How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  Dennis continued going to mass, for the sake of the family, for the sake of a quiet life, but it had no meaning for him. Nothing had, except small, simple pleasures – a glass of beer at the local, a soccer game on TV – handholds by which he kept moving from hour to hour, from day to day. He worked excessively hard at his job to occupy his mind and tire himself out, staying behind at the office long after everyone else had left and often going in on Saturday mornings to the silent, empty factory. Sunday was the worst day of the week because there were so many hours to fill once they had all got back from church.

  When Michael and Miriam invited them to an agape, Dennis found an excuse not to go, and Angela went on her own; but intrigued by her account of the proceedings, he accompanied her on subsequent occasions and derived some entertainment, if not spiritual renewal, from these packed, intense gatherings. It amused him to listen to the conversation, to observe the wildly Utopian ideas that blossomed and bloomed recklessly in the hothouse atmosphere, and to interrupt, with a dry question or two, some confident dismissal of, say, industrial capitalism, by a young lecturer in, say, the philosophy of education, who had never put his nose inside a factory, and whose training and salary ultimately derived from wealth generated by industrial capitalism. Dennis posed his questions mildly and without animus, for he had no ideological commitment to industrial capitalism either – he just couldn’t see that there was a better alternative available, certainly not the models currently on offer from Russia or China, where most of these innocent Christian radicals would have withered away in labour camps long ago if they had had the misfortune to live there. It was the same with questions of religion: he couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss about what they called the authoritarian structure of the Church, why they worked themselves up into furious anger about the conservatism, paternalism, dogmatism of this or that bishop or parish priest. He could see that it would matter to Austin Brierley – after all, it was his job – and with Austin he sympathized; but he couldn’t see why the others didn’t just leave the Church if they found being in it so irksome.

  “But why should we leave, Dennis?” they cried. “It’s just as much our Church as theirs.”

  “But just as much theirs as yours,” he pointed out. “Why not live and let live? Everybody do their own thing. Latin masses and novenas for the old-fashioned, and this sort of thing –” he gestured at the table, the wholemeal crusts, the empty wine-glasses, the big Jerusalem Bible – “for the avant-garde.”

  “Oh, Dennis!” they said, laughing and shaking their heads. “You’re such a cynic. If the Church doesn’t renew itself totally, it’ll just fall apart in the next fifty years.”

  “It seems to be falling apart already, to me,” he said.

  So Dennis became a kind of court jester, a licensed cynic, to the group. They recognized that his commonsense was a useful check, or at least foil, to their radicalism, and were apt to glance slyly, almost flirtatiously at him when making some particularly extreme remark. It helped him to play this role that he had aged in appearance more than his contemporaries. His hair was thin and grizzled, his face lined and jowly, and he had a paunch. He smoked thirty cigarettes a day, and when people commented on this said, with a shrug, who wants to live for ever?

  Angela was still capable of turning heads when, rarely, she took some trouble over her appearance, but her body had thickened, she suffered from varicose veins and her brows were drawn together in a perpetual frown. When Nicole was four she got her into nursery school and herself began to train as a teacher of the educationally sub-normal, not with any serious intention of getting a job, but in order to learn how best to help Nicole’s development. The college was some twenty miles away and their domestic life became one of great logistic complexity, involving the use of two cars and the cooperation of sundry baby-sitters, child-minders and cleaning ladies. They drove fast and rather recklessly along the country lanes around their dormitory village, frequently scraping and denting their vehicles. Angela kept up with her voluntary activities and was frequently going out again when Dennis returned late from work. Once or twice a week, perhaps, if they happened to go to bed at the same time, and Angela was not feeling too tired, they would make love.

  It is difficult to do justice to ordinary married sex in a novel. There are too many acts for them all to be described, and usually no particular reason to describe one act rather than another; so the novelist falls back on summary, which sounds dismissive. As a contemporary French critic has pointed out in a treatise on narrative, a novelist can (a) narrate once what happened once or (b) narrate n times what happened once or (c) narrate n times what happened n times or (d) narrate once what happened n times. Seductions, rapes, the taking of new lovers or the breaking of old taboos, are usually narrated according to (a), (b) or (c). Married love in fiction tends to be narrated according to mode (d). Once or twice a week, perhaps, if they happened to go to bed together at the same time, and Angela was not feeling too tired, they would make love. Which is not to say that this was an unimportant part of their married life. Without its solace the marriage would probably have broken down under the successive crises of Nicole and Anne. But they themselves could hardly distinguish in memory one occasion of lovemaking from another. Over the years they had composed an almost unvarying ritual of arousal and release which both knew by heart. Their foreplay was a condensed version of their courtship: first Dennis kissed Angela, then he pushed his tongue between her teeth, then he stroked her breasts, then he slid his hand up between her thighs. They usually reached a reasonably satisfying climax, and afterwards fell into a deep sleep, which did them both good. By the next morning they retained only a vague memory of the previous night’s pleasure.

