Persse evaded the question by asking one of his own. “What about the father of your child?” he said. “Shouldn’t he be helping you with money?”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“Wasn’t he a guest at your hotel? It should be possible to trace him from the register.”
“I wrote him a letter once. It came back with ‘Not Known At This Address’ on it.”
“Who was he? What was his name?”
“I’m not telling,” said Bernadette. “I’ve no wish to get involved with him again. He might try and get Fergus off me. He was a queer gloomy sort of fellow.” She looked again at her watch. “I really must go now. Thanks for the salad.” She looked at it apologetically. “Sorry I had no appetite.”
“Never mind that,” said Persse. “Look, Bernadette, if you ever change your mind about going back to Ireland, there’s a priest in Rummidge who will help you. He has a fund for repatriating young Irish people. The Our Lady of Knock Fund.”
“Our Lady of the Knocked-Up would be more like it,” said Bernadette, sardonically.
“Knocked-up?”
“Haven’t you heard that expression before?”
“Indeed I have. Anyway, this priest is called Father Finbar O’Malley—”
“O’Malley, is it? Sure his people have the farm three miles up the road from ours,” said Bernadette. “His mother is the biggest gossip in the parish. He’s the last person in the world I’d go to. Remember now—don’t tell Mammy and Daddy what I’m doing. You can give them my love.”
“I will,” he said.
She leaned across the table and brushed his cheek with her lips. He inhaled a heady waft of perfume. “You’re a good fellow, Persse.”
“And you’re a better girl than you pretend,” he said. “Goodbye,” she said huskily, and hobbled away without a backward glance, unsteady on her gold high-heels.
Soon she was lost to his sight in the restless ebb and flow of humanity on the concourse floor. Persse meditatively consumed her uneaten ham salad. Then he went to the Aer Lingus desk, where they told him apologetically that the flight to Shannon was full. There was, however, a British Airways flight to Dublin leaving shortly, with plenty of spare seats, if that was any use to him. Persse decided to fly to Dublin and hitch from there to Limerick. He accordingly hurried to Terminal One, and presented himself at the checkin desk for the Dublin flight.
“Hallo again,” said Cheryl Summerbee. “Did you find the chapel all right?”
“Yes thank you.”
“Do you know, I’ve never been inside, all the time I’ve been working here. What’s it like?”
“Rather like an airplane,” said Persse, glancing anxiously at his watch.
“Nice and quiet, I expect,” said Cheryl, leaning forward on her elbows and bringing her blue, slightly askew eyes quite close to his.
“Yes, it is very peaceful,” said Persse. “Er, excuse me, Cheryl, but doesn’t the plane leave quite soon?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll catch it,” said Cheryl. “Now let’s find you a really nice seat. Smoking or non-smoking?”
“Non-smoking.”
Cheryl tapped on her computer keyboard, and frowned at the screen. Then her brow cleared. “16B,” she said. “A lovely seat.”
Persse was the last to board the plane. He couldn’t see anything special about seat 16B, which was the middle one in a row of three. The window and aisle seats were both occupied by nuns.
The dinner—_gazpacho_, roast guinea fowl and stuffed peppers, fresh sliced oranges in a caramel sauce, and a dolcelatte cheese—was superb, as was the wine, made and bottled, Fulvia informed Morris, on the estate of her father-in-law, the Count. They ate by candlelight in a panelled dining-room, shadows and highlights flickering over the dark wooden surfaces of walls and table, discreetly waited on by a maid and a manservant. At the conclusion of the meal, Fulvia regally dismissed this pair to their own quarters, and informed Morris that coffee and liqueurs awaited them in the drawing-room.
“This lavish hospitality overwhelms me, Fulvia,” said Morris, leaning up against the white marble mantelpiece and sipping his coffee, a thimbleful of sweet, scalding liquid the colour and consistency of pitch, with a caffeine kick like a thousand volts. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
Fulvia Morgana looked up at him from the sofa where she was half-reclined, the slit skirt of her white robe falling away from one shapely leg. Her red lips curled back over two rows of sharp, white, even teeth. “Soon I show you ‘ow,” she said; and the possibility, which Morris Zapp had been mentally assessing all evening with a mixture of alarm and incredulity, that Fulvia Morgana meant to seduce him, now became a certainty. “Sit ‘ere,” she said, patting the sofa cushions, as though addressing a pet dog.
