How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  “How do you think the human race managed before Valium was invented?” Miriam demanded.

  “That’s a good question,” he admitted. “Of course, there was always alcohol, laudanum, and so on. But I sometimes wonder if there hasn’t been a quantum leap, lately, in the average human being’s expectation of happiness. I mean, in times past, your average chap was content if he could fill his belly once a day and avoid disease. But now everybody expects to be happy as well as healthy. They want to be successful and admired and loved all the time. Naturally they’re disappointed, and so they go round the bend.”

  Edward advanced his theory partly in self-defence. He did not seriously believe that it accounted for poor Violet’s psychological condition, which seemed more like a hereditary curse or congenital defect, with no reason or justice behind it. He still felt a vestigial interest in and responsibility for Violet, remembering vividly the day he had taken her to the hospital after she started throwing crockery around in Lyons cafeteria. As they were driving north that Christmas, 1973, to stay with his parents, Edward thought they might break their journey to call on Robin and Violet. Tessa wasn’t keen. “There won’t be time,” she said. “Anyway, how d’you know she isn’t still in hospital?” So Edward phoned Robin at his University to enquire.

  “Violet’s out of hospital,” said Robin. “She’s been out for some time.”

  “Oh, good,” said Edward. “She’s better then?”

  “Well, she is in a way,” said Robin. “Though as far as I’m concerned she’s just exchanged one form of religious mania for another. She’s joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

  “Good God! You’re not serious?”

  “Someone she met in the hospital converted her.”

  “But it’s all nonsense, isn’t it?”

  “Complete nonsense. But then, so is Catholicism as far as I’m concerned. Shall I give her a message?”

  “Well, we may be driving through your neck of the woods soon,” said Edward tentatively.

  “Well, do drop in, by all means,” said Robin. “Violet will be glad to see you both.”

  But Tessa declined to share the visit. “You go,” she said, “while I take the children round the Cathedral. We’re too many to descend on someone just out of a mental ward.” So Edward made the visit alone.

  It was nearly fifteen years since they had seen each other, but Violet had not changed as much as he had expected. She smiled shyly at Edward when she opened the door to him, and led him into a living-room that was comfortably furnished but seemed oddly bleak. Robin was out. Edward met Caroline, a rather sulky young woman whom Violet introduced as their student lodger but who seemed to comport herself more as a member of the family, and Felicity. Edward asked Felicity what Father Christmas was going to bring her and received the disconcerting reply that Father Christmas wasn’t Christian. Felicity looked at her mother for approval as she delivered this rebuff, and was rewarded with a smile. Edward suddenly realized why the room seemed so bleak: there were no cards or decorations in evidence.

  Caroline took Felicity off and left Edward and Violet alone. They made small talk for a while, but soon Violet turned the conversation to religion. “Do you read the Bible, Edward?”

  “Not much,” he admitted.

  “Oh, you should, it’s a great comfort,” she said earnestly. “I got better, you know, through reading the Bible. I’ll give you one before you go.”

  “Well, we have got one at home, actually.”

  “But this one is different. It’s got notes.”

  “Well, mine’s got notes as well,” said Edward with a smile.

  “Ah, yes, but they’d be Catholic notes,” said Violet. “And the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon, you know.”

  “Violet,” said Edward. “You don’t really believe that.”

  “Oh yes,” said Violet. “It’s all in the Bible. That’s why the Catholic Church used to try and stop people reading it. The Catholic religion isn’t true Bible religion, you know.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. For instance, there’s no hell, like they used to tell us at school, only gravedom.”

  “Gravedom?”

  “That’s the meaning of the Hebrew word Sheol. And there’s no such thing as the soul. When you die, you die, you’re just dust, nothing. You can’t feel anything, so you can’t suffer. You can’t be punished. Your spirit goes back to God who created it, until the Coming of the Kingdom.”

  “What will happen then?” said Edward.

  “Then God will resurrect the dead and reign for a thousand years.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then there will be a Judgement.”

  “Ah,” said Edward.

  “But you won’t be judged on what you did in this life,” said Violet. “You’ll just have to pass the test.”

  “What test?”

  “To witness your loyalty to God,” said Violet. “But after a thousand years of the earthly paradise, with no death or sickness or suffering or violence, a thousand years of happiness and peace for the whole world, who wouldn’t choose God?”

  “And when is this thousand years due to start?” said Edward.

  “Quite soon,” said Violet, getting up to fetch a book from a bookcase. “The Bible says there will be great earthquakes and pestilence and food shortages. Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. You only have to read the newspapers. Here.”

  She put into Edward’s hand a small booklet open on a historical chart headed Events of History, Past and Present. It began:

  and ended:

  “Looks as if we’d better make the most of 1974, then,” said Edward.

