Thinks...

by David Lodge

  We whizzed up the M5 to Droitwich Spa in Carrie’s sporty Japanese car in no time. Apparently Droitwich is built on the biggest, deepest deposit of salt in Europe, and the hot springs bubble up from this source. People have been bathing in the water for centuries on account of its alleged medicinal and restorative properties, but the present-day baths are surprisingly and agreeably modern, Inside, the ambience was not, as I had feared, that of an antiquated municipal baths, with draughty changing rooms and slimy cracked tiles, but more like a private health club. You change into your swimming costume, put on a white towelling robe, and shower in the main bathing area, a light, airy space with long windows all down one side. They tell you to smear Vaseline over any scratches or cuts on your skin to avoid a stinging effect from the brine, and on no account to try and swim, because any splashing could be dangerous to the eyes.

  The bath itself is like a medium-sized swimming pool, though. You descend a flight of shallow stone steps into the warm, almost hot, water, which is quite clear, and sink gently into what feels like a huge liquid cushion. You float effortlessly, with half your body above the surface, buoyed up by the dense salinity of the water. It’s most comfortable to lie on your back. Shaped polystyrene pillows are available to keep the back of your head out of the water. Supported by one of these, you can float in total relaxation.

  Swimming pools are usually such noisy places, echoing with the shrieks of children and the splashes of divers, but here the loudest noise was the murmur of conversation from the café area at the far end of the pool where you are served with complimentary tea and biscuits after your immersion. The bathers in the water do not talk much. They lie entranced, spreadeagled on the water, drifting gently on the occasional ripple that passes over its surface, or moored to the edge of the pool by their feet, hooked under the handrail that runs all around it. If it weren’t for their serene expressions you might imagine they were corpses from some marine disaster.

  I closed my eyes and drifted until I bumped gently against the end of the bath. A slight push with my foot sent me back into the middle of the water. I licked my finger experimentally: it tasted unbelievably salty. I thought of Alice in Wonderland swimming in the deluge of her own tears with the Mouse and the Duck and the Dodo, and it struck me that perhaps they didn’t drown because tears are salty. The brine bath was like a tank brim-full of fresh warm tears. Then I suddenly thought: I will never weep for Martin again.

  You are advised to bathe for not more than forty minutes. I lost all sense of time, but when I saw Carrie rise majestically from the water, like some beautiful hippopotamus, her sleek lycra costume stretched over her voluptuous breasts and hips and her hair covered by a tight rubber cap, I followed her out of the pool. We showered, dried off, put on our robes, and relaxed on loungers for a while. Then we went to have our tea and biscuits. I thanked her for introducing me to a fascinating experience, and said that I already felt better for it. She asked me why I had been feeling depressed, and rather to my surprise – having sworn her to secrecy, and without revealing the source of my information – I told her.

  22

  ‘WELL, I CAN understand how you feel,’ says Carrie, pouring another cup of Darjeeling for herself. ‘But look on the positive side. He told her from the start that he wasn’t going to leave you for her, right? That shows he really loved you.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Helen says. ‘It might mean that he simply didn’t want to be bothered with the mess and expense of a divorce. Especially the expense – his salary at the BBC wouldn’t have stretched to support two ménages comfortably.’

  ‘Well, at least it means he didn’t love her,’ says Carrie. ‘It was just sex. And who knows, maybe she threw herself at him. Not many men can resist that.’

  ‘I can’t believe young women were queuing up to throw themselves at Martin,’ says Helen. ‘He wasn’t that attractive.’

  Carrie sighs. ‘You’d be surprised. Whenever you have a situation where the men have power and the women have youth and beauty, there’s a trade-off. The men exploit their power to get sex, and the women exploit their looks to get promotion, or good grades, or just a good time. I should know, I did it myself.’

  ‘You did?’ Helen sounds surprised, almost shocked.

  ‘Sure. When I was a co-ed at Berkeley, I only slept with faculty. And they had to be assistant professors, at least – not just graduate instructors. I wouldn’t even look at the boys in my classes.’ She giggles reminiscently. ‘I was a real bitch. But I was beautiful in those days.’

  ‘You still are, Carrie,’ says Helen.

