by David Lodge
Ralph has been speaking to Helen for some minutes, when Detective Sergeant Agnew bursts abruptly into the room. He stands at the threshold, opens his mouth to speak and then closes it as he sees that Ralph is on the phone. Ralph covers the mouthpiece. ‘What is it?’
‘You’d better come, sir,’ says Detective Sergeant Agnew. ‘It’s Professor Douglass.’
‘What about him?’
‘I’m afraid he’s dead, sir.’
Ralph says into the phone, ‘I have to go,’ and replaces the receiver.
32
ONE, TWO, THREE, testing . . . It’s Tuesday, the 3rd of June, 5.35 p.m. I’m alone for the first time today. It’s been one meeting after another . . . the VC, the police, the Head of Public Relations, the staff of the Centre . . . Everybody’s in a state of shock . . . except me. I wonder why. It’s not because I disliked him . . . I’m not glad that he’s dead. In fact I feel sorry for him, probably for the first time in my life. But I’m not in a state of shock, though of course I say I am, like everyone else . . . ‘It’s a shock,’ I say. People would think I was a monster of callousness if I didn’t.
Poor Agnew really is in shock. He blames himself, though I don’t see why he should. Who could have anticipated that Duggers would top himself like that – so quickly, so unhesitatingly, the moment he saw he’d been found out? He seemed to recover his self-control after the outburst in my room. He led Agnew to his office and unlocked the door and pointed out the various bits of computing equipment, answered a few questions about his software with frigid politeness, and then excused himself to go to the toilet. Agnew saw nothing unusual in that . . . the people he questions often get the squitters, as he put it. He sat himself down at the PC on the desk and began to trawl through the Internet files, and it was only after ten or fifteen minutes that he got alarmed at Duggers’ absence, and went looking for the Men’s room on the second floor. He looked under the doors of the stalls, saw a pair of feet in black shoes hanging a foot above the ground, kicked in the door and found Douglass, dead. He’d hanged himself from a ventilator grille, with a computer lead. Tied it round his neck, stood on the lavatory seat, and stepped off into thin air. Into oblivion.
He must have had a plan. He must have thought about contingencies in advance . . . like me, with my lump . . . He must have said to himself, if they ever find out, if they come for me, I’m not going to wait to be exposed, arrested, put on trial . . . Perhaps he’d actually worked out how he would do it . . . identified the ventilator grille, tested its strength . . . perhaps he even calculated the drop, and kept a lead ready in a drawer . . . I can’t help admiring his decisiveness. It gives me a new respect for him. In theory I was prepared to do it myself, but fortunately I wasn’t put to the test. In a way I almost feel as if he died instead of me . . . No, that’s silly, delete that . . . And yet, if I were superstitious . . . if I believed in fate, providence, the stars . . . There was a strange symmetry about yesterday evening, the way my reprieve arrived from Halib at the very same moment that catastrophe stared Duggers in the face. It was as if we were balanced on a pair of scales, and Halib’s call was the thumb in the pan that brought me safely down to earth and sent Duggers flying up into the air, hanging by his neck . . .
I was shown some of the stuff they found in his filing cabinets. Hundreds of photographs. Nothing really nasty, Agnew said, and he should know . . . Mostly pictures of pre-pubescent girls, naked, or nearly naked, sometimes with boys of the same age, but no boys on their own. Peeing, exposing their bottoms, exposing their genitals . . . childish stuff . . . some arty ones like Lewis Carroll used to take . . . You’d say it was almost harmless, until you wonder how the photographs were obtained . . . There’s no evidence that Duggers took any of them himself, or that he had any physical contact at all with children . . . He belonged to a ring of people who passed the pictures around between them on the Internet, using some encryption software, it was a kind of circulating library or co-op . . . Presumably he did it all from his office rather than home to prevent his mother or his sister accidentally discovering anything . . . I’ve sent them a letter of condolence. Not an easy one to write . . . There’ll be an inquest of course . . . and a funeral I suppose, a private one presumably. There won’t be a memorial service, that’s for sure . . .
