Thinks...

by David Lodge

  One Sunday Helen joined him and the children at Horseshoes, and they managed to take a walk together on their own in the afternoon. The boys wanted to watch a rugby match on television, and Emily was too idle to join in the expedition Messenger proposed: to show Helen a prehistoric barrow called Belas Knapp. Emily had seen it already and knew what a stiff climb it was. Messenger, needless to say, made no great effort to persuade her.

  It was indeed a strenuous walk, especially the last part, up a steep grassy hill, a mile or more from the nearest road. The sheep stopped cropping the grass to stare at them, as if they had never seen human beings so high up. Messenger said they were the Cotswold long-haired breed, whose wool was favoured for making rugs and hard-wearing cloth. He seemed surprisingly knowledgeable on the subject of sheep. When she commented on this, he explained that he had worked with a shepherd in Yorkshire for several months as a teenager. At the top of the hill there was a copse and a narrow footpath between the trees which became a little avenue, and at the end of the avenue was the barrow, a whale-shaped mound about forty yards long, covered with turf. It had been partially excavated to expose some of the dry stone walling and a kind of porch blocked by a great slab of stone. An English Heritage information board erected nearby explained that the bones of about thirty people belonging to the Late Stone Age had been found on the site, together with animal remains and shards of pottery. They had been buried there about four thousand years ago.

  Helen was impressed that people so primitive should have taken the trouble to bury their dead at this inconvenient site. Was it because it was at the top of a hill, where the earth was nearest to the sky? Did they have an idea of heaven, a place up above, where the individual’s spirit would go after death, she wondered. Messenger kissed these questions from her lips. The isolation of the place, no sign of human civilization visible except for the relics of these remote ancestors, seemed to excite him sexually. Nothing would satisfy him but to spread his cagoule on the sloping side of the barrow and copulate with her, like a Stone Age man taking his mate, short and sharp. ‘No, no,’ she protested, half amused and half annoyed, as he fumbled with her clothing. ‘No, don’t, Messenger, I am not Lady Chatterley nor was meant to be.’ But her literary wit was lost on him. She beat at his head and shoulders with her fists as he pushed her down. ‘Stop it, Messenger, someone may come.’ But he was indifferent to her protests and her puny blows, so in the end she let herself become slack and shameless, opened her legs and let him take his pleasure, patient and open-eyed as a ewe being tupped by a ram (though there were no sheep similarly occupied on the hillside, it was the wrong time of year apparently, the end of the lambing season) looking up at the fleecy clouds passing slowly across the blue sky as he thrust and grunted, feeling totally detached from reality and curiously happy. No doubt we are not the first couple to have made love here, she thought afterwards, as she pulled up her knickers and brushed down her skirt – it must have been a favourite spot for lovers through the ages, so remote, so sheltered, so secret. On their way back through the copse they met a group of middle-aged ramblers with maps and walking sticks who smiled and said ‘Good afternoon.’ ‘Good job they didn’t get here five minutes ago,’ Helen muttered to Messenger. ‘We would’ve heard them coming,’ he said with a grin, but she wasn’t at all sure about that.

  For herself, she much preferred to make love indoors, on a bed, behind drawn curtains, and to sleep for hours afterwards – though that last luxury was one they had been able to enjoy only once, when Messenger had to stay in London overnight in order to be on a television breakfast show the next morning. He was commenting on the defeat of the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, by a computer. Helen went up to London by an earlier train on the same day, casually informing anyone who might be interested that she had to meet her tenants to discuss whether a faulty dishwasher should be repaired or replaced. This was a genuine reason up to a point, though the business could probably have been sorted out by telephone.

  It was in fact the first time she had been back to London since she started her job at the University. In the early weeks of depression and alienation she had been afraid to go back, even for a day, in case she couldn’t bear to return to the campus, and was tempted to desert. Then, as her life in Gloucestershire became more interesting and involving, she thought less and less of London. It was quite a shock to step down from the train at Paddington into the clamour and bustle of the great station, and then to descend into the infernal labyrinth of the Tube and squeeze into the press of bodies inside the carriages. She felt deafened by the mechanical noise, suffocated by the stale air, and tense at the close proximity of so many silent impassive strangers. It had never struck her so forcibly before how people on the Tube avoided eye contact, how determinedly they tried to withdraw from this hideously uncomfortable form of travel by reading a book – one-handedly if necessary, hanging from a strap with the other – or listening to a personal stereo, or just staring at the diagram of the Tube line above the faces opposite. Only the tourists chattered to each other. The seasoned travellers, like the unfortunate rape victim she had read about, tried as far as possible to separate their minds from their bodies and to retreat into the former.

  It was a strange sensation, also, to revisit her own house after an interval of nearly three months. Her first impression was how shabby the outside looked, how badly the woodwork needed a coat of paint. Inside, it was both familiar and slightly, disturbingly, altered. The furniture had been rearranged; strange coats hung on the hallstand; other people’s books and magazines were displayed on the shelves and coffee tables in the living-room; smells of a different kind of cooking from her own lingered on the air of the kitchen. The Weismullers had been responsible tenants, but they made the most of her visit, taking her on a tour of the house and pointing out various flaws and faults in politely reproachful counterpoint. Helen placated them by agreeing to replace the ailing dishwasher, and went immediately to her local discount store to purchase a new one and arrange for it to be delivered and installed.

