Thinks...

by David Lodge

  How did I come to unlock this particular drawer of the filing cabinet anyway . . . ? Helen Reed, yes, I’d like to fuck her too, but that isn’t just thinkable, it’s conceivably doable, no taboo there . . . I kissed her, and she didn’t object . . . she didn’t respond exactly, but she didn’t resist . . . it’s been a good week for illicit kisses . . . I snogged Marianne yesterday, in Sainsbury’s car-park of all places . . . I was in the store getting the wine for the party, she was doing the weekly grocery shop on her own, we met in the aisle pushing trolleys in opposite directions, between the soft drinks and the Phileas Fogg Tortilla Chips . . . we chatted for a while, innocently enough, but as we parted I asked her where she was parked and after a moment’s hesitation she murmured, ‘By the bottle bank’ . . . When I’d filled my trolley with booze and paid at the checkout I pushed it out into the car-park and unloaded it into my car . . . it was dark and wet, a fine invisible drizzle falling on the rows of cars, misting their windows . . . I sat in my car watching until she came along, pushing her own trolley piled high with food . . . when she’d unloaded it into the boot of her Volvo she got into the driving seat but she didn’t start the engine or turn on the lights. It was a nice dark spot beside the bottle bank, with no other cars parked near. I walked up to the car opened the front passenger’s door and got in, she had the seat back down in the recline position . . . we fell on each other . . . wordlessly as always, tongues in each other’s mouths, hands groping under each other’s clothes . . . I was thinking we might actually do it right there and then in the car, like a prostitute and her trick, but there was a sudden explosion of broken glass as somebody tossed a salvo of bottles into the bottle bank and it startled her, she broke away, turned aside, and started the engine . . . without a word . . . she put the car into reverse . . . I had to scramble out in a hurry . . . she left me standing there beside the bottle bank, panting for breath and with an erection like a broomstick . . .

  Oh yes, a nasty accident, VW camper turned over, MG in the ditch, police cars, ambulance . . . Thank you, officer . . . I’m out of here, as the Yanks say . . . [recording ends]

  12

  THURSDAY 13TH MARCH. I’ve encountered a strange and rather disturbing problem with one of my students, Sandra Pickering. I had already cast her as the Enigma of the group, because she said very little in class – just stared at me in a slightly disconcerting way, impassive, unblinking. She’s in her late twenties, with a smooth oval face, straight shoulder-length blonde hair, and a full bust, usually concealed under a black leather blouson. Her lips are full and fleshy, the upper protruding over the lower, giving her a slightly sulky expression in repose. There’s nothing remarkable about her appearance except that she has a metal stud in her tongue – silver I suppose, or perhaps stainless steel. You glimpse it now and again on the rare occasions when she speaks, winking and gleaming inside her mouth. It must be very uncomfortable when eating, one imagines.

  She’s one of the students who have given up jobs to do the course – hers was in advertising, she vouchsafed, when I went round the group on my first day questioning them about their backgrounds. In fact she never says anything to me unless I specifically address a question to her, and then she replies briefly and non-committally. I wondered whether she was depressed or had some other personal problem, and discreetly sounded out Simon Bellamy on the subject. He admitted that she seemed subdued this semester, but said she had never been a very demonstrative or talkative member of the group, always ‘keeping herself to herself’. She has attended all the seminars and workshops, but she was the only student who didn’t submit a piece on ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ (admittedly it was voluntary) and she didn’t have anything to say about anyone else’s, giving the impression that she considered the whole thing a rather trivial parlour game. More significantly, she was the last one in the group to show me her work-in-progress. She handed in a couple of chapters of a novel entitled Burnt on Tuesday, after I had sent her a sharpish note, and I read them yesterday.

  The novel is about a young woman called Laura who works in an advertising agency as personal assistant to an older, married man called Alastair. She is attracted to him, and it’s obvious that they’re going to have some kind of affair in due course. It’s a familiar, not to say banal story, enlivened by some shrewd observation of office politics, and a deft, sardonic handling of the contrast between the heroine’s turbulent inner life – all romantic longing, erotic fantasy and self-doubt – and her composed, professional outward behaviour at work. It’s written in the second person: ‘You put on the white blouse. You take off the white blouse because it makes you look like a school prefect. You put on the black silk bustier. You take off the black silk bustier because it makes you look like a tart. You put the white blouse back on, leaving three buttons undone at the neck . . .’ I expect she got the idea from Jay McInerney, but no matter. So far, so good, I thought at the end of the first chapter.