“I’m OK here for a minute,” said Morris, setting down his cup and saucer on the mantelpiece with a nervous rattle, and busying himself with the lighting of a cigar. “Tell me, Fulvia, who d’you think will be in the running for this UNESCO chair?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Tardieu, perhaps.”
“The narratologist? Hasn’t his moment passed? I mean, ten years ago everybody was into that stuff, actants and functions and mythymes and all that jazz. But now…
“Only ten years! Does fashion in scholarship ‘ave such a short life?”
“It’s getting shorter all the time. There are people coming back into fashion who never even knew they were out of it. Who else?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Von Turpitz is surely to apply.”
“That Nazi?”
“‘E was not a Nazi, I believe, just a conscripted soldier.”
“Well, he looks like a Nazi. Like all the ones I’ve seen, anyway, which is admittedly only in movies.”
Fulvia abandoned her pose on the sofa and went to the drinks trolley. “Cognac or liqueur?”
“Cognac would be great. What about Turpitz’s last book—did you read it? It’s just a rehash of Iser and Jauss.”
“Don’t let us talk any more about books,” she said, floating across the dimly lit room with a brandy glass like a huge bubble in her hand. “Or about chairs and conferences.” She stood very close to him and rubbed the back of her free hand over his crotch. “Is it really twenty-five centimetres?” she murmured.
“What gives you that idea?” he said hoarsely.
“Your wife’s book…”
“You don’t want to believe everything you read in books, Fulvia,” said Morris, grabbing the glass of cognac and draining it in a single gulp. He coughed and his eyes filled with tears. “A professional critic like you should know better than that. Novelists exaggerate.”
“But ‘ow much do they exaggerate, Morris?” she said. “I would like to see for myself.”
“Like, practical criticism?” he quipped.
Fulvia did not laugh. “Didn’t you make your wife measure it with her tape measure?” she persisted.
“Of course I didn’t! That’s just feminist propaganda. Like the whole book.”
He lurched towards one of the deep armchairs, puffing clouds of cigar smoke like a retreating battleship, but Fulvia steered him firmly towards the sofa, and sat down beside him, pressing her thigh against his. She undid a button of his shirt and slid a cool hand inside. He flinched as the gems on one of her rings snagged in his chest hair.
“Lots of ‘air,” Fulvia purred. “That is in the book.”
“I’m not saying the book is entirely fictitious,” said Morris. “Some of the minor details are taken from life—”
“‘Airy as a beast… You were a beast to your wife, I think.”
“Ow!” exclaimed Morris, for Fulvia had dug her long lacquered nails into his flesh for emphasis.
“‘Ow? Well, for example, tying ‘er up with leather straps and doing all those degrading things to ‘er.”
“Lies, all lies!” said Morris desperately.
“You can do those things to me, if you like, taro,” Fulvia whispered into his ear, pin
ching his nipple painfully at the same time.
“I don’t want to do anything to anybody, I never did,” Morris groaned. “The only time we ever fooled around with that S/M stuff, it was Desiree’s idea, not mine.”
“I don’t believe you, Morris.”
“It’s true. Novelists are terrible liars. They make things up. They change things around. Black becomes white, white black. They are totally unethical beings. Ouch!” Fulvia had nibbled his earlobe hard enough to draw blood.
“Come,” she said, rising abruptly to her feet.
“Where are we going?”
“To bed.”
“Already?” Morris consulted his digital watch. “It’s only ten after ten. Can’t I finish my cigar?”
“No, there isn’t time.”
“What’s the hurry?”
Fulvia sat down beside him again. “Don’t you find me desirable, Morris?” she said. She pressed herself seductively against him, but there was a faintly menacing glint in her eyes which suggested that her patience was running out.
“Of course I do, Fulvia, you’re one of the most attractive women I’ve ever met,” he hastened to assure her. “That’s the trouble. You’re bound to be disappointed, especially after Desiree’s write-up. I mean, I retired from this sort of thing years ago.”
