by David Lodge
what about wednesday then? we could go off campus to a country pub if you prefer. ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: your invitation
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 16:42:18
* * *
Dear Ralph,
I think it would be best if we didn’t meet for a while, certainly not ‘a deux’ (I can’t seem to do italics in Email). You have made your feelings very plain. I won’t pretend that I find them repugnant, but I can’t reciprocate, for reasons you know.
Best wishes, Helen
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: ridiculous
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 16:50:49
* * *
helen, that’s ridiculous. i can take no for an answer, I’m not going to harrass you. i admire you mind as well as your body. i enjoy your company. i like kicking ideas around with you.
ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: ideas
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 17:31:02
* * *
Dear Ralph,
Can’t we kick them around by Email?
Helen
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: a proposal
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 09:21:25
* * *
ok I was going to put a proposal to you over lunch but here it is. suppose we swap journals? i show you mine and you show me yours – complete, uncensored, unedited. what do you say?
ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: your proposal
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 11:21:19
* * *
Dear Ralph,
What an extraordinary idea. I wouldn’t dream of it. My journal is private. I have no intention of ever publishing it. I may draw on it one day for fiction, but very selectively, and with all kinds of disguises and transpositions. It’s not intended for anyone’s eyes but mine.
Helen
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: my proposal
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 12:26:53
* * *
helen, the same is true of my journal, when i started it i thoiught i might use it as research data, to illustrate my work in progress on consciousness but i soon realised i could never publish any substantial chunk of it, its too compromising. i think this may be a fundamental difficulkty in consciousness studies, nobody daring to bring the third person discourse of science to bear on the first-person phenomenology of their own consciousness in a raw state . . .
we,ve spoken before about the essential feature of c. being its secrecy, the fact that our thoughts are known only to ourselves. sometiems this is a source of satisfaction, it gives us a sense of our own unique identity, I think therefore I am. sometimes it leads to solipsism, the rather frightening idea that perhaps only my own thoughts arereal . . . either way it works against the AI project which must assume there are regularities in the architrcture of the human mind which can be replicated. It seems to me that there is a kind of opportunity here in the coincidence that we have both been keeping journals over the period when we made each other#s acquaintance. If we swap we would each have a unique insight into the workings of another person’s mind, we could compare our responses to the same event. I could literally ‘read your mind’ and you mine.
ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: your proposal
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 18:45:29
* * *
Dear Ralph,
I can see what’s in it for you. What’s in it for me?
Helen.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: my proposal
Date: Tues, 25 Mar 1997 22:53:02
* * *
surely a novelist, especially a woman novelist, should jump at the chance to look inside a man’s head, to really see what goes on in there. i,m taking a trremendous risk, much more than you would be i’m sure. you’ll be shocked, disgusted by a lot of the things bobbing about in my stream of consciousness. it’s more like a sewer most of the time. it’s possible that when you’ve read my journal you’ll nver want to see me or speak to me again. i sincerely hope not of course. i hope that like me you value the truth above all else. if we do this we shall ‘know’ each other more completely than lovers ever know each other. they penetrate each others bodies to the depth of a few inches or so, with tongues, fingers, etc, but we would get inside each other’s heads, we would possess each other as no two people have ever done before. doesn’t that idea excite you?
ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: your proposal
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 10:24:42
* * *
Dear Ralph,
You’re very eloquent, but no thanks. Of course as a novelist I’m curious about other people’s minds, and what goes on inside them, and a lot of the business of writing fiction consists of trying to imagine what X or Y would be thinking in this or that imaginary situation. And yes, OK, perhaps reading your journal would give me some insights into the male psyche in general and yours in particular. But ultimately I feel that the privacy of our thoughts is essential to human selfhood and that to surrender it would be terribly dangerous. We all have bad, ignoble, shameful thoughts, it is human nature, what used to be called Original Sin. The fact that we can suppress them, conceal them, keep them to ourselves, is essential to maintain our self-respect. It’s essential to civilization.
Why is torture so horrible, so morally repugnant? Not just because of the pain it inflicts, but because it uses bodily pain to prise secrets from the mind, which should be inviolable.
Helen
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: my proposal
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 11:10:12
* * *
helen, hey i’m not trying to torture you, i’m just offering you a deal, your thoughts for mine, to further our respective researches into human nature.
ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: your proposal
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 12:24:42
* * *
Dear Ralph,
I’m sorry, but there seems to me something distinctly Faustian about your contract. I smell a whiff of brimstone about it.
The answer is no.
Best wishes, Helen
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: my proposal
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 12:40:12
* * *
well it was worth a try.
I hope you won’t have any objection to joining us at horseshoes next weekennd. as its easter we’re making a long one of it. You could come sunday and stay overnight. carrie seconds this invite.
ralph
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: your invitation
Date: Wed, 26 March 1997 17:55:32
* * *
Dear Ralph,
Thank you (and Carrie) very much, but I have promised to visit my parents at the Easter weekend. I hope to see you both sometime after the break.
