David Lodge - Small World

by Author's Note

  Philip began to wipe himself. When the lights came on of their own accord he found he was up to page five of his lecture on “The Legacy of Hazlitt.”

  Two

  PERSSE woke late the next morning, after a night of troubled dreams, with a dry mouth and a moderate headache. He lay on his back for some time, staring at the sprinkler nozzle, a metallic omphalos in the ceiling of his room at the YMCA, wondering what to do next. He decided to go back to the Club Exotica and make further enquiries about the whereabouts of “Lily”.

  Soho seemed distinctly less sinful in the late morning sunshine. Admittedly the pornshops and the sex cinemas were already open, and had a few devout customers, but their facades and illuminated signs had a faded, shamefaced aspect. The streets and pavements were busy with people with jobs to do: dustmen collecting garbage, messengers on scooters delivering parcels, suited executives with briefcases, and young men pushing wheeled racks of ladies’ dresses. There were wholesome smells in the air, of vegetables, fresh bread and coffee. At a newsagents, Persse bought a copy of the Guardian and the Times Literaty Supplement. “LONDON LITERATI ADRIFT” said a headline on the front page of the former. “RUDYARD PARKINSON ON THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF CRITICISM” announced the cover of the latter.

  By retracing the route he had taken with Ronald Frobisher the night before, Persse found the Club Exotica—only it wasn’t the Club Exotica any more. That name, in tubular glass script, lay discarded on the pavement, trailing flex. Over the door two workmen were erecting another, larger sign, “PUSSYVILLE”.

  “What happened to the Exotica?” Persse asked them. One looked down at him and shrugged. The other, without looking, said, “Changed its name, dinnit?”

  “Under new management?”

  “I should fink so. The gaffer’s inside now.”

  Persse descended the stairs and pushed through the quilted swing doors at the bottom. Inside, unshaded bulbs hanging from the ceiling cast a bleak light on stained carpet and shabby furniture. A vacuum cleaner whined among the tables. In the middle of the floor, a man in a striped suit was inspecting a young woman who was wearing only briefs and high-heeled shoes. The man carried a clipboard in his hand, and circled the girl in the manner of a used-car dealer scrutinizing a possible purchase for signs of rust. Along one wall other girls lolled in negliges, evidently awaiting the same appraisal.

  “Yes?” said the man, catching sight of Persse. “Have you brought the new lights?”

  “No,” said Persse, modestly averting his eyes from the half-naked young woman. “I’m looking for a girl called Lily.”

  “Anybody here called Lily?” said the man.

  After a moment’s silence, a girl stood up at the end of the row. “I’m Lily,” she said, with one hand on her hip, shooting a languorous glance at Persse from beneath a frizzy blonde hairdo.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know you,” stammered Persse.

  “You were never Lily,” said the girl next to the blonde, tugging her back into her seat. “You just fancy ‘im.” Laughter rippled along the row of seats.

  “She used to perform here,” said Persse, “when it was the Club Exotica.”

  “Yeah, well, this isn’t the Club Exotica any more. It’s Pussyville, and I have to find twelve topless waitresses by Monday, so if you don’t mind.” The man frowned at his clipboard.

  “Who owned the Club Exotica?” Persse asked.

  “Girls Unlimited,” said the man, without looking up.

  “It’s in Soho Square,” said the frizzy-haired blonde.

  “I know,” said Persse, “but thank you.”

  Five minutes’ walk took him to Soho Square. Girls Unlimited was on the fourth floor of a building on the west side. After stating his business, he was admitted to the office of a lady called Mrs Gasgoine. The room was carpeted in red, and furnished with white filing cabinets and tubular steel chairs and tables. There was a large map of the world on the wall. Mrs Gasgoine was elegantly dressed in black, and smoking a cigarette in a holder.

  “What can I do for you, Mr McGarrigle?”

  “I’m looking for a girl called Lily Papps. I believe she worked for you at the Club Exotica.”

  “We’ve sold our interest in the Club Exotica.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Are you a client of ours?”

