Thinks...

by David Lodge

  There I encountered an obstacle. The main doors were locked, and I had no key. I hurried over to the Security Centre near the main gate and asked if someone would let me into the building. The men on duty, who belong to some private security firm, were polite but uncooperative. Did I have a pass authorizing me to enter the building outside normal hours? No, I did not, I wasn’t aware that I needed one. Then they were afraid they couldn’t help me. I raged and expostulated, and they grew less polite and even less cooperative. In the end I stormed out of the office, threatening wildly and futilely to make a complaint. I went back to the maisonette, made myself some lunch, clumsily, boiling the soup and burning the toast, forced down the food without tasting anything, tried to read – hopeless. Then I had another idea: Jasper Richmond, as Head of the School of English, would have keys, keys to everything. I rang him up, and Marianne answered. Jasper had gone out for a walk with Oliver. Could she help? No, I said, I’ll call again later. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell him when he comes in.’ Her tone was cool, guarded. Perhaps she had picked up a hint of hysteria in my own.

  Jasper called me at about three. I had had time to rehearse a reasonably plausible story about why I needed to borrow his keys to the Humanities Tower and the School of English Office and the filing cabinets containing student records. He offered to drive over to the campus to assist me, but I insisted on going to fetch the keys and promised to return them this evening. I arrived at his house half an hour later. On the way I passed through several villages with clusters of parked cars round their churches and chapels, indicating that services were in progress inside, but otherwise the roads were clear and quiet. Oliver opened the door. ‘Hallo Helen Reed,’ he said, before I had identified myself. ‘Have you written any novels lately?’ ‘No I haven’t,’ I said. ‘Neither has Egg,’ he said, ‘because Milly is going out with O’Donnell. And Miles is jealous because Anna is being nice to Jerry.’ He proceeded to tell me a great deal more about the state of play in This Life before Jasper came out of his study to rescue me and hand over the keys. I declined the offer of a cup of tea, and drove straight back to the University.

  I parked near the Humanities Tower and stayed in my car, concealed by its tinted windows, until a patrolling security guard had passed by, afraid that he might stop me from using my borrowed keys without a pass. Then I slipped into the building like a thief, and took the lift to the tenth floor. I felt deeply uneasy in the huge empty building, in which every sound I made seemed amplified – my footsteps on the lino-tiles, the thud of the fire-doors slamming shut behind my back, the click of the key in the lock of the School Office door, the metallic rumble of the filing cabinet drawers. I took deep breaths and struggled to remain calm.

  I found Sandra Pickering’s file after a few minutes’ search. There wasn’t much in it – her application form, her CV, Russell Marsden’s report on her first term’s work – but it was enough. There in her CV was all the evidence I needed. From 1993 to 1994, Sandra Pickering had been employed as a contract research assistant by the BBC in London, working on radio documentaries.

  MONDAY 31ST MARCH. Just got back from Southwold after a long, tiring drive on roads congested with returning holiday traffic. It wasn’t much of a holiday for me – I wasn’t in the mood – though I was glad to get away from Stalag Glosu for a few days, and Southwold is a pretty little place which I usually enjoy visiting. It’s certainly the ideal retirement location for Mummy and Daddy. They’ve been ‘retired’ most of my adult life, but now they really are beginning to look old.

  I was born when my mother was forty – a ‘mistake’ I presumed, perhaps one of the many failures of the Rhythm Method of birth control. It was always a mystery to me how they managed to limit the number of their offspring to two before I came along, since they belonged to a docile and obedient generation of Catholics, who accepted the Church’s teaching on this matter unquestioningly. I didn’t enquire, of course. We never discussed sex in a personal way at home. I suspect that they didn’t have a great deal of it – that much libido was sacrificed on the altar of Faith in their married life, and that the act which led to my conception was a fairly rare event by that time in their marriage. It would be fascinating to know what provoked it. Some happy family celebration? Some euphoric holiday excursion? Some sexy film seen accidentally on television? No, definitely not that – when I lived at home my mother would always tell Daddy to ‘turn over to the other side’ if anything even mildly salacious appeared on the box, and it wasn’t just to preserve my innocence. God knows my novels are pretty reticent by contemporary standards, but I can tell from the odd comment that Mummy and Daddy find them rather shocking, ‘a little . . . you know, dear . . . outspoken . . . of course we’re very old-fashioned . . .’ I don’t pursue the matter. I never discuss my books with them – I would prefer that they didn’t read them at all, for reasons I explained to Emily the other day.

