How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  “Actually, you know,” said Michael, “it isn’t all cant about serious interpersonal relationships and so on. I reckon most of the students who sleep together while they’re here get married eventually.”

  “Michael finds it rather amazing,” said Miriam sarcastically, “that anyone should want to marry a girl after he’s managed to have sex with her.”

  “All right, I admit it. That was our generation, wasn’t it? You weren’t allowed to have sex outside marriage, so naturally having sex came to seem the main point of getting married.” He opened a third bottle of Sainsbury’s Catalonian Red. “And don’t pretend it was a one-sided attitude. Girls hung on to their virginities on the same principle in those days.”

  “I hung on to mine too long,” Fiona moaned. “Now I’d gladly give it away. Or auction it for CAFOD.”

  “Those long engagements,” said Michael. “What were they but institutionalized postponements of consummation? Extended foreplay sessions. What d’you think, Dennis?”

  “I think our courtship must have been the longest drawn-out foreplay session in the history of sexuality,” said Dennis.

  “You could have slept with me if you’d wanted to,” said Angela, piqued, and a little intoxicated.

  “Oh yes, a likely story!” he retorted.

  “You could have – once.” Angela challenged and held his gaze, until a long-suppressed memory surfaced, of orange light inside a tent, Angela lying back in a two-piece swim suit, inviting him with her arms, her lips.

  “Oh, that,” he muttered, blushing. “That was just once.”

  “Oh! Oh! Tell us, tell us!” they chorused. But Dennis changed the subject, and asked about the Paschal Festival which Catholics for an Open Church were planning for the following Easter. It was to be held at Michael’s college and was expected to attract members and fellow-travellers from all over the country.

  “Adrian feels the movement needs a bit of a boost,” said Michael. “Now that HV’s no longer such an issue, we need to open up a wider range of areas for Catholic renewal. It should be quite an occasion. We’ve invited Dan Figuera, you know, the South American liberation theology man. Ruth is going to do her charismatic bit. And Miles has agreed to be on a panel on sexuality. Did you know he’s come out, by the way?”

  “Come out?” said Angela blankly.

  “Admitted he’s gay. He lives with an ex-monk called Bernard now.”

  “I didn’t think Catholics could be practising homosexuals,” said Angela.

  “Well, officially they can’t, of course,” said Michael. “But I suppose they can just decide to follow their own consciences, like us with birth control. Or the students who sleep with each other before they get married.”

  In the car on the way home, Dennis said musingly, “I wonder what would have happened if we had made love that day in Brittany.”

  “With our luck, I’d probably have got pregnant,” said Angela. “Then we’d have had to get married, with you in the Army, on National Serviceman’s pay. A proper mess.” She yawned. “I hate going out mid-week,” she said. “I feel so shattered the next day.” Angela had a part-time job now, teaching in the ESN school that Nicole attended. They hardly needed the money, but the work gave her satisfaction, and she was able to keep a close eye on Nicole’s development.

  “No, but supposing you hadn’t got pregnant … I wonder if we’d have got married at all.”

  “You mean, once you’d got me into bed, you would have lost interest in marriage – like Michael was saying?”

  “No, I was wondering if you’d have married me. You never really liked it, did you, for a long time, sex?”

  “We weren’t very good at it for a long time,” said Angela.

  “That’s what I mean. If we’d made love that afternoon, it might have put you off for good.”

  “Oh, what’s the point of speculating,” she said. “So many things might have been different. We might never have met at all. I nearly went to Liverpool University instead of London – Dad didn’t want me leaving home, God rest him.” She sighed and yawned again.

  Dennis drove slowly and deliberately, still feeling a little sluggish from the wine at dinner. He debated inwardly whether to propose sex when they got home, and then reflected how unthinkable it would have been to the young man in the orange tent in Brittany that one day he would be free to possess Angela and would be wondering whether to bother. To lift the oppression of this thought, he urged her to make love when they were getting ready for bed. “If you like,” she said. But when he came from the bathroom she had fallen asleep with the light on and a towel ready to hand on the bedside cabinet. He could not deceive himself that he was unduly disappointed.