  “Client?”

  “Have you hired our girls in the past?”

  “Good Lord, no! I’m just a friend of Lily’s.”

  Mrs Gasgoine blew angry smoke through her nostrils. “You mean she was moonlighting with you.”

  “I suppose you could say that,” replied Persse, remembering the glassy corridor in the sky at Rummidge, the snowscape under the moon, the quotations from Keats.

  Mrs Gasgoine extinguished her cigarette and twisted the holder to expel the stub. It fell into her ashtray like a spent bullet case. “This isn’t a Missing Persons Bureau, Mr McGarrigle, it’s a business organization. Lily is one of our most versatile employees. She’s been transferred to another job—something that came up at short notice.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you. It’s part of our contract with our girls that we don’t divulge their whereabouts to family or friends. Quite often, you see, they’re running away from some complication at home.”

  “I don’t even know where her home is!” Persse protested.

  “And I don’t know you from Adam, Mr McGarrigle. You could be a private investigator, for all I know. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you would like to leave me your name and address, I’ll forward it to Lily, and if she wants to, she can get in touch with you.”

  Persse hesitated, doubtful whether Angelica would respond if she knew he had discovered her secret. “Thanks, but I won’t put you to that trouble,” he said at length.

  Mrs Gasgoine looked as if all her suspicions were confirmed.

  He left the premises of Girls Unlimited and looked for a bank at which to cash his cheque. On his way, he passed a window at the side of Foyle’s bookshop in which an assistant was arranging some rather dusty-looking copies of Hazlitt and the Amateur Reader by Philip Swallow, flanking a blown-up photocopy of Rudyard Parkinson’s review in the TLS. At the bank Persse took out most of his money in traveller’s cheques. Then he went to a branch of Thomas Cook and booked himself a flight to Amsterdam. The only thing he could think of doing now was to look for Angelica’s adoptive father.

  He hadn’t been in Amsterdam three hours before he met Morris Zapp. Persse was standing on one of the curved canal bridges in the old town, puzzling over his tourist map, when the American came up and slapped him on the back.

  “Percy! I didn’t know you were at the conference.”

  “What conference?”

  Morris Zapp indicated the large plastic disc dangling from his lapel, which had his name printed inside a circular inscription, “VIIth International Congress of Literary Semioticians”. On his other lapel was a bright enamel button which declared, “Every Decoding Is Another Encoding”. “I had it made at a customized button shop back home,” he explained. “Everybody here is crazy about it. If I’d brought a gross with me I could have made a fortune. A Jap professor offered me ten dollars for this one. But if you’re not at the Conference, what are you doing in Amsterdam?”

  “A sort of holiday,” said Persse. “I won a poetry prize.” He found that he didn’t want to confide in Morris about Angelica.

  “No kidding! Congratulations!”

  A thought struck Persse. “Angelica isn’t at the conference by any chance?”

  “Haven’t seen her, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t here. The conference only opened yesterday, and there are hundreds of people. We’re all in the Sonesta—great hotel. Where are you staying?”

  “At a little pension near here.”

  “It wasn’t such a big prize, then?”

  “I’m trying to make it go a long way,” said Persse. “Perhaps I’ll drop in on your conference.”

 
“Why not? I thought I might go to this afternoon’s session myself. Meanwhile, how about some lunch? They have great Indonesian food here.”

  “Good idea,” said Persse. The diversion was welcome, for he had had a discouraging morning. The Head Office of KLM had been courteous but discreet. They confirmed that a Hermann Pabst had been an executive director of the airline in the nineteen-fifties, but he had resigned in 1961 to take up a post in America, the details of which they were unable or unwilling to divulge. Persse was faced with the prospect of having to continue his search in America. He wondered how long his Ł1000 would last at this rate.

  Morris Zapp seemed to have already mastered the spider’s-web layout of the Amsterdam canals and streets. He led Persse confidently past a quayside flowermarket, over bridges, down narrow alleys, along busy shopping streets. “You know something?” he said, “I really like this place. It’s flat, which means I can walk without getting pooped, it has good cigars that are very cheap, and wait till you see the nightlife.”