  When I was growing up, Mummy and Daddy always seemed significantly older than the parents of my friends – more like other children’s grandparents. And now they hardly seem to belong to the modern world at all – the world of mobile phones and body-piercing and serial cohabitation and recreational drugs . . . Southwold, with its rows of brightly painted beach-huts facing the sea, its quaint old-fashioned tea-shops, its horse-drawn brewery drays, its by-laws against dogs and radios and ice-cream vans and anything else which might make a noise or a mess, its promenade where in high summer you will see ladies wearing stockings with their flowered dresses, and gentlemen wearing folded handkerchiefs tucked into the breast pockets of their blazers – Southwold, which has successfully created the illusion that time stopped there at some moment in the nineteen-fifties, suits them perfectly. It even has a fine medieval church which Daddy has the satisfaction of regarding as only on temporary loan to the Protestant persuasion. Of course we went to the much less impressive Catholic church for the Easter Vigil mass on Saturday evening, which was however crowded – ‘five times as many people as you’ll see in St Edmund’s this weekend,’ Daddy boasted, and he was probably right, though the congregation was smaller than I remembered from previous years.

  The symbolism of the Easter fire, lit in a brazier outside the church, and carried into the sanctuary as lighted candles, never fails to impress, and some of the readings in the service, especially from the Old Testament, are magnificent. All day there had hardly been a minute when I wasn’t thinking privately about Martin and Sandra Pickering, but for a while I was lifted out of my own preoccupations by the power and eloquence of the scriptures. It seemed a good and wholesome thing to be sitting there, listening to the word of God. But then came the Renewal of Baptismal Promises: ‘Do you reject Satan? I do. And all his works? I do. And all his empty promises? I do . . . Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, died and was buried, rose from the dead and is now seated at the right hand of the Father?’ No, I didn’t, not really, honestly. I couldn’t bring myself to utter the responses, and I sensed that Mummy and Daddy were aware of my closed lips. And needless to say, I stayed in my seat when they went up to the altar to take communion.

  Mummy could tell that I was depressed and preoccupied, and attributed it to grief for Martin. We often used to go to Southwold for Easter, and she obviously presumed that my visit had stirred up poignant memories. She made several references to the healing effect of time and the advisability of not ‘brooding’ on the past. ‘Of course, it would be easier if you still had your faith, dear,’ she sighed. ‘But I pray for you, and for Martin, every night.’ She assumes Martin must be in Purgatory, expiating his sins in this world before being admitted to eternal bliss. As an agnostic he clearly can’t have gone straight to Heaven; on the other hand it would be distressing to suppose one’s son-in-law had gone to Hell, and modern theology allows salvation to be possible outside the Church. So he must be doing time in Purgatory, and she supposes that her prayers will help him gain some remission. ‘Don’t bot
her, Mummy,’ I felt like saying. ‘Let him burn for a good while yet.’ But of course I didn’t – not just because I wouldn’t dream of shocking her with the story of Sandra Pickering, but because I can’t be absolutely certain that he was unfaithful to me with her until I hear it from her own lips. All weekend I have been living in a horrible indeterminate state between righteous indignation and self-doubt, which won’t be resolved until I confront her tomorrow. Please God let her plane not be delayed. I don’t think I could bear another twenty-four hours of suspense.

  TUESDAY 1ST APRIL. April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough. I certainly feel that I have been made a fool of – though for years, not just a day.