Fulvia drew away and stared at him, dismayed. “You mean, you’re…”
“No, not impotent. But out of practice. I live on my own. I jog. I write my books. I watch TV.”
“No love affairs?”
“Not in a long while.”
Fulvia looked at him with compassion. “You poor man.”
“You know, I don’t miss it as much as I thought I would. It’s a relief to be free of all the hassle.”
“‘Assle?”
“Yeah, you know—all the undressing and dressing again in the middle of the day, and showering before and after, and making sure your undershorts are clean and brushing your teeth all the time and gargling with mouthwash.”
Fulvia threw back her head and laughed loud and long. “You funny man,” she gasped.
Morris Zapp grinned uncertainly, for he had not intended to be that funny.
Fulvia stood up again, tugging Morris to his feet. “Come on, you funny man, I will remind you of what you are missing.”
“Well, if you insist,” he sighed, stubbing out his cigar. In this more relaxed mood Fulvia seemed less intimidating. “Give me a kiss,” he said.
“A kiss?”
“Yeah, you remember kissing. It used to come between saying ‘Hi’ and fucking. I’m an old-fashioned guy.”
Fulvia smiled and pressed the length of her body against him. Pulling his face down to meet her own, she kissed him long and fiercely. Morris ran his hands down her back and over her hips. She appeared to be wearing nothing underneath the white robe. He felt desire stirring in him like dull roots after spring rain.
Fulvia’s bedroom was a deeply carpeted octagon, lined, walls and ceiling, with rose-tinted mirrors that multiplied every gesture like a kaleidoscope. A bevy of Fulvias stepped, naked as Botticelli’s Venus, from the white foam of their discarded dresses and converged upon him with a hundred outstretched arms. A whole football team of Morris Zapps stripped to their undershorts with clumsy haste and clamped hairy paws on ranks of peach-shaped buttocks receding into infinity.
“How do you like it?” murmured Fulvia, as they stroked and grappled on the crimson sheets of the huge circular bed.
“Amazing!” Morris said. “It’s like being at an orgy choreographed by Busby Berkeley.”
“No more jokes, Morris,” said Fulvia. “It isn’t erotic.”
“Sorry. What would you like me to do?”
Fulvia had her answer ready. “Tie me up, gag me, then do whatever you desire.” She pulled from a bedside cabinet a pair of handcuffs, leather thongs, sticky tape and bandages.
“How do these work?” said Morris, fumbling with the handcuffs.
“Like so.” Fulvia slipped the cuffs over his wrists and fastened them with a snap. “Ha, ha! Now you are my prisoner.” She pushed him down on to the bed.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
What she was doing was pulling off his undershorts. “I think your wife exaggerated just a leetle, Morris,” she said, kneeling over him, her long cool fingers busy.
“Ars longa, in life shorter,” Morris murmured. But it was like the last despairing witticism of a drowning man. He closed his eyes and surrendered himself to sensation.
Then Morris heard a thud from below stairs, as of a door closing, and a male voice called out Fulvia’s name. Morris opened his eyes, his body rigid with apprehension, apart from one zone which was limp with it. “Who’s that?” he hissed.
“My ‘usband,” said Fulvia.
“What?” A score of naked, handcuffed Morris Zapps leapt from the bed and exchanged looks of alarm and consternation. “I thought you said he was stuck in Rome?”
“‘E must ‘ave decided to drive,” said Fulvia calmly. She raised her head, and her voice, to call out something in Italian.
“What are you doing? What did you say?” demanded Morris, struggling with his undershorts. It wasn’t easy, he discovered, to put them on while wearing handcuffs.
“I told ‘im to come up.”
“Are you crazy?” How am I supposed to get out of here?” He hopped around the room with his undershorts half on and half off, opening closet doors, looking for a second exit or somewhere to hide, and tripped over his own shoes. Fulvia laughed. He shook the handcuffs an inch from her Roman nose. “Will you kindly take these fucking things off my wrists,” he said, in a whisper that was like a suppressed scream. Fulvia searched lackadaisically for the key in a drawer of the bedside cabinet. “Quick, quick!” Morris urged frantically. He could hear someone mounting the stairs, humming a popular song.
