Thinks...

by David Lodge

  I flew to Prague from Bristol via Amsterdam rather than take a direct flight from London to avoid the tedious journey to and from Heathrow or Gatwick, but now Carrie has to meet me at Birmingham and drive me to Bristol so I can pick up my car which I left there . . . I just phoned her to make the arrangement and she wasn’t too pleased, can’t say I blame her . . . She’s at Horseshoes with the kids and Helen and it’s going to cut their day short . . . I suppose Helen felt easy about going out there knowing I was away . . . I hope she’s not going to keep avoiding me, for one thing Carrie will notice and wonder what’s been going on . . . perhaps it’s just as well she didn’t take me up on that offer to swap journals . . . God knows what would have happened if she’d agreed . . . and yet in a way that was part of the attraction, the element of risk . . . As soon as the idea popped into my mind that Friday . . . walking back to the Centre from her house . . . I couldn’t stop thinking about it, it obsessed me all weekend, especially as she didn’t join us at Horseshoes . . . she called Carrie on Saturday to say she had a cold coming on, I didn’t believe it for a moment . . . then at Easter she was away . . . I must try and resume friendly relations when I get back . . .

  I’ve got a two-hour wait here so I got the old Pearlcorder out of my briefcase to fill up some of the time and stayed put in this soundproofed telephone cubicle where nobody can overhear me, though the lounge is as quiet as a graveyard . . . not many businessmen travel on Sundays . . . Whew . . . I’ve only just recovered my breath, and a normal pulse . . . Still got indigestion though . . . effect of four days eating Czech food, which seems to consist entirely of saturated fat and carbohydrates . . . the Czech idea of a well-balanced meal is, say, goulash soup with dumplings, followed by half a roast goose with fried potatoes and dumplings, and for dessert cranberry dumplings smothered in whipped cream. Washed down with a few litres of Pilsner beer. How do they survive this diet? Why aren’t they falling down in the street in droves with cardiac arrest? Well, you do see a lot of overweight people, especially middle-aged men, but also a surprisingly large number of slim, elegant young women . . . like Ludmila for instance, she must have a twenty-inch waist and her belly is as flat as a . . . Not a pancake, not a Czech pancake anyway, stuffed with preserved plums and whipped cream . . . though she ate one . . . she ate two, she ate anything that was put in front of her while I was with her . . . How do these girls do it? Perhaps they only eat socially, when someone else is paying, and starve themselves the rest of the time . . . or stick their fingers down their throats after a blowout . . . it’s not anorexia, though, or bulimia, there’s no lack of self-esteem involved, quite the contrary. It’s a shrewd assessment of what will help them to get on in, or out of, the Czech Republic . . . It’s not enough to be smart and speak English, you have to look like Kate Moss too . . . I imagine these young women all over Prague, living at home in cramped apartments in crummy concrete tower blocks, sharing a bedroom with a younger sister, a bathroom with the whole family, with no privacy, no money, just one really good dress in the wardrobe and a figure which they tend carefully like a priceless plant, knowing their prospects depend on not getting to look like their mothers . . . Because in spite of the Velvet Revolution, or rather because of it, there’s a lot of what you might call genteel poverty in the country. Superficially Prague seems to be a lively prosperous place, but it’s mainly tourists, entrepreneurs and crooks (if you can tell the difference between the last two) who are having a good time . . . a lot of people are worse off than they used to be under communism, especially if they work in the state sector. Ludmila’s parents, for instance, both professionals, her father’s a pathologist, her mother’s a hygienist, but she told me they have to coach schoolkids in the evenings to make ends meet, because their fixed salaries have been devalued by inflation . . . Not surprisingly there’s a slightly weary cynicism in people’s reaction when you speak approvingly of the Velvet Revolution. ‘Sure we’re free to travel now,’ Ludmila said to me. ‘But we can’t afford to.’ We were in bed at the time, having a post-coital chat. I was longing to go to sleep but it didn’t seem polite to turf her out, and there wasn’t room for us both to go to sleep, it was a single bed hardly big enough for us to lie side by side . . . The British Council booked me into a quaint old inn overlooking the Charles Bridge, with its thirty-one statues of saints gesticulating like petrified bookies all along the parapets . . . I suppose they thought I would like the historic ambience of the place, its crooked staircases and low headbanging doorways and dark panelled walls and cabin-like rooms, when actually what I really like when I’m away from home is something like a Hilton or a Hyatt – space, luxury . . . a bath big enough to float in, a shower powerful enough to drill holes in your skin . . . a well-stocked mini-bar, a choice of porn channels on the TV . . . and a bed big enough to do sixty-nine without the likelihood of falling on to the floor or stubbing a toe on the bedside table. Not that I attempted anything of the sort with Ludmila, it was a very basic sort of fuck . . . no oral sex and I used a condom, so it was safe enough, but . . . somewhat mechanical . . . Not a night to remember with any great satisfaction . . . I’m supposed to have given up that sort of thing, anyway, one-night stands on trips abroad, especially with women half my age . . . It was partly boredom, partly gallantry, because of that remark I made, ‘I can think of several things,’ which she misinterpreted. Funny that, but I thought she might be insulted if I didn’t make a pass as the evening drew to a close . . . it was that, and boredom with dragging round Prague . . . Everybody raves about the place, but it seemed to me like a rather superior sort of heritage theme park, overcrowded with the same sort of people you see at Disneyland, tourists in trainers and baggy shorts and tee-shirts . . . because the weather was warm, spring has arrived in central Europe, almost a heat-wave . . . and that was another thing, I was too hot most of the time, brought the wrong clothing with me, too much wool, I felt itchy and sweaty, especially sitting in stuffy restaurants shovelling down the goulash soup and roast goose with dumplings, or for a change beef broth with dumplings and roast pork with sauerkraut and dumplings . . . the trouble is I actually like that kind of food and I’m naturally greedy so I eat too much of it . . . especially on a trip like this where people keep taking you out to restaurants twice a day, lunch and dinner, three or four courses every time . . .