  But then, as the character of Alastair was developed in the second chapter, I had a very strange feeling of déjá vu. In several respects he resembles the character of Sebastian in The Eye of the Storm. He is tall and gangly, absent-minded and untidy, often turning up for work with odd socks, or with his shirt buttons done up askew. He has a habit of leaning back in his swivel chair and putting his feet up on the desk and vibrating a pen or pencil between his teeth when thinking. He answers the telephone with an impatient ‘Yes?’ He is forever banging into people and furniture because he walks around with his head down. And there are other, less tangible similarities, harder to pin down, but very apparent to me.

  I was, to use an ugly but expressive word, gobsmacked. I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it some kind of joke? If so, I didn’t get it. Or had she read The Eye of the Storm, assimilated the details about the character of Sebastian into her creative subconscious, and recycled them without knowing it? That seemed the most likely explanation.

  When she attended my breeze-block cell of an office for her tutorial, I came straight to the point: ‘Have you read The Eye of the Storm’? She said she had, over the Christmas break. That surprised me: it meant she must have written the second chapter very recently, and she couldn’t possibly have been unconscious of her borrowings. ‘You do realize, I suppose,’ I said, ‘that a lot of Alastair’s character traits correspond exactly to those of my character Sebastian?’ ‘Yes, I noticed that,’ she said coolly. ‘You noticed?’ I repeated blankly. ‘When did you notice?’ ‘When I read your book,’ she said, looking equally blank. ‘But you must have written this second chapter after you read The Eye of the Storm,’ I said. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I wrote both those chapters last summer, before I started the course.’ I stared at her. ‘Have you revised them while you’ve been here?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘in November, after I showed them to Russell.’ ‘Are you telling me,’ I said slowly, ‘that you wrote every word of this’ – I held up the second chapter, and looked her straight in the eye – ‘before you read The Eye of the Storm?’ She didn’t look away – she hardly blinked. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘Then how do you explain the extraordinary similarities between my character and yours?’ I listed some of them. ‘Just coincidence, I suppose,’ she said, with a shrug. The suggestion of a scowl passed over her smooth features, like a pond ruffled by the wind. ‘You’re not suggesting I copied your character, are you?’ she said. ‘I thought perhaps you reproduced some details from my book without being aware of it,’ I said. ‘Oh no,’ she said, shaking her head emphatically, ‘that’s impossible. I told you – I started my novel before I read yours.’ ‘Perhaps somebody else told you about it? Perhaps you read a review?’ I said, trying desperately to find a face-saving explanation which we could both agree on, even if I didn’t believe it. ‘No,’ she said flatly, ‘I’d remember it.’ ‘Well then,’ I said, throwing up my hands, ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m totally at a loss.’ I should report that throughout this conversation, while I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and swivelled my
chair from side to side, and fiddled with things on my desk, as if I were the accused party, she sat in her chair quite still and composed, with her knees and feet together and her hands joined demurely in her lap. ‘I don’t see the problem,’ she said. ‘They’re quite common, men like that. We can’t be the only writers to have invented a character who sometimes wears odd socks.’ She added cheekily, ‘It’s a bit of a cliché, actually.’ ‘Of course the details are not significant if you take them one by one,’ I said irritably. ‘It’s the same combination that’s so extraordinary.’ We were both silent for a few moments. ‘What did you think of it, anyway?’ she said, as if we had disposed of the problem. ‘I find it hard to judge, in the circumstances,’ I said. ‘Have you written any more?’ It turns out that she has written drafts of two more chapters. I said I would be very interested to see them, and brought the tutorial to a rather abrupt end.

  I was thrown completely off-balance by this encounter, and have been unable to think of anything else all day. I’m afraid I was a very ineffective chair of the workshop session this afternoon – fortunately it was Simon Bellamy’s turn to present his work, and he was quite capable of running the discussion himself. While it proceeded I kept glancing at Sandra Pickering, often finding myself, disconcertingly, looking straight into her opaque brown eyes. Once she made a comment on Simon’s piece, and I glimpsed the little metal stud gleaming in the dark hollow of her mouth, like a jewel in the forehead of a toad. There is something faintly reptilian about this young woman – her impassivity, her repose, her unblinking gaze. No doubt I’m just projecting my own insecurity on to her. Suppose she is telling the truth. Is it possible that two different writers could independently invent the same character? Only, surely, if the character were a complete stereotype. I suppose that’s what rattled me – the implication that both Sebastian and Alastair are stereotypes, composed of the same clichés.

