by David Lodge
‘It was European colonialists who regarded the earth as something to be bought and sold and exploited,’ said Laetitia. ‘Indigenous populations have a natural instinct to preserve their habitat and use its resources sparingly.’
‘On the contrary, only the limitations of their technology have prevented primitive peoples from destroying their environment on a scale that would appal us,’ said Ralph.
‘I don’t know how you can be so sure of that,’ she said.
‘The Polynesians wiped out half the bird species on the Hawaiian islands long before Captain Cook ever got there,’ he said. ‘In New Zealand the Maoris butchered the entire population of giant moa birds and left most of the carcasses uneaten. To this day the Yuqui Indians in the Bolivian rainforest chop down trees to get at the fruit. Conservation is a concept of advanced civilizations.’
‘Messenger, stop showing off,’ said Caroline, and we all laughed with relief. ‘I’m only trying to set Laetitia straight,’ he said mildly. ‘No you’re not, you’re haranguing her.’ ‘Yes,’ said Marianne, who was sitting at the head of the table, with Ralph to her right and Laetitia two places down to her left. ‘Leave Letty alone, Ralph, and help me carry out these dishes to the kitchen.’ And he grinned and followed her out of the dining room with a stack of soiled plates, looking rather pleased with himself like a naughty but unrepentant boy, while Laetitia plaintively asserted that she could defend herself perfectly well.
Jasper opened another couple of bottles of Gum Tree Pinot Noir (or whatever it was) and went round the table recharging glasses. I took the opportunity to go to the loo, but must have misunderstood Jasper’s directions because the first door I opened was a broom cupboard, and the second gave access to the back garden. I stepped outside to take a few welcome breaths of cold, fresh air, and found myself looking across a small paved yard into the brightly lit kitchen. Ralph Messenger had our hostess pinned against the kitchen door in a passionate embrace, and she was digging her gold-painted talons into his buttocks. Her eyes were closed – but in any case, she wouldn’t have been able to see me standing in the darkness. It would seem that Jasper Richmond was misinformed about the Messengers’ ‘arrangement’: either there isn’t one, or it’s being breached.
I woke this morning feeling slightly hungover and dyspeptic from last night’s consumption of food and wine (I fear I was probably over the limit when I drove myself home, albeit very slowly and carefully) so I went for a walk after breakfast to get some fresh air. The sky was not promising – a quilt of dark grey cloud sagged from horizon to horizon – and it began to rain as soon as I left the house. Trudging round the campus on a wet Sunday morning was not a spirit-lifting experience, but I persevered, making it an occasion to master the geography of the place, and learn the locations of the various departments and faculties. The buildings erected in the sixties and seventies have not weathered well. Their concrete facades absorb the rain patchily, like blotting paper, and the brightly coloured panels and tiles with which they are trimmed, designed to relieve the dominant grey, are chipped and cracked or missing in many places. Ralph Messenger’s Centre for Cognitive Science looks as if it was built more recently and to a higher standard. It’s a round three-storey building with a domed roof that has a shallow indentation across the middle, very like an observatory except that there’s no opening for a telescope. According to Jasper Richmond it was built with money from the Holt Belling computer people, after an international competition. The divided dome is supposed to represent the two hemispheres of the brain. The walls are made of mirror-glass. I wonder what that is supposed to represent – the vanity of cognitive scientists?
A little while later I came across another oddly shaped building – octagonal, this time. It turned out to be an ecumenical chapel and inter-faith meeting-place, shared by various Christian denominations and also (to judge by the notices pinned up in the lobby) used by Buddhists, Bahaists, Transcendental Meditators, yoga enthusiasts, Taichi devotees and similar New Age groups. What drew me into the building, however, were the strains of a familiar hymn, one we used to sing in my parish church when I was a girl. ‘Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder . . .’ I checked a notice-board: yes, a Catholic mass had just begun. On an impulse I slipped into the chapel and sat down in the back row.
