by Unknown
meetings and he saved her the trouble of getting baby-sitters.
For politeness' sake he invited her in for a cup of coffee, Also she was a slow riser and appreciated his willingness to and to his surprise she accepted. 'You're going to get make breakfast for the twins and see them off to school.
awfully wet, I'm afraid,' he said.
Imperceptibly they settled into a routine. It was almost like
' I've got an umbrella. We can run for it.'
being married. On Sundays he would drive the "twins into They ran for it - straight into the side of the house.
the State Park on the other side of the Plotinus hills and take
'I can't understand it,' he said. 'The front door should them for rambles through the pine-woods. He felt himself be here.'
reverting to a more comfortable, loose-fitting version of his 178
179
life in England. The interregnum of Pythagoras Drive beer with the meal, and perhaps a Scotch afterwards as they seemed like a drugged dream as it receded into the past.
watched the day's rioting on television. One evening when There had been something unnatural, unhealthy about it, they were doing this he said,' I found quite a nice apartment after all, something ignoble and ridiculous about the role he today. On Pole Street.'
had played there, a middle-aged parasite on the alternative
'Why don't you stay on here?' Desiree said, without society, hanging around the young folk with a doggy, taking her eyes from the screen.' There's plenty of room.'
ingratiating look, anxious to please, anxious not to offend,
'I can't go on imposing on you.'
hoping for a game that never materialized: the game he had
'You can pay me rent if you like.'
seen developing that first evening in the girls' downstairs
'All right,' he said.' How much ?'
apartment, with the Cowboy and the Confederate Soldier
'How about fifteen dollars a week for the room plus and the black wrestler. They never seemed to play it again, twenty dollars a week for food and liquor plus three dollars or else they took care to play it when he was out. He never heating and lighting that makes thirty-eight dollars a week sniffed the hint of an orgy from that night onwards, though or one hundred and sixty dollars per calendar month ?'
he kept his senses alert for a sign. The nearest he got to
'Goodness me,' said Philip. 'You're very quick off the group sex was reading the swingers' small ads in Euphoric mark.'
Times. Perhaps he should have put one in himself. British
'I've been thinking about it. It seems like a very con-Professor, not especially well hung, likes Jane Austen, Top of the venient arrangement to me. Are you in tomorrow night, by Pops, gin and tonic, seeks orgy, suitable beginner. Or a personal the way? I have a consciousness-raising workshop.'
message. Melanie. Give me a second chance. I need you but can't Philip stopped at a red light and wound down his window.
speak. I am awake in my room and waiting for you. Awake and The buzz of a helicopter told him he was now in the mili-sweating into the darkness, listening to the muffled sounds of tarized zone, though you wouldn't otherwise have guessed her and Charles Boon making love in the next room. It had that there was any trouble at the University on this side of been sick, really. The landslip had swept away a whole the campus, he thought, as he steered the car through the Sodom and Gomorrah of private fantasies and unacted broad entrance on the West perimeter, past lawns and desires. He felt a new man in the calm, initially sexless shrubberies where the spume of rotating water sprinklers atmosphere of Desiree Zapp's luxurious eyrie high up on the rainbowed in the sun and a solitary security man in his peak of Socrates Avenue. He began to eat better, sleep shelter lifted a lazy hand in salute. But as he approached better. Together he and D6siree gave up smoking.' If you'll Dealer, the signs of conflict became more evident: windows throw away that stinking pipe, I'll throw away my stinking smashed and boarded up, leaflets and gas canisters littering cigarettes, is that a deal?' It was the karate that determined the paths, Guardsmen and campus police watchfully her to quit, she said, she felt humiliated gasping for breath patrolling the paths, guarding buildings, muttering into after ten minutes' exercise. Philip found it surprisingly easy walkie-talkies.
and decided that he'd never really liked the pipe anyway. He He found a vacant space in the car park behind Dealer, was glad to be free of the paraphernalia of smoking. Now driving in beside Luke Hogan, just arrived in his big green the days were warm and he could wear lightweight trousers Thunderbird.
