by David Lodge
“What?”
“You know ….”
Dennis stopped in the act of undoing his belt, and turned to face her. She was still fully dressed, her skirt up round her thighs. “Aren’t you on the Pill, then?”
“No. Why should I be?”
“I don’t know… I just thought….”
“I haven’t got a fella, you know. And I don’t go in for one-night stands.”
“I’m sorry, Lynn.” Red with embarrassment, he began to do up his belt, put on his shoes, his tie, his jacket. When he was dressed, he turned to her. She had not moved. He pulled down the hem of her skirt. “Can we try and forget this ever happened?” he said.
“No,” she said.
He made a helpless shrugging gesture. “Can we have a cup of tea, then?”
She laughed, sighed and sat up. Over tea he heard the story of her life, in brief. Brought up in a small town, chapel-going community; trained as a secretary and went to work for a local legal firm. Was seduced by her boss, a married man, and after an extended affair, became pregnant. Refused to have an abortion and left home to avoid disgracing the family. Dennis couldn’t help thinking how close they had come to re-enacting the whole sequence. As if reading his thoughts, Lynn said: “I had to stop you just now – I didn’t want it to happen again.”
“It was just as well,” said Dennis. “I think we were both a bit drunk.”
“You won’t ever do it now, will you,” said Lynn, with a wry smile. “I’ve missed my chance.”
“What chance, Lynn? I’m nobody’s chance – certainly not yours.” Lynn said nothing. “I should never have started it,” he said. “It was all my fault, I apologize.” Lynn stirred her tea, smiling enigmatically. Dennis looked at his watch. “I’d better be going.”
He kissed her again on leaving, trying to make it a chaste and chastened kiss. She clung to him for what seemed like hours, but did not attempt any further show of passion. He let himself out of the house.
When Dennis got home, Angela was in the kitchen, making mince pies. “What’s the matter with your face?” she said.
“It must be lipstick,” he said. “Doreen Wills trapped me under the mistletoe.”
Angela yelled with laughter. “Poor you!” She was in good humour, he noted. She liked Christmas, all the bustle and preparation and wrapping of presents, the orgy of spending.
“Where’s Nicole?”
“In the lounge. There’s a Blue Peter Special I said she could watch, in a few minutes.”
Nicole was sitting cross-legged on a cushion in front of the television. She was addicted to TV and her watching had to be carefully rationed. She scrambled to her feet and came to give Dennis a hug. “My Daddy!” she sighed, as if he had been away for weeks.
“How are you, love?”
“I’m all right.” She drew him gently to a chair facing the TV and sat on his knee, returning her gaze to the screen.
Nicole, at eight, was doing very well. She could swim like a fish, read quite advanced Ladybird books and write her name legibly on Christmas cards. She was cheerful and friendly and related well to other people. Dennis loved her dearly, yet he could never set eyes on her without a pang. All mongols looked more like each other than like their parents, but beneath the characteristic heavy, curved jaw, the snub nose and stubby unfinished ears, the short thick neck and barrel-shaped torso, he could discern a likeness to Angela when he had first met her – as though an X-ray portrait of Nicole would reveal the ghostly image of the beautiful, gifted girl she might have been but for the rogue chromosome. Nicole! How many times had he regretted the choice of that exotic name, suggestive of French chic and feminine allure!
Some old black-and-white film, a romantic melodrama by the look of it, was coming to an end. Hero and heroine were exchanging husky endearments against an obviously painted backdrop of lake and mountains. Violin music swelled in the background. “Waiting for Blue Peter?” said Dennis conversationally.
Nicole nodded, then pointed at the TV. “First they kiss,” she explained, “then it’s finished.” She had seen the endings of a lot of old films.
Perhaps, thought Dennis, it would be all right after all. When Lynn sobered up, she would see the afternoon’s events as a moment of madness which they could bury, like her letter, and carry on as before. No harm, thankfully, had been done. Perhaps it would even be easier between them, now that the pressure had been relieved. Pressure, safety valves – with these hydraulic images Dennis sought to reassure himself that all was well, that the episode was closed. But the next morning, while most of the family were still in their dressing-gowns after a late breakfast and the opening of presents, there was a ring on the doorbell and Lynn appeared on the step, a small package wrapped in gift paper in her hand. Her face was white and anxious.