  While they were clearing up after the dinner party, Michael and Miriam had a row. She accused him of provoking an embarrassing scene between Angela and Dennis. Nonsense, he said, it was all in fun. We were all a bit merry, except you. That’s another thing, said Miriam, you pour out far too much wine, you only think a party’s going well if everybody’s half-seas over, it’s not necessary. I hate dinner parties, anyway, she said, scraping plates angrily into the garbage can, you always tell me to cook too much, and then look at the waste. Yes, said Michael sarcastically, you could feed a whole street in Calcutta for a week on our leftovers. Well, it’s true, said Miriam, and while we’re on the subject, I want to covenant a tenth of our income to CAFOD. You’re insane, said Michael, that’s over five hundred pounds a year. If the developed countries are going to help the Third World, said Miriam, they’ve got to accept a drop in their standard of living. We could do without the car, for instance. I’ll give up my car if everyone else will give up theirs, said Michael, but I’m damned if I will otherwise. Is that what you call Christian leadership? said Miriam. It’s what I call common sense, said Michael, what use is my five hundred pounds to the Third World, most of it would disappear into the pockets of bureaucrats and middlemen anyway. All right, pay me a proper wage for keeping house, and I’ll make my own arrangements, said Miriam. Don’t be ridiculous, said Michael. It’s not ridiculous, said Miriam, white with anger now. Anyway, I’m fed up with housekeeping, I’ll get a job of my own. There aren’t any music teaching jobs, said Michael, they’ve all been cut back in the freeze. I don’t want to teach music anyway, said Miriam, I want to be a social worker. A social worker! Michael exclaimed, but you’re not trained. I’ll train, then, said Miriam, there’s a course at the Poly. You’re going to train as a social worker, said Michael, at great public expense, and ours too, because you won’t get a grant, in order to give half your salary away to the Third World? That’s right, said Miriam, any objections? What about the kids, he demanded, you always used to say that you didn’t want them to be latch-key children. They’re old enough to cope, said Miriam, and if you’re so worried about them you can arrange your teaching so that you get home when they do.

  Michael snatched up the garbage pail and took it outside to the back garden, where he relieved his feelings by banging the dustbin lids. When he returned to the kitchen with a fully worked out account of why he couldn’t reorganize his teaching schedule, Miriam had gone to bed, leaving him the rest of the washing-up. Moodily he made himself a cup of instant coffee. The mild lechery which he had been fuelling throughout the evening with wine and sexy talk had evaporated, and he knew exactly what an unfriendly posture Miriam would have adopted in bed upstairs – her face turned towards the wall, her shoulders hunched, her nightdress pulled down and locked between her ankles. These rows, which had become more frequent of late, frightened him, not so much because of the aggression they released in Miriam but because they made him wonder whether they should ever have married each other. Miriam was a puritan, an ascetic, self-denial was no hardship for her, it was the only way she could be happy, whereas more and more he felt himself to be an epicurean. But it was not clear to him whether they had both changed since they had married, or, brainwashed by the cult of matrimony in their youth, had tacitly conspired to conceal and ignore
their real identities. There were times when Miriam seemed like an utter stranger, and their married life like a dream from which he was just beginning to But to what?

  Dennis couldn’t help wondering whether Lynn was sexually experienced or not. He presumed she must be, if even Catholic students were sleeping together these days, but he knew almost nothing about her private life, except that she was twenty-five, came from South Wales, and had a flat some miles from the factory. She alluded occasionally to attending evening classes for pottery, but otherwise seemed to have no social life. One day he commented on this enigma to a colleague, who said, “Didn’t you know? I thought it’d been all round the shop. She’s got a kid.”

  “A kid?”

  “What they call a one-parent family, these days, isn’t it? In other words, some bloke put her in the family way, and then scarpered.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want to marry him,” said Dennis.

  “Perhaps. Silly girl should’ve got it adopted, then. Nice girl like her could get married easy. But who’d take on some other bloke’s little accident?”