  I think I preferred Eastern Europe when it was communist and there wasn’t so much to eat, not much of anything actually, even if you were a visitor carrying hard currency . . . There was a kind of bracing satisfaction to be got from exposing yourself temporarily to a life of privation. I remember walking the streets of ?(501)d? one winter afternoon, it must have been in the seventies, in a kind of ecstasy at the total unrelieved miserableness of everything, the grimy dilapidated apartment blocks, the dirty frozen snow heaped in the gutters, the trams packed with grey-faced passengers grinding and groaning round the corners on their metal tracks, the lines of shapeless, expressionless women in boots and topcoats queuing stoically outside food shops with totally empty windows and bare shelves . . . it made you appreciate the ordinary taken-for-granted luxuries of life back home . . . it made you profoundly grateful for the British passport and airline ticket tucked safely in your inside pocket . . . there’s not the same exhilarating contrast any more . . .

  The original invitation for this trip came from my Czech publisher to go out for the publication of their edition of The Mind Machine . . . I suppose I was flattered that they considered my ten-year-old book worth translating and thought they deserved to be encouraged, so I accepted . . . then the publisher immediately applied to the British Council for funding and they agreed on condition I gave a lecture and a seminar at the University, so I said all right, and in the end it developed into a very busy programme, what with the lecture and the seminar and press interviews and book signings and even a three-minute interview on the national networked TV news . . . My publisher, Milos Palacky, whom I’d never met before, turned out to be a typical product of the new spirit o
f postmarxist entrepreneurial capitalism, a genial but wily character who had conjured up all this publicity without laying out a single koruna himself apart from picking up the bill for lunch one day (cauliflower soup with dumplings, roast wild boar with dumplings, fruit dumplings with dumplings) . . . According to a Czech writer I met Palacky is notorious for not paying royalties when they’re due, and I shouldn’t expect to get any more money than the rather modest signature advance I’ve received . . . I wasn’t reassured when I was introduced to my translator, a middle-aged lady who didn’t speak English very well and seemed to have no scientific background, but I wasn’t able to probe Palacky about this because he doesn’t have much English either . . . everywhere he went he was accompanied by two broad-shouldered heavies in black suits and dark glasses who opened doors and held people back when he walked from his car into a building . . . presumably they were there to protect him from assault by angry creditors . . . Well it didn’t take me long to realize that I was being exploited, but I soldiered on, did my stuff with the media and the booksellers like a pro, gave my all-purpose oft-repeated survey-lecture on The Problem of Consciousness to a full house at the Charles University . . . Levine’s Explanatory Gap, Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis, Chalmers’ Hard Question, Dennett, Searle, Minsky, Penrose, the usual suspects, a little dig at neuroscience as the new phrenology, a little dig at behaviourism – ‘How was it for me?’ always gets a laugh . . . finally a plug for AI complemented by phenomenology, building models of affective as well as cognitive processes, working from the bottom up rather than the top down . . . That was on Friday afternoon . . . followed by a reception and a dumpling dinner . . . then on Saturday morning I gave a closed seminar to the Philosophy and Psychology faculty about our experimental work at the Centre and afterwards the prof in charge introduced me to Ludmila Lisk, a young research assistant in Psychology . . . The rest of my day was slated as ‘free time – sightseeing’ on my itinerary prepared by the British Council, and Ludmila had been appointed to act as my guide. At that moment what I really wanted to do was bugger off back home on the first available flight . . . but there was this eager, smiling, not-bad-looking and incredibly slim young woman holding out her hand for me to shake . . . it would have been cruel to refuse her services . . . I swear I didn’t calculate then how far these services might extend . . .

