them both to rest for a few hours. Sleep is bliss – but alas, a bliss one can’t consciously enjoy, by definition. There’s perhaps a brief moment of delicious languor, when you feel yourself dropping off, like when you’re given an anaesthetic, but the next thing you know is that it’s over, you’ve woken up, probably in the small hours, with your worries and regrets more oppressive than ever, and you can’t recover the sensation of what it was like to be unaware of them. I’m tempted to go to the Health Centre and get a prescription for sleeping tablets, but I became so dependent on them in the months after Martin’s death, and felt so zombie-like in the mornings when I was on them, that I’m determined to do without if I possibly can.

  THURSDAY 20TH FEB. Second meeting with the students as a group. A workshop session, meaning that one of them reads from work in progress (in future it’ll be circulated in advance) and the rest of them tear it apart, with me acting as umpire. That’s the way the course is organized. Thursday afternoon is always a workshop session. The content of the Tuesday seminars is up to me: I can set them writing exercises or we can discuss some text or other that I prescribe.

  Russell Marsden encouraged them to be candid in the workshops, which I find rather alarming after the let’s-all-be-supportive-of-each-other atmosphere of my evening classes at Morley. Rachel McNulty read a piece from her novel in progress about a young girl growing up on a farm in Ulster. I thought it was sensitive and convincing, if somewhat underwritten, but two of the others criticized it because there was no mention of the Troubles. The question was raised: is it possible to write about Northern Ireland without mentioning the political situation? I diplomatically suggested that the family tensions described in Rachel’s fiction might be read as symbolic of the divisions in the community as a whole; but to her credit Rachel rejected this face-saving formula and said that some things were more universal than politics and they were the things she wanted to write about. Secretly I agreed with her.

  FRIDAY 21ST FEB. As far as I can tell, few if any of my students live on campus. Most of them share flats or have bedsits in Cheltenham or Gloucester, and several have permanent homes in London or other places, and spend just three days a week here, sleeping over Tuesday and Wednesday nights in B&Bs or on the sofas of their friends. So I have a curious sense of living more like a student than they do. After yesterday’s workshop we all went across to the Arts Centre Café for a cup of tea that was emended to an early drink, and I listened almost enviously to them all making their plans for the weekend away from the campus. The more I see of it, the more unsuitable it seems to me as a place in which to try and educate young people for life. If they don’t have cars of their own it’s difficult for students to travel to Cheltenham or Gloucester, and there’s not much incentive to make the effort. All the necessities of life are provided on campus: there’s a small supermarket, a launderette, a bank, a unisex hairdresser’s, a bookshop-cum-stationer’s, several bars, cafés and canteens. The Arts Centre puts on quite a good programme of concerts, touring productions of plays, art exhibitions and films. According to Simon Bellamy, who was an undergraduate here a few years ago, lots of students never leave the campus from one end of a semester to the other. They might be living in married quarters on some top-secret airbase ringed with electrified wire, or inhabiting a vast space-platform orbiting the earth, for all the contact they have with normal life. Simon assured me that they are quite content. ‘Remember, for most of them it’s the first time they’ve lived away from home. They can experiment with sex, drink, dope, without coming to much harm. Free contraception from the Health Centre. No drink-drive problem. No fuzz asking you to turn out your pockets. Nobody telling you when to go to bed or when to get up or to tidy your room. It’s what most teenagers dream about. Pig heaven.’ He grinned as he listed these attractions. Nevertheless I wonder if they don’t pall after a while, and then what? One of the most depressing sights on campus is a drab, smoky, lino-tiled room on the ground floor of the Union full of pinball machines and computer games. It seems to be open twenty-four hours a day and there are always several catatonic figures inside, staring intently at the screens and displays, twitching occasionally as they operate the buttons and levers. Was it for this that they swotted for A Levels, pored over UCCA forms, and drained their parents’ pockets? How glad I am that Paul is at Manchester and that Lucy has a place at Oxford, real places with real people in them.