  The discovery gave Lynn a new interest and a new pathos in Dennis’s eyes. At the same time it made her crush on him a more worrying responsibility. Sometimes he wondered if it would not be kinder to get Lynn transferred to another job, even another factory, so that she could shake off her infatuation and perhaps meet some decent fellow who would be glad to marry her and give the child a father. But he hesitated and procrastinated, because he was unwilling to seem cruel in order to be kind, and because, in truth, he couldn’t bear the prospect of parting from her. Then, at Christmas, their relationship changed decisively.

  On Christmas Eve, work stopped on the shopfloor and in the stores and offices at midday, and a kind of serial party began, made up of lots of little parties, stretching round the factory like a paper-chain, with a great deal of drinking and seasonal fraternization between management and workers. Dennis did his bit in this respect, touring the different departments with a pocketful of cigars and taking a drink with each group of merrymakers. An atmosphere of boozy bonhomie and tawdry licence spread through the buildings. In the corridors Dennis crunched crisps and broken glass underfoot, skirted couples kissing greedily, mouth on mouth, still holding unfinished drinks and smouldering cigarettes in their outstretched hands, and heard behind the doors of the women’s toilets the sound of young girls unaccustomed to liquor moaning and being sick. In the corner of one of the stores a woman packer, her face a raddled, grinning mask of powder and lipstick, was doing high kicks on a table, urged on by a rhythmically clapping crowd. It was the same every year at this season, one afternoon on which the accumulated repressions and frustrations of the rest of the year were discharged in a squalid orgy, the memory of its excesses being quickly buried in the stupor of a domestic Christmas. Usually Dennis merely tolerated the custom with a skin-deep show of party spirit, but today he felt genuinely excited. A project was forming in his head and would not be removed: under cover of this feast of misrule he could safely give Lynn a kiss, something, he realized, he had been wanting to do for some time. There would be nothing odd or untoward about such a gesture – on the contrary, bosses were kissing their secretaries all over the factory. Lynn could not imagine that he meant by it anything more than a friendly sign of affection, nor would it give scandal if they were observed. The more he thought about this idea, and the more nips of scotch he took on his tour of the factory, the more excited Dennis became, and as he approached his own department again he was gripped by a hollow, breathless feeling of erotic expectation more intense than anything he had felt in many years.

  “Give us a kiss, then, Dennis!”

  Doreen Wills, from Personnel, normally the hardbitten career woman incarnate, was ogling him from the door of the hospitality room, a glass in her hand and a paper hat askew on her upswept hairdo. She pointed upwards to a sprig of mistletoe pinned to the door frame. He gave her a perfunctory peck on the cheek, but she twisted her face round to glue her lips to his. “Happy Christmas, Dennis, darling,” she said, breathing gin and sweet vermouth into his face. He responded absently, looking over her shoulder into the room where an impromptu disco was in progress. “You know, I could really fancy you, Dennis,” said Doreen. “Come and have a dance.”

  “Sorry, Doreen, I don’t go in for that kind of dancing,” he said. “Have you seen Lynn anywhere?”

  “Ah! Want to get her under the mistletoe, eh?”

  “No, just got some work to finish off,” he lied, nettled by the shrewdness of her guess.

  “For Christ’s sake, Dennis, it’s Christmas Eve! Anyway, I think she’s gone home.”

  “Home?” Dismayed, Dennis rushed off to Lynn’s office. It was empty, and her coat had gone from its hanger behind the door. Angrily Dennis kicked this door shut, cutting off the sounds of carousing, and strode into his own office by the communicating door. Lynn, dressed in her outdoor clothes, looked up from behind his desk.

  “Oh,” she said. “I was just leaving you a card.” She held out a Christmas card to him like an alibi. He approached her and took it across the desk, in a queer reversal of their usual roles. “It’s very nice,” he said, glancing at it. “Thank you.”

  “I had a job getting a religious one,” she said. Then, leaning forward to peer at him, “You’ve got lipstick all over your face.”

  “Doreen Wills caught me under the mistletoe.”

