by David Lodge
Ralph closed the document and looked at Helen’s subdirectories. He opened the one called ‘Journal’, and scrolled through a long list of filenames with dates stretching back to the 17th February. He opened that one, clicked on Find in the Edit Menu and entered ‘Carrie’ in the dialogue box. He clicked his way rapidly through the document, speed-reading the passages in which her name occurred. Then he closed the file, opened the next journal document in chronological sequence, and repeated the procedure.
Helen meanwhile was walking across the campus from the Humanities Tower to Maisonette Row. Her Examiners’ Meeting had gone on longer than she had anticipated, but she did not hurry. She didn’t know what would happen when she met Ralph, and what was more disturbing, she didn’t know what she wanted to happen. She had made up her mind yesterday to tell him that the affair must end. But in that case, why had she washed her hair that morning, and put on her most becoming underwear, and a dress Ralph had particularly admired? It was as if her body had done these things of its own accord while her mind watched, disapproving but powerless to intervene. So she took her time, walking at a leisurely pace in the late afternoon sunshine, almost hoping that time would run out for Ralph, that he would have to return to wife and family before he had an opportunity to try and coax her into bed.
When Helen let herself into the house, Ralph had just finished reading her journal entry for Friday 11th April. Hearing her key in the lock, he hastily switched off the computer without bothering to save the file, and closed the cover. ‘Messenger?’ Helen called, as she shut the front door behind her. ‘Are you still here?’ Ralph moved swiftly away from the desk. When Helen came into the living-room from the cramped little hallway, he was standing by the sofa as if he had just got to his feet. But Helen saw immediately that he was in a strangely perturbed state. ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.
He stared at her for several moments before speaking, divided between an instinct to conceal what he had done and a need to answer the question that was burning in his brain. In the end his jealousy was stronger than his sense of self-preservation. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Carrie and Nicholas Beck?’ he said.
The question was totally unexpected to Helen, and she took her time answering it. She felt both relief that she was no longer burdened with this secret, and apprehension about all the complications that might now ensue.
‘Because I thought it was none of my business,’ she said at length. ‘And then I gave Carrie my word.’
‘She talked to you about it then?’ Ralph said with eager intensity.
‘Once, yes.’
‘So it wasn’t just some suspicion of yours – some fantasy, some scenario for one of your novels?’
Helen frowned, puzzled by this question, and his inquisitorial tone. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said. ‘How did you find out, anyway?’
He did not answer her, but his eyes flicked to the laptop and away again. Helen followed the direction of his glance. ‘You’ve been reading my journal!’ she said incredulously.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘I can’t believe it. It’s despicable.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s despicable and inexcusable and unforgivable.’
‘Why did you?’
He shrugged. ‘I couldn’t stop myself.’
‘How much of it have you read?’
‘I got as far as your trip to Ledbury,’ he said. ‘Is she really fucking that effete wanker? What does she see in him?’
‘You’d better ask her that yourself,’ Helen said. ‘Now I’d be grateful if you’d go away and leave me alone.’
Ralph picked his jacket off the back of the chair and folded it over his arm. ‘I’m sorry, Helen . . .’
‘Just go,’ she said.
‘Goodbye, then,’ he said, and left the house.
Driving back to Cheltenham, Ralph at first had every intention of doing what Helen had recommended – confronting Carrie, forcing the truth out of her, and then going round to Nicholas Beck’s exquisite house in Lansdown Crescent and beating the shit out of him. But after a while he began to be aware of the weakness of his position. If he accused Carrie of infidelity, he would invite a counter-attack, and even if she didn’t know about his involvement with Helen, there was always a risk that she might find out, possibly from Helen herself, who was now thoroughly disaffected. He was also fairly sure that Carrie had many good reasons to suspect his unfaithfulness to her in the past, reasons which she had chosen to keep to herself in the interests of marital harmony, but which she wouldn’t hesitate to use in self-defence if challenged. It was, she would say, with some justification, tit for tat. She had defected knowing he had defected. And what would be the point or profit of dragging all this dirt into the light, and provoking a major row which might easily destroy the entire marriage? He didn’t want a divorce. He didn’t want either the emotional attrition or the material damage that would entail. Carrie’s personal wealth was still ring-fenced, thanks to Daddy Thurlow’s shrewd stewardship, and Ralph was well aware that he would come out of a divorce settlement with little more than a half share of the house and limited access to his children.
Ralph did not formulate these arguments in quite such explicit terms, but they were, as we say, at the back of his mind, as he raged inwardly at Carrie’s treachery, her appalling choice of a lover, and the insult to his pride and self-esteem. Gradually they exerted a cooling influence on his thoughts of retribution and revenge. He grew calmer and more contemplative; his driving, dangerously fast at the beginning of his journey, had become more controlled by the time he reached the outskirts of Cheltenham; his mood, when he entered the house on Pittville Lawn, was surly rather than angry. Carrie and Emily had just got back from their expedition to Stratford. Ralph was unable to respond to their animated chatter about the production they had seen, but Carrie attributed his taciturnity to delayed shock at the death of Douglass and was not discomposed by it. After supper he went up to his study, booted up his computer, and worked late into the night on his Work in Progress.
