How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  All worked hard in the weeks preceding their examinations, though, as is the habit of students, when they met they pretended otherwise. Violet, however, really wasn’t working, or pretending. She found herself incapable of revising, and more incapable the nearer the time of Finals approached. She would go to the Library each morning, open a book and stare at it for hours, turning the pages out of habit, but not taking in a single word; then she would go home to her digs, open another book and stare at that for hours in the same way. She lived mostly on Lucozade and cigarettes, and her hands shook when she lit the cigarettes and poured the Lucozade. She went regularly to the Thursday masses, but when she remarked in the Lyons cafeteria afterwards that she wasn’t doing any work the others thought that it was the usual kind of precaution against hubris and paid no attention. They could see that she didn’t look very well, but then none of them did. The girls’ hair was lank and greasy from neglect, and the boys looked pale and scurfy from lack of exercise and fresh air.

  Violet herself came to the conclusion that she was under some kind of spell or curse, that God was punishing her for her sins. She began to go to Confession compulsively, once a day, then more than once, in different churches all over London, hoping to lift the curse. She did not go at the advertised times: there was usually a bellpush somewhere in a Catholic church by which you could summon a priest to hear your confession at any hour of the day or night. She liked to go into some strange, empty church, in the middle of the morning or afternoon, let the door swing shut behind her, muffling the everyday sounds from the street, and walk with echoing footsteps down the aisle to push the bell button for Confession; then kneel beside the confessional wondering what kind of priest her action would pluck from his hiding-place, and whether he would be the one to break the spell. Always she said she wanted to make a general confession for all the sins of her past life. She confessed the same sins to different priests and compared the penances they gave her. Some were lengthier than others, but none of her confessors seemed particularly shocked by what she told them, so she began, at first subtly, then more and more extravagantly, to embellish her sins and to invent totally fictitious ones: she had corrupted her little sister, she had sold herself as a child to an American soldier for chewing gum, she had masturbated with a statuette of the Sacred Heart. These revelations produced a gratifying reaction from the priests – sighs and stunned silences from the other side of the grille, heavy penances and earnest exhortations, until one day a sceptical Franciscan began to question her sharply about details, and reminded her that it was sacrilege to tell anything other than the strict truth in Confession. This threw Violet into a worse state than before, because she was frightened to admit that she had made all the false confessions. She was less able than ever to do any revision and felt certain that she would fail her examinations. She would have tried to kill herself if that hadn’t been a surer way than any of going to Hell. When, one Thursday morning at breakfast in Lyons, someone made a flippant remark about Violet’s exaggerations, she suddenly burst into uncontrollable hysterics and began throwing crockery at the wall. Edward took her round to the Outpatients Department of the College Hospital, where she was given a sedative and put in a cubicle to rest until her parents could be contacted to take her home to Swindon. Edward explained to the others that it was a nervous breakdown.

  Later, Violet wrote to Edward from the West of Ireland, where she was recuperating on her uncle’s farm, to thank him for looking after her, and to say that she would not be taking the exams that summer, but was hoping to return to College in due course to do her final year again. The others were very sorry for Violet, but too preoccupied with their own anxieties about Finals to spare much thought for her. Besides, they did not really understand about nervous breakdowns, they did not quite see how a nervous breakdown fitted into the theological framework of sin and grace, spiritual snakes and ladders. Was it your own fault if you had a nervous breakdown, or was it a cross that God had asked you to bear, like TB? They did not know. For most of them Violet’s nervous breakdown was the first they had come into contact with, though it would not be the last.

  When the examination results were published, Miles got a First in History, Michael got a very good Upper Second and Polly a Third in English, Dennis an Upper Second in Chemistry and Angela a Lower Second in French, Ruth an Upper Second in Botany and Adrian (to his great disappointment, for he had secretly hoped for a First) a Lower Second in Economics. On the whole these results corresponded to the intelligence and/or industry of each of them respectively, rather than to their virtue.

