by David Lodge
I think Alexandra’s talents are wasted on me. She should be working in the City of London convincing people that Greed is good.
I had a go at The Concept of Dread this evening – thought I’d start with the title that seemed most obviously relevant to me – but it was a great disappointment. The table of contents alone was enough to put me off:
Chap. I Dread as the presupposition of original sin and as explaining it retrogressively by going back to its origin.
Chap. II Dread as original sin progressively.
Chap. III Dread as the consequence of that sin which is the default of the consciousness of sin.
Chap. IV The dread in sin, or dread as the consequence of sin in the particular individual.
Chap. V Dread as saving experience by means of faith.
I’ve never regarded myself as a religious person. I believe in God, I suppose. I mean I believe there’s Something (rather than Somebody) beyond the horizons of our understanding, which explains, or would explain if we could interrogate it, why we’re here and what it’s all about. And I have a sort of faith that we survive after death to find out the answer to those questions, simply because it’s intolerable to think that we never will, that our consciousness goes out at death like an electric light being switched off. Not much of a reason for believing, I admit, but there you are. I respect Jesus as an ethical thinker, not casting the first stone and turning the other cheek and so on, but I wouldn’t call myself a Christian. My Mum and Dad sent me to Sunday school when I was a nipper – don’t ask me why, because they never went to church themselves except for weddings and funerals. I liked going at first because we had a very pretty teacher called Miss Willow, with yellow curls and blue eyes and a lovely dimpled smile, who got us to act out stories from the Bible – I suppose that was my first experience of drama. But then she left and instead we had a severe-looking middle-aged lady called Mrs Turner, with hairs growing out of a big spot on her chin, who told us our souls were stained black with sin and had to be washed in the Blood of the Lamb. I had nightmares about being dunked in a bath full of blood by Mrs Turner, and after that my parents didn’t make me go to Sunday School any more.
Much later, when I was a teenager, I used to attend a Catholic Youth Club, because Maureen Kavanagh was a Catholic and belonged to it; and occasionally I would get trapped or dragged in to some kind of service on Sunday evenings, a recitation of the rosary in the parish hall, or something they called Benediction in the church next door, a funny business with a lot of hymn-singing in Latin and clouds of incense and the priest on the altar holding up something like a gold football trophy. I always felt awkward and embarrassed on these occasions, not knowing what I was supposed to do next, sit or stand or kneel. I was never tempted to become a Catholic, though Maureen used to throw out the occasional wistful hint. There seemed to be far too much about sin in her religion, too. Most of the things I wanted to do with Maureen (and she wanted to do with me) turned out to be sins.
So all this stuff about sin in the chapter headings of The Concept of Dread was discouraging, and the actual book confirmed my misgivings. It was dead boring and very difficult to follow. He defines dread, for instance, as “freedom’s appearance before itself in possibility.” What the fuck does that mean? To tell you the truth I skimmed though the book, dipping here and there and hardly understanding a word. There was just one interesting bit at the very end:
I would say that learning to know dread is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known dread or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be in dread has learned the most important thing.
But what is learning rightly to be in dread, and how is it different from sinking under it? That’s what I’d like to know.
Three spasms in the knee today, one while driving, two while sitting at my desk.
Wednesday 24th Feb, 11.30 p.m. Bobby Moore died today, of cancer. He was only fifty-one. People in the media must have known he was ill, because the BBC had a tribute all ready to slot into Sportsnight tonight. It included an interview with Bobby Charlton that must have been live, though, or recorded today, because he was crying. I was nearly crying myself, as a matter of fact.