  Then she went to the hotel the BBC had booked Messenger into, and took a room for herself. He had proposed that she pretend to be Mrs Messenger and share his room, but Helen thought this would be going too far. So they dined in the hotel’s restaurant like a couple of old friends who had met by chance, said goodnight in the bar, and went separately to their rooms, meeting later in Messenger’s (in case one of the children tried to call him) where they had an orgiastic night. The BBC sent a car to the hotel at 6.30 the next morning. Watching him later on the TV in her own room, explaining lucidly how Deep Blue’s program worked – scanning the consequences of millions of possible moves in a matter of seconds – and how different this was to the intuitive methods of a human player, she was amazed how fresh and collected he seemed, showing no trace of the excesses of the night before.

  His style as a lover was very different from Martin’s. With Martin foreplay tended to be very elaborate and extended, and the act itself over rather quickly. With Messenger it was the other way round. He liked to get inside her quickly and copulate in various positions before he achieved his orgasm, bringing Helen to several in the meantime. He was immensely strong in the arms and shoulders, and flipped her effortlessly this way and that, over and under him, like a wrestler practising ‘holds’. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was straining too hard, that he wanted to reduce her to a helpless quivering bundle of sensation, to force the astonished, languageless sounds of pleasure from her throat, to make her beg for mercy, slapping the mattress like a beaten wrestler.

  Yesterday, though, he was the one who had had to admit defeat. He called in at the maisonette on his way home, bringing with him some literature about the consciousness conference just in case he ran into somebody and needed an alibi. He wasn’t able to stay long because Emily was cooking the evening meal and he dared not be late for it, so he began to undress Helen as soon as the front door was shut behind him. They went upstairs to the bedroom and lay do
wn on the bed, but for once he was impotent. He was a picture of despondency. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘It’s psychological. It was a bad idea trying to make love against the clock.’ ‘We’ve had to be quick before,’ he said. ‘Well, perhaps you’ve been overdoing it, lately,’ she said jokingly. ‘For a man of fifty.’ He bridled at this. ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘It’s most likely the Staff House curried chicken I had for lunch. I’ve had indigestion all afternoon.’ ‘You’re always complaining of indigestion,’ she said. ‘You should do something about it.’ She suddenly heard herself sounding just like a wife, and the shock of this realization abruptly silenced her. But he didn’t seem to notice. ‘All I need is a couple of Rennies,’ he said. He dressed quickly, kissed her, and left.

  Helen took a bath. Was she falling in love with Messenger, she wondered, as she lolled in the water, topping it up occasionally from the hot tap with her toe. She had been attracted to him from the first moment they met, in the Richmonds’ living-room, but she wouldn’t have described it, to herself or anyone else, as ‘love’ in the traditional, romantic I-can’t-live-without-you-and-only-you sense. And she hadn’t supposed for a moment that he was expressing such an emotion when he described himself as ‘falling in love’ with her, that day when he brought her the modem and she gave him lunch. The first time she went to bed with him had been entirely opportunistic and experimental. She was still reeling from the encounter with Carrie and Nicholas Beck in Ledbury, and Carrie’s revelations beside the river at Bourton. In this new light, her principled rejection of Messenger’s advances in the preceding weeks looked suddenly redundant. If Carrie was having an affair with Nicholas Beck, there seemed no good reason why she herself shouldn’t have a fling with Messenger. The circumstance that Carrie flew off to California at that precise moment made it easier to act on this conclusion. And the gradual extension of Carrie’s absence from days to weeks (as her father’s condition very slowly improved) had allowed the ‘fling’ to develop into a fully-fledged and very carnal affair. For three weeks they had thought of little else – at least, she had thought of little else – except finding opportunities to make love. It was surprising to Helen that nobody in their circle of acquaintance seemed to have any suspicion of what they were up to. Hadn’t her students discerned the lineaments of gratified desire in her countenance? Didn’t Messenger’s colleagues smell the scent of sex on him when he hurried back to a meeting from a lunchtime assignation? Didn’t anybody notice that they were frequently absent from view at exactly the same time? Apparently not. Only Sandra Pickering, she thought, might have sensed a subtle alteration in her demeanour. Sometimes Helen would come back from some erotic reverie in the middle of a class and find the young woman regarding her quizzically, as if trying to work out how she had changed. Otherwise, everybody seemed to be too preoccupied with their own affairs, private and professional, to take any notice of Helen’s and Messenger’s behaviour, or draw any inferences from it.

  It had helped, no doubt, that the General Election was the object of so much excitement and attention at this time. She and Messenger attended the Glovers’ party on Election Night, but hardly spoke to each other. They slipped away, separately and inconspicuously, soon after the first results indicated the scale of Labour’s victory, and rendezvoused at Helen’s house. When people asked her in the days following, ‘Were you up for Portillo?’ referring to the most sensational Tory defeat of the night, she had to reply rather sheepishly, ‘No, I was in bed,’ and hope that she didn’t blush.