  Miles went to Cambridge (where he would have gone as an undergraduate if he hadn’t been undergoing a spiritual crisis at the time of the college entrance examinations) to do a PhD, and Ruth went into a convent as a postulant. You are not going to hear much about these two in this chapter because they did not lose their virginities (unless you count mutual masturbation between schoolboys, in which case Miles had lost his already). Ruth did, however, have a kind of wedding when she took her first vows at the end of her novitiate.

  She was led into the convent chapel, clothed in a long white dress and veil and carrying a bouquet of white roses, accompanied by two matrons of honour. Angela, who was one of them, thought poor Ruth looked ridiculous in this get-up, and found the whole ceremony faintly morbid. She couldn’t get used, either, to Ruth’s being called Sister Mary Joseph of the Precious Blood. Together they moved in procession to the altar where the bishop waited.

  “What do you ask?”

  “The mercy of God and the holy veil.”

  “Do you ask it with your whole mind and heart?”

  “I do.”

  Here the two matrons of honour had to remove Ruth’s headdress, and with a little pair of gold scissors the bishop cut off one lock of her hair.

  “Oh Lord, keep thy handmaid, our sister, always modest, sincere and faithful to thy service.”

  Then Ruth withdrew into a small room, attended by the Mother Superior and two sisters. The matrons of honour had to wait outside, but they knew what was happening behind the door. So did Ruth’s mother, who was sobbing audibly in the congregation. Her father had refused to come.

  The two sisters helped Ruth off with her bridal dress, and she put on a plain shift of coarsely woven linen and heavy black shoes and stockings. Then she sat on a stool with a towel round her shoulders, and the Mother Superior ran a pair of electric clippers over her scalp until she was cropped like a convict. Then Ruth put on the black habit, the scapular, the cincture and crown, the coif, the band and the veil, reciting a special prayer with each article of dress. When she returned to the chapel for the rest of the ceremony, she was hardly recognizable as the bride in white – and looked much prettier, Angela thought. All you could see of Ruth now was her face from cheekbone to cheekbone and from forehead to chin, which happened to be by far the most attractive part of her. Everything else was concealed by the graceful folds and starched linen of the habit, which had been modelled on the dress of the bourgeoises of Bordeaux in the late seventeenth century, when the Order was founded.

  Afterwards there was a kind of wedding breakfast, with an iced cake, but of course no sparkling wine or any other kind of alcoholic beverage, though the sisters seemed to get distinctly tipsy on the cake alone, being unused to such rich ingredients in their food. Later, on the pavement outside the convent gates, Ruth’s mother clutched Angela’s arm and declared that if she didn’t have a stiff drink in the next five minutes she would die.

  “Don’t you think it’s a shame, a terrible waste?” she said, when they were seated in the corner of a saloon bar (Angela felt strange, never having been in a pub without Dennis before) and she had drained her first gin-and-lime.

  “Well, she’ll still be able to use her qualifications,” said Angela loyally. “The Order runs a lot of schools.” But she could not rouse much enthusiasm, having herself steadfastly resisted years of propaganda for the nun’s life at school. She fingered Dennis’s rin
g on her left hand, and felt particularly glad at that moment that she was engaged to be married. That was nearly three years after they took Finals.

  Immediately after the examinations were over, and before the results were known, Polly and her fiancé of the moment (she had had a different one in each academic year) invited Dennis and Angela to join them for a camping holiday in Brittany. Polly and Rex would provide the car, borrowed from Rex’s father, and all the gear. Angela was a little surprised by this invitation, for she had never been a really close friend of Polly’s, but she and Dennis accepted readily enough, and not until it was too late to withdraw did they realize that they were being asked along as chaperones – Polly’s parents having agreed to the trip only on condition that they took with them a reliable Catholic couple. Rex was not a Catholic, and frankly suggested to Dennis, as they lay in their tent on their first night in France, that as soon as possible they should aim to pair off with the girls in the two tents. He was rather put out by Dennis’s uncooperative response, and offered to lend him some French letters if that was the problem. (It was not – that problem was still in the future for Dennis.) So Polly preserved her virginity on that holiday, but only just.