When I looked up at the window of his office from the car-park, last Friday evening, the only room in the building with a light still burning behind the blind, it suddenly came into my head that he was the man Agnew was looking for. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of him before. I suppose I had him down as a kind of ascetic, exclusively interested in his subject, sexually neuter . . . Always a mistake, to suppose that you know what’s going on inside anyone else’s head. But looking up at the window, joking to Helen about Duggers working late at his algorithms, I remembered meeting him coming into the Centre on a Sunday morning as I was leaving it, and the glare of surprise and fury he gave me through the glass doors, and the penny dropped . . . He had a similar look on his face as he lay on the floor in the Men’s toilet yesterday evening, similar but more exaggerated . . . the eyes bulging, the face suffused with blood, lips curled in a kind of snarl . . . and he had a deep red weal round his neck, where Agnew had removed the plastic flex . . .
I left Agnew to call a doctor, ambulance, inform the local police, and campus security. I was late for the reception, but not for the dinner. I’d already informed Carrie quickly by phone, and sworn her to secrecy. I didn’t want the news circulating at the dinner. It would have soured the atmosphere, and I knew that if the TV people got hold of it they would feature it in their coverage of the conference. It’s just the sort of thing they love. But nobody knew, and nobody guessed, that anything untoward had happened. Duggers’ unoccupied seat at the dinner didn’t attract much attention – his dislike of social occasions was well-known. The trickiest moment came when I had to make my speech thanking everybody who’d helped with the organization of the conference. What could I say? ‘And my thanks to Professor Douglass, who unfortunately couldn’t be with us tonight . . . for personal reasons . . . due to unforeseen circumstances . . .’ I couldn’t think of any form of words that wouldn’t sound like a sick joke to myself, to Carrie, and eventually, when the truth came out, to everybody else. So I simply made no reference to him in my speech. Helen came up to me afterwards and said in a slightly accusatory tone, ‘Shouldn’t you have thanked Professor Douglass? He was complaining to me at the reception about all the extra work he’d had to do.’ ‘I forgot,’ I said. Later I took her aside and told her what had happened . . . She was, of course, shocked.
Helen, yes . . . What am I going to do about Helen? I’m standing at the window of my office now, looking out over the Science end of the campus and speaking into the Pearlcorder, just as I did that rainy Sunday morning in . . . when was it? February . . . when I saw her come round the corner of Biology, a solitary figure in calf-length boots and a smart raincoat, whose face I couldn’t see at first because of her umbrella . . . A lot has happened since then.
I feel pretty good at this moment. I feel physically well, for one thing, though I haven’t even started Halib’s course of drugs yet. It may be the effect of psychological relief, or it may, as Carrie half-jokingly said, be the result of knocking off booze and red meat for the last two weeks. We made love last night, the first time for weeks. I didn’t initiate it, neither did she, it wasn’t necessary, it was an unspoken agreement between us in the car coming home, it was implied in the way I softly locked the bedroom door and the way she looked at me as she lifted and bent back her arms to undo her necklace . . . perhaps neither of us wished to speak of it in case the other thought there would be something unseemly about having sex with Duggers’ body hardly cold. But that was why we needed to fuck . . . to put it out of our minds . . . to celebrate my reprieve . . . to affirm life over death. Afterwards we slept like babies.
I feel a sense of achievement this evening, satisfaction and serenity. I feel that my life is back
under my control. I don’t have a life-threatening illness. The conference was a success, a feather in my cap, and I managed to stop Duggers’ suicide from overshadowing the last evening. Even this morning most of the delegates left without knowing what had happened. There’s going to be a certain amount of fuss in the media, inevitably . . . but with the long vac starting next week, there’ll be fewer people around to keep the pot boiling . . . The protest over Donaldson’s degree has fizzled out . . . and it wasn’t Duggers after all who leaked the Senate papers to On Campus – it was almost certainly Reginald Glover . . . the editor of the rag as good as told me. He was over here this afternoon to get a statement about Douglass and I winkled it out of him. Whether Glover did it out of principle or nostalgia for the sixties or to punish me for humiliating his wife at the Richmonds’ dinner party, I don’t know, or care . . . Donaldson will get his D.Phil, and the Centre will get its fat research contracts from the MoD . . . Oh yes, and I fixed up Ludmila Lisk with a post-doc job at Boulder . . . I told Steve Rosenbaum to be sure to look at her poster and she did the business on him. So she won’t be getting in my hair any more . . . though you have to admire that babe’s determination . . .