  Angela’s father died in the spring of 1974. He had to go back into hospital at the end, and visiting him there in a ward full of coughing old men, shortly before he died, Dennis was deeply shocked. The papers that day were full of a terrible air-crash – a jumbo jet had fallen out of the sky near Paris, killing hundreds instantaneously – but cancer seemed to Dennis an excellent argument for dying in an air-crash as air-crash as he walked away from the hospital with Angela. She had been up and down the motorway regularly in the past few months to visit her father, so was prepared for his wasted appearance, his slow, shadowy gestures, his tired voice, the eyes that seemed to have retired to the back of his skull, like the eyes of some small animal cornered in a cave. He seemed to know he was dying, and had gratefully accepted the Last Sacraments, but throughout his illness he had been very insistent that his condition was not lung cancer, making the point to all his visitors. As it seemed to give him some kind of comfort to believe this, they naturally humoured him. Perhaps it was a comfort to themselves, too, for at the funeral most of the mourners seemed to be lighting up compulsively every few minutes and then hastily stubbing out their cigarettes for fear of appearing irreverent. The ashtray in one of the cars became jammed with dog-ends and began to smoulder so that the vehicle drew up at the cemetery filled with a nicotine fog, the occupants coughing and weeping and clutching their throats as they fell out on to the gravel drive. Dennis had the odd feeling that he was the only person who saw anything grimly funny about this. The note of disregarded black farce persisted. At the reception after the funeral, held at the house of one of Angela’s married sisters, there was a rat-tat on the open front door and a penetrating middle-class female voice trilled, “Cancer here!” but the murmur of conversation in the living-room scarcely missed a beat. Dennis went to the door and pushed coins into the woman’s collection box. “Thank you so much,” she said. “Having a party, are you? That’s nice.” Watching her prance back down the garden path, Dennis pushed a cigarette between his lips; then, on second thoughts, replaced it in the packet. In the car on the way home that evening he told Angela that he was going to give up smoking. She grunted sceptically.

  “Did you see that girl of Tom’s?” she said. “That Rosemary.”

  The family occasion had brought back a working-class timbre to her voice. It
made him think of tight-lipped housewives in head-scarves gossiping on doorsteps. “She seems quite nice,” he said. “Infant teacher, isn’t she? Does your mother guess?”

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Tom’s been very clever, the way he introduced her. She’s become quite a family friend. I suppose he thinks it’ll take off some of the shock when he tells them he’s going to marry her.”

  It was late when they got home and Dennis was tired from the drive, but he felt restless and tense. “Feel like making love?” he said to Angela as they were retiring – diffidently, because she had shown little enthusiasm for sex during her father’s illness. Rather to his surprise, she agreed. Why? he wondered, as he went through the ritual of foreplay. Was it some obscure jealousy of Tom’s girl that she was appeasing? Or was she pursuing this crazy idea that Christians ought to be cheerful and throw parties when their parents died? It certainly seemed to be on principle rather than for pleasure, for she did not appear to have a climax. But Dennis did, and fell gratefully asleep.

  The next day was a Saturday, but Dennis went into his office to see if anything important had cropped up on the previous day. He drove through the gates of the factory with a wave to the security man, and parked in the space that had his car number freshly painted on the tarmac (he was Director of Manufacturing now). He let himself into the empty building with his master key. The air inside smelled stale, slightly tainted with chemical odours, and the benches in the workshops, the shrouded typewriters in the offices, had a dead, abandoned look. But he always liked being alone in the empty factory, soothed by the peace, the silence, the curious sense of freedom.

  On his desk, neatly arranged, was Friday’s mail, each item clipped to its appropriate file, a record of incoming telephone calls, and a sheaf of freshly typed letters and memoranda which he had dictated on to tape on Thursday evening. Dennis smiled approvingly. Lynn was an excellent secretary, the best he’d ever had. At first he had found her difficult to relate to – a shy, softly-spoken Welsh girl who dropped her head at the slightest discouragement, and screwed up her lips in a sceptical smile when complimented on her work, as if she suspected irony. Dennis certainly never intended it: over the year and a half she had worked for him she had proved efficient, conscientious and fiercely loyal. He lived in perpetual dread that she would tell him one day she was leaving to get married.

  As he addressed himself to his papers, Dennis patted his pockets automatically for his cigarettes, then ruefully remembered that he had given up smoking. The need for nicotine stabbed in his veins, but he controlled it and picked up the first of the letters awaiting his signature. One figure needed correction, and he flipped up the top sheet to emend the carbon copy underneath. The carbon was, however, of a different letter. A love letter evidently – or part of one. Dennis detached the sheet, scanned it and turned it over in bewilderment. There was no apostrophe at the beginning or signature at the end. It looked as though Lynn had been doing some private correspondence while he was away and had got it mixed up with the firm’s. Amusement at this discovery quickly gave way to disappointment at her lapse and, more surprisingly, jealousy. Then, as Dennis read the letter more carefully, it suddenly struck him that it was addressed to himself. He began to tremble. His hand shook so violently that he had to lay the sheet of paper flat on the desk to read it. He read it over and over again. There was nothing specific in it, no names or other references that would put its meaning beyond doubt, it was all vaguely expressed longing, protestation, self-abasement, like the words of a popular song: but there were hints of problems and difficulties of age and status that fitted the situation of Lynn and himself.