  Sandra Pickering got back in time for the seminar this afternoon – straight from the airport, evidently, for she was toting her holiday luggage. After the class had ended, I asked her if I could see her in my office. She said she was tired and asked if it could be postponed till tomorrow, but I insisted. I marched her in silence, like a prisoner, to the tenth floor. I think she guessed what was coming. She certainly didn’t seem surprised by my questions, once we were seated in my office, and she didn’t prevaricate in her answers. Yes, she said, she had known Martin at the BBC. She worked with him on two programmes in 1993. He had taken her with him on research trips, which sometimes entailed staying in hotels overnight, and on one such occasion they had started an affair, which lasted about six months, mainly conducted in snatched hours during the day, in her studio flat in Paddington. She said he made it clear to her from the beginning that he wasn’t going to leave his family for her, and she mustn’t imagine that he ever would. She was sufficiently under his spell to accept this condition. She read my novels, ‘naturally’, but The Eye of the Storm wasn’t published until after the affair had ended, and she had left the BBC to work in advertising. Then she chose not to read it, because she was planning to write her own novel, and didn’t want to be intimidated or distracted by reading anything by me. ‘I was always a bit jealous of you, actually. The clever, successful writer-wife-mother whom he was never going to leave.’ She went on an Arvon long-weekend course, and made an impression on Russell Marsden, who was one of the tutors, and he encouraged her to apply for the MA in Creative Writing here. She started Burnt in the summer before she came up, never dreaming of course that she would be taught by me. It wasn’t until halfway through the semester that Russell Marsden announced to the group that I had been appointed to replace him while he was on study leave. ‘I knew there was a risk that you would recognize Martin in Alastair,’ she said, ‘especially when I read The Eye of the Storm over Christmas. But there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t start again from scratch, with a completely different character.’ ‘You could have started a completely different novel,’ I said. ‘What, halfway through the course?’ she said. ‘Why should I? I’ve given up a good job to do this course, I’ve drawn out all my savings and borrowed to pay for it. Why should I throw away all the work I’ve done just to avoid hurting your feelings?’ I had no answer to this. My remark sounded weak to my own ears, as if I should have preferred to live on in ignorance. Perhaps part of me would have preferred that. I asked her why the affair had ended. ‘It ended when he got another research assistant.’ There was something about the way she said it, a slight curl of her fleshy upper lip, a stress on the word another, which warned me there were more revelations to come. ‘I wasn’t the first,’ she said, ‘or the last.’

  It seems that Martin had a reputation for sleeping with his research assistants. Most of his close colleagues must have known this, including some whom I met socially. Many of the people at the Memorial Service must have known. Sandra herself had been in the church that day, though she avoided meeting me afterwards, and so, she assured me, had been the girl who supplanted her in Martin’s affections.

  I felt dizzy and hardly able to breathe. The raw breeze-block walls of the poky little office seemed to swell and contract, the gross, meaty nude on the Lucian Freud poster, and the black, burnished figure on the Mapplethorpe, seemed to ripple and move obscenely. I struggled to conceal my dismay, to retain some dignity and professional poise. When she said, ‘I hope this isn’t going to prejudice my mark for the course,’ I wanted to scream and throw things at her, but I just said coldly, ‘That’s what external examiners are for.’ Then I terminated the interview.

  I sat there at my desk for perhaps an hour, hardly moving, slowly turning back the pages of my married life and re-reading them in the light of what I had just learned. I had been completely deceived. There was a whole dimension to my husband’s character and behaviour that I, with my famous novelist’s insight and intuition, had never suspected or guessed at. How was it that I never smelled the perfume or body scents of those young sluts on him? Never found a trace of lipstick on his collars or a compromising note or pair of ticket stubs in his pockets? He must have been very, very careful. Or perhaps it was just me who was very stupid, very unobservant, very trusting. Now I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he had been chronically unfaithful to me, a number of little incidents and enigmas, that I had hardly registered at the time, suddenly came back sharply into focus, charged with implication. A shirt or two of his that unaccountably disappeared. Phone calls that went dead when I answered. Messages that he would have to work late. How easily I had been fooled.

