David Lodge - Small World

by Author's Note

  Indifferent to life himself, Persse observed the conduct of those around him with detached curiosity. His seat gave him a ringside view of the cabin crew. He saw the chief stewardess take a handmike from its recess near the galley and clear her throat preparatory to making an announcement. Her expression was solemn. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, in a Kerry accent, “we have received a request from a passenger for a public recitation of the Act of Contrition. Is there a priest on board who would be willing to lead us in prayer?” She waited anxiously for a few moments, looking down the length of the plane (the curtain between the Club and economy-class sections had been drawn back) for signs of a volunteer. Another hostess came forward from the economy section, shaking her head. “No luck, Moira,” she murmured to the chief stewardess. “Wouldn’t you know it, just when you need a priest, there isn’t one. Not even a nun.”

  “What shall I do?” said Moira distractedly, her hand over the mike.

  “You’ll have to say the Act of Contrition yourself.”

  Moira looked frantic. “I’ve forgotten it,” she whimpered. “I haven’t been to confession since I went on the pill.”

  “Oh, Moira, you never told me you were on the pill.”

  “You do it, Brigid.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “Yes, you could. Didn’t you tell me you were a Child of Mary?” The chief stewardess said into the microphone: “Since there doesn’t appear to be a priest on board, stewardess Brigid O’Toole will lead us all in the Act of Contrition.” She thrust the mike into the hands of the dismayed Brigid, who looked at it as if it was a snake that might bite her at any moment. The plane reared and dropped sickeningly. The two girls, thrown off-balance, clung together for support.

  “In the name of the Father …” Moira prompted in a whisper.

  “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” Brigid croaked into the microphone. She clapped her hand over it and hissed: “My mind’s gone blank. I can’t remember the Act of Contrition.”

  “Well, say any prayer you like,” Moira urged. “Whatever comes into your head.”

  Brigid shut her eyes tightly and held the microphone to her lips. “For what we are about to receive,” she said, “may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

  Persse was still laughing when they landed, quite safely, at Shannon airport, ten minutes later. Brigid gave him a sheepish grin as he left the aircraft. “Sorry about the fuss, sir,” she murmured.

  “Not a bit of it,” he said. “You gave me back an appetite for life.”

  He went to the Irish Tourist Board desk at the airport and enquired about renting a cottage in Connemara. “I want somewhere very quiet and isolated,” he said. He had decided what to do with the rest of his prize money and the rest of his study leave. He would buy a second-hand car, fill the back seat with books and writing-paper and Guinness and his cassette player and Bob Dylan tapes, and spend the summer in some humble equivalent of Yeats’s lonely tower, writing poetry.

  While they were telephoning for him, he picked up a leaflet advertising the American Express card, and for want of anything else to do, filled in the application form.

  Philip Swallow settled his hotel bill and sat in the foyer with his packed bags beside him, waiting to be picked up by the British Council car,—or, rather, Landrover, for such was the vehicle prudently favoured by the Council in Ankara. Philip had never seen such roads in a modern city, pitted and potholed like the surface of the moon. Whenever there was rain the roads flooded because the construction workers who laid them had disposed of all debris by throwing them into the drains, which were therefore permanently blocked.

  The hotel manager passed Philip, smiled, stopped and bowed. “You go back to England tonight, Professor?”

  “No, no. To Istanbul. By the night train.”

  “Ah!” The manager’s face lit up with envy and pathos. “Istanbul is very beautiful.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Very old. Very beautiful. Not like Ankara.”

  “Oh, I’ve enjoyed my stay in Ankara very much,” said Philip. Such lies become second nature to the cultural traveller. He had not enjoyed his stay in Ankara at all, and would be glad to shake the dust of the place off his feet—and there was plenty of that, whenever it didn’t happen to be raining.