Helen meanwhile packed up all her belongings ready for her departure from Gloucester University. She could hardly wait to get away from the place. She slept badly and woke before daybreak. Instead of waiting for her alarm to ring, she got up, showered, dressed, drank a cup of coffee, and loaded her car. She did this quietly, almost stealthily, to avoid disturbing her neighbours, whose bedroom curtains were still drawn. It struck her that she was enacting the fantasy she had entertained in her first depressed weeks on the campus, of running away in the early hours of the morning. Then she had imagined escaping under cover of the darkness of winter; now it was broad daylight by the time she drove away from the house, but the campus was quiet and the only human figures she encountered were a lone jogger and the security guard at the exit barrier to whom she gave the keys of her house in a brown envelope. Then it was down the avenue, on to the main road, on to the M5, the M42, the M40, London . . . There she got caught up in the tail end of the rush hour, but she was home by a quarter to ten.
She let herself into the house and walked from room to room, renewing her acquaintance with it as with an old friend. The Weismullers had gone back to America, taking all their possessions with them. Vera, Helen’s regular cleaner, who knew the house well, had tidied up after their departure by arrangement, and on her own initiative replaced most of the furniture and much of the bric-a-brac in their accustomed places. Helen put a Vivaldi concerto in the CD player, and a sweet cascade of strings filled the high-ceilinged room with such clarity and resonance that she almost gasped. She realized how much she had missed this pleasure. The strains of the music followed her faintly as she moved through the house and up the stairs. The music system had been assembled with loving care and immense technical expertise by Martin. Indeed almost everything in the house was a reminder of him. Together they had bought it, restored it and decorated it, tearing out the horrible modern picture windows and replacing them with sash windows, sanding
and polishing the wooden floorboards, stripping the brown paint of ages from the banisters, buying curtain material from Liberty’s and rugs from Heal’s. She came at last to the master bedroom. On the dressing table was a framed photograph of Martin which she had taken herself when they were on holiday in Greece. She had put it away when she let the house, but Vera had found it in a drawer and put it back. Helen picked up the photograph. Martin looked young and healthy and happy, sitting at a café table in an open-necked shirt, smiling and squinting in the sun. The picture brought back a flood of memories, of the happy times they had had together. She began quietly to weep. She forgave Martin, and she wept for him.
Ralph Messenger needed after all to have an operation to remove the cyst. It was a complete success, but people who knew him commented that it seemed to knock him back a bit, and that afterwards he was perceptibly less assertive, more subdued, more middle-aged. He lost his reputation for chasing women at conferences and on similar excursions. He never confronted Carrie over Nicholas Beck, but she picked up vibrations of his suspicions and prudently terminated the affair, which had never deeply engaged her emotions. Carrie did not finish her novel about the San Francisco earthquake, but she took up sculpture, mostly modelling in clay, and opened a small art gallery in Montpellier Street to exhibit her work and that of her friends. Ralph published his book Machine Living to wide media coverage, and achieved gratifying sales. In 1999 Sir Stanley Hibberd put him at the top of the University’s recommendations for Honours, and he was awarded a CBE for services to science and education in the Millennium Honours List.
A year after she returned to London, Helen Reed met a literary biographer in the cafe of the new British Library and they started going out together. He is divorced, with three teenage children. They see each other frequently and go on holidays together, but retain their respective houses. In the first year of the new millennium Helen published a novel which one reviewer described as ‘so old-fashioned in form as to be almost experimental’. It was written in the third person, past tense, with an omniscient and sometimes intrusive narrator. It was set in a not-so-new greenfields university, and entitled Crying is a Puzzler.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The University of Gloucester is an entirely fictitious institution.
At least, it was at the time of writing.
D.L.
Acknowledgements
I was first, alerted, somewhat belatedly, to the current scientific and philosophical debate about consciousness by an article, entitled ‘From Soul to Software’, by John Cornwell, published in The Tablet in June 1994, which discussed two key books: Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) and Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994). I am grateful for that initial stimulus, and I profited from John Comwell’s subsequent writings in the same subject area, and from attending the interdisciplinary conference he organized on ‘Consciousness and Human Identity’ at Jesus College Cambridge in September 1995. (Its proceedings, edited by John Comwell, were published under the same title by OUP in 1998.)
Among the books and articles I read in preparation for writing this novel, in addition to the titles cited above, I found the following particularly illuminating or thought-provoking: David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996); Rodney Cotterill, No Ghost in the Machine (1989); Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (rev. edn 1989) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986); Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (2000); Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) and Kinds of Minds (1996); Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (1991); Robin Dunbar, The Trouble with Science (1995) and Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (1997); Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992); Susan Greenfield, The Human Brain (1997); John Horgan, The End of Science (1996); Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (1997); Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (1996); V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, The Brain and its Phantoms (1998); John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1996); Galen Strawson, ‘The Sense of the Self’, London Review of Books 18 April 1996; Tom Wolfe, ‘Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died’, Sunday Independent, 2 February 1997; Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards, Passionate Minds: the inner world of scientists (1997). Ken Campbell’s lively and informative TV series for Channel 4, Brainspotting, shown in 1996, also deserves mention.
My biggest single debt is to Aaron Sloman, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Aaron patiently answered my elementary questions, gave me copies of his publications, introduced me to his colleagues, welcomed me to his departmental seminars, escorted me to an eye-opening international conference on consciousness (held appropriately enough at Elsinore) and generally acted as an indispensable guide to consciousness studies in general and artificial intelligence in particular. Though he shares some of the views of my fictional character, Ralph Messenger, on these matters, anyone who knows him will testify that they have nothing else in common. I am grateful to his colleagues who allowed me to pick their brains, over coffee or by Email, and especially to Russell Beale for practical advice about speech recognition software. Vijay Raichura generously found time in his busy life to advise me on medical aspects of my story, for which I am deeply grateful. The novel is dedicated to my daughter and elder son, who also gave me some professional advice and assistance in the course of writing it.
D.L.
Birmingham, August 2000
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