Best wishes, Helen
21
THURSDAY 27TH MARCH. Just got back from a workshop. It was Franny Smith’s turn to present her stuff – a chapter from the novel in progress, provisionally entitled Class Notes. I circulated it in advance, but she asked if she could read it aloud, which was a good idea, because the Liverpool accent made the
dialogue really come alive. I wonder if I should encourage her to write for radio. I didn’t go across to the Arts Centre Café for a drink with the students as usual, because it’s the Easter weekend and most of them are going home or off for a short holiday and were anxious to get away. The University closes tomorrow for four days. I’m going away myself, to spend a few days with Mummy and Daddy. It was arranged ages ago, at Christmas in fact, and I was glad to have an excuse, genuine this time, to decline another invitation to Horseshoes. I shall have a duller weekend, but more peace of mind, out of Ralph Messenger’s reach for a while, even by Email (I’m leaving my laptop and modem behind).
I’m not going to Southwold till Saturday, however. I pretended to Mummy and Daddy that I was tied up here tomorrow, but the rather shameful fact is that I don’t want to spend Good Friday with them. I never did like Good Friday, even as a child. It always seemed a queer uncomfortable day. A holiday of a kind – most of the shops shut in those days, though they don’t seem to any more – but you weren’t supposed to be happy or enjoy yourself. In the afternoon we went to church, its statues shrouded in purple drapes, standing out against the white walls like ink blots shaken from a giant pen; to the bleak Good Friday service with its interminable prayers and Veneration of the Cross (how I hated pressing my lips against the ceramic feet of Jesus on the big wooden crucifix after a long line of other people had done the same; even if the altar server did wipe away the spittle each time with a white linen cloth – what kind of hygienic protection did that give after the hundredth wipe, I squeamishly wondered). And it was a day of fasting and abstinence – still is, I presume, about the last one left in the Church calendar – so you felt hungry much of the day; and Mummy held the view that our one proper meal shouldn’t be positively enjoyable, so we had an almost flavourless repast of steamed fish, boiled potatoes and cabbage. And the television set wasn’t turned on in the evening unless for a religious programme, or at least something very serious and improving. As far as I know they still observe Good Friday in the same austere fashion, and I respect them for it; but I don’t want to go to the Good Friday liturgy or to upset them by declining to go. The Easter Vigil is a different matter, I can handle that. So I’m planning to make an early start on Saturday morning – it’s a horrendously long drive, right across the thick waist of England, but hopefully the worst of the holiday traffic will be over by then.
At the end of the workshop this afternoon Sandra Pickering came up and thrust an A4 envelope of a substantial weight and thickness into my hand. ‘This is what you asked to see,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll look at it over the weekend.’ We were the last to leave the seminar room, so I made conversation as we walked along the corridor together. ‘By the way, I enjoyed your piece on Mary the Colour Scientist. Very clever.’ ‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘Are you going anywhere interesting this weekend?’ I asked. ‘I’m going to Spain,’ she said. ‘I may miss next Tuesday’s seminar actually. I’m coming back that morning, and if the flight is delayed I won’t get back here in time.’ ‘Oh, well, don’t worry. Enjoy yourself,’ I said. ‘Thanks,’ she said, without returning my smile, and we parted.
The envelope is on the desk beside me, unopened. Now that, after badgering her for a fortnight, I’ve finally got my hands on the continuation of her novel, I feel strangely hesitant about reading it, almost apprehensive. What am I going to do if her male character continues to resemble Sebastian in The Eye of the Storm? I haven’t the faintest idea. I think I’ll leave it till tomorrow. Have my supper and half a bottle of wine and watch television instead.
GOOD FRIDAY, 28TH MARCH. It’s been a horrible, horrible day. Sometimes I thought I should go mad.
I opened Sandra Pickering’s envelope after breakfast and settled down to read the contents – two chapters, about fifty pages of neat double-spaced typescript in all. At first I felt relieved, if anything. The character of Alastair still reminded me intermittently of Sebastian (and indirectly of Martin) but I put this down to my memory of the first two chapters, for there were no new character-traits that were obviously derivative from The Eye of the Storm. And the story itself rattled along in a quite lively fashion – I was almost enjoying it. And then . . . the thunderbolt struck. I could almost smell burning. No that’s the wrong metaphor. I felt a sudden chill. I froze with a kind of terror. I was reading a passage about the heroine, Tina, and Alastair making love for the second time. Only it wasn’t Alastair. It was Martin.
I’ve been turning this over and over in my mind all day, but most of the time in a kind of delirium, and only now, as darkness is falling, do I feel capable of writing down, lucidly, coherently, rationally, what I felt as I read that passage and why I felt it.