  “I was in Soho the other night,” said Persse.

  “Soho, schmoho,” said Morris Zapp. “That’s a kindergarten compared with what goes on in the rosse buurt.”

  They emerged from a narrow street into a broad square where tables and chairs were spread in the sun outside the cafés. Morris Zapp suggested an aperitif.

  “Have we time? What about the conference?” said Persse. Morris shrugged. “It doesn’t matter if we miss a few papers. The only one I want to hear is von Turpitz’s.”

  “Who is he?”

  Morris Zapp beckoned to a waiter. “Gin OK? It’s the vin du pays.” Persse nodded. “Two Bols,” Morris ordered, forking the air with his fingers. “Turpitz is a kraut who’s into reception theory. Years ago he wrote a book called The Romantic Reader—why people killed themselves after reading Werther or made pilgrimages to the Nouvelle Heloise country… Not bad, but basically trad. literary history. Then Jauss and Iser at Kostanz started to make a splash with reception theory, and von Turpitz jumped on the bandwagon.”

  “Why do you want to hear him, then?”

  “Just to reassure myself. He’s a sort of rival.”

  “For a woman?”

  “God, no. For a job.”

  “I thought you were satisfied where you are.”

  “Every man has his price,” said Morris Zapp. “Mine is one hundred grand a year and no duties. Have you heard of something new called the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism?”

  While Morris was telling Persse about it, the waiter brought them two glasses of neat, chilled gin. “You’re supposed to drink it in one gulp,” said Morris, sniffing his glass.

  “I’m your man,” said Persse, raising his own.

  “Here’s to us, then,” said Morris. “May we both achieve everything we desire.”

  “Amen,” said Persse.

  They lunched well at an Indonesian restaurant where dark-skinned waiters in white turbans brought to their table a seemingly endless supply of spicy aromatic dishes of chicken, prawn, pork and vegetables. Morris Zapp had dined there the previous evening and appeared to have taken tuition in the menu. “This is peanut sauce,” he said, eating greedily. “This is meat stewed in coconut milk, these are pieces of barbecued sucking pig. Have a prawn cracker.”

  “Will you be able to stay awake this afternoon?” Persse asked, as they heavily descended the stairs of the restaurant and made their way towards the Sonesta. The sky had clouded over, and the atmosphere had become sultry and oppressive, as if a storm was brewing.

  “I aim to sleep through the first paper,” said Morris. “Just wake me up when von Turpitz appears on the rostrum. You can’t mistake him, he wears a black glove on one hand. Nobody knows why and nobody dares to ask him.”

  The Sonesta was a huge modern hotel grafted on to some old buildings in the Kattengat, including a Lutheran church, in the shape of a rotunda, which had been converted into a conference hall. “I hope it’s been deconsecrated,” Persse remarked, as they came in under the huge domed ceiling. A mighty organ, built of dark wood and decorated with gilt, and a carved pulpit projecting from the wall, were the only reminders of the building’s original function.

  “Reconsecrated, you mean,” said Morris Zapp. “Information is the religion of the modern world, didn’t you know that?”

  Persse surveyed the rapidly filling concentric rows of seats, hoping against hope that he might see Angelica there, cool and self-possessed behind her heavy spectacles, with her stainless steel pen poised over her notebook. A man with a brown leathery face and hooded eyes bowed just perceptibly to Morris Zapp as he passed, accompanied by a sulky-looking youth in tight black trousers. “That’s Michel Tardieu,” Morris murmured. “He’s another likely contender for the UNESCO chair. The kid is supposed to be his research assistant. You can tell how good he is at research by the way he wriggles his ass.”

  “Hallo, young man” Persse felt a light tap on his shoulder, and turned to find Miss Sybil Maiden standing behind him in a Paisley pattern frock, holding a folded fan in her hand.