  Admittedly, things had improved after his first day: they could hardly have got worse. Akbil Borak had been very kind and attentive, even if his only two topics of conversation did seem to be Hull and Hazlitt. There was no doubt that he really did know an awful lot about Hazlitt—rather more than Philip himself, in fact; though it was a pity that he drew attention to their common familiarity with the Romantic essayist by referring to him as “Bill Hazlitt”. Philip had been trying for days to think of a way of correcting this habit without appearing to be rude.

  The other Turks he had met had been equally kind and hospitable. Almost every evening there had been a party or dinner or reception for him, at one of the Universities or in someone’s cramped, overfurnished apartment. At private parties there would be food and drink somehow scrounged or saved in spite of the endemic shortages—at what cost and domestic sacrifice Philip hated to think. Official receptions were discreetly supplied with booze by the British Council, largesse deeply appreciated by the Turks, who looked upon Philip in consequence as a kind of lucky mascot. Not for a long time had the university teachers of English in Ankara had so many parties in such a short time. They turned up night after night, the same faces beaming with pleasure, shaking Philip’s hand enthusiastically as if they had just met him for the first time. There was laughter and chatter and recorded music—sometimes dancing. Philip laughed and chatted and drank, and even on one occasion essayed a clumsy pas de deux with a lady professor of mature years who retained a remarkable aptitude for the belly-dance. This performance was greeted with loud applause, and described by a misty-eyed British Council officer who witnessed it as a breakthrough in Anglo-Turkish cultural relations. But in some deep core of himself, where raki and Embassy scotch could not reach, Philip felt lonely and depressed. He recognized the symptoms of his malaise because he had suffered from it before on his travels, though never so severely. It was a feeling that defined itself as a simple, insistent question: Why am I here? Why was he in Ankara, Turkey, instead of in Rummidge, England? It was a question that posed itself less sharply at parties than when he sat beside a lectern at the front of some dusty classroom facing rows of curious, swarthy young men and dark-eyed young women and listened to some Turkish professor introducing him at laborious length, punctiliously enumerating every academic distinction that could be squeezed from the reference books (Philip confidently expected one day to hear his O-level results being recited, if not his brilliant performance in the eleven-plus) while he himself nervously fingered the hastily rewritten opening pages of his lecture on Hazlitt; or when he lay upon his hotel bed in the slack hours between lecturing and partying and sightseeing (not that there was a great deal to see in Ankara once you had visited the Anitkabir and the Hittite museum, but the tireless Akbil Borak had made sure that he saw it all), picking out previously unread bits of the crumpled Guardian he had brought with him days before, and listening to the strains of foreign music and the sound of foreign tongues coming through the walls and the strident noise of traffic rising from the street. Why am I here? Hundreds, probably thousands of pounds of public money had been expended on bringing him to Turkey. Secretaries had typed letters, telex machines had chattered, telephone wires hummed, files thickened in offices in Ankara, Istanbul, London. Precious fossil fuel had been burned away in the stratosphere to propel him like an arrow from Heathrow to Esenboga. The domestic economies and digestions of the academic community of Ankara had been taxed to their limits in the cause of entertaining him. And for what purpose? So that he could bring the good news about Hazlitt, or Literature and History and Society and Psychology and Philosophy, to the young Turkish bourgeoisie, whose chief motive for studying En
glish (so Akbil Borak had confided in a moment of raki-induced candour) was to secure a job as a civil servant or air hostess and to avoid the murderously factious social science faculties? When he was driven through the streets of Ankara, teeming with a vast anonymous impoverished proletariat, dressed in dusty cotton drab, toiling up and down the concrete hills with the dogged inscrutable persistence of ants, under the unsmiling surveillance of the omnipresent, heavily armed military, he could understand the modest pragmatism of the students’ ambitions. But how would Hazlitt help them?

  “Excuse me, sir.” The hotel manager was back. “Will you be requiring dinner? The train to Istanbul does not leave for several hours.”

  “Oh, no thank you,” said Philip. “I’m going out.” The manager bowed and withdrew.