  It was much the same for most of the other couples. Now that they were using birth control, the sexual act had become a more frequent and, inevitably, more routine activity. For they did not take lovers or have casual copulations with strangers met at parties, or in hotels, or in aeroplanes – the kind of thing they read about in novels (even novels by Catholics) and saw in films and on television. Their sex lives were less dramatic, more habitual, and most of them, especially the men, worried about this occasionally. It was true that there was more sex in their lives than there had been – but was it as much as it ought to be? They had lost the fear of Hell, and staked their claim to erotic fulfilment, but had they left it too late? All of them were nearing the age of forty, they had spent more years on earth after leaving University than before going up, they were approaching – perhaps they had already reached – that hump in man’s lifespan after which it is downhill all the way. Death beckoned, however distantly. Their bodies began to exhibit small but unmistakable signs of decay and disrepair: spreading gut, veined legs, failing sight, falling hair, receding gums, missing teeth. The men were aware that their sexual vigour was in decline – indeed it seemed, according to some of the many articles on the subject that began to flood the public prints in the early seventies, that their sexual vigour had begun to decline long before they had ever exercised it, the male’s maximum potency occurring in the years from sixteen to twenty-three. Premature ejaculation, which had afflicted most of them in early married life, was no longer a problem; indeed, it could be a matter of some anxiety whether, after a few drinks or several nights’ lovemaking on the trot, one could ejaculate at all. As for the women, well, according to the same sources of information, their capacity for sexual pleasure was reaching its peak, but they were all well aware that the capacity of their bodies for arousing desire was rapidly diminishing. Making love with the light on was a calculated risk, unless it was very carefully shaded. Meanwhile, their older children were passing into puberty and adolescence and, stripped for the beach, reminded their parents more forcibly with each passing year of the physical lustre they had themselves lost (or perhaps never had).

  The permutations of sex are as finite as those of narrative. You can (a) do one thing with one partner or (b) do n things with one partner or
(c) do one thing with n partners or (d) do n things with n partners. For practising Catholics faithful to the marriage bond, there was only the possibility of progressing from (a) to (b) in search of a richer sex life.

  Michael became an addict of sex instruction films, of which there was a spate in the early seventies, mostly produced in Germany and Scandinavia, ostensibly because he was going to write an article about them, in fact because he enjoyed watching even the most clumsily simulated sexual intercourse, and was prepared to sit patiently through long, tedious conversations between white-coated doctors and bashful clients, and voice-over lectures illustrated by coloured diagrams reminiscent of evening class instruction in motor maintenance, for the sake of a few minutes’ practical demonstration by a reasonably handsome nude couple in full colour. Michael, with his literary education, was the least willing of all our male characters to admit that sex might become just a comfortable habit. He wanted every act to burn with a lyric intensity, and it was as if he thought that by studying it on the screen he might learn the knack of being simultaneously inside and outside his own orgasms, enjoying and appraising, oblivious and remembering. There was also the opportunity to master through these films the repertoire of postural variation by which married love might, the white coats assured him, be given a new zest, if one’s partner were willing to cooperate, which Miriam was not, alas; until one evening when he coaxed her into accompanying him to one of the seedy downtown cinemas that specialized in such films, and she said, afterwards, thoughtfully, as they walked to the bus stop, “I wouldn’t mind trying one or two of those things,” and he leaped ecstatically into the road, shouting “Taxi! Taxi!” Well, that had been a memorable night, to be sure, and for the next few weeks it was like a second honeymoon between them, and much more satisfying than the first. He went about his work in an erotic trance, hollow-eyed with sexual excess, his mind wandering in seminars and committees as he planned what variations they would experiment with at night. But it was not long before they had to settle between them the old question of how far you could go. in due course their erotic life became as habitual as before, if more subtly textured. It seemed to Michael that he was no nearer grasping the fundamental mystery of sex, of knowing for certain that he had experienced its ultimate ecstasy, than he had been twenty years before, staring at the nudes in the Charing Cross Road bookshops. Then he began to shit blood and quickly lost interest in sex altogether.

  Adrian sent away for an illustrated book on sexual intercourse, delivered under plain cover, which showed forty-seven positions in which coitus could be contrived. He tried to run through them all in one night, but Dorothy fell asleep on number thirteen. When he woke her up to ask which position she had found the most satisfying, she yawned and said, “I think the first one, Adie.”

  “You mean the missionary position?” he said, disappointedly. “But that’s what we always do.”

  “Well, I don’t really mind. Which do you like best, Adie?”

  “Oh, I like the missionary position best, too,” said Adrian. “It just seems rather unenterprising to do the same thing night after night.”

  “Why do they call it that?”

  The explanation tickled Dorothy, and afterwards, when Adrian heaved himself on top of her, she would sometimes chuckle and say, “What are you doing, you dirty old missionary, you?”

  Edward and Tessa experimented with positions not so much for the sake of erotic variety as to ease the strain on Edward’s back. They found that the most satisfactory arrangement was for Edward to lie supine and for Tessa to squat on top of him, jigging up and down until she brought them both to climax. At first Edward found this very exciting, but the passivity of his own role in the proceedings worried him, and he frightened himself sometimes with the thought that one day he might be incapable of even this style of copulation.