and slimline shirts without displaying unsightly bulges like
'Nice car you've got there, Phil,' said the Chairman.
cysts all over his torso. Admittedly he drank more these days:
'Morris Zapp used to have one just like it.'
usually a couple of gin and tonics before dinner, and wine or Philip shifted the subject of conversation slightly. 'One 180
181
thing to be said for the troubles on campus,' he observed,' it hurried in beside them. He was a short, bespectacled man makes parking easier.'
with thinning hair - a disappointingly unheroic figure, Hogan nodded dolefully. The crisis was no fun at all for Philip had thought when he first identified him. He still him, sandwiched between his radical and conservative wore a KEEP KROOP button in his lapel, as a veteran might wear a combat medal. Or perhaps he wore it merely to colleagues.' I'm real sorry, Phil, that you had to visit us at a embarrass Hogan, who had presided over his firing and re-time like this.'
hiring.
' Oh, it's quite interesting really. Perhaps more interesting
'Hi, Luke, hi, Philip,' he greeted them jauntily. 'See you than it ought to be.'
guys on the steps later ?'
'You'll have to come back another year.'
Hogan responded with a sickly smile.' 'Fraid I'm going to
'Supposing I asked you for a permanent job?' Philip be tied up in a committee this morning, Karl.' He leapt out asked, half-seriously, recalling his conversation with Desir£e.
of the lift as soon as it opened, and disappeared into his Hogan's response was entirely serious. An expression of office.
great pain passed over his big, brown face, parched and
'Motherfucking liberal,' Kroop muttered.
eroded like a Western landscape. 'Gee, Phil, I wish I
'Well, I'm a liberal,' Philip demurred.
could...'
'Then I wish,' said Kroop, patting Philip on the back,
' I was only joking.'
'that there were more liberals like you, Philip, prepared to
'Well, that was a mighty fine review you had in the Course lay their liberalism on the line, to go to jail for their Bulletin... And these days, teaching counts, really counts.'
liberalism. You're coming to the vigil ?'
' I haven't got the publications behind me, I know that.'
'Oh yes,' said Philip, blushing.
'Well, I have to admit P h i l . . .' Luke Hogan sighed. 'To As he entered the Department Office to check his mailbox, make you an offer appropriate to your age and experience, Mabel Lee greeted him. 'Oh, Professor Swallow, Mr Boon we should expect a book or two. Now if you were black, of left a note in your mailbox.' She simpered. 'Hear you're course, it would be different. Or better still, Indian. What I going to be on his show tonight. I'll be sure to listen.'
wouldn't give for an indigenous Indian with a PhD,' he
'Oh dear, I wouldn't recommend it.'
murmured wistfully, like a man on a desert island dreaming He took a copy of the Euphoric State Daily from the pile on of steak and chips. Part of the settlement of the previous quar-the counter and scanned the front page: RESTRAINING
ter's strike had been an undertaking by the University to ORDER ISSUED AGAINCT SHERIFF o'KEENE . . .
employ more Third World faculty, but most other uni-OTHER CAMPUSES PLEDGE SU
PPORT . . . PHYSICIANS, versities in the country were pursuing the same quarry, so SCIENTISTS PROBE ALLEGED BLISTER GAS . . . WOMEN
the supply was running short.
AND CHILDREN IN PROTEST MARCH TO GARDEN. There
'That's another thing, I haven't got a PhD,' Philip ob-was a photograph of the Garden, now rapidly reverting to served.
a dusty waste lot, with a few pieces of play equipment and This was a fact known to Hogan but he evidently con-some withered shrubs in one corner, surrounded by the sidered it bad taste on Philip's part to draw attention to it, familiar wire fence. A few stolid soldiers inside, a crowd of for he made no reply. They entered Dealer, and waited for women and children outside, like some surrealistic inversion the lift, in silence. A roughly painted notice on the wall of a concentration camp. Something for the Charles Boon Said, 'ENGLISH FACULTY VIGIL, DEALER STEPS II A.M.'