  I wondered how long his philandering had been going on. As soon as I posed the question I thought I knew the answer: since the time of my big depression, seven or eight years ago. For six months I languished at the bottom of a deep hole, like the shaft of a waterless well, while kindly, puzzled people, of whom Martin was one, peered down at me over the rim of the parapet and tried to cheer me up, or lowered drugs and advice in a bucket. During that time I was unable to write, or even read fiction. My own novels seemed worthless, banal, phoney. I read the gushing compliments in the fan-letters I occasionally received with a kind of listless wonder that people could be so easily taken in. I read a lot of non-fiction – history, biography, letters – not with any real pleasure, but just to fill up the days. I was unable to take pleasure in anything, including sex. Especially sex. We made love occasionally, on Martin’s initiative, but I couldn’t pretend to enjoy it. I said I was sorry, there was nothing personal about it, and he was patient and understanding – or so I thought. Well, he understood all right, but he wasn’t so patient after all, apparently.

  Then after six months, for no discernible reason, except perhaps sheer boredom with being miserable, but not miserable enough to end it all, my depression began to lift. Recovery was helped, though not caused, by a number of lucky breaks and happy events in quick succession: the French translation of Mixed Blessings won a prize, Martin accompanied me to Paris to collect it, and we had a delightful weekend in a luxury hotel at someone else’s expense; Lucy passed the entrance exam to North London Collegiate with flying colours . . . Life suddenly seemed good again. The sun shone inside my head once more. I started a new novel. We resumed normal married life. Our love-making was not as frequent as it used to be, but I put this down to a natural decline of libido as we grew older. Now I know differently. Martin had plenty of libido left, but not so much to spare for me. He had developed a taste for younger flesh while I had been turned off sex.

  Can I blame him? Yes, of course I blame him. Not just because he polluted our marriage by intimate contact with other, foreign bodies, but because he deceived me, he cheated on me, he made a fool of me. If he were still alive I would divorce him. But death has divorced us already. There is nothing I can do with this knowledge, no way I can relieve my anger, except to write it down.

  Carrie called this evening. She asked me how I was and I said, ‘Fine, thanks,’ as one does, and she said, ‘No you’re not, I can tell from your voice.’ I admitted to feeling in low spirits, but not the reason. ‘I know just what you need,’ she said. ‘An afternoon at the Droitwich Brine Baths. I’ll take you.’ This didn’t sound at all enticing to me, but she insisted it would do me
a world of good. ‘When things get too much, I always take time out at the Brine Baths,’ she said. ‘You won’t regret it.’ She arranged to pick me up tomorrow. Ralph is away, apparently, in Prague, for a few days. I can’t help wondering what might have happened the Friday before last if I had known then about Martin and Sandra Pickering.

  WEDNESDAY 2ND APRIL. Carrie came to the maisonette to pick me up, at about 1.30. I was on the watch for her, so that as soon as her car drew up outside I was able to pop out of my front door, fully dressed and ready to go. I wanted to avoid having to invite her in and show her round the house, in what would have been a rather queasy replay of Ralph’s tour of inspection. I couldn’t decide whether or not to mention his visit to Carrie. If he had already mentioned it himself, it might seem strange if I didn’t. On the other hand, if he hadn’t mentioned it to her, and I did, she might wonder why he had concealed it from her. It vexed me to be involved in all this calculation and deception about what had been essentially a non-event. As it happened Carrie solved my dilemma by remarking, as we drove off, ‘Ralph tells me you have a neat little pad there.’ ‘Yes, he came round the other day – he very kindly helped me to get fixed up with Email,’ I said. I didn’t mention that he stayed for lunch, and neither did Carrie, so perhaps she doesn’t know.