  I can see myself acquiring bad habits from living here. My little house is equipped with a TV, and I’ve watched a lot this week. At home I seldom switch on before The Nine O’Clock News, and usually it’s later than that, for an arts documentary or a film. This week I’ve been watching TV while eating my solitary dinner, and leaving it on afterwards because when I switched it off the silence seemed so deathly, and I can’t stand listening to music on my tinny transistor radio. I’ve seen all kinds of programmes I never normally watch, soaps and sitcoms and police series, consuming them steadily and indiscriminately like a child eating its way through a bag of mixed sweets. For simple mindless distraction you can’t beat early evening television. No scene lasts more than thirty seconds, and the stories jump from character to character so fast that you hardly notice how cardboard-thin they are.

  SATURDAY 22ND FEB. Last night the film Ghost was on television after the News, and I decided to watch it, although I had seen it before, with Martin – or rather I watched it because I had seen it before with Martin. It was a surprise hit when it first came out and everybody was talking about it. We enjoyed it, I recalled, even as we rather despised its slick exploitation of the supernatural. I remembered only the bare bones of the plot: a young man is murdered in the street walking home with his girl, and tries to protect her from the conspirators who killed him, though as a ghost he is invisible and can only communicate with her through a medium. The few details of the movie that had lodged in my memory were the special effects when characters died: for instance, the hero gets up from the ground apparently unscathed and only realizes that he’s dead when he sees his distraught girlfriend cradling his own lifeless body in her arms; and when the baddies die they are immediately set upon by dark gibbering shapes that drag them screaming off to hell (surprisingly satisfying, that). And I remembered that Whoopi Goldberg had been very funny in the role of the fraudulent medium who is disconcerted to find herself genuinely in touch with the spirit world. These things were just as effective the second time round. What I wasn’t prepared for was the way the love story would overwhelm me. Demi Moore, whom I’ve always considered a rather wooden actress, seemed incredibly moving as the bereaved heroine. When her eyes filled with tears, mine brimmed over. In fact I spent most of the movie weeping, laughing at Whoopi Goldberg through my tears. I knew in my head that the film was cheap, sentimental, manipulative rubbish, but it didn’t make any difference. I was helpless to resist, I didn’t want to resist, I just wanted to be swamped by the extraordinary flood of emotion it released. When the ghostly hero reminds the sceptical heroine, through the Whoopi Goldberg character, of intimate and homely details of their life together that nobody else could possibly know, and it dawns on Demi Moore that her dead lover really is communicating with her, my skin prickled with goosepimples. When the hero (I’ve already forgotten his name, and that of the actor who played him) acquires the powers of a poltergeist and uses them to terrify the thug threatening Demi Moore, I crowed and clapped my hands in glee. And when, in a sublimely silly scene towards the end, Whoopi Goldberg allows him to inhabit her body so that he can dance cheek to cheek with Demi Moore to the smoochy tune they made love to at the beginning . . . well, I almost swooned with vicarious pleasure and longing. Afterwards I had a long hot bath and sipped a glass of wine as I replayed favourite scenes from the film in my head, and before I went to sleep I masturbated, something I haven’t done since I was a teenager, imagining that Martin’s ghost hand had inhabited mine and t
hat he was making love to me.

  When I woke in the small hours I felt depressed, as usual, but not ashamed. In a curious way it was a cathartic experience.

  SUNDAY 23RD FEB. To the Richmonds’ dinner party yesterday evening – the social highlight of my first week at Gloucester U. It was quite an interesting evening. They have a nice house in a village about ten miles away – modern, but tastefully built in a traditional style out of Cotswold stone. I got lost in the dark country lanes and was the last to arrive. It was difficult to take in so many new faces all at once, but fortunately Jasper had given me a run-down of the guest list over morning coffee in the Senior Common Room on Friday.

  Jasper himself opened the front door and took me somewhat by surprise by planting a firm kiss on my cheek. It was rather early in our acquaintance, I thought, for such a greeting – but I accepted it with good grace. He had a glass of white wine in his hand and I guessed it wasn’t the first one he’d imbibed that evening. A teenage boy hovered nearby, bobbing and weaving restlessly.

  ‘Oliver, take Helen’s coat,’ Jasper said to him, and introduced us. ‘This is my son, Oliver. This is Helen Reed, Oliver. She’s a writer. She writes novels.’

  ‘Egg is writing a novel,’ Oliver said, without looking at me.

  ‘Is he?’ I said, politely. ‘Who is Egg?’

  ‘Egg lives in London, with Milly and Anna and Miles.’