  They finally pitched their tents in the south of Brittany, on the far side of the Loire estuary. It was too hot to lie out on the beach in the afternoons, so they took their siestas in the tents that were shaded by pine trees, and it seemed absurd not to do that as couples. But those sultry afternoons were occasions of sin if anything was, lolling on air mattresses in their swimsuits, for it was too hot to wear anything else, sensually drowsy from the lunchtime wine, and looking, as they all did, amazingly handsome and beautiful from the sunshine and exercise. Every day Dennis and Angela lay side by side, holding hands across the space that separated them, and listening to the scuffles and giggles and sighs emanating from the neighbouring tent. By the end of the second week, Polly and Rex had reached the stage of petting to climax, as Polly intimated to Angela, asking her if she thought it was possible to get pregnant that way. Angela was shocked and unhappy. She wanted to return home, she told Dennis the next afternoon, or at least stop pairing off in the two tents. When he wheedled out of her the reason in full detail, he became uncontrollably excited. He rolled over on to her mattress and whispered breathlessly in her ear, “Let’s do it, let us do it.”

  “What?”

  “What they do, what Polly said, oh please let’s Ange!”

  After a pause, she said: “Why not do it properly, then?”

  Dennis sat up and stared at her. Was she serious?

  She was. Angela was suddenly fed up with acting as a moral referee over their endearments, blowing the whistle at every petty infringement and quibbling endlessly over the interpretation of the rules. Besides, she felt erotically excited herself by Dennis’s strong, brown body, bathed in the orange light of the tent’s interior. She lifted her arms slightly and, half closing her eyes, pushed out her lips in the shape of a kiss. He had never seen her look so seductive, but instead of increasing his desire, it frightened him.

  “No,” he said, “we’d better not.”

  By the following day he had changed his mind, but so had Angela, and she was not to be wooed into offering herself a second time. He had plenty of leisure in which to brood on his missed opportunity (if that was what it was), his victory over selfishness or his failure of manhood (whichever it was) in the next two years, most of which he spent in a desolate barracks in northern Germany. His Upper Second was not quite good enough to win him a postgraduate scholarship with further deferment of his National Service, and he was called up into the Royal Signals.

  Basic training seemed like some sort of punishment for a crime he hadn’t committed: shouts, oaths, farts, bruising drill, nauseating food, monotonous obscenity, fucking this fucking that, from shivering morning to red-eyed, boot-polishing night. I have described it in detail elsewhere. So have others. It is always the same. When the Catholic Chaplain came round to talk to the RCs in Dennis’s intake, he had an impulse to cry, “Help us! Get us out of here!” and listened with dismay as the priest told them they were soldiers of Christ and should try to set an example to the other lads. He tried for a commission and failed his War Office Selection Board (they told him he lacked enthusiasm). Eventually he was trained as a wireless operator and posted to an artillery regiment stationed near Bremen. On his pre-posting leave he and Angela got engaged. Travelling to Germany after that leave, sitting up through the night in a railway carriage foetid with the breath and perspiration of seven other soldiers, remembering Angela’s pale, gold-fringed face held up to the train window for a last kiss, feeling the collar of his battledress blouse chafing his neck, and knowing that he would have to wear it for another fourteen months, he tried to comfort himself with the thought that, whatever happened, life couldn’t possibly hold greater misery for him than he felt at that moment. (He was wrong, of course.)

  Dennis wrote every other day to Angela and she almost as frequently to him. She refused many invitations to go out with other young men, and he kept himself chaste. To fill the intolerable tedium of his days and nights, and in a determined effort to wrest some material advantage from his servitude, he studied furiously electronics and information theory by correspondence course, passed every trade test for which he was eligible, and rose to the rank of corporal.

