Thinks...

by David Lodge

She said that they were going to spend the day at Horseshoes, and why didn’t I come with them. I had anticipated this invitation and was going to excuse myself on the grounds of all the manuscripts I have to read, but I weakly changed my mind and accepted. It was a bright crisp morning and the thought of a day in the country was inviting, certainly more inviting than solitude and a TV dinner on Maisonette Row.

  So I spent another agreeable day with the Messengers, helping Carrie prepare the vegetables for lunch, helping Emily with her French homework, playing Trivial Pursuit with the younger kids, while Ralph retired to his study to read a book he is reviewing for one of next Sunday’s papers. I felt a little like a governess to a rich family in a nineteenth-century novel, sharing some of the perks of affluence in return for making myself invaluable, but I didn’t really mind.

  When the time came for the hot tub I excused myself – rather wistfully because the sky had clouded over in the course of the afternoon and a few snowflakes were beginning to fall. The idea of sitting in the hot tub while it was snowing was exciting, but I hadn’t brought a swimming costume with me. Ralph rather cheekily suggested I wore my underwear, and put it in the tumble drier afterwards, but Carrie found me an oversized tee-shirt and an old pair of cotton shorts belonging to Emily which served the purpose admirably, practical without being alluring. It was a magical experience, lying back in the hot tub, watching the feathery flakes flutter down, dark against the sky, then white when they reached eye level, then melting into the steam and the hot water. By the time we got out, the snow had settled in a thin layer on the deck, and we left our warm wet footprints in it as we climbed back to the house. I made sure that I didn’t get left behind in the tub with Ralph this time.

  I have new neighbours: a young couple have moved into the maisonette next door. When I got back from Horseshoes yesterday evening I saw there was a car in the drive and lights on behind the curtains. This morning I saw the new occupants go off for a jog together, and popped out to introduce myself when they returned, glowing and panting from their exercise. Ross and Jackie, they’re called. He has just been appointed to a lectureship in Sports Science, whatever that is, in the School of Community Studies, whatever they are, and she is a physiotherapist, hoping to get a job in a private clinic in Cheltenham or Gloucester. I invited them in for a coffee, but Ross said they were ‘running late’. I said it seemed quite early enough for running to me, but the quip failed to register. But when Ross said they had better go and get showered, Jackie giggled as if at something risque. I get the impression that they haven’t been living together for very long. They have a honeymoon air about them. Ross had his arm round Jackie’s waist as we talked, and patted her bottom fondly as they went off to take their shower, no doubt together. I’m afraid they’re unlikely to become bosom pals of mine.

  I saw Annabelle Riverdale at the Library this morning. She was on duty at the Reader Services Desk, and gave me a slightly panicstricken look as I went by, so I stopped to say hallo. ‘I’m afraid I disgraced myself on Saturday,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, ‘I don’t think anybody noticed.’ ‘Colin did,’ she said gloomily. ‘I get nervous at parties and then I drink too much.’ She eyed me speculatively. ‘You mustn’t take any notice of what I say in my cups.’ ‘I can’t even remember what you said,’ I said airily. She gave me a timid, grateful smile.

  WEDNESDAY 19TH MARCH. Students handed in their ‘Mary the Colour Scientist’ pieces yesterday. Some excellent work again. Sandra Pickering did a surprisingly good imitation of Fay Weldon. But she hasn’t given me the next chapters of her novel yet. I reminded her at the end of the class and she mumbled something about needing to do more work on them. I suspect she’s trying to make her Alastair less like my Sebastian, and finding it difficult. It seems obvious to me now that she must have read The Eye of the Storm when it first came out, borrowed from it unconsciously when she came to start her own novel, then read it again last Christmas because I was coming to teach the course, and realized what she’d done. If she’d only admit it I could do something to help her.

  I haven’t seen much of my new neighbours, though I do hear them through the party wall, laughing and shouting to each other, and thumping energetically up and down the stairs. Sometimes a sudden silence falls after a series of shrieks from Jackie, and I wonder if horseplay has turned into what I’m sure they call ‘bonking’. I imagine Ross catching Jackie on the stairs, pulling down her tracksuit bottoms and taking her incontinently on the landing. Once I pressed my ear to the wall and listened for the sounds of sexual congress, but heard nothing except the beating of my own heart.