“Relax, Morris, Ernesto is a man of the world,” said Fulvia. She inserted a key into the handcuffs and with a click he was free. But with another click the bedroom door opened, and a man in a pale, elegant suit, grey-haired and deeply tanned, came in. “Ernesto, this is Morris,” said Fulvia, kissing her husband on both cheeks and leading him across the room to where Morris was hastily pulling up his undershorts.
“Felice di conoscerla, signore,” Ernesto’s face crinkled in a broad smile and he extended a hand which Morris shook limply.
“Ernesto does not speak English,” said Fulvia. “But ‘e understands.”
“I wish I did,” said Morris.
Ernesto opened one of the mirrored closet doors, hung up his suit, kicked off his shoes, and walked towards the en suite bathroom, pulling his shirt over his head. A stream of muffled Italian came from inside the shirt.
“What did he say?” Morris gaped, as the bathroom door closed behind Ernesto.
“‘E is going to take a shower,” said Fulvia, plumping the pillows on the bed. “Then ‘e will join us.”
“Join us? Where?”
“‘Ere, of course,” said Fulvia, getting into the bed, and arranging herself in the centre of it.
Morris stared. “Hey!” he accused her. “I believe you planned this all along!”
Fulvia smiled her Mona Lisa smile.
In the tiny bathroom of their apartment in Fitzroy Square, Thelma Ringbaum was preparing for bed with more than usual care. It had been a long and tiring day: the agency through which they were renting the apartment had lost the key and kept them waiting several hours while a duplicate was obtained. Then, when they finally got into it they found that the water had been turned off in some inscrutable fashion and they had to phone the agency to send a man to turn it on—and to do that they had to go out and search the neighbourhood for an unvandalized phone booth because the telephone in the apartment had been disconnected. The kitchen stove was so filthy that Thelma decided she would have to clean it before they even made themselves a cup of coffee, and the inside of the icebox was like a small working model of a glacier and had to be defrosted before
they could use it. Having had no proper sleep the previous night, Thelma was, by the time she had completed these tasks, and gone marketing for basic foods at the local stores, and fixed their supper (because Howard wouldn’t go out to a restaurant), ready to drop. But there was a tryst pending between herself and Howard, and Thelma’s life was not so full of romance that she could afford to break it. Also, Howard needed cheering up after finding that disappointing letter from Morris Zapp on the doormat.
In spite of her weariness, and the discouraging decor of the bathroom, all cobwebs and peeling paint, Thelma felt a quickening of erotic excitement as she prepared herself for Howard’s pleasure. She softened her bathwater with fragrant foam, massaged herself afterwards with scented skin cream, dabbed perfume behind her ears and in other intimate hollows and crevices of her anatomy, and put on her sexiest nightgown, a frivolous garment of sheer black nylon. She brushed her hair for one hundred strokes, and bit her lips to make them red. Then she tiptoed to the living-room, threw open the door and posed on the threshold. “Howard!” she cooed.
Howard was crouched in front of the ancient black-and-white TV, fiddling with the controls while the picture buzzed and flickered. “Yes?” he said, without turning round.
Thelma giggled. “Now you can have me, honey.”
Howard Ringbaum turned round in his seat and looked at her stonily. “Now I don’t want you,” he said, and resumed his fiddling with the controls of the television.
At that moment, Thelma Ringbaum determined that she would be unfaithful to her husband at the earliest possible opportunity.
All around the world people are in different states of dress and undress, alone or in couples, waking or sleeping, working or resting. As Persse McGarrigle walks along an Irish country road in the middle of the night, with Morris Zapp’s deerstalker tipped back on his head, the same sunbeam that, reflected off the moon, now illuminates his way, and shows him the shapes of darkened farms and cottages where men and beasts slumber and snore, has just a few seconds ago woken up the pavement dwellers of Bombay and the factory workers of Omsk, shining directly into their wincing faces or stealing through the gaps in tattered curtains and broken blinds.
David Lodge - Small World Page 17
