How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  All disown this intention with laughter and mock indignation. Union do’s, especially on St Valentine’s night, are notoriously dissipated affairs, involving the construction in a corner of the Lounge of a dimly-lit, cushion-lined grotto designed expressly for snogging, if not worse.

  “Are you going to the Cath. Soc. party?” Adrian asks, glancing between Angela and Dennis. The “you” could be singular or plural. Dennis thinks it is meant to be interpreted as singular and addressed to Angela, and that Adrian must be the sender of the second Valentine. “No,” he says, “I’ve got an experiment to write up.”

  “Oh, we must go, we must all go,” says Angela. “Polly will be disappointed if we don’t.”

  “I think I may drop in for an hour,” says Adrian.

  “All right then, if you really want to,” says Dennis grimly to Angela.

  Momentous things happen at or around the St Valentine’s party. Walking Angela to the prefabricated hut in the College precincts where it is to be held, and unable to bear his jealousy any longer, Dennis stops suddenly under a dripping tree in Russell Square and apologizes abjectly for his boorish behaviour of the morning, recklessly declares his love for her, and asks if she will marry him. Angela is moved, overwhelmed, by this sudden gush of emotion; and feeling her heart knocking, the blood coming and going in her face and, as Dennis takes her in his arms underneath her overcoat, unwonted sensations in her vagina, decides that this must indeed be love, and murmurs into his ear that she loves him too, but she cannot promise to marry him till they know each other better and have their degrees, which is nearly three years away. He says he doesn’t mind waiting, and at that moment he doesn’t. They move on slowly through the square, with their arms round one another and keep them round one another for the rest of the evening, rotating slowly under Polly’s crepe paper hearts to the theme tune of La Ronde, a saucy French film still attracting queues in the West End.

  “Have you seen La Ronde, Adrian?” says Polly.

  “I certainly have not,” he replies in his flat Derbyshire accent.

  “You should, it’s awfully good.”

  “It’s been banned by the League of Decency in America.”

  “Pooh, why should we take any notice of them?”

  “Personally, I think we could do with an organization like that in this country.”

  “Oh, Adrian, you are the end! Why don’t you ask me to dance?”

  “I don’t dance, as you very well know, Polly. Anyway, I was just going. I have work to do.”

  While speaking to Polly, Adrian has been watching Angela and Dennis dancing, and has come to a decision. He will not pursue Angela. To try and win her now would entail too much expense of spirit. To prise her loose from Dennis’s possessive embrace, he would have to become as infatuated, as abandoned, as Dennis himself, and Adrian is not prepared to pay that price. No woman is worth it, not even Angela. Looking at her perfectly symmetrical features, slightly flushed and softened by the romantic trance in which she moves about the dance floor, and haloed by the soft waves of her golden hair, he feels a wrenching pang of envy and desire, which he ruthlessly suppresses. Very well, then, if not Angela, then no one – at least until his studies are completed. He tugs tight the belt of his double-breasted gaberdine raincoat and marches out into the cold, dark drizzle. Very well, then, he will work, work and pray. If not Angela, then no one – certainly not Polly, a flighty, frivolous girl who will get herself into trouble one of these days, and not Ruth, either, because too plain, and not Violet, too unstable. He will work hard, he will get a good degree, and he will become a star of the Catholic Evidence Guild. One day Angela will stand beneath his rostrum at Hyde Park Corner, and admire, and regret. Thus Adrian.

  Meanwhile Polly, slightly tipsy on the cider cup she prepared, and experimentally tasted rather too often, is dancing with Miles, a quickstep. He dances superbly, beautifully balanced on the pointed toes of his gleaming black shoes, but somehow coldly. There is no warmth in the pressure of his long fingers, splayed out across the small of her back, and when she tries to nestle against him he arches away from her, swings her round in a centrifugal flourish, and breaks into a sequence of rapidly executed fishtails that requires all her concentration to follow. At the conclusion of the record, he spins her like a top at the end of his long arm and bows with mock formality. Polly responds with a theatrical curtsey and nearly overbalances. She is gripped by an almost intolerable desire to be cuddled. Seeing Michael on his own, she goes over to him. Divested of his Artful Dodger’s overcoat, wearing a clean white shirt, and having slicked back his quiff with a lavish application of Brylcreem, he looks quite presentable.