  Polly broke off her engagement to Rex shortly after they all returned from Brittany – a morose, ill-tempered journey in which everybody quarrelled in turn with all the others. She was dashed to find that she had only got a Third and went to see her tutor about it. She had a little cry in his room, then she cheered up. She met Michael nervously combing his hair in the corridor outside the Head of Department’s room, waiting for an interview. He had got a scholarship to do postgraduate research, and was thinking of doing his thesis on the novels of Graham Greene. “I don’t know how you can bear the thought of another year in this place,” said Polly, and made up her mind that, instant to go abroad. She went to Italy to be a kind of au pair girl with an aristocratic Catholic family in Rome, a connection of one of the nuns at her old school. The head of the family was a count, a handsome, charming man who deflowered Polly quite quickly and skilfully on what was supposed to be her afternoon off. Afterwards she cried a little, but then she cheered up. The count gave her a present of money to buy clothes, telling her not to spend it all at once in case it would be noticed. A couple of months later she had an affair with the young Italian teacher from whom she took language lessons. After she slept with him the first time he said he would have offered to marry her if she had been a virgin, but as she wasn’t, he wouldn’t. Polly said she didn’t want to marry him anyway, upon which he sulked.

  She came home to England for Christmas, and at a New Year’s party got very drunk and went upstairs with a young man whose name she could not afterwards remember. They found an empty bedroom and thrashed about on the bed by the blue light of streetlamps shining through the windows. When the young man pulled off Polly’s knickers she crouched on all fours and presented her broad bottom to him, greatly to his astonishment. Both her Italian lovers had taken her in this position and she had assumed it was the usual one. Either this surprise, or the drink he had taken, unmanned the youth, for he was unable to perform, and Polly went back to Italy with a poor opinion of Englishmen. The trouble with Italians, on the other hand, was that they took no contraceptive precautions, and she had had a bad scare when her period was a week overdue once. However, with the help of a girl-friend who worked in the US Embassy, she got herself fitted with a diaphragm by an American doctor, and was therefore well prepared for her next love affair, this time with a photographer who threatened to kill himself if she didn’t yield to his passion. She didn’t believe him for a moment, but it was an exciting fiction.

  By this time Polly had stopped going to mass except for form’s sake. She had come to the conclusion that religion was all form and no content. She had watched the count who had seduced h
er receive Communion the following Sunday, and even if he had been to Confession in the meantime (which she doubted) he certainly hadn’t made a Firm Purpose of Amendment, for he made another pass at her on her very next afternoon off. He was a pillar of the Church, with some important function in the Vatican, yet everyone, even his wife, knew that he had a mistress established in a flat on the other side of the Tiber. At first Polly was shocked by the hypocrisy of Roman life, but gradually she got used to it. The trouble with English Catholics, she decided, was that they took everything so seriously. They tried to keep all the rules really and truly, not just outwardly. Of course that was impossible, it was against human nature, especially where sex was concerned.

  Polly explained all this to Michael in a coffee bar near the British Museum after her return to England in the autumn of 1955. Coffee bars, equipped with glittering Italian coffee machines that hissed like locomotives, were all the rage in London at this time. Polly impressed Michael immediately by asking the waiter for “uno capuccino” instead of just a white coffee. She had certainly acquired, he thought, a certain worldly wisdom as a result of her year abroad.

  “Italians tolerate adultery and brothels because they’re not allowed to divorce,” she said. “English Catholics have the worst of both worlds. No wonder they’re so repressed.”

  Michael nodded, causing his Brylcreemed forelock to fall forward across his eyes. “It’s the Irish Jansenist tradition,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “In penal days, Irish priests used to be trained in France, by the Jansenists, so that over-scrupulous, puritanical kind of Catholicism got into their bloodstream – and ours too, because, let’s face it, English Catholicism is largely Irish Catholicism.”