Which leaves Helen as the only outstanding problem. She’s going back to London on Friday, and she’ll expect me to say something about the future before we say goodbye . . . What shall I say? I could say I’m too shocked by Duggers’ death to think straight at the moment . . . but she wouldn’t believe me . . . I know she was amazed at my self-possession last night, the way I went through the whole dinner as if nothing had happened . . . I could say, I don’t feel I’m out of the wood yet as regards my health, I still might have to have an operation . . . let’s leave our thing on hold until I’m really well again . . . then we’ll sort something out . . . Yes, more plausible . . . I must find the right moment, though. Not over the phone, or sitting in the Staff House restaurant . . . some time when we can be alone together . . . a last loving kiss . . . Perhaps more than a kiss, who knows? It bothers me still, the memory of our last time in bed, when I was impotent . . . I don’t want that to be the way she’ll remember me. [recording ends]
33
WEDNESDAY 4TH JUNE. Messenger just phoned to ask if he could come round tomorrow afternoon, ‘to say goodbye’. He added quickly, ‘I mean you’re leaving on Friday, aren’t you, and we may not be able to meet for some time.’ I told him I had to attend an Examiners’ Meeting in the School of English tomorrow afternoon and didn’t know how long it would last, so he said I should leave my key under the loose brick by the front door, and he would come round at about four and let himself in if I wasn’t back. We did this once or twice before, in our mad time. He said he had meetings himself all tomorrow morning, and Carrie would be coming back in the evening. I said, ‘Coming back from where?’ and he said she was taking Emily to a matinée at Stratford, to see As You Like It, one of her set texts for ‘A’ level. So then I knew why he was so keen to see me tomorrow afternoon, when Carrie would be out of the way. He wants to go on with the affair. Which is ironic, because I thought he wanted to end it, and after much heart-searching I had come to the conclusion that it would be better if we did.
I spent the whole of yesterday indoors, cleaning the house in preparation for my departure. It’s part of the agreement you sign when you move in, to leave the place clean and tidy when you go, but I went far beyond my contractual obligations, scrubbing and hoovering and washing down and polishing in a frenzy of activity, occupying my body while I turned it all over in my mind. It seemed to me that we’d taken incredible risks, and survived incredible dangers, and that we shouldn’t push our luck any more. Douglass’s suicide, though it had nothing to do with our relationship, had everything to do with my decision. It put me into a state of fear and trembling. It opened up such an abyss of unhappiness and wrongdoing and pain, into which it is so easy to fall once you stop listening to your conscience. James has a fine sentence about illicit love somewhere, one of the Prefaces I think, comparing it to a medal made of some hard bright alloy, one face of which is somebody’s bliss and right, and the other somebody’s bale and wrong. Something like that. I can’t deny that our affair was blissful for a while, but the longer it goes on the more likely it is to do harm. Now is the time to end it. And if Carrie has any sense she will come to the same conclusion, after all the alarms and crises of the last few weeks.
I know what he will do tomorrow afternoon. He’ll try and get me into bed and persuade me to change my mind. I hope I have the strength of mind to resist. I have to admit that my first reaction to his call was a visceral thrill of pleasure, knowing that he still desires me.
34
IN THE EVENT, Helen was not required to struggle against temptation – which in any case would have been much less consequential than she imagined, since Ralph had no intention of continuing the affair, merely of having sex with her one last time.
At about twenty minutes to four on the Thursday afternoon, Ralph left his office and walked across the campus to the terrace of little houses that Helen called Maisonette Row, reflecting not for the first time that it was fortunate it was tucked away in such an obscure corner of the campus, where there was little chance that he would be observed by anyone who knew him. The service road was, as usual, deserted. He rang the doorbell once, and receiving no response, removed the spare key from under the loose brick where Helen had left it and let himself into the house. The little hallway smelled pleasantly of polish and disinfectant, and the living-room looked exceptionally clean and tidy, which he took as a good omen, assuming it had been spruced up in his honour. He caught sight of himself in a gleaming wall mirror, and stepped up to look closer at his reflection, turning his head from side to side, checking for grey hairs. It seemed to him that he had acquired some new ones – not surprisingly, he reflected, considering what he had been through lately.