  She’d been given a sum of money to cover our expenses so the first thing she did was take me to a ‘typical Czech restaurant’ where we had a typical Czech lunch . . . then I dragged my bloated stomach round old Prague in the heat of the afternoon and followed Ludmila in and out of the Cathedral and the Castle and churches and art galleries and admired Gothic this and Rococo that and art nouveau the other until Ludmila said it was time to have an early dinner because she had tickets for the opera, something by Janá?ek . . . ‘Would you mind very much if we didn’t go to the opera?’ I said . . . She looked worried. ‘You do not like it?’ she said. ‘I hate it,’ I said. She bit her lip to suppress a smile, as if I had something naughty. ‘What do you like to do instead?’ she said . . . ‘Well, I can think of several things,’ I said, smiling . . . at least I intended to smile, but maybe it came across as a kind of leer, because she blushed, thus converting my innocent remark into a double entendre . . . ‘For instance,’ I said, trying to disperse this misunderstanding, ‘we could find a nice cool bar and have a few ice-cold beers and then perhaps we might go to a movie in an air-conditioned cinema and then perhaps I might be ready for a light supper somewhere.’ So that’s what we did. We found a bar with a jazz guitarist grooving quietly in the background . . . and then an old Woody Allen movie with English dialogue and Czech subtitles . . . and then a little Vietnamese restaurant that served meals without compulsory dumplings . . . Over supper and a very decent bottle of Hungarian Riesling Ludmila told me about her research, a team-project modelling the learning process, trying to build into the model the accumulation of knowledge through experience, dialogue with and imitation of other learners, as well as the acquisition of rules, using simulations of children’s games like Animal, Vegetable or Mineral . . . it sounded pretty hopeless to me, too many variables, but I was politely encouraging . . . and of course she grovelled before my reputation, flattered me like hell, but she’d done her homework, knew The Mind Machine well enough to quote it . . . and all the time hovering over our conversation, like ‘Thinks’ bubbles in a cartoon, were our respective speculations about how the evening would end. ‘Does he want to sleep with me?’ and ‘Does she expect me to sleep with her?’ Officially the plan was that she would see me back safely to my hotel before taking a cab home . . . It was a warm balmy night . . . we strolled through Wenceslas Square and had another look at the Astronomical Clock, which happened to be just striking midnight, with its moving figures, the Turk, the Rich Man and Vanity, all shaking their heads at Death, who nods ‘Yes’ . . . and lingered on the Charles Bridge to gaze at the floodlit Castle or Palace or whatever it was on a high ridge overlooking the city, apparently floating in the night sky like a mirage . . . At last the place began to work its spell on me, and it seemed natural to imitate the other couples canoodling in the shadows cast by the thirty-one saintly statues so I put my arm round her waist and commented on how slender it was and wondered whether I could make my finger-tips join round it and she laughed and invited me to try . . . I couldn’t, but I held her young body between my hands, hard and springy and supple like a sapling, and drew her towards me and bent back her head with a kiss . . . and one thing led to another . . . She didn’t waste any time once we were inside my room, she was out of her clothes in a flash, not that she was wearing many – a cotton dress, a pair of briefs, no bra, she didn’t need one her breasts were so small, too small for my taste . . . the opposite of Carrie . . . what was that ad when I was a kid, I forget what it was for, ‘Not too little, not too much . . . but just right . . .’ She slid between the sheets and lay there watching me undress, which I found disconcerting . . . my body seemed gross and lined and blemished compared to her lean white torso and limbs . . . I turned out the light and drew back the curtains to open the windows on the grounds that it was stuffy in the room but really to conceal my embarrassment and lack of visible ardour . . . I rose to the occasion in due course . . . but I couldn’t swear that she didn’t fake her orgasm . . .

