by David Lodge
Michael had long ago overcome his own scruples and resumed the full practice of his religion. A sensible priest, to whom he had unburdened himself, had assured him that his was a common problem, no more than a venial sin, as long as he was sorry for having given way to temptation. Since Michael always felt melancholy after masturbating, this was a satisfactory solution. Anyway, he had shed the habit since falling in love with a student of music called Miriam, whom he met at an NUS farm camp, picking strawberries. She was extremely pretty, with green eyes and copper-coloured hair, though, ironically enough, almost flat-chested. It was in fact because she had no bosom worth looking at that Michael had looked more closely than usual at her face and into her eyes, and discovered there a person whom he very much liked. When Polly rang up out of the blue and proposed a meeting, some instinct had warned him against bringing Miriam along, and he was glad he hadn’t when Polly began to hold forth about sex.
“So you’ve got a girl friend at last, Michael,” she said, when he made some allusion to Miriam. “Is she a Catholic?”
“She’s taking instructions.”
“Goodness, it must be serious.”
“We’re thinking of getting engaged, actually.”
“D’you really want to settle down so soon, Michael? Don’t you want to have some fun, first?” Polly’s expression made it fairly clear what kind of fun she had in mind.
“How can you, if you’re a Catholic, Polly? I mean, either you are or you aren’t. I am. I often wish I wasn’t – life would be more fun, agreed. But I am, and there it is.”
“Oh, Michael! Just like a Graham Greene character.”
“Have you read his new one?”
“No, what’s it like?”
“It’s about the war in Indo-China. Not like the others, really.” Michael had been impressed by The Quiet American, but slightly disturbed too. It seemed morally and theologically confused – there was not the same stark contrast between the Church and the secular world that you got in the earlier novels. Michael’s interest was more than academic: in some oblique way the credibility of the Catholic faith was underwritten for him by the existence of distinguished literary converts like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, so any sign of their having Doubts was unsettling. Polly, however, didn’t want to talk about Graham Greene, but about her love affairs.
Michael listened, fascinated and appalled. Here was sin incarnate. If Polly were to walk out of the coffee bar now, and under a bus, there was not much hope for her immortal soul. For dissolute agnostics there might be some mercy, but Polly had been instructed in the True Faith. She knew the rules and the penalties for not keeping them, whatever she might say about the instinctive passion of the Italians.
“It’s the sun, you see, Michael. It makes everything seem so different.” She drained her transparent Pyrex cup, leaving a large red mouth-shape on the rim. Michael, who was practised in eking out a cup of espresso for an hour and a half, watched her with dismay. “Would you like another?” he asked.
“Please, and perhaps just a tiny piece of that chocolate gâteau.”
Polly had grown plumper, Michael thought, she looked almost fat, and under the heavy makeup her complexion was not good. By middle age she would be bloated and raddled. He thought of his own lean, lissome sweetheart with complacency.
“Italian men are an awful nuisance,” said Polly, “pinching you and ogling you all the time on the street and on buses. But at least they notice you.” She looked around the coffee bar at the unnoticing young men, clerks in pin-stripe suits and students in fisherman’s knit sweaters and Harris tweed sports jackets. “God!” she sighed. “England is so boring.”
That same autumn, Violet went back to College to begin her final year all over again. She had quite recovered from her nervous breakdown, her eczema had cleared up, and she looked very pretty. The Professor in charge of the Department declared that he would personally undertake tutorial responsibility for her work. He was a short man who looked quite tall sitting behind his desk because of his large, handsome head and luxuriant silver-grey beard. He reminded Violet of pictures of God the Father speaking out of clouds. She felt his interest in her progress was a great honour and was determined to prove worthy of it.
The Professor appointed four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon for her tutorial, which allowed it to overrun the statutory hour. At five o’clock his secretary would knock discreetly and come into the room with letters to be signed. Then, after she had gone, as the corridors of the Department fell gradually silent, and the winter dusk turned to darkness outside the window, he would draw the curtains, and light a single standard lamp for her, shining down on her notebook, leaving him behind his desk in shadow, and bring out a bottle of sherry and two glasses, and then discourse about the classical world to Violet, about things he never alluded to in his lectures, about pagan fertility rites, phallus worship, Dionysian orgies and sacred prostitutes. “I hope I do not shock you, Violet,” he would murmur, stroking his beard as if soothing a pet, and she would shake her head vigorously, though in truth she often thought she would have been shocked if he had not been her professor and it had not been a tutorial.
Then, one day, as he was holding forth in his melodious cadences, she knocked over her sherry glass and, jumping to her feet in reflex response, saw to her horror and amazement that he had his fly open and was playing with himself under the desk. She stared at him for a moment, then dropped to her knees and began scrubbing furiously at the carpet with a handkerchief. He rose from his place and came round the desk to stand over her. “Violet,” he said, after several minutes had passed. “Get up.”
She rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go,” she said.
“Violet,” he said. “Have pity on an old man.” He tugged and gnawed at his beard as he spoke.
“You’re not old,” she said, pointlessly.
“I am fifty-five years old and have been impotent for the last fifteen.