“I bought this for your little girl, Nicole,” she said. “I forgot to give it to you yesterday.”
“Come in, Lynn,” said Dennis, with a sinking heart. “Come in.”
In Rome that Christmas, Pope Paul, assisted by the Cardinal Penitentiary, chipped with an ornamental tool at the bricked-up Holy Door in the facade of St Peter’s and thus inaugurated the Holy Year of 1975. A Holy Year, in case you are wondering, is a year in which the Pope grants a special plenary indulgence to all those who visit Rome and fulfil the usual conditions. The custom dates back to medieval times. In the corridors of the Vatican there was hope that the Holy Year of 1975 would knit the fraying fabric of the Church together by a worldwide demonstration of homage to the Holy See. This expectation, however, was disappointed. The Holy Year was not a success, not even for the Italian tourist trade. Catholics didn’t seem to be as interested as they used to be in obtaining plenary indulgences.
Throughout the world, the Church continued to boil with conflict and controversy. Since the Council, this had been chiefly provoked by the ecclesiastical Left, who wanted to identify the Church with socialism, abolish priestly celibacy, ordain women, demythologize the Scriptures, repeal Humanae Vitae, and so on. But now a new threat to unity was emerging on the Right, in the person of a French archbishop called Lefebvre, who was right wing enough to think that Pope Paul was a crypto-communist and that the Vatican Council had betrayed the Catholic faith to modernism. This point of view he cleverly associated with a campaign to bring back the old Latin mass – a cause which aroused ready support in the breasts of older Catholics nostalgic for the spiritual certainties of their youth and dismayed by the rapidity of recent change. Tridentine masses, celebrated in defiance of ecclesiastical authority by priests sympathetic to Lefebvre, attracted large congregations and great publicity. The threat of schism loomed. Frantically, Rome tried to steady the rocking boat: Lefebvre was admonished, but so was the modernizing theologian Hans Küng, for questioning the doctrine of papal infallibility.
The Catholics for an Open Church Paschal Festival was going to be a sort of counter-demonstration to Archbishop Lefebvre’s movement, and a showcase for the pluralist, progressive, postconciliar Church, as Michael explained to Polly and Jeremy over aperitifs one weekend in February, when his and Miriam’s long-mooted visit to the converted oast-house had finally materialized. The Festival programme was settled in outline: the participants would assemble on Holy Saturday morning and throughout the day there would be a continuous programme of lectures, workshops and panels on theology, liturgy, ethics and pastoral practice, leading up to the Easter Vigil and Midnight Mass celebrated by Father BEDE, the College chaplain (since Austin was still under suspension), followed by an agape and all-night party, and culminating in a special Easter Dawn Service which had yet to be devised, but would probably involve sacred dancing by nuns.
“Far out,” said Jeremy. “I want to film it. The whole thing.”
“Really?” said Michael.
“It’s perfect for an Elton special. We’ll call it The New Catholics’.” Jeremy now worked for a commercial television company and had his own networked documentary every fortnight, called the Elton Special.
“Adrian will be tickled pink,” said Michael.