  Carrie shakes her head sadly. ‘It’s sweet of you to say so, Helen, but I lost the battle against cellulite some time between the third and fourth babies. If we were living in the age of Rubens, it might be a different story, or even Renoir . . . But today’s ideal of feminine beauty is the body of an adolescent boy, with tits like apples stuck on the front. Check it out in Vogue. Messenger has a theory about it.’

  ‘Oh?’ Helen angles her head interrogatively.

  ‘Yeah. When fertility was the most desirable attribute of a woman, big hips and huge bosoms were an index of good childbearing potential, so got selected. Now that sex has become primarily recreational, men favour lithe, athletic partners that can do all the positions in The Joy of Sex without breaking sweat. In a few hundred thousand years, all babies will be made in test tubes and the pear-shaped woman will be as obsolete as the dinosaur.’

  ‘You’re not pear-shaped, Carrie,’ says Helen, ‘you’re . . . magnificent. You’re Junoesque.’

  ‘Well, thank you, honey,’ says Carrie, smiling. ‘But when I was twenty-one . . . Boy, I could fall in love with myself just looking in the mirror. If I fancied a teacher, I only had to sit in the front row of the classroom in a pair of shorts and a tight-fitting top and look at him admiringly and he would like, melt visibly. I could guarantee that the next time I went to see him in his office hours he would suggest we continued the discussion of my paper over a coffee, and before the week was out we would be in the sack together. It was the nineteen-seventies, you know, before AIDS and Political Correctness, and everybody on campus was screwing like there was no tomorrow. Was it like that at Oxford?’

  ‘A bit,’ says Helen.

  ‘Fortunately the climate had changed by the time I met Messenger,’ Carrie says. ‘I don’t have to worry about gorgeous young graduate students – not that there are that many in Cognitive Science, but they do show up occasionally – I don’t have to worry about Messenger that way. There’ve been too many sexual harassment cases in universities. Faculty have learned to be wary of getting involved with students – and quite right too. Berkeley in the seventies was like Sodom and Gomorrah. Even Harvard was swinging – I went there to do graduate work. Naturally I set about seducing my dissertation adviser. Ironically enough he turned out to be an old-fashioned honourable guy who insisted on marrying me.’

  ‘Who was he?’ Helen asks.

  ‘Alexander Higginson. You heard of him?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘He’s written several books about nineteenth-century French painting, and a whole load of articles. Alex was quite a bit older than me. It was a kind of Dorothea Brooke and Casaubon thing – I was in awe of his fine mind and his beautiful French accent. My folks tried to talk me out of it. My father thought Alex was just after my money – my granddaddy left me quite a bit, you know. I don’t think Alex was, actually, but anyway Daddy insisted on a marriage contract drawn up by his lawyer which put a ring fence round my personal income, so I suppose I should be grateful to him, the way things turned out.’

  ‘This is all quite fascinating,’ says Helen. ‘How did you meet Ralph?’

  ‘At a party in Cambridge – Cambridge, Mass. Messenger was at MIT. I’d never met anyone like him before. Most of our friends at Harvard were humanities faculty, and at home my folks mixed mainly with wealthy business people and patrons of the arts. I’d met very few scientists and I thoug
ht of them as dull, nerdy types obsessed with boring and incomprehensible things like electrons and neutrons. Messenger was totally different from the stereotype. For one thing he looked more like a rock star than a scientist – he wore his hair long in those days, and dressed in flares and bright silk shirts. He talked to me in this funky Michael Caine accent about computers and artificial intelligence in a way that made sense to me. He talked like a man who had the future in his bones. He also seemed incredibly sexy. My marriage wasn’t going too well by then. The age gap was taking its toll. Things had picked up a little when Emily was born, but after the novelty had worn off it was clear that Alex didn’t really like babies. And I was no longer in awe of his intellect. I’d figured out that all his books were variations on the same theme, and even that was borrowed from Gombrich. I was through with the Dorothea role and ripe for Madame Bovary . . .’

  ‘You had an affair with Ralph?’