  15

  MARY HAD A little lamb . . . testing, testing . . . It’s 9.10 a.m Monday 17th March and I’m driving to work. Progress is painfully slow on the Inner Ring this morning, a combination of rain and roadworks, so I got out the old Pearlcorder to pass the time . . . It seems to have become a habit . . . like keeping a diary, though I never kept a diary before, couldn’t be bothered, but dictating to Voicemaster makes it easy . . . and perhaps it’s middle age, you begin to feel rather possessive, protective about your thoughts, anxious to get them down on paper before they fade away . . . the brain cells are decaying inexorably, the neural networking is getting slower, you generate fewer new ideas . . . Or you forget the ones you’ve had – spend hours, days, working through an argument or a theory and then when you finally get it into shape you realize it’s an idea you had yonks ago . . . This is a cheerful train of thought for a wet Monday morning . . . comes of passing the fifty mark no doubt . . . The party was . . . interesting . . . Marianne, yes, I’m not sorry she’s called off our little game, it was getting too risky, and all for what, a bit of frottage every now and then . . . I hope to Christ whatsisname, Oliver, keeps his trap shut . . . or nobody pays any attention to his babblings . . . So Marianne’s going back into purdah and Helen doesn’t want to take her place . . . Though she jumped at the chance to come to Horseshoes next day, and Christ that outfit she wore in the tub, the tee-shirt clinging to her tits and the white cotton shorts were semitransparent when she stood up and climbed out with Carrie and the others, I could see the dark crack of her arse through them, Jesus . . . I had to stay behind in the tub until my hard-on subsided . . . There’s no doubt that sexual [recording stops]

  It’s 9.35 and I’m in a layby on the A435, parked behind a Dutch juggernaut whose driver is presumably having a kip since there’s no coffee-bar on wheels to tempt anyone to stop here, or other attraction apart from an overflowing garbage bin . . . I interrupted the recording on the Inner Ring because I noticed a passenger in the front seat of a Mondeo level with my car in the traffic jam was staring at me and I became a bit self-conscious, especially given what I was . . . interesting that usage, by the way, ‘to become self-conscious’, as if we’re not self-conscious all the time . . . What it really means is second-order self-consciousness, or you could call it reflected self-consciousness . . . when we become conscious of ourselves as perceived by others, or rather we feel others are conscious of our self-consciousness, as if they’ve accessed what is usually private and known only to ourselves . . . I wondered if this bloke could lip-read he looked so interested, twisted round in his seat to stare at me dictating . . . I gave him a cold fuck-off look and he hastily turned his head away, but I didn’t feel like going on with the dictation, so I closed down the Pearlcorder . . . and quite soon the traffic cleared and I was on my way . . . But having a bit of time in hand I thought I’d pull in here for a few minutes and put my pensée on record while I can still remember it . . . What I was going to say was that sexual desire is a tough nut for AI to crack, though I’m not aware that anyone has even thought of how to build it into the architecture . . . that curious and uniquely human combination of physical stimulus-response and mental activity . . . that rich intoxicating brew of blood-filled tissue and pheromones and obsession and calculation . . . It’s a puzzler, as Darwin would say.

  Yesterday evening, after we got back from
Horseshoes, I decided to look for that tape of Isabel Hotchkiss . . . something about the shape of Helen’s breasts moulded by the saturated tee-shirt reminded me, especially the nipples, blunt and protuberant, they reminded me of Isabel’s tits, and I was suddenly seized with a strong desire to listen to the tape of us having sex in that hotel room in San Diego . . . Not to jerk off, but just to recover the sensation of a wild one-night stand, something I haven’t had for some time . . . Carrie was watching TV with the kids, some heritage melodrama with horses and carriages and crinolines, never my cup of tea . . . I went up to my study to hunt for the tape . . . didn’t take long to find it . . . I wore headphones so nobody else in the house could possibly overhear anything, dimmed the lights and stretched out on the chaise longue . . . and pressed Play . . .