“So will you, admit it,” said MIRIAM, squashing Michael since politeness restrained her from squashing Jeremy. She was suspicious of Jeremy, a small but shapely man, with a handsome head and a mischievous, slightly vulpine smile, like a fox in a fable. She couldn’t decide whether she positively disliked him, but she certainly didn’t trust him – or, for that matter, Polly, who was a charming and efficient hostess, but slightly abstracted in manner, as if she were all the time wondering what use she could put you to in her next column. The affluence of the Elton ménage also made MIRIAM feel defensive. If their own style of furnishing was Habitat and Handed-down, this was Heals and Harrods: a kitchen straight out of the colour supplements, an Italian dining suite of solid oak and tubular steel, Scandinavian real-hide module furniture in the living room, Japanese hi-fi and video equipment banked up against one wall like a showroom display, hand-woven curtaining fabrics, wall-to-wall Wilton everywhere, a mosaic-topped coffee table covered with the latest weekly and monthly magazines, and a new hardback novel in its pale lemon jacket that had been widely reviewed in the last few days. MIRIAM could see Michael covertly fingering everything and examining the brand names in barely controlled paroxysms of envy. The Eltons had two Connemara ponies in their stable, and a swimming-pool and a sauna and a sheepdog and a trail-bike and a rowing machine and a table-tennis table and a Victorian rocking horse and a stunning Swedish au pair who made Martin’s ears glow bright red just by looking at him. Martin and the other two children were as enchanted by this palace of pleasure as Michael. When it had begun to snow heavily at lunchtime and MIRIAM anxiously wondered aloud whether they would be able to get away on the following day, her youngest, Elizabeth, had burst out, “Oh, Mummy, I do hope not!” to the great amusement of the Elton children. These, MIRIAM had to admit, were less spoiled than one might have expected, though infinitely more precocious and sophisticated than her own offspring. Abigail, at thirteen, was already dressing with flair, and had a way of patting her hair with both hands, and of curling up in an armchair, that showed an intuitive sense of her own allure, whereas Miriam’s Helen, nearly two years older, was still a tomboy; and Jason, at fifteen, looked as tall and mature as the seventeen-year-old Martin. MIRIAM watched the interaction of these children with painful interest, scarcely able to restrain herself from intervening to coax from Martin and Helen the qualities she knew they possessed. She wondered fleetingly if she had failed them somehow, they seemed so shy and gauche beside the Eltons; but seeing Michael envying, coveting, flattering, affecting a worldliness that wasn’t their true style at all, she braced herself to keep the family’s conscience, to resist the blandishments of Mammon.
“Don’t you think,” she said now to Michael, as they sipped their pre-dinner drinks around the log fire, with the curtains cosily drawn against the snow, “that having TV cameras all over the place will inhibit people?”
“No way,” Jeremy intervened. “After a few hours, they’ll forget we’re there, believe me. Sometimes I can hardly credit it myself, the things people will do in front of the cameras. We were making this programme the other day about a wedding, a sort of portrait in depth of a typical suburban wedding….” He laughed reminiscently, and Polly took up the story.
“Yes, you see, Jeremy wanted to get the expression on the girl’s face when she woke up in the morning and realized it was her wedding day, and would you believe it, they let him park a cameraman in her bedroom all night.”
“Then he overslept, and we had to get the bride to fake it after all,” said Jeremy. “But honestly I think, if we’d asked, they’d have let us tag along on the honeymoon and film their first fuck.”
“I suppose they were getting paid,” said MIRIAM frostily. Jeremy admitted that there was usually a fee in such cases. “And shall we get paid if you film our Festival?”
“Oh, I don’t think COC would worry about that, darling,” said Michael.
“Why not? I don’t see why the TV people should get us for nothing.”
“Miriam’s perfectly right, of course,” said Jeremy. “There would certainly be some money in it for your organization.” He did not seem in the least discomfited by Miriam’s insistence, but rather to respect her for it, “I’ll write to your chairman – what’s his name again?”
“Adrian. Adrian Walsh.”
Polly gave a little shriek. “Not that tall bony boy in Cath. Soc. with glasses and the huge missal?”
“Polly – why don’t you come to the Festival with Jeremy?” said Michael. “There’ll be a lot of old friends besides ADRIAN there.”
“I don’t know if I could bear it,” said Polly. “It’s just the sort of thing to make one feel incredibly ancient. Perhaps I will. But supposing I got converted back to the Catholic Church? I’d have to leave you, darling,” she said, with a mock-disconsolate moue at Jeremy, “and make you go back to your horrid bitch of a first wife.”
“No, no,” said Michael. “If you get converted to our kind of Catholicism you don’t have to worry about that kind of thing. You can do whatever you think is right.”
“Really?” said Jeremy, pricking his ears.
“Well, within reason,” said Michael.