  Custer, the British Council’s cultural affairs officer, had invited Philip to a buffet supper at his apartment. “I won’t pretend it’s in your honour,” he had explained. “We’ve got a string quartet from Leeds arriving in the afternoon. Got to lay on something for them, so you might as well come along. Nothing elaborate, you know, quite informal. There’ll be a few other people there. Tell you what,” he added, as if struck by a brilliant idea, “I’ll invite Borak.”

  “I think he may have seen enough of me in the last few days…” Philip suggested.

  “Oh no, he’d be offended if I didn’t invite him. His wife, too. Hassim will collect you from the hotel about seven. Bring your luggage with you, and I’ll run you down to the station at about ten to catch your train.”

  Recognizing the tall figure and melancholy moustache of Hassim, the Council driver, negotiating the revolving door, Philip stood up and carried his bags across the foyer. Hassim, who spoke no English, relieved him of his suitcase and led the way to the Landrover.

  Of course, Philip reflected, as he climbed into the seat beside Hassim, and they jolted away, he might have felt quite differently about this trip if it hadn’t been for that surprising spasm of desire for Hilary at the very moment of his departure from home. The warm promise of that glimpsed swaying breast had imprinted itself upon his mind, taunting and tormenting him as he lay awake in his narrow hotel bed, reinforcing the question, Why am I here? Sex with Hilary wasn’t the greatest erotic sensation in the world, but at least it was something. A temporary release from tension. A little pleasant oblivion. Here in Turkey there wasn’t a hope of erotic adventure. The friendly women he met were all married, with husbands in genial but watchful attendance. The dimpled, sloe-eyed girl students never seemed to be allowed closer than lecturing distance to him, unless they appeared in the role of daughters to one of the academic couples, and Philip had the feeling that to make a pass at one of them might provoke a diplomatic incident. Turkey was, on the surface anyway, a country of old-fashioned moral propriety.

  The Landrover crawled forward amid congested traffic. There seemed to be a permanent traffic jam in the centre of Ankara—if this was the centre. Philip had acquired no sense of the geography of the city because it all looked the same to him—untreated concrete, cracked pavements, pitted roads, everything the colour of ash, scarcely a tree or blade of grass to be seen, in spite of its being spring. It was getting dark, now, and under their sparse and inadequate street lighting the streets grew deep and sinister shadows, except where kerosene lamps flared amid an improvised street market, with shawled women haggling over vegetables and kitchenware, or where bleak fluorescent light bounced through plateglass windows from the Formica tabletops of a smoke-filled working-men’s café. Philip had the feeling that if Hassim were suddenly to stop the Landrover and pitch him out into the street, he would never be seen again—he would be dragged into the shadows, stripped and robbed of everything he possessed, murdered and flung into one of the blocked drains. He felt a long way from home. Why was he here? Was it, perhaps, time to call a halt to his travels, abandon the quest for intensity of experience he had burbled on about to Morris Zapp, hang up his lecture notes and cash in his traveller’s cheques, settle for routine and domesticity, for safe sex with Hilary and the familiar round of the Rummidge academic year, from Freshers’ Conference to Finals Examiners’ Meeting, until it was time to retire, retire from both sex and work? Followed in due course by retirement from life. Was that it?

  The Landrover stopped: they had arrived at a modern apartment block on one of the hills that ringed the city. Hassim gestured Philip into the lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor. Custer came to the front door of the apartment, flushed, in shirtsleeves, a glass in his hand. “Ah, there you are, come in, come in! Let me take your case. Go into the drawing-room and I’ll bring you a drink. Gin and tonic? Borak’s in there. By the way, it isn’t a string quartet after all, it’s a jazz quartet. London cocked up again.”

  Custer led him down a hall, opened a door and ushered Philip into the drawing-room, moderately full of people standing in groups with glasses in their hands. The first face that Philip focused on was Joy Simpson’s.