It’s perhaps time I admitted to myself that I’m totally muddled and inconsistent about religion. I’m deeply grateful that I had a Catholic education even though I suffered unnecessary agonies of guilt, frustration and boredom on account of it in childhood and adolescence; and in retrospect I feel only nostalgic affection for the nuns who taught me even though most of them were more or less deranged by superstition and sexual repression, which they did their best to instil in me. I ceased to be a practising Catholic in my second term at Oxford, at the same time that I lost my virginity. The two events were connected – I could not with sincerity confess as a sin something I had found so liberating, or promise not to do it again. Intellectual rejection of the rest of Catholic doctrine quickly followed, whether as a consequence or a rationalization of this moral decision would be hard to say. Some years later, by dint of a certain amount of fudging and dissembling, I was married in a Catholic church, to avoid giving needless pain to my parents but also because when all’s said and done I wouldn’t have felt properly married in a registry office. When I had children of my own I had them baptized, again ostensibly to please Mummy and Daddy, but secretly because I should have felt uneasy myself otherwise. Also, it enabled us to send them to a Catholic primary school in due course. Martin didn’t object, in spite of being a nonbeliever himself, because he recognized that the local Catholic primary school was better than the state ones and we couldn’t afford private education at that stage of our lives. He thought there would be no harm in exposing our children to the more benign myths of Catholicism, like Christmas and guardian angels and people going to heaven when they died, as long as we were at hand to check any tendency to morbidity or fanaticism, and that they would grow out of any belief they acquired in due course, as indeed they did. Children are extraordinarily acute. Paul and Lucy seemed intuitively to know, even at the age of five or six, that they must pretend to believe things at school which weren’t believed at home, and perhaps vice versa, and they managed this double life with remarkable aplomb. At their secular secondary schools they soon became as indifferent to religion as most of their peers, but I like to think that they acquired from their early education an above-average ethical sense, not to mention a priceless key to the literature and art of the last two thousand years. (I was shocked to realize that some of my students in the seminar last Thursday didn’t understand Rachel McNulty’s allusion to the New Testament story of Martha and Mary.)
After Paul and Lucy’s first communions we never went to church as a family except for occasional weddings, funerals, and midnight mass at Christmas with my parents for old times’ sake. But after Martin died I started going to Sunday mass again on my own, at the local parish church, out of a confused jumble of motives. I was desperate for some kind of consolation and reassurance, and perhaps I feared superstitiously that the Catholic God had punished me for my apostasy, and that I’d better get back on good terms with Him before He did something else terrible to me or my children. But the consolation never came and the fear seemed more and more ignoble as time passed. I was pleased to see girls serving at the altar, but otherwise not much had changed since I had last been in a Catholic church. The parish priest was an uncharismatic Irishman who celebrated mass as if it were a repetitive job which somebody had to do and the quicker the better, and his sermons were almost insultingly simple-minded. I didn’t, needless to say, go to confession or communion, and after a few weeks I stopped going to church altogether.
Why did I go into the chapel today? My morale was at a very low ebb, and I suppose I thought the atmosphere would be different from that of a parish church, and so it was, but hardly more inspiring. The decor of the room itself was depressingly bleak and bar
e, having been purged of any trace of religious art or symbolism that might give offence to any of its users. A simple wooden table served as the altar, with chairs arranged in an irregular arc around it. It was a mainly youthful congregation, naturally enough, with a scattering of faculty and their families. I was surprised, and not particularly pleased, to see the Riverdales with their two infants on the other side of the room. I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, but I caught sight of Colin smiling at me in the middle of the Gloria.
The style of the liturgy was informal: the altar server wore a tracksuit and trainers, and the music, led by a girl in jeans with a guitar, favoured folk tunes and rhythms. The young infants of the faculty were allowed to wander or crawl round the room pushing and pulling their Fisher-Price toys – or the young priest who was celebrating mass didn’t have the courage to ask that they should be stopped from doing so. It was the Second Sunday of Lent, I discovered. (Lent! What a complex of forgotten emotions and memories that word summons up! Fasting and abstinence on Ash Wednesday, and the black smudges of ashes on foreheads of girls and teachers at school, piously left there all day . . . ‘Giving up’ sweets and sugar in tea . . . The joy of pigging oneself on chocolate on Easter Sunday . . . There are pleasures generated by self-denial that many young people will never know.) The First Reading was the story of Abraham and Isaac – a good story, but a rather horrifying one too, as Kierkegaard pointed out. One might have hoped for some allusion to Fear and Trembling in a homily on this text at a university mass, but no such luck. The young priest expounded it as a simple tale of obedience to the will of God and concentrated on the ‘blessings’ that accrued to Abraham in consequence. The Gospel was the story of the Transfiguration, ending with the apostles ‘discussing among themselves what “rising from the dead” could mean’. Indeed.
It was impossible to avoid speaking to the Riverdales afterwards. ‘I didn’t know you were a papist,’ Colin said, smiling, and putting ironic quotation marks round the last word. If he had read any of my books apart from The Eye of the Storm he might have guessed that I was brought up as one. ‘I’m not practising,’ I said. ‘I came in on impulse – just happened to be passing.’ ‘Well, lost sheep are always welcome,’ he said, which I considered a bit of a nerve, even if it was passed off as a joke. ‘Let me introduce you to Father Steve, our part-time chaplain,’ he went on. ‘No thanks,’ I said coldly. ‘I must be going.’ Annabelle gave me a wistful, half-apologetic smile as I left them.