  Michael watches Polly’s approach with alarm. He has been appraising her breasts while she has been dancing with Miles and is afraid that she has noticed. This is not in fact the case, but by coming and speaking to him, she effectively puts a stop to the appraisal. They are in the same Department, English, and talk books for a while. Michael’s favourite novel at the moment is The Heart of the Matter, and Polly’s, Brideshead Revisited. “But Greene’s awfully sordid, don’t you think?” says Polly.

  “But Waugh’s so snobbish.”

  “Anyway, it said in the Observer that they’re the two best English novelists going, so that’s one in the eye for the Prods.”

  After a while the restless Polly moves off to change the records on the gramophone, and leaves Michael free to contemplate her breasts again. He wonders what it is like to live with those twin protuberances, quivering and jouncing in front of you at every moment, like heavy ripe fruit on the bough; what it is like to sponge them at the washbasin every morning, rub them dry with a towel, and fit them carefully into the hollow cups of a brassiere, first the left one, then the right. Extraordinary.

  Miles, watching Polly move across the room, recognizes with a certain inner panic that he finds her prominent bust and voluptuous hips repulsive. His spiritual adviser, a Farm Street Jesuit, has assured him that he will come to like girls in due course, given prayer and patience, but so far there are no perceptible signs of it. His erotic fantasies are still of young boys in the showers at school, their high, taut buttocks gleaming under the cascade. Perhaps, he had wondered aloud to the Jesuit, he should renounce sex altogether and try his vocation as a priest; but after a great deal of throat-clearing and tortuously allusive argument he gathered that only guaranteed heterosexuals were eligible for the priesthood. That was manifestly untrue of the Anglican clergy, he had protested. And that’s why you get all those scandals in the Sunday papers, was the answer.

  Neither Michael nor Miles gives a sexual thought, positive or negative, to Ruth, who is cutting sandwiches in a corner of the room. Yet she is a woman, and particularly conscious of it this evening, for her period has just started and she is bleeding copiously under her limp, dowdy dress of navy blue crepe. Normally Angela would have been helping her, for Angela is that kind of girl, never one to stand idly by when there is work to be done; but tonight Angela is blind to everyone else in the room except Dennis, and, looking up from her sandwiches and holding her throbbing head, Ruth watches Angela dancing, and Polly flirting (with Edward now) and feels gloomily that the Christian fellowship of the morning has after all been dissolved by sex. A bitter remark scrawled on the wall of a loo at school comes back to her: “Blessed are the good-looking, for they shall have fun.” Then, ashamed of these envious thoughts, she bows her head over the sandwiches again. Tomorrow she will put in an extra afternoon at the orphanage, where there is no time – or occasion – for envy. It suddenly comes into Ruth’s head that she might herself become a nun. She thrusts this idea away, a little frightened by the plausibility of it, for she doesn’t want to give up her freedom, she nourishes dreams of becoming a famous botanist, travelling the world to discover new species, and perhaps marrying another famous botanist who will love her for her mind rather than her looks. And her mother would have kittens. At the thought of her parents’ likely reaction to such an idea, Ruth grins t
o herself, not knowing what a nice smile she has, because no one has ever told her.

  Later, there is an entertainment in the form of sketches. In one of these, entitled “The Return of St Valentine”, Edward plays the part of the Roman martyr’s ghost, dressed in a toga and holding on to his head with both hands in case (as he explains) it should topple off, for he was beheaded, who returns to earth in modern London and is bewildered and scandalized by the cult being celebrated in his name. Orgies of snogging in the Students’ Union are represented by the miming of an extravagant display of passion on a sofa immediately behind the figure of St Valentine, as he recites the woeful story of his martyrdom in stumbling rhyming couplets. This sofa, raised on a dais, has its back facing the audience, so that all they can see are arms and legs appearing in surprising and suggestive positions above and to each side of the sofa, and various garments being discarded on to the floor. It is all done, rather cleverly, by Polly alone, using her four limbs and a collection of male and female attire. She tosses shoes to the right and left, she throws a bare arm languorously backwards over the side of the sofa, she draws on one leg of a pair of man’s trousers and lofts it hilariously in the air, she points a stockinged leg, daringly exposed to the very suspender button, at the ceiling and wiggles her toes in a droll signal of alarm or ecstacy.