My wife has left me. Sometimes I can coax a little juice to flow. It does no harm to anyone, does it?”
Violet went home in a trance, twice nearly being run over, and tossed and turned in bed, wondering what to do. The Professor’s appeal had not fallen on deaf ears. She did indeed pity this great man, the distinguished scholar of whom the entire Department stood in awe, so starved of love that he was reduced to the ignoble expedient in which she had surprised him. Violet had a strong impulse to sacrifice herself, to become a sacred prostitute, to heal his broken sex. It would be a sin, technically; but also, she thought, a corporal work of mercy.
She went back into College with this purpose vaguely in mind, and was dismayed to discover a note in her pigeonhole stating that she had been transferred to another tutor. With some difficulty, she managed to obtain an interview with the Professor. He looked at her with fear in his eyes, tugging and gnawing at his beard.
“You realize,” he said, “that if you make a complaint I shall deny everything.”
Violet was unable to speak.
“In any case,” he said, “my conscience is clear. No genuinely innocent girl would have sat there all these weeks listening to what I told you without a flicker of protest.”
Instead of being outraged by this insinuation, Violet was completely convinced of its justice. It revived and confirmed her old feelings of guilt. There must be something about her, she thought, that brought out the worst in people: there was her cousin in the attic, and the tramp in the shelter, and now the Professor. And she had to admit that she had derived a certain thrill from the Professor’s stories of pagan filthiness. She went back to her digs and opened a book and stared at it for several hours without taking in a word. Then she got a letter from her new tutor asking why she hadn’t been to see him. He was a young man, recently appointed to the Department. She went into College to tell him that she was going to withdraw from the course, this time for good, for she could feel another nervous breakdown coming on.
“What will you do?” asked the tutor, who invited he
r to call him by his first name, Robin.
“I don’t know,” said Violet. “I might become a nun.”
Robin laughed, but not unkindly. He was intrigued by Violet, and besides, she was pretty.
“What was the problem with the Old Man?” he asked casually. “Made a pass at you, did he?”
It was a bold but happy gambit. To Violet it came as a huge relief that this stranger spontaneously assumed that the Professor and not herself might have been responsible for what had happened. She did not tell Robin what that was, but she agreed to carry on with her studies under his supervision. His tutorials also overran the statutory hour, but they were exclusively academic in content. Violet had a lot of work to make up, and he was determined to prove his prowess as a teacher by getting her through Finals.
One day he proposed taking her to see Donald Wolfit in Oedipus Rex, as it would help her with her tragedy paper. Robin found her an agreeable companion, deferential but not sycophantic, and full of quaint opinion and anecdote deriving from her Irish Catholic background. (Her parents had emigrated from the West of Ireland to England when she was only three, but for most of the war years she had been educated at a convent boarding school in Ireland, and she returned to the West frequently for holidays.)
“Which of the six sins against the Holy Ghost do you think is the worst?” she said in the Tube, à propos of nothing in particular.
“I don’t even know what they are, Violet.”
She rattled them off, parrot-fashion, like a child in school: “Presumption, Despair, Resisting the Known Truth, Envy of Another’s Spiritual Good, Obstinacy in Sin, and Final Impenitence.”
He considered. “Resisting the Known Truth,” he said at length.
“Isn’t that just typical of a university lecturer! I think the worst is Final Impenitence. Imagine, at the moment of death, when you’ve everything to gain and nothing to lose by being sorry for your sins … Final Impenitence.” She gave a faint shudder that was not entirely affected. “I had an uncle in Limerick, they say he died raving against the Holy Ghost. ‘Get that damned bird out of here!’ he kept shouting, on his deathbed. Of course, he was delirious. But it wasn’t very nice for Aunty Maeve. It naturally made her wonder about the state of his soul.”
Subsequently Robin took Violet out to other plays and films that had no obvious relevance to her course. When he escorted her home afterwards she did not invite him in because, she said, her landlady would not like it (in fact, because her room was like a pigsty and she was ashamed to let him see it). They said goodbye on the porch and shook hands. On the third such occasion, he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, and the time after that on the lips. It seemed to Violet that they must be courting; and though Robin never initiated any discussion of their feelings for each other, he did impress upon her the importance of concealing from the rest of the Department the fact that they were meeting outside tutorials. This threw a romantic aura of the clandestine over their relationship. Violet could hardly believe her good fortune. Robin’s slim, dark good looks, his soft, supple clothes of velvet corduroy, suede and cavalry twill, his cool self-assurance and his dry, understated conversation, were to her the quintessence of Englishness, the culture which her family affected to despise but secretly admired.
Violet was very happy that spring, and sailed through her exams in June without stress. After she had sat her last paper, Robin took her to an Italian restaurant in Soho for dinner. Between the chicken alla cacciatore and the zabaglione he reached across the table and covered her hand with his.
“Violet, darling,” he said, and her heart thumped, because he had never called her darling before, “you know I care for you very much, don’t you?” She nodded. “And I think you care for me?”
“Oh, Robin,” she said. “You know I do.”