On the way back to la maisonnette I stopped at the supermarket to buy three bloated Sunday papers and spent the afternoon reading longingly about all the new plays, films, exhibitions etc., on in London. Just before it got dark I went for another walk. The rain had cleared and there was a red winter sunset. The wire perimeter fence, reflecting the slanting light, glowed briefly like the element in an electric toaster, and then went out as the sun slipped behind a distant hill. I more and more feel as if I am in an open prison: I could easily walk out, I long to walk out, but the predictable consequences of doing so keep me here, on my honour. I must do my time.
3
ON THE WEDNESDAY of the second week of the semester, Ralph Messenger and Helen Reed happen to meet in the University’s Staff House, at lunchtime. Helen is in the lobby, looking at an exhibition of paintings by a local artist. Ralph sees her as he comes in through the revolving door, and walks up behind her.
‘What d’you think of them?’ he says at her shoulder, making her jump.
‘Oh! Hallo . . . I was thinking, if they were very cheap, I might buy one to brighten up my living-room.’
‘Well, they’re bright enough,’ he says, surveying the pictures with his head cocked appraisingly. They are landscapes, boldly painted in lurid acrylic colours seldom, if ever, encountered in nature.
‘Yes, and they’re cheap enough, too. But somehow . . .’
‘Somehow they’re hideously ugly.’
She laughs. ‘I’m afraid you’re right.’
‘Have you had lunch?’
‘I was just on my way to the cafeteria.’
‘Why don’t we have it together?’
‘All right. That would be nice.’
‘But not in the cafeteria.’
‘I don’t usually eat much for lunch,’ she says.
‘Neither do I, but I like to eat it in comfort,’ he says.
The dining room on the second floor is waitress service, and the tables have table-cloths and little vases of plastic flowers on them. They sit by a window with a view of the lake. Helen orders a salad, Ralph the pasta Dish of the Day, and they share a large bottle of sparkling mineral water.
‘Actually, I was going to offer you coffee last Sunday morning,’ Ralph says. ‘I saw you walking in the rain, looking as if you were at a loose end –’
‘How did you see me?’ She seems startled, and not particularly pleased, by this information.
‘From my office window. You walked past the Centre, and I happened to be looking out.’
‘What were you doing in your office on a Sunday morning?’
‘Oh . . . catching up on work,’ he says vaguely. ‘I went out of the building to speak to you, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. You seemed to disappear into thin air.’
‘Did I?’ She seems faintly embarrassed.
‘Where were you?’
‘I went into the chapel.’
‘What for?’
‘Why do people usually go into a chapel on a Sunday morning?’
‘Are you religious, then?’ There is a note of disapproval, or perhaps disappointment, in his voice.
‘I was brought up as a Catholic. I don’t believe any more, but –’
‘Oh, good.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, it’s impossible to have a rational conversation about anything important with religious people. I suppose that’s why I didn’t think of looking for you in the chapel. I had you down as an intelligent rational person. So what were you doing there, if you’re not a believer?’
‘Well I don’t believe literally in the whole caboodle,’ she says. ‘You know, the Virgin Birth and Transubstantiation and the Infallibility of the Pope and all that. But sometimes I think there must be a kind of truth behind it. Or I hope there is.’
‘Why?’
‘Because otherwise life is so pointless.’
‘I don’t find it so. I find it full of interest and deeply satisfying.’
‘Well, you’re fortunate. You’re healthy and comfortably off and successful in your work –’
‘Aren’t you, then?’ he says.
‘Well, I suppose so, up to a point. But there are millions who aren’t.’
‘Let’s forget about them for a moment. What about you? Why isn’t this life enough? Why do you need religion?’
‘I don’t need it, exactly. I mean, I’ve got along without it for most of my adult life, but there are times . . . I lost my husband, you see, about a year ago.’
‘Yes, I heard about that.’
She waits for a moment, as if she expects him to add something like ‘I’m sorry’, but he doesn’t.
‘It was very sudden, totally without warning. An aneurysm in the brain. Our lives seemed to be going so well when it happened. Martin had just been promoted, and my last novel had just won a prize – we were planning to splurge some of it on a holiday. We were actually looking at brochures when . . .’ She stops, evidently upset by the memory. Ralph Messenger waits patiently for her to resume. ‘When he collapsed. He went into a coma, and died the next day, in hospital.’
‘That was tough for you, but a good way to go for him.’
‘How can you say that?’ She looks shocked, then angry, angry enough to get up and leave him sitting at the table. ‘He was only forty-four. He had years of happy life to look forward to.’