  Akbil Borak never ceased to be surprised by Philip Swallow’s behaviour. On the day of his arrival the Englishman had twice abruptly measured his length upon the ground, and now, on the evening of his departure, he looked as if he was going to do it again, in Mr and Mrs Custer’s drawing-room, for he stumbled on the threshold, and only saved himself from falling by grabbing at a chair-back for support. Heads turned all across the room, and there was a moment’s embarrassed hush; then, seeing that there was nothing seriously amiss, the groups resumed their convivial chatter.

  Akbil had been standing next to Oya, talking to the drummer from the jazz quartet and to Mrs Simpson, the British Council librarian at Istanbul, a pleasant, if reserved lady, with shapely buttocks and beautiful blonde hair. Akbil was telling Mrs Simpson about the shops in Hull, and mentally wondering whether the fair women of the north had golden pubic hair to match their heads, when Philip Swallow made his noisy entrance, crashing into the furniture near the door. Akbil hurried forward to offer assistance, but Philip, rising from his knees, shook off his hand and took a few uncertain steps towards Mrs Simpson. His face was white. “You!” he whispered hoarsely, staring at Mrs Simpson. She, too, had turned slightly pale, as well she might at this strange greeting. “Hallo,” she said, holding her glass tightly with the fingers of both hands. “Alex Custer told me that you might drop in tonight. How are you enjoying Turkey?”

  “You have met before, then?” said Akbil, glancing from one to the other.

  “Briefly,” said Mrs Simpson. “Several years ago, in Genoa, wasn’t it, Professor Swallow?”

  “I thought you were dead,” said Philip Swallow. He had not altered the direction of his gaze, or even blinked.

  Oya clutched at Akbil’s sleeve with excitement. “Oh, how is that?” she cried.

  Mrs Simpson frowned. “Oh dear, I suppose you read that list in the newspapers,” she said to Philip Swallow. “It was issued prematurely by the Indian authorities. It caused a great deal of confusion and distress, I’m afraid.”

  “You mean you survived that crash?”

  “I wasn’t on the plane. I was supposed to be—this was about three years ago,” she explained parenthetically to Akbil and Oya and the jazz drummer. “My husband was posted to India. I was going with him, but at the last moment my doctor said not to go, I was eight months pregnant and he thought it would be too risky, so John went alone, and I stayed behind with Gerard, our little boy, but somehow our names were left on the passenger list, or some passenger list. The plane crashed, landing in the middle of a storm.”

  “And your husband…?” Oya quavered.

  “There were very few survivors,” said Mrs Simpson simply “and he wasn’t one of them.”

  Oya was weeping copiously. “I pity you,” she said, snuffling into a handkerchief.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Philip Swallow again, as if he had not heard this explanation, or, having heard it, had failed to take it in.

  “But you see, Professor Swallow, she is not dead after all! Sh
e lives!” Oya gave a little clap of her hands and rose on to the tips of her toes, smiling through her tears. Akbil had the sense that his wife was supplying all the emotion that the two English should be exhibiting. The jazz drummer had slipped away unnoticed at some point in Mrs Simpson’s recital. “You should be happy,” said Oya to Philip. “It is like a fairy story.”

  “I am of course very pleased to see Mrs Simpson alive and well,’ he said. He seemed to have recovered his composure, though his face was still pale.

  “And the art of pleasing consists in being pleased, as Bill Hazlitt says,” Akbil struck in, rather neatly, he thought.

  “But what are you doing in Ankara?” Philip asked Mrs Simpson. “I’m just here for a few days, for some meetings. I run the Council library in Istanbul.”

  “I’m going to Istanbul tonight,” said Philip Swallow, with some signs of excitement.

  “Oh? How long will you be staying there?”

  “Three or four days. I go home on Friday.”

  “Unfortunately, I’m here till Friday.”

  Philip Swallow looked as if he couldn’t believe this intelligence. He turned to Akbil. “Akbil, Alex Custer seems to have forgotten all about my drink, could you possibly…?”

  “Of course,” said Akbil, “I will seek it.”