  ‘Yeah. He invited me over to MIT to see some computer-generated art, and he kissed me in the elevator on the way out. It was some kiss. We never looked back. I used to have to get a baby-sitter for our assignations – that’s how Alex found out. I guess he could have made something of that if he’d wanted custody of Emily, but he didn’t. It was quite a civilized divorce. Shortly afterwards Messenger got a job at Cal Tech and we moved to Pasadena. Would you like some fresh tea?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  Carrie summons a waitress and orders more tea. The waitress says apologetically that only one complimentary pot is included in the price of admission. Carrie says she will gladly pay for it later, but hasn’t any money on her at the moment. The waitress looks worried and offers to bring fresh hot water for nothing. Carrie settles for that. ‘England, I love it,’ she says, as the woman trots off. ‘So what’s your story,’ she says to Helen. ‘How did you meet Martin?’

  ‘At a play, in the courtyard of an Oxford college,’ Helen says. ‘On a summer evening, with swifts flying through the air.’

  ‘Sounds wonderfully romantic. Were you students together?’

  ‘No, Martin went to Durham. I was a postgraduate when I met him, he was a trainee with the BBC in London. He was the brother of a friend of mine who was playing Titania in a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She invited him up to see it and asked me to sit next to him and keep him company. It was rather like you meeting Ralph actually. We hit it off immediately. He was only a couple of years older than me, but he seemed much more mature than any of the boyfriends I’d had. We went to the cast party afterwards and sat in a corner talking, until it was time for him to catch his late-night bus back to London. I got to know that bus service very well. We started seeing each other regularly, spending alternate weekends in Oxford and London. I think it was the happiest time of my life, looking back at it. Working in the Bodleian Monday to Friday, every hour it was open, and making love at the weekends. Until I got pregnant.’

  ‘Accidentally?’ Carrie asks.

  ‘Of course,’ says Helen. ‘I didn’t want a child, not when I was still on the very bottom rung of the academic ladder. But I didn’t want to have an abortion – my residual Catholic conscience, I suppose. Fortunately Martin didn’t want me to, either. He suggested we got married, which frankly was a huge relief because my parents would have found the idea of a grandchild born out of wedlock rather hard to swallow.’

  ‘Is that why you married him?’ Carrie asks.

  ‘No, I was in love with him, I was hoping we would get married one day, and have children, the usual things. It was just all happening a bit sooner than I’d envisaged. I moved down to London. I thought I could go on with my research at the British Museum, and travel up to Oxford occasionally to see my supervisor. I managed it for a few months, but once Paul was born, things got difficult. I couldn’t really cope with a baby and a husband in our cramped flat in Balham. I got post-natal depression.’

  ‘Oh, that’s tough.’

  ‘I got over it in time, but I abandoned the PhD, and my academic ambitions.’

  ‘But you became a novelist instead,’ says Carrie. ‘Which is a much better thing to be.’

  ‘Well, perhaps.’

  ‘I never finished my PhD either,’ Carrie says.

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  ‘Not really. I didn’t want an academic career. I was always uncomfortable with the competitive atmosphere of the Harvard graduate school. I could sense the other students were thinking all the time, “What’s she doing this for? She’s so rich she doesn’t need a job.” Which was true actually. But I’d like to do something, apart from raising the family and managing Messenger . . . Hence the novel.’

  The waitress brings the hot water and, with a conspiratorial wink, more biscuits. Carrie pours the water into the two pots and nibbles a biscuit thoughtfully. ‘Were you always faithful to Martin?’ she says when the woman is out of earshot.

  ‘Of course,’ says Helen, bridling a little. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t feel so hurt. I’d have no right to be.’

  ‘Sure,’ says Carrie. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . It’s just that, well, your novels have quite a lot of infidelity in them.’

  Helen laughs, a little self-consciously, and tugs at the belt of her robe. ‘Well, so have most novels, I’m afraid. There’s not a great deal of narrative mileage in the stable monogamous marriage.’

  ‘Yeah. Like Tolstoy says at the beginning of Anna Karenina, “All happy families resemble each other . . .”’

  ‘“But unhappy ones are different in their own ways.” I’m not sure that’s true, actually, the first part,’ says Helen, frowning. ‘Happy families are not all alike. The trouble is, they’re not very interesting – unless of course you happen to belong to one. Fiction feeds on unhappiness. It needs conflict, disappointment, transgression. And since novels are mainly about the personal, emotional life, about relationships, it’s not surprising that most of them are about adultery. Infidelity, I should say, because lots of couples don’t get married nowadays – but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to the sense of betrayal, does it, when one partner cheats on the other?’