  No, it was definitely not a lay to remember with any great satisfaction . . . it was all too easy . . . If it had been the nineteen-seventies I might have suspected a plot, taperecorders and cameras hidden in the woodwork, to blackmail me into becoming a spy . . . Though there was a sort of payback time in the end . . . during the day I’d carelessly mentioned the conference at the end of May and when she was getting dressed to go home she asked me if she could give a paper because then she could apply to the British Council for a travel grant . . . I said that the programme was already full (a lie) but she could do a poster if she liked . . . I could hardly say less having just fucked her . . . but the Council won’t think a poster is worth a travel grant . . . I trust . . .

  24

  SUNDAY 6TH APRIL. I’ve just returned from Horseshoes after dropping off the Messenger children at Pittville Lawn. While we were having lunch, Ralph phoned from Amsterdam airport to say he’d missed his connection to Bristol and was flying to Birmingham instead, so Carrie has had to go there to pick him up. I offered to take the children home to save Carrie some driving and she gratefully accepted. I was glad of the opportunity to do her a favour for a change.

  The change of plan cut short our day at Horseshoes, which was a pity, because it was glorious weather, warm enough to sit out on the deck. It’s six p.m. now and still light. The clocks went forward last weekend, but I was too preoccupied then to notice or take any pleasure in the extra daylight in the evening. I’m feeling calmer about the Martin business now. It was a relief to talk to somebody about it, and Carrie was a sympathetic listener, though there was an irony in the advice she gave me to find another man, since the only one who is intere
sted in me at the moment is her husband.

  One consequence of the revelations about Martin is that he has finally ‘gone’. He’s no longer an invisible presence hovering on the margins of my consciousness. I have no urge to conjure up his spirit to accuse or reproach him. Nor do I seriously want him to burn in purgatory, still less in hell. I can’t imagine him going on existing anywhere, in fact, because he turned out to be a kind of impostor, whose real self I will never know. In a way I’m glad I found out the truth here rather than at home, with the children and friends around. By the time I am back in London it will seem quite natural that I should have stopped grieving for him, or even mentioning him.

  MONDAY 7TH APRIL. Spring seems definitely to have arrived. Another fine day, and the sun was distinctly warm on my back as I walked across the campus. The sap is visibly rising everywhere. The pink cherry blossom is out on the trees around the Library, and the students were out on the steps, sunning themselves with straps down and shirts off, flirting, kissing and holding hands, helpless participants in the rites of spring.