  At this point Father Brierley makes an unexpected and unnoticed appearance at the party. He is not amused. He is appalled. When items of underclothing – panties, brassieres, Y-fronts – begin to fly through the air, he cries, “Stop, stop, this is too bad!” and turns on the main lights in the room. Edward, startled, freezes in mid-speech, still holding on to his head. The audience blinks, stirs, looks round. Polly, fully dressed, stands up behind the sofa. Austin Brierley is totally disconcerted: first, to find his favourite student responsible for the spectacle, second, that no real indecency has taken place. But he proceeds to do his duty, which is to reproach them for a lapse of moral standards, not to mention taste. Catholic students should set an example to other young people by their purity of mind and body. The Catechism, he reminds them, explicitly forbade attendance at immodest shows and dances as an offence against the sixth commandment. All the more deplorable was it, therefore, actually to perform such degrading entertainments. He was surprised, he was shocked, he was disappointed. He expected an apology, well not an apology, after all it was Almighty God who was offended, Confession would be more appropriate, he would leave it to their consciences, they would talk about it another time, he did not wish to exaggerate, he was not opposed to harmless fun, but there were lines that had to be drawn.…

  He stammers to a halt. There is a long silence. All feel the breath squeezed out of them by embarrassment, and avoid each other’s eyes. Then Edward, who has by now lowered his arms to his side, mutters, “Sorry, Father, it was only meant to be a bit of fun,” and pulls off his toga, his big ears bright red. Ruth offers the priest a cup of coffee. Polly looks very white and angry and says nothing. Father Brierley declines the coffee and leaves. It is only ten o’clock, but the party is clearly over.

  “Well, Polly did get rather carried away, I’m afraid,” says Ruth to Edward, as they stack the chairs and tear up the paper hearts. “You couldn’t see what was going on behind your back.”

  “Silly girl,” says Edward, “I believe she was a bit under the influence.”

  By now, Polly is weeping in a corner, comforted by Violet. “You were super, Polly, honestly, you should go on the stage,” says Violet. “I couldn’t have done it to save my life.”

  This isn’t, perhaps, the most tactful of remarks, and Polly weeps more violently than ever. “I’ll never go to his stupid study group again,” she vows, “or his stupid Thursday masses.” Then, shocked herself at what she has just said, she stops crying and, after a while, cheers up.

  The incident has broken the spell of romance for Dennis and Angela. On the tube train back to her digs they have a slight disagreement about it. Angela opines that Polly was a fool to make such an exhibition of herself. Dennis, disappointed that Angela did not, like himself, find the sketch erotically exciting, defends it. When they kiss goodnight on the porch of her digs he tries to push his tongue between her lips, but she draws back and says gently but firmly, “Don’t do that, pet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  They wrangle for a while about this, the first of many such arguments, until Dennis has to run back to the station for the last train to his own digs on the other side of London. In those days he seemed to have a permanent stitch in his side from running for last trains and buses.

  Austin Brierley went home and tossed and turned all night, tormented by the memory of Polly’s stockinged leg waving in the air above the back of the sofa. The next morning, on an impulse, he asked his parish priest for counsel.

  “You did well to give them a telling-off,” said the PP, when Austin Brierley had told his story. “What are you worried about?”

  “I keep having impure thoughts about the girl, Father,” Austin confessed with a blush. “I can’t seem to get the image of her leg out of my mind.”

  “Pooh, pooh! Have you tried ejaculations?”

  “Pardon?”

  “‘My Jesus, mercy, Mary help!’ That’s a good one.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve tried prayers.”

  “Pray especially to Our Lady, she’ll help you to forget it. It wasn’t your fault, you didn’t seek the occasion of sin.” The PP sniffed and blew his nose loudly into a handkerchief. “Some of these young hussies need their bottoms smacked,” he said indignantly, a careless expression in the circumstances, that didn’t do anything at all for Austin Brierley’s peace of mind.