  Tessa herself was in a constant fever of vague sexual longing to which she dared not give definition. Her body sent messages which her mind refused to accept. Her body said: you are bored with this clumsy form of intercourse, you want to lie back and close your eyes and be possessed by a strong male force for a change, your body is a garden of unawakened pleasures and time is running out. Her mind said: nonsense, you are a happily married woman with four fine, healthy children and a good, kind, faithful husband. Count your blessings and find something to occupy yourself now that the children are growing up. So Tessa joined keep-fit classes and a tennis club. But the physical wellbeing that accrued only fuelled the fires of her libido. She exulted in the power and grace of her movements across the court or in the gym. In the changing-rooms afterwards she followed the example of the younger women who walked unconcernedly naked from their lockers to the communal shower heads, while the older and less shapely ones waited timidly for the curtained cubicles to become free. The full-length mirrors on the walls reassured her that her body could stand such exposure. From this exercise she returned home, glowing euphorically, to a jaded and weary spouse. Her body said: it would be nice to fuck. Her mind, deaf to the indelicacy, said: he’s tired, he was called out last night, his back is paining him.

  Tessa, in short, was classically ripe for having an affair, and in another milieu, or novel, might well have had one. Instead, she bought lots of clothes and changed more times a day than was strictly necessary, collected cookbooks and experimented with complicated recipes, read novels from the library about mature, sensitive women having affairs, and enrolled in the Open University.

  In spite of his sardonic remarks about campus permissiveness, Robin was fully conversant with the new polymorphous sexuality from his barbershop reading in Playboy and Penthouse, and anxious to try a few things himself. In this regard he found Violet suprisingly compliant, though unenthusiastic. In her perverse way she had decided that since she was in a state of mortal sin anyway by taking the Pill, it mattered little what else she did in the sexual line – that her best course of action was to let Robin burn out his lust and then repent everything at one go. Robin, for his part, found the listless, whorish impassivity with which she accommodated herself to his whims disconcerting, and it was as difficult as ever to bring her to a climax by penetration, whatever attitude they assumed. He quickly tired of sexual acrobatics. If he was honest, what he enjoyed most was a slow hand-job performed by Violet while he lay back with his eyes closed and listened to Baroque music on a headset. Violet herself was most readily satisfied by lingual stimulation, and gradually this arrangement became customary, each taking turns to service the other. “If we’re just going to do this,” Robin pointed out one night, “there’s no need for you to take the Pill.” “If I wasn’t on the Pill, I wouldn’t be doing it,” she replied. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Tell me something new,” she said.

  When Felicity started school, Violet tried to get herself a teaching job, but without success. She lacked a postgraduate certificate, and there was no great demand for women classics teachers. So to occupy herself, she signed on at the local art college to study sculpture. This increased their circle of friends, though Robin did not care for the art college crowd (or their art). Almost every weekend there was a party invitation deriving either from the University or the College. For Violet was socially in demand. She fascinated people, as she had fascinated Robin, by her behavioural volatility. Party hosts invited her because she brought a whiff of dangerous irresponsibility into their rooms, without which no party was truly successful, not the parties of that time and place anyway. Violet rarely disappointed them. Being more or less permanently on Librium or Valium, she was not supposed to drink alcohol, but when she arrived at the house, wherever it was, thrumming from cellar to attic with the bass notes of heavy rock and thronged with people chatting and eyeing each other in dimly lit rooms, she felt herself shaking with excitement and social terror and was unable to resist the offer of a glass of wine. Before long she would get intoxicated, and make a set at this or that man, dragging him on to the dance floor, where she would either attempt to shake herself to pieces
in frenzied jiving or, draped amorously round his neck, twitch negligently to the beat of some languorous soul ballad. Occasionally she would disappear with her partner into the dark recesses of the house or garden and allow him to grope her while they kissed with open mouths – sometimes, if she was feeling very abandoned, groping him back, but never allowing proper sex. The men she led on in this way sometimes turned nasty, but she usually had some ready lie to get herself out of the tightest corner: it was her period, she was pregnant and fearful of a miscarriage, she had cystitis, she had forgotten to take her pill.… Then the man, with good or ill grace, would desist, and having adjusted their dress, they would return to the party as nonchalantly as they could manage, and studiously ignore each other for the rest of the evening, commencing new flirtations in due course. At about two o’clock in the morning Violet would nearly, or actually, pass out from drink or exhaustion, and Robin would take her home, stumbling over other supine bodies in the hall and perhaps the front garden, and put her to bed. The next day she would drag herself off to mass with Felicity, speechless with hangover and guilt; but the next time they got an invitation to such a party, and Robin tried to refuse it, she would accuse him of being snobbish and of trying to deprive her of a normal social life. He did not know what to do. Sometimes he even thought of writing to Ann Field.