So this was it. She had often wondered what it would be like to be proposed to, and her imaginings had been surprisingly close to reality: soft lights, a bottle of wine, cosy intimacy. It took her some time to realize that it was not exactly marriage that Robin was proposing, at least not yet. He wanted her to spend a weekend away with him somewhere, “To see how we suit each other physically.”
“Oh, no,” she said, taking her hand away. “I couldn’t do that, Robin. Isn’t that what they call a trial marriage? Catholics aren’t allowed.”
But Robin was a very persuasive young man, and played cannily on Catholic belief in his arguments. Wouldn’t it, he asked rhetorically, be madness for two people to contract an indissoluble marriage without knowing whether they were sexually compatible?
“But if they loved each other, wouldn’t it be bound to come right in the end?” Violet pleaded.
“Unfortunately there are case histories which prove otherwise.”
After a few bouts of this kind of discussion, Violet gave in. Robin borrowed a friend’s car and took her to a hotel in the country for a weekend.
“For heaven’s sake, drive carefully,” she said, chain-smoking in the passenger seat. “I’m in a state of mortal sin, you know.”
He laughed and glanced sideways at her. “But you haven’t done anything yet.”
“No, but I mean to, and that’s just as bad. Worse, in a way.”
“Worse?”
“I couldn’t say I was carried away by the impulse of the moment, could I?”
“No,” he said gleefully, “you couldn’t say that.” Robin never knew how seriously to take Violet’s religious scruples, but overcoming them certainly gave the adventure an extra frisson of excitement.
“Suppose I get pregnant?” she said after a while.
“You needn’t worry about that. I shall take the necessary precautions.”
“That’s another mortal sin on top,” she said gloomily.
After they had checked into the hotel, Violet refused to leave their room because, she claimed, everyone in the lobby had immediately guessed they weren’t really married; so Robin had to have dinner sent up at considerable extra cost and trouble. Still, he was willing to indulge her on this occasion. When the waiter had cleared away the dishes, Robin knocked on the door of the bathroom, where Violet was hiding, and said: “Time for bed.”
“I’m going to have a bath,” she said.
He pushed the door hopefully, but it was locked. When she came from the bathroom half an hour later, Violet was swathed in a dressing-gown from her chin to her feet and insisted on total darkness before she would get into bed. Robin found it difficult to fit his contraceptive sheath in these conditions, particularly as it was not an operation he had performed all that often. Violet also kept his erotic drive in check by her continual chatter.
“You’ve done this before haven’t you Robin how many times I mean how many girls were they not compatible or were you not thinking of marrying them anyway did you just want their bodies for a night?”
“For heaven’s sake, Violet, do be quiet.”
“I’m sorry, Robin, it’s just that I’m so nervous.”
“Just try and relax.”
In the pitch darkness, impeded by the heavy quilt on the bed, he pushed his index finger in and out of Violet’s vagina, hoping that he was stimulating her clitoris. The manual of sexual technique that he had studied rather more frequently than he had actually practised intercourse had laid great stress upon this item of foreplay.
“I’m sorry, darling, but that’s hurting,” Violet said after a while.
He pulled his finger away as though it had been burned.
“It doesn’t mean that we’re incompatible, Robin,” she said anxiously. “It’s just that you were rubbing in the wrong place.”
“I’m sorry,” he said huffily, “to be so clumsy.”
“Shall I show you the right place?” she whispered.
This was better. She took his long index finger, that had so often pointed out to her the syllabic pattern of Latin verse, and gently guided it on to her favourite spot. As he rubbed, he felt her pelvis heave like a swimmer lifted by a wave, and her l
egs opened wide and his own member stiffened in response.
They made love four times that weekend, and on each occasion Violet had an orgasm under digital stimulation, but not during the act itself, when Robin had his. This worried him somewhat in the light of the textbook, so that when Violet asked him if he thought they were compatible he said he thought they both needed time to think over the experience of the weekend. She looked crestfallen. “Let’s sleep on it,” he said. “We’ve already slept on it,” she said, “we’ve done nothing else all weekend.” He kissed her and said, “You’re lovely and I love you, but there’s no need to rush into anything.” This was as they were preparing to go home.
“I’m not going away with you for another of these weekends, you know,” she said.
“Do you have to say it like that?” he said, pained by her lack of tact.
“Yes, because I’m going to Confession at the very first church we come to and I must have a firm purpose of amendment or it won’t be any good.”
As soon as they returned to London, Robin was buried in examination scripts – not university exams, but “O” and “A” level papers which he marked to enhance his meagre salary. Violet helped him check the marks and fill in the mark sheets. One day as they were doing this she said, “Robin, I think I’m pregnant.”
“What? You can’t be.”
“Those things don’t always work, do they? I’m three weeks overdue, and this morning I felt sick when I got up.”
“My God.” He stared at her, appalled. It was, he supposed, possible that fumbling with his sheaths in the dark he had nicked one with a fingernail or otherwise mismanaged the business.
“I’m not trying to blackmail you into marrying me,” said Violet. “But I thought you ought to know.”
“If it’s true,” he said heavily, “you’ll just have to get rid of it.”
“You mean, have it adopted?”
“I mean have an operation. It can be arranged, I believe, at a price.” He looked miserably at the pile of scripts.