  The point is, I know that Sebastian isn’t a stereotype, because I based him partly on Martin. Martin recognized the resemblance, and didn’t mind – was rather tickled in fact – and so did most of our friends. But perhaps in the actual writing, in the process of turning the real Martin into the fictional Sebastian, I somehow lost the sense of felt life (as Henry James called it), I fell back lazily on familiar tricks of ‘characterization’, I failed to find a language that would give familiar traits and mannerisms a unique individual quality, and ended up producing something indistinguishable from the apprentice efforts of Sandra Pickering. A humbling, not to say humiliating, thought. I wish I had the folder of reviews of The Eye of the Storm with me here to browse through, to reassure myself that there was real originality in that book. Pitiful, really, that one’s self-confidence should be so fragile, but there it is, it never took much to undermine mine. How often did Martin come home from work to find me long-faced and red-eyed because I’d lost faith in what I was writing. Once – it must have been before I had a computer, or even a photocopier – he had to go out into the back garden and recover a whole manuscript from the dustbin where I had thrown it in a fit of despair, and brought it back all stained and smeared, but smelling rather pleasantly of the potato and apple peelings adhering to it. He sat me down at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and made me read the first couple of chapters aloud to him, and convinced me that it was worth going on with. That was Mixed Blessings, so he was right. Oh Martin, how I miss you.

  FRIDAY 14TH MARCH. Went into Cheltenham today to buy a present for Ralph Messenger. Choosing something appropriate was not easy. They’ve both been so kind to me that I wanted it to be more than a token, but not too expensive, or it would look like a bribe to make them go on being kind. In the end, after much hesitation, I settled on an executive toy, a little abacus made of brushed stainless steel. It was actually quite pricey, but I hope it will be received as merely witty.

  I also bought myself a new dress for the occasion, a nice A-line frock in crushed velvet with a scoop neckline. I didn’t want to wear the same skirt and top that I wore to the Richmonds’ dinner party, and the other evening outfits I brought down here no longer please me for one reason or another. As usual I thought about going for something coloured and ended up getting black. It’s safe and versatile and still in fashion. And after all, I am a widow.

  13

  ‘IF I WERE you, I would separate the historical stuff from the story of Alice and her family,’ says Helen. ‘Having Alice think so much about local politics and the architecture of the city, and so on, seems rather unnatural.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ says Carrie. ‘But how?’

  ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t use an omniscient narrator, simply addressing the reader over the head of the character,’ says Helen.

  ‘Wouldn’t that make the book seem rather old-fashioned?’

  ‘You can give it a modem spin,’ says Helen. ‘Drop in a lot of references to the present day. You know The French Lieutenant’s Woman?’

  ‘Oh yes, I loved that book,’ says Carrie.

  ‘Or frame Alice’s story with a contemporary one: somebody like yourself going over family papers, trying to reconstruct the history of her great-grandmother, researching the historical background . . .’

  Carrie stops peeling prawns. ‘That’s a brilliant idea, Helen.’

  ‘Well, don’t rush into it,’ says Helen. ‘It would involve a lot of re-writing.’

  ‘What would?’ says Ralph, coming into the kitchen.

  ‘Go away. Messenger,’ says Carrie. ‘Helen is giving me a tutorial.’

  ‘Oh, have you been reading Carrie’s book?’ Ralph says to Helen. ‘What’s it like? She won’t let me see it.’

  ‘It’s very promising,’ says Helen.

  ‘Am I in it?’

  ‘Of course, that’s the first question you would ask,’ says Carrie.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Helen.

  ‘What do you want, Messenger?’ says Carrie.

  ‘The Screwpull,’ says Ralph, grinning at Helen as if inviting her to see an innuendo in the name of this device. ‘The host’s best friend.’

  ‘It’s in the drinks cabinet.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘Then it’s where you last left it. Try the sideboard drawers.’

  ‘OK.’ Ralph plunges his index finger into a bowl of guacamole, licks it, gives an approving grunt, and goes out.

  ‘I wish I was taking your course, Helen,’ says Carrie.

  ‘You might not like it,’ says Helen. ‘Some of the students are pretty rough with each other’s work.’

  It is the evening of Ralph’s birthday party. Helen has arrived early, by prior arrangement, to help with the food preparations. Most of the serious food – the poached whole salmon, the farm-cured ham on the bone, the variegated salads – has been supplied by a local catering firm, and is already laid out in the dining room beside stacks of plates and sets of cutlery wrapped in thick paper napkins. But Carrie likes to prepare her own canapes. Helen has been entrusted with the task of chopping and slicing crudités for the savoury dips. Carrie herself is peeling fresh prawns and impaling them on toothpicks, separated by cubes of ripe pimiento, like miniature shish kebabs. In the large square hall, with its floor of black and white flags, a table has been placed to serve as a bar, with bottles of red and white wine arranged in two symmetrical phalanxes, separated by a large tray of gleaming wineglasses. Shortly after Ralph has left the kitchen the two women hear the regular pop! pop! of corks being pulled with the aid of the Screwpull. More distantly the strains of cool instrumental jazz percolate from the hi-fi in the drawing room, where Emily is placing little bowls of nuts and pretzels in strategic places. The Messengers are experienced party-givers, and everyone knows their function and how to perform it. The front doorbell rings.