  2

  * * *

  How They Lost Their Virginities

  IN THE FIFTIES, everyone was waiting to get married, some longer than others. Dennis lost track of the weddings he and Angela attended in that decade – weddings in churches and chapels of every size and shape, and receptions of all sorts, from a champagne and smoked salmon buffet on a Thames riverboat to a cheap sit-down lunch of rectilinear sliced ham and limp salad, with tinned peaches and ice cream to follow, in a dismal school hall in Watford. But somehow the weddings were all the same – organ music, hats, speeches, hilarity, indigestion; and they always ended in the same way, with Dennis and Angela standing on the edge of a crowd, waving goodbye to some grinning couple off to the scarcely imaginable pleasures of the marriage bed. Once, they went to two weddings on the same Saturday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, on opposite sides of London, and the second one was like a nightmare, having to eat cold chicken and sausages on sticks and wedding cake, and drink sweet sparkling wine, all over again, and listen to what sounded like the same speeches and telegrams, and exchange small talk with what looked very much like the same two sets of relatives.

  As for themselves, there was Dennis’s degree to be got, and Angela’s degree to be got and his National Service to be done and her postgraduate certificate of education to be obtained and jobs to be found and money to be saved. Some of these time-consuming operations would overlap, but collectively they would account for at least five years and in fact it turned out to be rather longer before they were married. At a well-wined dinner party in 1974 Dennis was to describe their courtship as the most drawn-out foreplay session in the annals of human sexuality. He was alluding to the infinitely slow extension of licence to touch which Angela granted him over the years, as slow as history itself. By November 1952, when The Mousetrap opened in the West End, he was allowed to rest one hand on a breast, outside her blouse. In 1953, Coronation Year, while Hilary and Tenzing were scaling Everest, Dennis was persuading Angela to let him stroke her leg, when she sat on his lap, up to stocking-top height. In 1954 food rationing came to an end, Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile and Dennis got his hand inside Angela’s blouse and on to a brassiere cup. Then there was a setback. One day Angela emerged weeping from the confessional of the parish priest of Our
Lady and St Jude’s, and for a long time there was no touching of legs or breasts in any circumstances. The Comet was grounded and a link established between smoking and lung cancer.

  1954 was the year most of the regular Thursday mass-goers sat their Final examinations. They had stopped going to the New Testament Study Group for lack of time, but to have given up the mass as well would have been inviting bad luck. Adrian, indeed, broke his tight-packed revision schedule to go on Student Cross with Edward (whose medical Finals were some years off) reasoning that the loss of preparation time would be more than compensated for by the spiritual merit earned on the pilgrimage. Student Cross, in case you haven’t read about it before, consisted of about fifty young men carrying a large, heavy, wooden cross from London to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham in half a dozen stages, reciting prayers and singing hymns from time to time, as an act of penance for the sins of students everywhere (no light undertaking) and for the edification of the general public. The general public stared, looked embarrassed or incredulous, sometimes pretended not to see the pilgrims at all. An old lady on the pavement of Enfield’s main shopping street inquired, as they were halted at traffic lights, if they were advertising something. Adrian said, “Yes, madam, the Crucifixion.” Edward murmured: “And foot-powder.” All suffered from blisters, especially Adrian. An experienced walker, he had the misfortune to lose his boots just before the pilgrimage and was obliged to wear new ones, not properly broken in. Soon his feet were covered in blisters, his boots seemed filled with molten fire. Every step was agony, and to ease the pain he tried to walk on the sides of his feet with his legs unnaturally bowed, which gave him cramp. His face was creased with pain, his eyes were glazed. Edward urged him to drop out, but Adrian refused to acknowledge defeat until he keeled over in the middle of the A10 just south of Cambridge and they had to phone for an ambulance. He was sent home in a wheelchair, sitting in the guard’s van amid bales of returned newspapers and crates of disgruntled chickens. He tried to console himself with the thought that he had done his best, but it did not seem a good omen for his Finals.