  ‘No. But how did you get your insight into that? In Mixed Blessings, for instance?’

  ‘There was quite a lot of chopping and changing in our circle of friends in London. I kept my eyes and ears open. Then my women students at Morley, in the creative writing course, would talk to me about their intimate lives at the drop of a hat . . .’

  ‘Really?’ Carrie laughs. ‘How did they feel when their stories turned up later in one of your books?’

  ‘Of course I took very good care not to use anything in a way that would embarrass anyone,’ says Helen, a shade defensively. She pours herself another cup of tea. ‘Sometimes you only need a tiny detail from real life to set your imagination working in a completely different direction from the original anecdote, so that the person who told it to you won’t even recognize it in the finished novel. Don’t stare, but there’s something rather interesting going on behind you.’

  Looking over Carrie’s shoulder, Helen has caught sight of an elderly woman being winched into the pool in a kind of cradle suspended from a small crane. Carrie adjusts the angle of her chair so that she can see too. The woman is thin and bony, her swimming costume droops on her withered flesh, her joints are swollen with arthritis, and her limbs tremble as if she is afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease. Her hollow features are twisted in a grimace that is meant to be a smile but expresses only embarrassment and discomfort. A friend or nurse stands in the water, speaking reassuringly, ready to receive her as she is gently lowered into the water. Then she is released from her harness, and allowed to float free, her companion holding up her head. Her limbs slowly unfold, the trembling diminishes, and a genuine smile settles on her lips.

  ‘That’s a neat bit of machinery,’ Carrie remarks. ‘I wonder if it would take my weight. I may need it one day.’

  ‘Don’t,’ says Helen.

  ‘You too. You never know.’ She turns to f
ace Helen. ‘Look, since you’ve told me all this stuff, I’ll tell you what I think. I understand the pain you’re feeling. You trusted Martin and now you discover he wasn’t the person you thought he was. But you can’t do anything about it, you can’t even bawl him out, because he’s not around any more. You thought you were safe inside a little citadel of happy marriage, observing all the sexual strife going on outside, taking notes, counting the casualties, without getting hurt yourself. But now you’ve been wounded, you really have something to write about. From the heart. That’s the way to relieve your anger.’

  ‘I don’t want to write a revenge novel,’ Helen says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Good writing never comes out of purely negative feelings,’ Helen says. ‘Maybe in time, when the wound is not so fresh . . .’

  ‘Right. Take your time. Meanwhile, get a life, as the saying goes.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve been grieving for Martin ever since he died, right? It’s time to quit.’

  ‘I already have. It just came to me, as I was floating in the pool. I shall never weep for him again.’

  ‘Great. It’s time you started thinking about making a new relationship. You’re beautiful, charming, intelligent –’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Carrie!’

  ‘No, you come off it, Helen. No false modesty, please. It’s time to get happy again.’

  ‘Oh, “happy”,’ says Helen with a sigh. ‘Sometimes I think I’m hardwired for unhappiness, to use one of your husband’s expressions.’

  ‘Messenger? When did he say that?’

  ‘On television,’ says Helen.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ says Carrie. ‘Well, he’s hardwired for happiness, I guess. That’s probably why I married him.’

  23

  GOOD KING WENCESLAS looked out . . . OK . . . Battery light looks a bit dim but it seems to be working . . . It’s Sunday afternoon, 6th April, I’m in the British Airways Executive Lounge at Amsterdam airport . . . waiting for a plane to Birmingham because I missed my connecting flight to Bristol by minutes due to a delayed departure from Prague, in spite of running the entire fucking length of Schiphol, which is under reconstruction and a complete shambles . . . running with my head back and my briefcase tucked under my arm like a wing-threequarter having a bad dream trying to score a try on an infinitely receding pitch . . . the Schiphol terminal must be a kilometre at least from end to end . . . jinking and weaving through defensive lines of travellers porters builders painters plasterers . . . only to be told at the gate that the flight had closed and was already taxiing to the runway, though the Departure monitors said it was still boarding . . . I was royally pissed off, especially when I discovered there were no more flights to Bristol today . . .