After dinner (home-made asparagus soup, a fragrant chicken casserole, chocolate soufflé, Wine Society Beaujolais) they played a tournament of electronic TV tennis with the children; then, when these had retired to bed, or to listen to pop records in Jason’s room, or to watch TV in Abigail’s, Jeremy distributed whisky and liqueurs and showed some recent Elton Specials on his video cassette equipment. The programmes were all identical in technique. There was no explanatory commentary, just a montage of images and recorded voices. Jeremy explained that his method was to shoot everything in sight, ask people questions, and then make an edited account of the results. The general effect, MIRIAM felt, was to make the subjects look rather foolish. In the course of this entertainment, Gertrude came into the room to ask if she could take a sauna bath.
“Sure, you know how to turn it on,” said Jeremy.
“Isn’t that rather extravagant, darling?” Polly murmured, after the girl had gone. It was the first evidence of the weekend that the concept of extravagance was recognized in this household. Perhaps, MIRIAM thought, the fact that Gertrude was young and pretty had something to do with it. Jeremy brushed aside the objection. Someone else might like a sauna later.
“I’ve never had a sauna bath,” said Michael. “What’s it like?”
“There you are!” cried Jeremy. “We’ll all have a sauna together. It can seat four.”
“Together?” said Miriam doubtfully.
“It’s all right, Miriam, relax.” Jeremy twinkled. “We always offer guests the choice: with towels or without.”
“With, then,” said Miriam firmly.
“What d’you have to do?” said Michael, beady-eyed. “Beating yourself with twigs comes into it, doesn’t it?”
“Whisking is optional,” said Jeremy. “And we don’t have the proper birch twigs anyway. Could fix you up with some tomato canes, if that sort of thing turns you on.”
“Basically,” Polly explained, “it’s a wooden cabin, with a stove in the middle, that gets extremely hot, but so dry that it’s not uncomfortable. You sit in it for ten minutes or so, and sweat a lot, and then you go and have a cold shower and then you wait a bit and go back into the sauna and then shower again, as many times as you like.”
“I’ve known Gertrude go through the cycle six times,” said Jeremy. “She’s a real addict.”
“What’s the point of it?” said Miriam.
“Well, it’s like lying in the sun and then diving into a swimming-pool and then lying in the sun again.”
“And what’s the point of that?”
Jeremy laughed. “It’s pleasant.”
“It sounds like eating salted peanuts to make yourself thirsty to me,” said Miriam.
“That’s a good idea,” said Jeremy. “Let�
��s all have another drink.”
“Not if we’re going to sauna,” said Polly.
“I’ve had quite enough to drink anyway,” said MIRIAM. “And so have you, Michael,” she added as he held out his glass.
“Tell you what,” said Jeremy. I’ll mull some wine over the fire afterwards.” He bared his sharp-edged teeth. “And show you some of my special bedtime videotapes.”
“Not Deep Throat, for heaven’s sake, darling,” said Polly.
“Deep Throat? Have you got that here?” said Michael eagerly.
“Friend of mine brought back a pirated tape from the States,” said Jeremy. “It’s hilarious.”
“It’s quite disgustingly crude,” said Polly.
“I’d be jolly interested to see it, I must admit,” said Michael.
“What’s it about?” said MIRIAM.
“Oh, you must have read about it, MIRIAM,” said Polly. “It’s about this girl, Linda Lovelace, who can only come when she’s sucking men off. A typical male chauvinist fantasy.”
“But they surely can’t show that in a film,” said Miriam.
“Oh yes they can,” said Polly.
“Well, don’t let’s argue about it now,” said Jeremy, “let’s have our sauna.”
Michael and Miriam went to their room, as instructed, to undress and put on bathrobes. “You’ll find a couple of spare ones in the cupboard,” said Polly, and inevitably these garments were posher than their own dressing-gowns. While Miriam was undressing, Michael came up behind her and ran his hands over her body. “What fun, eh?” he murmured, nibbling her ear.
“I’m not going to watch that film,” said Miriam.
“Don’t be a spoil-sport, Miriam,” he wheedled.
“If he puts that film on,” she said, “I’m going straight to bed. To sleep.”
“That’s blackmail,” said Michael, taking his hands away. “That’s using your body to extort obedience to your will.”
“Well, it’s either me or Linda Lovelace,” said Miriam. “Take your pick.”
“Why d’you want to stop me from watching a blue movie? I mean, why do you feel so threatened by it?”