The sexual act is such a common, banal act, endlessly repeated by millions of people every day, as Ralph observed; but everyone has their own individual way of leading up to, performing and disengaging from it, as unique and unmistakable as a signature or a thumbprint. It’s made up of several things – tempo and sequence, for instance, as well as the kind of foreplay or coital position that is favoured. If you are in a long-term relationship you become familiar with your partner’s pattern of stimulus and response, and he with yours. It’s not that every sexual act is exactly the same; but there is a kind of repertoire which you build up together, elements of which you combine in different ways on different occasions. It is, as I wrote here the other day, a kind of language which lovers learn. A certain movement of the limbs speaks for itself: touch me here, stroke me there, come into me now. And of course there may be unusual or perverse elements in the repertoire which make it particularly distinctive.
When two people start a new relationship they both bring to it habits and preferences acquired with their previous partners, but it’s likely that the more experienced partner will dominate the creation of the new repertoire, at least at first. That was certainly the case with Martin and me. Sandra Pickering’s heroine is much younger than Alastair and her sexual experience has consisted of unsatisfactory short-term affairs and one-night stands. Their first attempt at intercourse is in fact a comic disaster, which I found quite amusing. Alastair sees Tina home one night after an office party, declines her coded invitation to ‘come up for a coffee’, Tina prepares despondently for bed, takes a sleeping pill, Alastair has second thoughts, turns back and rings her doorbell. Tina lets him in and calculates that she has fifteen minutes to get him into bed and have sex before she falls irrecoverably asleep, so acts like a nymphomaniac, unbuttoning his shirt and unzipping his trousers, drags him into the bedroom demanding instant intercourse, but passes out in his arms ‘in mid-shag’, as she elegantly puts it. Alastair, concerned, stays the night, and in the morning, in the early hours, they wake together and she confesses her folly. He proceeds to make love to her in his own way.
I tried to persuade myself that this next passage replicated erotic descriptions in a thousand contemporary novels, but the tempo, the sequence, the combination of caresses and muttered endearments, the delicate attentions of Alastair’s tongue and fingers to Tina’s erogenous zones, were all like a replay of my own experience with Martin. The final piece in the jigsaw, the final tap of the hammer (for I felt stifled, trapped, like someone being nailed into a coffin still alive), was from the post-coital phase of our repertoire. Martin had an odd and rather endearing habit – not always, but often – of rolling on to his stomach and asking me to lie on top of him, to spread my limbs symmetrically over his splayed form, fitting my pelvic bone into the soft curve of his buttocks, relaxing and allowing my whole unsupported weight to press him into the mattress. We would lie like that for minutes on end, half asleep, breathing in and out like a single body. When I came to the description of this action in Sandra Pickering’s manuscript, I flung the pages to the other side of the room with a howl of pain and dismay.
Needless to say, there is nothing in The Eye of the Storm about Martin’s sexual habits, proclivities, and mannerisms. I don’t write explicit sex scene
s in my novels, and even if I did I wouldn’t have done so in a book which already took some indulged liberties with Martin’s character, nor would he have countenanced it. So where did Sandra Pickering get this material from? Putting aside supernatural or ESP explanations (and I did desperately entertain them from time to time in the course of this horrible day – Sandra Pickering as some kind of a witch or psychic who was able to read my mind and appropriate my memories), putting all irrational theories aside, there was only one possible source: Martin himself. Sandra Pickering must have had an affair with my husband.
More than anything in the world I wanted to confront Sandra Pickering. I wanted to have her pinned against the wall, tied to a chair, my hands on her throat, ready to tear the truth out of her. But she was gone from the campus, from England, for four days. I had a phone number for a flat she shared in Cheltenham, which I tried just in case she hadn’t left yet or had changed her plans, but a voice there confirmed that she had left the previous evening and no, they didn’t have a contact number for her in Spain.
What was particularly maddening was that I knew so little about Sandra Pickering, no facts which might corroborate – or blessedly falsify – my suspicion. Then I thought to myself files. There must be a file on her in the School of English Office with some personal information in it. I went out into the almost deserted campus. It was like a graveyard or a ghost town. Everybody had left for the weekend except foreign students who had nowhere else to go, or had been unprepared for the sudden exodus. They looked baffled and despondent, as if wondering what was supposed to be good about this Friday, that had emptied the campus like a rumour of plague. A cold wind was blowing across the flat acres of grass and ruffling the grey waters of the artificial lake. There were hardly any signs of spring, except for the occasional scattering of daffodils and crocuses shivering in the wind. I met the Japanese couple from the end house on my terrace, in tightly buttoned topcoats, evidently taking a walk. They smiled and bowed their heads, and looked as if for once they actually wanted to chat, but I was in no mood for socializing – I forced a smile and made noises and gestures suggestive of an urgent errand and pushed on to the Humanities Tower.