The first I knew of it was when Amy and I came out of a cinema in Leicester Square at about eight. We’d been to an early-evening showing of Reservoir Dogs. A brilliant, horrible film. The scene where one of the gangsters tortures a security guard is the most sickening thing I’ve ever seen. Everybody in the film dies violently. I honestly believe that every character you see is shot to death – the police who shoot the Harvey Keitel character at the end are just voices off camera. Amy didn’t seem disturbed by the mayhem. She was more bothered by the fact that she couldn’t recall what she had seen one of the actors in before, and kept muttering to me, “Was it House of Games? No. Was it Taxi-driver? No. What was it?” until I had to beg her to shut up. As we came out of the cinema, she said triumphantly, “I remember now, it wasn’t a movie at all, it was an episode of Miami Vice.” Just at that moment I clocked a newspaper billboard, “BOBBY MOORE DIES.” Suddenly the deaths in Reservoir Dogs seemed cartoonthin. I hurried Amy through her supper so that I could get back to the flat to watch the telly, and she decided to go home straight from Gabrielli’s. “I can see you want to be alone with your grief,” she said sardonically, and she wasn’t far wrong.
There were lots of clips of Bobby Moore in his prime as a player in Sportsnight, with of course a special emphasis on the World Cup Final of 1966, and that unforgettable image of Moore receiving the cup from the Queen, carefully wiping his hands on his shirt first, and then turning to face the crowd, holding the trophy high in the air for the whole of Wembley, and the whole country, to worship. What a day that was. England 4, Germany 2, after extra time. A story straight out of a boys’ comic. Who believed at the start of the tournament that, after years of humiliation by South Americans and Slavs, we’d at last be world champions in the game we’d invented? What heroes they were, that team. I can still recite the names from memory. Banks, Wilson, Cohen, Moore (capt.), Stiles, Jack Charlton, Ball, Hurst, Hunt, Peters and Bobby Charlton. He cried on that occasion, too, I seem to remember. But not Bobby Moore, always the model captain, calm, confident, poised. He had immaculate timing as a player – it made up for his slowness on the turn. Seeing the clips brought it all back: the way his long leg would stretch out at the last possible moment and take the ball off an opponent’s toe without fouling him. And then the way he would bring the ball out of defence and into attack, head up, back straight, like a captain leading a cavalry charge. He looked like a Greek god, with his clean-cut limbs and short golden curls. Bobby Moore. They don’t make them like that any more. They make overpaid lager louts plastered with advertising logos, who spit all over the pitch and swear so much that lip-reading deaf viewers write to the BBC to complain.
(I make an exception of Ryan Giggs, the young Manchester United winger. He’s a lovely player, thrilling to watch when he’s running at a defence with the ball apparently tied to his feet, scattering them like sheep. And he still has his innocence, if you know what I mean. He hasn’t yet been kicked into caution and cynicism, he hasn’t been worn down by playing too many games too close together, he hasn’t had his head turned by stardom. He still plays as if he enjoys the game, like a kid. I tell you what I like about him most: when he’s done something really good, scored a goal, or dribbled past three players, or made a perfect cross, and he’s trotting back towards the centre circle, and the crowd are going wild, he frowns. He looks terribly serious, like a little boy who’s trying to seem ever so grown-up, as if it’s the only way he can stop himself from turning cartwheels or beating his chest or screaming with excitement. I love that, the way he frowns when he’s done something really brilliant.)
But back to Bobby Moore and that glorious June day of the 1966 World Cup Final. Even Sally, who was never a great soccer fan, got caught up in the excitement, put Jane
to sleep in her pram and sat down to watch the telly with me and Adam – who was too young to really understand what it was all about, but sensed intuitively that it was important and sat patiently through the whole match with his thumb in his mouth and his blanket-comforter pressed to his cheek, watching me all the time instead of the screen. It was our first colour set. England wore red shirts instead of the usual all-white strip, strawberry-jam red. I suppose we tossed up with Germany for the privilege of wearing white, and lost, but we should have stuck with red ever after, it seemed to bring us luck. We were lucky to be awarded that third goal, which was why getting the fourth one was so deliriously satisfying. When the ball went in the net you could hear the cheering coming out of the neighbours’ open windows; and when it was all over people went into their back gardens, or out into the street, grinning all over their faces, to babble about it to other people they’d never said more than “Good morning” to in their lives before.