  “Lucky you,” she said drily. Her back was to the fading light of the December afternoon and he could not discern the expression on her face as she spoke.

  “Unlucky, you mean.” He rubbed furiously at his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Don’t do that, you’ll just make it worse. Here, have a Kleenex.” She rummaged in her handbag.

  “Pity we don’t have a bit of mistletoe in here,” he said, attempting a light-hearted tone that came out as a strangled croak.

  She looked up quickly. “I’ll remember to get some next year, then,” she said, holding out the tissue.

  His hand closed over hers and pulled her gently forwards over the desk. “I can’t wait that long,” he said, “to wish you a happy Christmas.” Supporting herself with her free hand, Lynn turned her cheek to receive his kiss. He had forgotten how soft a young girl’s skin could be. “That wasn’t much of a kiss,” he said, keeping hold of her hand. “Come round here.”

  She shook her head.

  “Please.”

  “You come, if you want to,” she whispered.

  Without letting go of her hand, as if performing some stately dance, he stepped round the end of the desk and drew her into his arms.

  What followed took Dennis completely by surprise. He had had in mind a single, wistful kiss, a tender but decorous embrace that would convey his appreciation of Lynn and his affection for her, but at the same time confirm their mutual awareness of the circumstances that made any deeper relationship impossible. Lynn, however, clung to him as if she would never be prised loose, she flattened herself against him like a climber marooned on a cliff-face, she shuddered in his arms and sighed and moaned and ran her fingers through his hair and thrust her tongue between his teeth as if she wanted to climb inside his mouth and wriggle down his throat. Dennis’s feeble lust was soon swamped by this demonstration. He was appalled by the intensity of the passion he had aroused, and daunted by the task of seeming equal to it. At last Lynn peeled her lips from his, sighed and nestled against his shoulder. Dennis, stroking her back as if comforting a child, stared past her head at the dusk gathering over the company car-park. What now, he thought, what now? What does one do next? What does one say? There was nothing he could say, he realized, after trying out a few phrases in his head, that wouldn’t sound either coldly dismissive or recklessly committing. It seemed to Dennis that a stark choice already stared him in the face between being a cowardly prig or an unfaithful husband; that, incredible as it seemed, one kiss had tumbled him irretrievably into a maelstrom of tragic passion and insoluble
moral dilemmas.

  “Shall I take you home?” he said at last. It was the most neutral thing he could think of, but the way Lynn nodded agreement immediately convinced him that, without intending it, he had sealed some sexual contract with her in the code which governed such matters.

  In the car, neither of them spoke, except for her to give, and him to acknowledge, directions. Dennis drove like an automaton. He felt deprived of free will, as if the wheels of his car were locked into grooves carrying him inexorably towards adultery. He felt no excitement or lust, only a sense of doom and a fear that he would fail sexually, humiliating both of them.

  He stopped the car outside a semi-detached Victorian villa. “Will you come in?” Lynn said. It did not seem to Dennis that she meant it as a real question or that he had a real choice. He followed her into the ground-floor flat. There was a pushchair in the hall. “I suppose you know I’ve got a little boy?” she said.

  “I heard rumours,” he said. “I didn’t like to pry.” The sight of the pushchair had given him hope of a reprieve. “Where is he now?”

  “I’ve got a friend who collects him from the nursery. She keeps him till I call.”

  The main room in the flat was furnished as a bed-sitting room. Lynn lit the gas fire, took off her coat, and flopped down on the divan bed. “Too much Cyprus sherry,” she said, closing her eyes.

  Dennis stooped over her, hopeful again. “Are you all right?”

  She put her arms round his neck and pulled him down beside her. Dennis stroked her breasts through the woollen dress she was wearing, put his hand under her skirt and slid it up over legs glazed in nylon tights. Now that he could see no way of avoiding the sexual act, he was impatient to get it over. “Why don’t you take this off?” he said, plucking at her dress; and sat up himself to take off his jacket, tie, shoes.

  This cannot be happening, he thought. Behind him, Lynn said: “Have you got something?”