Show ?' Who, one wonders, are the real prisoners here ? Who As the lift door slid open and they entered, Karl Kroop 183
182
is inside, and who is outside the fence?' Etc., etc. He lifted had swung through a whole spectrum of feelings - amuse-the flap on what he still called, to the immense amusement ment, annoyance, envy, anger, raging sexual jealousy and of his American colleagues, his pigeonhole. A small, queerly now, all that passion spent, a kind of grudging respect. You shaped package addressed in Hilary's handwriting gave him saw Boon everywhere these days, on the streets and on tele-a moment of queasiness until he saw that it had come by vision, wherever there was a march, or a demonstration, surface mail and had been posted months ago. Mail from conspicuous by a white plaster cast on one arm, as though he outside Euphoria disturbed him these days, reminding him were daring the police to break the other. His nerve, his of his connections and responsibilities beyond its borders; cheek, his self-confidence, knew no bounds; it turned into a especially did he shrink from Hilary's airletters, pale blue, kind of courage. Melanie's infatuation, which showed no wafer-thin missives, the very profile of the Queen in the signs of slackening, had become a little more explicable.
right-hand corner transmitting, to his guilty eye, a pained He crumpled the note and tossed it into the wastepaper disapproval of his conduct. Not that the actual text of basket. The package from England he would open in the Hilary's recent letters had expressed any sense of grievance privacy of his office. On his way there he visited the men's or suspicion. She chatted amiably enough about the chil-room on the fourth floor that had been bombed on his first ren, Mary Makepeace, and Morris Zapp, who seemed to be day - now repaired and repainted. It was said that the view taking quite a leading part in affairs at Rummidge these through the open window above the urinal, straight across days, having successfully sorted out a spot of student bother the Bay to the Silver Span, was the finest obtainable from they seemed to be having there . . . really, he had scarcely such a position anywhere in the world, but today Philip kept taken in her news, skimming the lines of neat, round script as his eyes down. Foreshortened, yes, definitely.
quickly as he could to reassure himself that no rumour of his Tou must believe me, Hilary, that there was absolutely nothing infidelity had been wafted to Rummidge to rebound in a cry sexual in the arrangement at all. On the few occasions we'd met up to of outrage and anger. It was no secret around Plotinus that that time we hadn't particularly taken to each other, and in any case he was living in the Zapps' house, but people seemed too Disirie was in the first flush of her conversion to this Women's preoccupied with the Garden troubles to inquire further.
Liberation business and extremely hostile to men in general. In fact, Either that or, as Desir6e maintained, they thought Philip that was what appealed to her about our arrangement...
was gay because he had taken Charles Boon into his apart-
'Oh, dear!' Dlsirle sighed after they made love for the ment and that she was a lesbian because of the Women's first time.
Liberation bit, so didn't imagine that the two of them might
•What's the matter?'
be having an affair. Also, Howard Ringbaum, prime suspect
' It was nice while it lasted.'
as author of the poison-pen letter about Melanie (the Cow-
' I t was tremendous,' he said. 'Did I come too soon?'
boy, being one of his students, could have been his source of
' I don't mean that, stupid. I mean our chastity was nice information) had left Euphoria, having been offered a job in while it lasted.'
Canada and released at short notice by a relieved Hogan.
'Chastity?'
Philip read Charles Boon's note reminding him of the
' I've always wanted to be chaste. It's been so nice these time and place of the broadcast. He recalled their meeting last few weeks, don't you think, living like brother and sister ?
on the plane, it seemed years ago.' Hey, you must come on Now we're having an affair, like everybody else. How banal/
the programme one night . . .' Many things had changed
'You don't have to go on with it if you don't want to,' he since then, including his attitude to Charles Boon, which said.
184
U
185
f 1'
'You can't go back, once you've started. You can only go
"This is supposed to be a silent demonstration, folks,' he said. 'And I think it would add dignity to our protest if you forwards.'
didn't smoke during the vigil.'