  It was, what, at least eight years ago, and I hadn’t listened to the tape since then, so I had only a vague memory of what was on it, and it was a big disappointment at first . . . the Pearlmaster wasn’t quite up to the job, too far away perhaps, or more likely the sound was muffled by my clothing, I hid the machine under my shirt, I think . . . I could hear occasional faint sexual noises, giggles and grunts and moans, but mostly it was a hissing silence, like radio noise from deep space . . . Then there was a passage of conversation between us, but I couldn’t distinguish any words, only the intonations of statements and questions . . . it was very frustrating . . . Then suddenly we raised our voices and I could hear everything . . . we were shouting at each other, shouting ‘Fuck me!’ and ‘I love you!’ and moving towards some tremendous volcanic orgasm . . . Isabel screamed and I howled ‘YESSSS!’ as we came together . . . and then there was the sound of someone knocking indignantly on the wall of the room next door and Isabel and I burst out laughing, happy heedless triumphant laughter. Listening to it was incredibly exciting. The whole episode came back to me in all its detail, including the conversation that was only an unintelligible murmur on the tape . . .

  It was the penultimate day of the conference, we’d both given papers in the late afternoon in the same session, papers which had been well received, so we were both feeling pleased with ourselves, high on the adrenaline of the occasion . . . ready to let off steam . . . for a little R&R . . . The conference was taking place in one of those vast American hotels with fountains and waterfalls and a small rain-forest in the atrium . . . express elevators that nail you to the floor with G force . . . thousands of identical rooms on corridors stretching to infinity, and any number of themed bars, coffee shops and restaurants . . . There was no need for the conferees to venture out into the streets of San Diego, and not much opportunity if you were conscientious, because the programme ran continuously from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. . . . Isabel and I had a couple of drinks with some other people who had been at our session . . . and either I was being particularly witty or Isabel was already making a play for me, for she chuckled and nodded at everything I said, and smiled at me over her glass . . . I manoeuvred through the crush to stand next to her, and then as the others moved off to eat, taking little carnets of meal tickets out of their wallets and frowning at them, I quietly suggested to Isabel that we should skip the evening’s plenary session and dine out somewhere for a change. She jumped at the idea, and went off ostensibly to powder her nose. Ten minutes later we rendezvoused in the air-conditioned lobby and emerged into the muggy Califomian night giggling like a couple of truant schoolkids. I told the cab driver to take us to the best Mexican restaurant in town, which looked like a hangout for the local mafia but turned out to be terrific . . . we had a hot spicy feast of burritos and enchiladas and chimichangas dripping with salsa and sour cream, sluiced down with a couple of bottles of robust Californian red. The second bottle was probably a mistake, though it didn’t seem so at the time because the more Isabel drank the less inhibited she became. We talked shop at first, research and professional gossip, then the conversation became more personal. She was in her mid-thirties, I would say, and not particularly goodlooking – she had somewhat equine features, wore thick-rimmed glasses, and her hair was drawn back into a bun at the back of her head, so tightly it made your head ache sympathetically to look at it . . . I had no intention of seducing her when I suggested the date, I just felt like having some admiring female company and she was to hand. But when, about two glasses through the second bottle, I made some light-hearted reference to the severity of her hairstyle she reached up to the back of her head, tugged at a comb, and shook out her hair. It was long and shiny and fell forward over her shoulders, suddenly making her look ten times more feminine and desirable, something she was obviously well aware of. The signal was unambiguous. She was an associate professor at one of the Illinois State campuses, separated from her husband, who worked in the same neurobiology department . . . According to Isabel, they split because she’d got tenure and he hadn’t – ‘He just couldn’t handle it . . .’ They had one child with shared access – hubby was looking after the kid while she was attending the conference. And was she seeing anybody else, I asked. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m leery of long-term relationships now . . . I don’t want to get involved again. What I’m looking for,’ she said, eyeing me boozily through a curtain of hair, ‘is a physically gratifying, emotionally empty, one-night stand.’ ‘I’m sure that could be arranged,’ I said, immediately on fire with lust. The Martha syndrome kicked in – the chance to bring sexual bliss to a mature woman gagging for it. I caught the waiter’s eye and wrote a cheque in the air to summon the bill.