  ‘They’re characters in a TV series,’ Jasper explained. He used his free hand to help me off with my coat. ‘All about young lawyers who share a house.’

  ‘I’ve been watching rather a lot of TV lately,’ I said, ‘but I must have missed that one.’

  ‘I like Miles best,’ said Oliver, looking over my head.

  ‘Here, Oliver, hang up Helen’s coat, will you?’ Jasper said, handing the garment to him. ‘Then you can go and watch TV. There’s nobody else coming. Off you go.’

  As Oliver took my coat away, Jasper said, ‘Oliver’s autistic. I should have warned you, but it slipped my mind.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘He thinks the characters in soaps are real people.’

  ‘Well, he’s not alone in that, I believe,’ I said.

  ‘True,’ said Jasper, with a smile.

  He ushered me into the drawing room and introduced me to Marianne, who was standing by the door in an irreproachable little black dress, relieved by an expensive-looking gold brooch, adjusting the lights. The room, handsomely proportioned, with a trompe I’oeil gas-fuelled log-fire burning in the open hearth, has lots of hi-tech spotlights and up-lights and down-lights controlled by dimmer switches which Marianne kept adjusting, so that one felt rather like being on a stage, perhaps in a musical by Stephen Sondheim: you’d be having a quiet conversation with somebody in a corner when suddenly you’d find yourself bathed in a pool of light and heads would turn as if expecting you to burst into song. Marianne used to be in publishing and we found we had one or two acquaintances in common. Now she works at home as a freelance editor. She is younger than Jasper and I presume his second wife. She is good-looking in a very groomed way (gold nail varnish to match her brooch), and has a bright, brittle social manner; her eyes glance all over the room, monitoring the other guests, while she talks to you.

  The other guests were as follows: Reginald Glover, hairy-faced, hornrimmed marxist Professor of History, and his wife Laetitia, a music therapist, vegetarian, and (as later became evident) committed Friend of the Earth. Colin Riverdale, a fresh-cheeked young lecturer in the English Department, and his wife Annabelle. Colin seems to be Jasper’s protégé and was anxious to make a good impression. He said several complimentary things about The Eye of the Storm, so specific in reference that I was fairly sure he’d been mugging it up in the last few days in preparation for meeting me. His own field is the eighteenth century, like Jasper’s. Annabelle works in the University Library and seemed understandably exhausted by the effort of holding down her job and looking after three young children, the youngest of whom was upstairs in a carrycot on the Richmonds’ bed. She said very little all evening and actually nodded off at one point. Nicholas Beck, silver-haired Professor of Fine Art, had been invited to make a pair with me, but only in the table-planning sense, because Jasper informed me that he is a celibate homosexual, on what authority I don’t know. He moved to Gloucester fairly recently from Cambridge, and has that high-table trick of being able to make urbane conversation about any topic whatsoever without saying anything memorable or profound. Jasper kept asking him anxiously what he thought of the wine – apparently he used to buy the wine for his college. Beck was politely approving but implicitly critical of Jasper’s offerings, e.g. ‘Australian reds really have improved out of all recognition.’

  The most notable guests, about whom Jasper had briefed me most thoroughly, were Ralph and Caroline Messenger. I knew of him already, of course, as someone who is often on radio and television, especially Start the Week, and as a reviewer of popular books about science and psychology in the Sunday papers. He’s something of a star here, Professor and Director of the prestigious Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science, an odd-looking building, somewhat resembling an observatory, which Jasper pointed out to me from his office window on my first day. Messenger is in his late forties, I would say, with a big handsome head: thick, grizzled hair combed back from a broad brow, a hooked nose and a strong chin. In profile he reminded me of a Roman emperor on an old coin. Caroline, or Carrie as she is familiarly known, is American. She must have been stunningly beautiful in her youth, and still has a lovely face, with big cow-like eyes, and braided blonde hair, but her figure is too matronly by today’s exacting standards. She was wearing a lovely billowing silk dress which flattered her ample form. They certainly make a striking couple. She addresses him as ‘Messenger’, which has a curious, ambivalent effect, half-deferential and half-ironic. In a way it seems to collude in placing him above ordinary mortals, who have their domestic first-name selves and their professional second-name personae; but at the same time the incongruous formality of a wife addressing her husband by his surname seems to mock his pretensions and set a cool distance between them. I only had time to exchange a few remarks with him before we were summoned to the dinner table. He has a frank, lively conversational manner, which combines the occasional American usage with a slightly plebeian London accent. That’s why the media love him, according to Jasper: he doesn’t sound like a dryasdust academic.