'Good,' he said, and to make quite sure of the principle,
'Or drink or have sex,' a wag in the back row added. Sy woke her up early the next morning to make love again. It Gootblatt, standing beside Philip, groaned and threw down took a long time to rouse her, but she came in the end in a his cigarette. 'It's all right for you,' he said, 'you've quit.
series of backarching undulations that lifted him clean off Howd'yadoit?'
the bed.
'I compensate with more drink and sex,' Philip replied,
' If I didn't know the vaginal orgasm was a myth,' she smiling. Telling the truth with a jesting air was, he had said afterwards,' you could have fooled me. It was never so discovered, the safest way of protecting your secrets in good with Morris.'
Euphoria.
'I find that hard to believe,' he said. 'But nice of you to
'Yeah, but what about the post-coital cigarette? Doncha say so.'
miss it ?'
' It's true. His technique was terrific, in the old days any-
' I smoked a pipe myself.'
way, but I always felt like an engine on a test-bed. Being,
'And remember,' said Karl Kroop gravely, ' if the cops, what do they call it, tested to destruction ?'
or the troopers try to break this up, just go limp, but don't He went into his office, opened the window and sat down resist. Any pig roughs you up, make sure you get his number, at the desk. The package from Hilary evidently contained a not that the motherfuckers wear their numbers these days.
Any questions ?'
book, and was marked 'DAMAGED BY SEA WATER* which explained its strange, almost sinister shape. He peeled the
' Suppose they use gas ?' someone asked.
wrapping paper off to reveal a warped, faded, wrinkled
"Then we're screwed. Just retreat with as much dignity as you can. Walk, don't run.'
volume which he could not immediately identify. The spine Sobriety at last settled on the group. The English Faculty was missing and the pages were stuck together. He managed contained very few genuine radicals, and no would-be to prise it open in the middle, however, and read: 'Flash-martyrs. Karl Kroop's words had reminded them that, in the backs should be used sparingly, if at all. They slow down present volatile atmosphere, they were all, just the tiniest bit, the progress of the story and confuse the reader. Life, after sticking their necks out. Technically they were in violation of all, goes forwards, not backwards.'
Governor Duck's ban on public assemblies on campus.
They assembled self-consciously on the steps of Dealer It all started with my arrest. If it hadn't been for that, I think Hall, the professors, instructors and teaching assistants of the nothing would have happened. It was Bistre"e,you see, who bailed me English Department. Karl Kroop bustled round handing out. ..
out black armbands. There were a few home-made placards
' Hallo, is that you Desiree ?'
in evidence, which declared TROOPS OFF CAMPUS and
'About time! Have you forgotten I'm supposed to be END T H E OCCUPATION NOW. Philip nodded and smiled to going out tonight ?'
friends and acquaintances in the shirtsleeved, summer-
'No, I haven't forgotten.'
frocked throng. It was a nice day for a demonstration. In-
' Where in hell are you ?'
deed, the atmosphere was more like a picnic than a vigiL
' I'm in prison, actually.'
Karl Kroop seemed to think so, too, for he called the com-
'In prison?'
pany to order with a clap of his hands.
187
186
'Stealing bricks.'
' I've been arrested for stealing bricks.'
•Hear that, Al?'
'Jesus. Did you steal them ?'
'I heard it, Lou.'
' No, of course not. I mean, I had them in the car, but I
' Like how many bricks, Professor ?'
didn't steal them . . . It's a long story.'
'Oh, about twenty-five.'
4 Better cut it short, Professor,' said the police officer who The felons looked wonderingly at each other. 'Perhaps was standing guard over him.
they was gold bricks,' said one. The other gave a high-
'Look Desiree, can you come down here and try and bail pitched, wailing laugh.
me out? They say it will cost about a hundred and fifty
'Any cigarettes, Professor ?'
dollars.'
'I'm sorry, no.' It was the only time he ever regretted