  After Messenger had left her to return home in the early hours of that morning, Helen put on her dressing gown and made a pot of tea and sat in front of her TV for an hour or so. She watched the delirious celebrations of Labour supporters on the South Bank, and the triumphal appearance of the new Prime Minister and his wife, and felt a twinge of regret that she hadn’t participated in this great historic event. She hadn’t canvassed, she hadn’t voted, she hadn’t even watched television much, because of her absorption in her own erotic adventure. Her guilt was perhaps exacerbated by the aura of virtuous connubial love radiated by the handholding Blairs. Messenger had at least taken the trouble to vote (a tactical one, for the Lib Dem candidate in Cheltenham) but to him the result was merely the least of the available evils. He had a deep contempt for politics and politicians. Politics, he maintained, was the curse of the modem age, as religion was of ages past. Just think of the sheer quantity of human misery caused by politics in this century – in Central Europe, Russia, China, Africa – he would urge rhetorically. Are you an anarchist, then, she asked. But of course he wasn’t. He seemed to have a rather old-fashioned Enlightenment faith in the perfectibility of society through the application of science. He made a stark opposition between the pursuit of knowledge, which was science, and the pursuit of power, which was politics. All forms of pseudo-knowledge, from divinity to deconstruction, he maintained, had to impose their false world pictures on others by becoming political. It sounded quite plausible in the glow of post-coital well-being (for such was the usual context of their conversations).

  But now Carrie was coming back (her father was going to be discharged from hospital, though he would require round-the-clock nursing care at home) Helen could no longer go about in an erotic trance, thinking only of their next assignation. Quite apart from the practical difficulties of continuing to meet clandestinely under Carrie’s nose, as it were, the latter’s presence would give the affair an entirely new moral and psychological context. As long as Carrie had been away it had been possible for Helen not to think of her as a rival, or even an obstacle. But with Carrie back in the frame, as wife, mother, manager, housekeeper, Helen’s position immediately became marginal and problematic. That Carrie herself had a lover made no difference. Hence the force of the question that Helen asked herself in the bath: was she falling in love with Messenger? And if so, what did that portend for the future, not only in the short term, but in the longer term? Would she be content to let the affair end when her job at Gloucester finished, at the end of the semester, and she returned to London? Her heart answered immediately, no. Would she be content to be an occasional mistress, meeting Messenger for short snatched hours of passion in London between his meetings and media appearances, or plotting to join him on one of his trips abroad somewhere? She had a mental image of herself sitting in a luxurious hotel room, with a basket of fruit on the dressing table and a bottle of champagne in a bucket of melting ice, waiting impatiently for Messenger to extricate himself from some conference seminar or official reception, and she did not relish the picture. Then she thought – she couldn’t help herself – suppose Messenger and Carrie divorced, and he married me? The idea was enticing, but she only had to imagine little Hope’s dismay to reject it. Gloom enveloped her for the first time in weeks. She wondered if it wasn’t the shadow of Carrie’s impending return that had suddenly cooled Messenger’s ardour and made him impotent.

  28

  WHEN RALPH GETS home, Emily is in the kitchen with her boyfriend, Greg, a tall, gawky eighteen-year-old who is in some awe of Ralph and says as little as possible in his presence. They are squatting on their haunches, peering into the oven through its glass door, at the meatloaf which Emily has prepared for supper.

  ‘I think it’s ready,’ Emily says. ‘Only I forgot to set the timer. I don’t want to burn it.’

  ‘It looks done to me,’ Ralph says, squatting beside them. ‘But isn’t meatloaf made with beef?’

  ‘I used lamb mince,’ Emily says.

  ‘A luxury meatloaf. Good. Let’s eat.’

  The meatloaf is excellent. Ralph takes a second helping, and congratulates Emily. While the others are clearing up after the meal she draws on the credit of her cooking to ask a favour.

  ‘Can Greg sleep over tonight, Messenger?’

  Ralph suppresses a belch. ‘You mean in your room? I think not, Flipper.’

  Emily frowns. ‘Why not? Mom lets us.’

  ‘I can’t take the responsibility.�
� Emily rolls her eyes in exasperation. ‘As it happens, I don’t approve, but that’s not the point. It’s up to Carrie, and she isn’t here.’

  ‘You don’t approve?’ Emily says in tones of incredulity.

  ‘No, I think it’s disturbing for the boys. They’re at a sensitive age.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s disturbing when you have Helen sleeping over?’ Emily says.

  Ralph stiffens. ‘That’s entirely different. She was a guest, sleeping in the guest room.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Emily, in a slightly insolent drawl. She looks at Ralph as if she might say more if challenged.

  The telephone rings. It is Carrie, confirming that she and Hope are leaving LA tomorrow night and will arrive at Heathrow early on Friday morning. Ralph offers to meet them at the airport. Carrie says, no, not to bother. She has already booked the chauffeur-driven car from Cheltenham. She expects to be home by the late morning.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Ralph says. ‘We’ve missed you.’