  I sat opposite Carrie at dinner and found her very easy to talk to as well, open and friendly, as Americans often are. She said she loved my books but she didn’t feel it necessary to demonstrate her familiarity by viva-ing me about them like Dr Riverdale. She gave me useful advice about shopping in Cheltenham, of which she seems to do quite a lot. Jasper told me that she has money of her own, adding, ‘I think that’s what keeps Ralph faithful to her, in his fashion.’ What fashion was that, I asked. ‘Well, Carrie told Marianne they have an agreement, that he’s not to embarrass her on her own territory. He has plenty of opportunities to play away from home. At conferences, on his media jaunts. There was a reference to him in Private Eye once as a “Media Dong”.’ Jasper chuckled reminiscently, and asked me if I had seen Messenger’s TV series on the Mind-Body Problem. ‘Some of it,’ I said.

  The truth is that I saw only the last ten minutes of the last programme in the series, and that by accident. They were on too early in the evening for me, and I tend lazily to duck science programmes anyway, but now I wish I had watched them. I remembered that big Roman head turning away from a piece of apparatus (a brain scanner or something of the kind, with a supine patient being slid inside like someone about to be shot from a cannon) and leaning towards the camera in close-up saying almost gloatingly, ‘So, is happiness – or unhappiness – just a matter of the hardwiring in your brain?’

  The head seems disproportionately large when you see him full-length, because his legs are on the short side. He has a thick, bull-like neck and broad sloping
shoulders which thrust the head forward in a challenging, somewhat intimidating manner. Undoubtedly he has a kind of presence which no other man at the dinner party possessed – the sort that film-stars and international statesmen have. I kept stealing glances diagonally up the dining table at him to try and analyse it, that effect of being permanently lit by flashbulbs without flinching. Once I encountered his own gaze, and he smiled genially. We were too far away to talk. The table was too long, and the guests too many, for a single conversation. Down at our end, chaired by Jasper, we were discussing the current craze for screen adaptations of classic novels and comparing the two competing versions of Emma (Nicholas Beck complained pedantically that in both of them the lawns had obviously and anachronistically been mowed by machine) when voices were suddenly raised at the other end. Laetitia Glover and Ralph Messenger were having an argument about environmentalism. ‘The earth doesn’t belong to us, we belong to the earth,’ she declared piously. ‘The Red Indians knew that.’ ‘The Red Indians?’ said Ralph Messenger. ‘You mean the guys who would stampede a whole herd of buffalo over a cliff to get themselves steak for dinner?’ ‘I’m quoting a speech made by Chief Seattle in the mid-nineteenth century, when the American Government wanted to buy his tribe’s land,’ said Laetitia stiffly. ‘I know that speech,’ said Ralph. ‘It was written by the script-writer of an American TV drama-documentary in 1971.’ Annabelle Riverdale, who had been roused from her torpor by this exchange, gave a little splutter of a laugh, and then, in the ensuing silence, tried to pretend she hadn’t. ‘I don’t know about any TV programme,’ said Laetitia, reddening, ‘I read it in a book. The script-writer probably did too.’ ‘He invented the whole thing,’ said Ralph, ‘and then people started quoting it in environmentalist tracts as if it were historical.’ Laetitia glanced at her husband for support, but he kept his head down, perhaps unwilling to risk his academic reputation on such uncertain ground. Jasper gallantly came to Laetitia’s rescue. ‘Even if it isn’t historical, Ralph, the sentiment could still be true.’ ‘On the contrary, it’s quite false,’ said Ralph. ‘We don’t belong to the earth. The earth belongs to us, because we’re the cleverest animals on it.’ ‘That’s so arrogant, so Eurocentric,’ sighed Laetitia, closing her eyes to dissociate herself as completely as possible from this odious opinion. ‘What do you mean, Eurocentric?’ Ralph demanded, thrusting his head forward challengingly. One by one the rest of us fell silent and stopped eating.