  The need for a smoke had become intolerable. Dennis broke into the firm’s hospitality room with his master key and found a couple of stale Rothman’s in a cabinet drawer. Lighting up with a spill touched to the electric fire in his office, he inhaled hungrily and considered what to do. The most important thing, obviously, was to find out whether the letter really was addressed to himself. That would have to wait till Monday. In the meantime he decided not to tell Angela, in case he was mistaken. And if he wasn’t mistaken …? Well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it. He folded the letter into his wallet and took it home.

  Several times in the course of the weekend Dennis surreptitiously examined the letter. Its ambiguity remained unresolved until five past nine on Monday morning. Then, he had only to glance at Lynn’s face as she came into his office with the morning’s mail to know. She blushed a deeper red than he had ever seen anybody blush before. Then she went very pale. Then she ran out of the room. Neither of them had spoken. She came back a few minutes later, wearing her outdoor clothes.

  “Where are you going, Lynn?” he said.

  “To hand in my notice,” she said. “Save you the trouble.”

  “What would you want to do a silly thing like that for? You know I can’t manage without you.”

  Lynn hung her head and said nothing.

  “Take your coat off and come back and take some letters,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, this one you did on Friday doesn’t seem to have a carbon. Be a good girl and see if you can find it, will you?”

  Neither of them made any further reference to the love letter. Office life went on much as before – almost. Sometimes Dennis surprised Lynn gazing soulfully at him, sometimes she might have caught his eyes resting on her longer than was strictly necessary. She was not a strikingly beautiful girl, but she was pretty in a quiet way, with delicate features, a small waist and fine brown hair falling straight to her shoulders. It astonished and moved Dennis that this fair young thing should have fixed her affections upon his broken spirit and gone-to-seed body, and he could no more bring himself to rebuff her than he could have stamped on a fledgling that had fallen out of a tree and lay helpless and palpitating at his feet. He had not asked her to fall in love with him, he had not wished or intended that she should do so, but since she evidently had, Dennis bowed his head in resignation, he accepted the gift of her devotion almost as if it were another blow of fate, like the birth of Nicole or the death of Anne. Of course, it was much nicer – indeed it in some ways healed the wounds of those events. The secret knowledge that he was loved restored Dennis’s will to live. He whistled in the morning while shaving. The economic recession that had plunged his managerial colleagues into deep gloom merely stimulated him to greater efforts at cutting costs. He succeeded in giving up smoking, and took up golf to keep his waistline under control. As the friends who introduced him to the game played on Sunday mornings, Dennis stopped going to mass. Since his eldest, Jonathan, had mutinied against mass attendance anyway, Dennis no longer felt obliged to set an example, and Angela acquiesced with only a token protest. She for her part would sometimes make the long drive to Michael’s college for the student mass because Nicole liked the guitars and folk hymns.

  At the College (where Michael was now Head of the English Department) sexual morality was in a fascinating state of flux. Many of the students who had come up as good, obedient Catholics had, in the course of their studies, either lost their religious faith altogether or espoused a radical and highly permissive version of it; and it was well-known to the students and some staff that many couples among the student body were having fully consummated relationships under the very roof of the College. The residential accommodation was segregated only by floor, and supervision was not strict. Little ingenuity was needed to smuggle a girl or boy friend into one’s room for the night. The teaching staff found the idea of this nocturnal traffic almost as exciting as did the students who were actually conducting it. They debated anxiously with each other their ethical responsibility in the matter. To put a stop to it seemed impossible without invoking the full weight of authority, informing the Principal and the Governors; and once the clergy, especially the Bishop, got any wind of it there was no knowing what would happen – the whole place might be closed down, or a highly puritanical regime imposed which would frighten away all the liveliest
and cleverest students. Besides, these members of staff were not at all sure in their own minds whether premarital intercourse was necessarily wrong any more. “I mean,” said Fiona Farrell, a colleague of Michael’s, a good-humoured spinster of fifty who had a flat in college and a pastoral responsibility for the girls on her floor, “with Bede teaching situation ethics in the Theology Department, it’s hardly surprising the young people should decide it’s all right to sleep with each other – always providing, of course, that it’s a serious interpersonal relationship based on genuine trust and a non-exploitative giving of oneself to another. Isn’t that the jargon? I daresay I’d do the same in their place. My God, when I think of my own student days! The nuns at College wouldn’t even let us lie out on the lawns in summer.”

  “You mean with your boy friends?”

  “Are you joking? Boys weren’t allowed within miles of the place. No, I mean if you took a book into the grounds in summer you had to sit bolt upright on the grass to read it. It was considered immodest to lie on the grass. I don’t know whether they were afraid we’d be pollinated by the bees or something.…”

  Fiona, who had come to terms with her own history of sexual repression by making a running joke of it, was holding forth at a dinner party given by Michael and Miriam for a few friends, including Dennis and Angela. Fiona had got them on to the ever-interesting topic with a spicy anecdote about a cleaner at the college who had that very morning found a contraceptive sheath in the girls’ loo on Fiona’s floor, and had been restrained with some difficulty from reporting it to the Principal. “Just think,” she sighed, “I didn’t even know what those things were for until I was thirty-five. I used to think people had been playing about with balloons in the parks.”