  “Why, hallo, Miss Maiden,” he greeted her. “I didn’t know you were interested in semiotics.”

  “I thought I should find out what it is all about,” she replied. “One should never dismiss what one does not understand.”

  “And what do you think of it so far?”

  Miss Maiden, fluttered her fan. “I think it’s a lot of tosh,” she declared. “However, Amsterdam is a very charming city. Have you been to the Van Gogh museum? Those late landscapes from Arles!

  The cypresses are so wonderfully phallic, the cornfields positively brimming with fertility.”

  “I think we’d better sit down,” said Persse. “They seem to be starting.”

  On every seat was a handout which looked at first sight like the blueprint for an electric power station, all arrows, lines and boxes, except that the boxes were labelled tragedy, comedy, pastoral, lyric, epic and romance. “A Semiotic Theory of Genre” was the title of the paper, delivered by a sweating Slav in stumbling English—with French, the official language of the conference. It was warm in the rotunda. From behind Persse came the regular swish of Miss Maiden’s fan, punctuated by an occasional snort of incredulity or contempt. Persse’s head felt as heavy as a cannonball. Every now and again, as he dozed off, it would loll forward and wake him up by a painful jerk on his neck ligaments. Eventually, he allowed his chin to sink on to his breast, and fell into a deep sleep.

  Persse woke with a start from a dream in which he was delivering a paper about the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare from a pulpit in a chapel shaped like the inside of a jumbo jet. What had woken him was a thunderclap. The sky was dark behind the high windows of the rotunda, and the lights had been switched on. Rain drummed on the roof. He yawned and rubbed his eyes. On the rostrum, a man with a pale face and a skullcap of blond hair was speaking into the microphone in Germanically accented English, biting off the consonants and spitting them out as if they were pips, gesturing occasionally with a black-gloved hand. Persse shook his head in the manner of a swimmer clearing his ears of water. Although visually he had woken up, his dream seemed to be continuing on the audio channel. He pinched himself, and felt the sensation. He pinched Morris Zapp, snoozing beside him.

  “Lay off, Fulvia,” Morris Zapp mumbled. Then, opening his eyes, he sat up. “Ah, yeah, that’s von Turpitz. How long’s he been speaking?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve been asleep myself.”

  “Is his stuff any good?”

  “I think it’s very good,” said Persse. Morris Zapp looked glum. “But then,” Persse continued, “I’m biased. I wrote it.”

  “Huh?” Morris Zapp gaped.

  Lightning flickered outside the windows and the lights inside the auditorium went out. There was a gasp of surprise and consternation from the audience, immediately drowned by a tremendous thunderclap overhead which made them all jump with fright. The lights came on again. Von Turpitz continued to read his p
aper in the same relentlessly precise accent, without pause or hesitation. He had evidently been speaking for some time, because he reached the end of his discourse about ten minutes later. He squared off the pages of his script, bowed stiffly to the chairman, and sat down to polite applause. The chairman invited questions. Persse stood up. The chairman smiled and nodded.

  “I’d like to ask the speaker,” said Persse, “if he recently read a draft outline of a book about the influence of T. S. Eliot on the modern reading of Shakespeare, submitted by me to the publishers Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein, of London.”

  The chairman looked puzzled. Von Turpitz looked stunned.

  “Would you repeat the question, please?” the chairman asked.

  Persse repeated it. A sussuration of whispered comment and speculation passed like a breeze around the auditorium. Von Turpitz leaned across to the chairman and said something into his ear. The chairman nodded, and bent forward to address Persse through the microphone. His identification disc dangled from his lapel like a medal. “May I ask, sir, whether you are an officially registered member of the Conference?”

  “Well, no, I’m not…” said Persse.

  “Then I’m afraid your question is out of order,” said the chairman. Von Turpitz busied himself with his papers, as though this procedural wrangle had nothing to do with him.

  “That’s not fair!” Persse protested. “I have reason to think that Professor von Turpitz has plagiarized part of his paper from an unpublished manuscript of my own.”