It was warm in the room from the afternoon sun flooding through the patio window. Ralph slid open the window a foot or so and drew the curtain a little. He took off his jacket and draped it over an upright chair. He sat down on the sofa, crossed his legs, and idly surveyed the room. His eyes came to rest on Helen’s desk, and the objects on its surface: a few books, a magazine, some letters and bills stuffed into a wire rack, a china mug holding pencils and ballpoint pens, a compact inkjet printer, and Helen’s Toshiba laptop. Ralph recalled how he had installed the software for Helen’s Email on the computer. It was closed now, and switched off, though connected to an electric wall socket by a lead.
It occurred to Ralph that this flat, drab, grey plastic box, the size and shape of a hard-back book, must contain Helen’s journal, the detailed record of her private thoughts, and therefore a kind of tracing or imprint of what she liked to call her self or soul. He had tried once to persuade her to let him read it, offering to barter the transcripts of his confessional tapes in return, and she had refused. But since then they had become lovers, and the contents of her journal would now be of immeasurably greater interest to him. If he were to do the unthinkable . . . if he were to cross the room and sit down at the desk and lift the cover of the computer and switch it on and access the files of Helen’s journal, he would discover why, after stating repeatedly that she wasn’t going to have an affair with him, she changed her mind; he would learn what triggered this volte-face, how she felt when they made love for the first time, how she felt on subsequent occasions, what she really felt about him and their relationship and what future she saw in it.
His heart beat faster with the excitement of these thoughts. Did he dare? How much time did he have? He glanced at his watch. It was 4.15. There was no way of knowing when she might return. These meetings could go on for hours, but she might leave before the end. She might return at any moment. He would hear the sound of her key in the door, though. He rose from the sofa and approached the desk like a thief, slowly, softly, and sat down on the typist’s chair, taking care not to disturb anything on the desktop, or alter the position of the co
mputer. He undid the catch and levered the top open to expose the screen inside. He pressed the power button on the side of the machine. He heard the faint whirr of the hard disk as Windows 95 was loaded, and then a sweep of tinkling electronic harp strings from the speakers as the Microsoft desktop appeared on the screen, the program icons floating like kites against the background of blue and white sky. He clicked on the Word 95 icon and almost instantly a blank document page appeared, with the Word toolbars across the top.
Now he hesitated. It was wrong, what he was doing, very wrong. He ought to stop now, shut down the computer, close the top, go back to the sofa on the other side of the room, and wait for Helen. But he couldn’t resist the temptation. It wasn’t just personal curiosity, he told himself, it was scientific curiosity too. It was a unique opportunity to break the seal on another person’s consciousness. It was, you might say, research. For a moment he actually entertained the idea of copying the entire contents of Helen’s hard disk onto floppies and carrying them away with him to analyse; but the enormity of such a violation of privacy was too much even for Ralph to contemplate for long, and anyway there were practical obstacles – she didn’t seem to have a zip drive, nor could he find any formatted blank diskettes in the desk drawers . . . time was running out . . . she would be back soon . . . He glanced at his watch: 4.17. There would only be time for a quick look at the journal, a random dip into its contents. It was now or never.
Ralph pulled down the File menu and looked at the filenames of the nine documents most recently saved. At the top of the list was ‘C: MY DocumentsJOURNAL4th June’. He clicked on it. Instantly a text appeared. It began: ‘WEDNESDAY 4TH JUNE. Messenger just phoned to ask if he could come round tomorrow afternoon, “to say goodbye”.’ Ralph read rapidly through the journal entry, smiling faintly to himself, until he came to: ‘Now is the time to end it. And if Carrie has any sense she will come to the same conclusion, after all the alarms and crises of the last few weeks.’ Carrie? His smile vanished. A fight-or-flight reaction kicked in with a rush of adrenaline. For a panic-stricken moment or two Ralph thought this reference must mean that Carrie knew about his affair with Helen, that Helen had told her about it. If so, when? How long had she known, and what did her silence imply? But hang on, he told himself, drawing his forearm across his brow (he was sweating in spite of being in shirtsleeves, he could feel the perspiration trickling down the sides of his torso), hang on, that doesn’t add up. ‘If Carrie has any sense she will come to the same conclusion . . .’ But logically Carrie couldn’t come to a conclusion about ending Helen’s affair. Only about ending an affair of her own.