It was a time of hope, a time when it was possible to feel patriotic without being typecast as a Tory blimp. The shame of Suez was behind us, and now we were beating the world in the things that really mattered to ordinary people, sport and pop music and fashion and television. Britain was the Beatles and mini-skirts and That Was The Week That Was and the victorious England team. I wonder if the Queen was watcing the telly tonight, and what she felt seeing herself presenting the World Cup to Bobby Moore. A pang or two of nostalgia, I should think. “Those were the days, Philip, eh?” Those were the days when she could wake up in the morning confident of not having to read detailed accounts of the sexual misbehaviour of her family in the newspapers: Dianagate, Camillagate, Squidgey tapes, Charles’s tampon fantasies, Fergie’s toe-sucking. Internal Derangement of the Monarchy. I was never a great one for the Royal Family, but you can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old Queen.
Which reminds me of an oddly disturbing experience I had this morning on my way to London. As I waited for the train at Rummidge Expo, I spotted Nizar further up the platform. I was just going up to greet him, my face already arranged into a suitable smile, when I saw that he was with a young woman. She wasn’t young enough to be his daughter, and I knew she wasn’t his wife, because I’d seen a silver-framed photo of the wife on his desk, a plump, rather severe-looking matron in a floral dress, flanked by three children, and she bore no resemblance to this tall slim young woman with glistening black hair falling to the shoulders of a smartly cut black woollen coat. Nizar was standing very close to her, talking animatedly and touching her, his surgeon’s fingers fluttering over the collar of her coat and adjusting her hair and plucking at her sleeves, in a manner which was at once possessive and deferential, like a star’s dresser. She was smiling complacently at whatever Nizar was murmuring into her ear, with her head bent because he was several inches shorter than herself, but she happened to look up just as I clocked what was going on. Fortunately she didn’t know me from Adam. I wheeled round and retreated rapidly to the waiting room, where I sat down and hid my face behind the Guardian until the train arrived.
There seems to be an adultery epidemic going on: Jake, Jean Wellington, the Royal Family, and now Nizar. What I want to know is, why should I feel embarrassed, even guilty, at having surprised Nizar with his bimbo? Why did I run away? Why did I hide? I don’t know.
Sally and I haven’t made love since last Thursday. I’ve been going to bed at different times from her, or complaining of indigestion or of feeling a cold coming on, etc., to discourage the idea. I’m scared of fiinding that I can’t come again. I suppose I could try masturbating, just to check there’s nothing mechanically wrong.
Thursday morning, 25th Feb. After I wrote that last bit, I undressed and lay on the bed with a towel handy and tried to jerk myself off. It’s a long time since I did this, getting on for thirty-five years in fact, and I was out of practice. I couldn’t find any Vaseline in the bathroom cabinet, and it so happened that I’d just run out of olive oil in the kitchen, so I lubricated my cock with Paul Newman’s Own Salad Dressing, which was a mistake. First of all it was freezing cold from the fridge and had a shrivelling rather than a stimulating effect at first, secondly the vinegar and lemon juice in it stung like hell, and thirdly I began to smell like Gabrielli’s pollo alla cacciatora as the herbs warmed up with the friction. But the main problem was that I couldn’t summon up the appropriate thoughts. Instead of erotic imagery I kept thinking of Bobby Moore triumphantly holding aloft the Jules Rimet trophy, or Tim Roth lying in a pool of his own blood in Reservoir Dogs, with the red stain spreading up his shirt front till he looked as if he was wearing the England strip.
I thought of trying one of the telephone sex lines I’d heard so much about lately – but where would I get a number from? The Yellow Pages weren’t any use, and I hardly thought I could consult Directory Enquiries. Then I remembered that there was an old listings magazine in the magazine rack, and sure enough I found columns of ads for phone sex in the back pages. I chose a number that promised “Fast Instant Sex Relief, Hard Smutty Sex Talk” with a footnote explaining that “due to new EEC regulations we can now bring you European-strength action.” I listened for about ten minutes to a girl describing with much sighing and groaning the process of peeling and swallowing a banana, and began to wonder whether it was EEC agricultural regulations that were being invoked. It was a total con, and so were the other two lines I tried.