  We necked lubriciously in the cab back to the hotel, and in the elevator to her room on the twenty-eighth floor . . . We tore each other’s clothes off as soon as the door was shut behind us and I foxtrotted her over to the bed but she said she had to go to the bathroom and while she was in there I draped my clothes over a chair and on a whim set the Pearlcorder to record . . . When she came back we lay on the bed and did all the things . . . we sucked and licked and fingered and fucked . . . and at first I was preening myself on how long I was managing to keep going without coming, but then I started to get a bit worried as to whether I was going to come at all . . . I regretted that second bottle of Californian red . . . meanwhile Isabel was sighing and moaning and purring with apparent pleasure, but she wasn’t showing any real signs of coming either . . . I raised the question as delicately as I could, lying on top of her and supporting myself on my forearms . . . ‘I guess I was wrong,’ she said. ‘You’re a wonderful lover, Ralph, but I guess I’m not cut out for recreational sex after all.’ She paused for a moment. ‘If you could say, “I love you,”’ she said, ‘it might do the trick. You don’t have to mean it.’ I cottoned on instantly. ‘Of course I love you,’ I said earnestly, without betraying the slightest hint of insincerity, and I felt a kind of shudder go through her body. ‘Oh boy,’ she murmured. ‘I love you and I love fucking you,’ I said, suiting the action to the word. ‘I love you fucking me,’ she said. I said, ‘I love you and I love to hear you say that word.’ ‘Oh fuck me, darling,’ she said. And so we went on, chanting a counterpoint of ‘love you’ and ‘fuck me’, until we reached a crescendo and a climax that had our neighbour hammering furiously on the wall.

  I listened to the tape again, and it was even more exciting the second time . . . I felt extremely horny . . . I went looking for Carrie . . . Emily and Mark, watching the TV in the lounge, said she’d gone to bed . . . I hurried upstairs again . . . I was glad to find her still awake, reading. I brushed my teeth and slipped under the bedclothes beside her, naked, and put my hand on her belly. ‘What do you want, Messenger?’ she said. ‘What do you think?’ I said, reaching down and lifting the hem of her nightdress. She sighed and put down her book. ‘All right, but don’t make a noise, the kids are still up.’ ‘I think they know we have sex,’ I said. ‘Even so . . .’ she said. She pulled her nightdress over her head. Her breasts are awesome . . . Sunday Sport readers would come in their trousers just looking at them. I climbed on top of her, sank into her, wallowed in her . . . making love to Carrie these
days is like fucking a Bouncy Castle . . . but I worked hard and after a while she began to respond and to make the little mewing noises she makes . . . ‘Say “fuck me,”’ I said. ‘Shsh. Fuck me,’ she whispered. ‘Louder,’ I said, ‘as if you mean it.’ But she wouldn’t. ‘I love you,’ I said. Her eyes opened wide with surprise. It’s a long time since I said that to her. ‘I love you too, Messenger,’ she said. ‘Then say “fuck me” aloud,’ I said. But she wouldn’t. I closed my eyes and tried to think of Isabel. But it was Helen Reed that I saw in my mind’s eye, in her wet tee-shirt and her sopping shorts. As I was saying, lust is a puzzler.

  16

  Mary Comes Out

  SHE SAT, MARY Willingdon, in the grey vestibule, windowless like every other room in the extensive subterranean apartment, with her hands folded in the lap of her grey serge skirt, and watched the minute-hand of the wall-mounted ebony clock move through the last segment of its circular sweep. Now it was exactly aligned with, and eclipsed, the hour-hand which pointed to the Roman numeral eleven. When the longer of these two indicators had measured five more units, the clock would strike eleven solemn, sonorous notes; the black baize door which gave access to the outside world, via a long dark corridor terminating in another door massive and studded, would swing silently open on its oiled hinges; and her master would appear on the threshold.

  He would be dressed, she was confident, in his usual immaculate black suit and gleaming black boots, with a crisp white shirt-front and a grey silk cravat at his throat. But he would not be wearing over his abundant black beard and side-whiskers the slitted face mask of dull steel that customarily concealed from her view the colour of his eyes and lips. And perhaps today he would be carrying, rather than wearing, the tight supple black gloves, made of the finest kid, that always concealed his hands in her company.