It occurred to me that I was only a few minutes’ walk from the largest concentration of pornographic bookshops in the country, and although it was now well past midnight, some of them might still be open. It was a bind having to get dressed again to go out, but I was determined to bring my experiment to a conclusion. Then, just as I was about to leave the flat, it crossed my mind to check the front porch on the entryphone video screen – and, sure enough, there was my squatter of last week, curled up cosily inside his sleeping bag. I recognized his pointed nose and chin peeping out of the top of the bag, and the hank of hair over his eyes. I stared at the picture until the camera cut out automatically and I was left with my own faint grey reflection in the screen. I imagined myself going downstairs and opening the front door. Either I would have to wake him up and have an argument, or I would have to step over him as if he wasn’t there – and not just once, but twice, since I would be returning after a short interval with a bundle of girlie magazines under my arm. Neither of these alternatives appealed to me. I undressed again and went back to bed, suffering acutely from Low Frustration Tolerance. It was as if this vagrant was holding me a moral prisoner in my own home.
Eventually I managed to produce a spurt of jism by sheer physical effort, so I know the plumbing is basically sound, but my cock is quite sore and it hasn’t done my tennis elbow any good either.
Thursday afternoon. I’m sitting in the Pullman lounge, Euston station, waiting for the 5.10. I meant to catch the 4.40, but just missed it. The ticket-collector saw me running down the ramp and shut the barrier when I was ten yards short, at 4.39 precisely. The station is plastered with notices saying that platforms will be closed one minute before the advertised departure times of trains “in the interests of punctuality and customer safety”, but he could have let me through without endangering either. I had no luggage except the briefcase containing my laptop. The last coach of the train was only twenty yards away, with the guard standing at ease beside it, looking up the deserted platform, waiting for the OFF signal. I could have made it easily, as I vehemently pointed out, but the guy at the barrier, an officious, determined little Asian, wouldn’t let me. I tried to push past him, but he pushed me back. We actually wrestled for a full minute, until the train finally pulled out, and I turned on my heel and walked furiously back up the ramp, uttering empty threats about making a complaint. He has better grounds for complaint than me (should that be “I”?) – indeed, he could probably have me for assault.
I’m still trembling a bit from the adrenalin rush, and I think I’ve pulled a small muscle in my back in the struggle. Pret
ty stupid behaviour, really, when you come to think about it, as I shall do very shortly. Low Frustration Tolerance will give way to Low Self-Esteem, and another wave of depression will move in to cover the Passmore psyche with low cloud and outbreaks of drizzle. Quite unnecessary. After all, it’s only half an hour till the next train, and the Pullman Lounge is a very civilized place to wait in. It’s rather like a brothel, or how I imagine brothels to be, but without the sex. You go up the stairs that lead to the table-service restaurant and the Superloo, and halfway along the passage to the latter there’s a discreetly inconspicuous door with a bell-push and speaker grille in the wall beside it. When you press the bell-push, a female voice asks you if you have a first-class ticket, and if you say “Yes” the door springs open with a click and a buzz, and you’re in. There’s a nice-looking girl at the desk who smiles as you show your ticket and sign the Visitors’ Book, and offers you complimentary coffee or tea. It’s calm and hushed inside, air-conditioned, carpeted and comfortably furnished with armchairs and banquettes upholstered in soothing tones of blue and grey. There are newspapers, and telephones, and a photocopier. Down below, the hoi polloi waiting for trains must sit on their luggage, or on the floor (since there are no seats in the vast marbled concourse) or else patronize one of the fast-food outlets – Upper Crust, Casey Jones, The Hot Croissant, Pizza Hut, etc. – that cluster together in a junk-food theme park at one end of
