changing-places-david-lodge

by Unknown

c No sign of her this morning. You fill her up with liquor ?'

  Amanda appeared at the door, arrayed in her school

  'Just a couple of martinis.'

  uniform - dark maroon blazer, white shirt and tie, grey

  ' Eggs with your bacon ?'

  skirt. The students of Rummidge High School for Girls

  ' Uh, I'll have two, scrambled.'

  wore their skirts very, very short indeed, so that they re-

  'What d'you think this is, Howard Johnson's?'

  sembled mythical biform creatures like mermaids or cen-

  'Yeah, and let me have a side order of golden-crisp taurs, all prim austerity above the waist, all bare forked ranch-fried potatoes.' He winked at Matthew, open-animal below. The bus stops in the neighbourhood were a mouthed over his bowl of cornflakes. The young Swallows nympholept's paradise at this time of the morning. Amanda were not used to adult repartee over the breakfast table, blushed under Morris's scrutiny.' I'm off, Mary,' she said.

  'Morris, could you possibly take me to the railroad

  'Just run upstairs first, Mandy, and ask your mother if station on your way to work this morning ?'

  she'd like a cup of tea or something, would you ?'

  ' Sure. Taking a trip somewhere ?'

  ' Mummy's not upstairs. She's in Daddy's study.'

  'You remember I told you I was going to visit my

  'Really? I must tell her about the meal tonight.5 Mary family's grave in County Durham ?'

  bustled out.

  ' Isn't that a long way from here ?'

  ' I see the Bee Gees are giving a concert in town the week

  ' I'll stay overnight in Durham. Be back tomorrow.'

  after next,' Morris said to Amanda.' Shall I get tickets ?'

  Morris sighed. 'I shan't be here. O'Shea has fixed his Amanda's eyes gleamed.' Oh, yes please!'

  roof, so I'll be going back to the apartment. I'm going to

  'Perhaps Mary will come with us, or even your mother.

  miss the cooking here.'

  D'you dig the Bee Gees ?' he asked Mary, who had returned.

  'Aren't you scared to go back to that place ?'

  'Can't stand them. Amanda, you'd better be on your

  'Oh, well, you know what they say: a lump of frozen way. Your mother's tied up on the telephone.'

  urine never strikes in the same place twice.'

  Hilary was still on the phone when it was time for Mary to

  'Hey kids, hurry up, or you'll be late for school.' Mary leave. She scribbled a note for Hilary while Morris backed put a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in front of Morris the Lotus into the road, its exhaust booming in a deep and he tucked in appreciatively.

  baritone that rattled the house windows in their frames.

  'You know, Mary,' he said when the children had left the

  'What time is your train?' he asked as Mary, manoeu-room, 'your talents are wasted as an unmarried mother.

  vering her belly with care, lowered herself into the passenger Why don't you persuade that priest of yours to become a seat.

  Protestant ? Then you could make an honest man of him.'

  ' Eight-fifty. Will we make it ?'

  'Funny you should say that,' she replied, taking an air-

  'Sure.'

  mail envelope from her pocket and wagging it in the air.

  ' This car wasn't built for pregnant women, was it ?'

  'He just wrote to say he's been laicized.'

  ' The seat reclines. How's that ?'

  ' Great! He wants to marry you ?'

  ' That's great. Mind if I practise my relaxation ?'

  ' He wants to shack up with me anyway.*

  'Go ahead.'

  'What are you going to do ?'

  Almost at once they hit a tailback of rush-hour traffic in

  'I'm thinking about it. I wonder what's the matter with the Midland Road. A line of people waiting at a bus stop Hilary? There are some things I have to tell her before I gazed curiously at Mary Makepeace practising shallow leave.'

  breathing in the bucket seat of the Lotus.

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  ' What's that all about ?' Morris inquired.

  'Anyway, she kept glowering «t me from out of the corner

  'Psychoprophylaxis. Painless childbirth to you. Hilary's of the room like a wild animal. I don't know, perhaps she teaching me.'

  was smiling at me and it just looked like a snarl.'

  ' You believe in it ?'

  'She wasn't smiling, Mary. I should keep out of Berna-

  'Of course. The Russians have been using it for years.'

  dette's way if I were you. She's jealous.'

  'Only because they can't afford anaesthetics, I'll bet.'

  'Jealous of me?'

  'Who wants anaesthetics at the most important moment

  'She thinks I knocked you up.'

  of a woman'h life ?'

  'Good Lord!'

  'Desir6e wanted the hospital to put her out for the whole

  'Don't sound so surprised. I'm perfectly capable of it.

  goddam nine months.'

  What time did you say your train was ? Eight-fifty ?'

  'She was brainwashed, if you'll pardon the expression.

  'That's right.'

  The medical profession has succeeded in persuading women

  'We're going to have to break the law a little bit'

  that pregnancy is a kind of illness that only doctors know

  'Take it easy, Morris. It's not that important.'

  how to cure.'

  The traffic appeared to be backed up for nearly a mile

  ' What does O'Shea think about it all ?'

  from the intersection with the Inner Ring. Mcrris pulled out

  'He just believes in old-fashioned pain.'

  and varoomed down the wrong side of the road, scandalized

  'That figures. You know, Mary, I can't understand why drivers honking protest in his wake. Just before he reached you put yourself in that guy's hands. He looks like the kind the Inner Ring an invalid carriage, as they were called of doctor who used to take bullets out of gangsters in old (more like euthanasia on wheels, he would have said, a

  "B" pictures.'

  frontwheel blowout in one of those crazy boxed-in tricycles

  'It's the system here. You have to register with a local and you were a gonner) handily stalled and gave him space doctor to get referred to the hospital. O'Shea was the only to get the Lotus back into line.

  doctor I knew.'

  'How about that?' he said elatedly. But unfortunately a

  ' I don't like to think of him examining y o u . . . I mean, he cop on traffic duty had observed the manner of Morris's has dirt under his fingernails!'

  arrival. He came across, unbuttoning his tunic pocket.

  'Oh, he leaves that kind of thing to the hospital. He only

  'Oh dear,' said Mary Makepeace. 'Now you're going to gave me a pre-natal once and it seemed to embarrass hell out get a ticket.'

  of him. He fixed his eyes on this hideous picture of the Sacred

  'Would you mind going back into that quick-breathing Heart on the wall and kept muttering under his breath like routine?'

  he was praying.'

  The policeman had to bend almost double to peer into Morris laughed. "That's O'Shea.'

  the car. Morris gestured with his thumb at Mary Makepeace

  ' It was a kind of spooky occasion all round. There was panting for all she was worth, her eyes closed and her this nurse of his -'

  tongue hanging out like a dog's, hands clasping her belly.

  •Nurse?'

  'Emergency, officer. This young lady's going to have a

  'A black-haired girl with no teeth -'

  baby.'

  'That's no nurse, that's Bernadette, the Irish slavey.'

  'Oh,' said the cop. 'Well, all right, but drive more care-

  'Well, she was wearing a nurse's uniform.' />
  fully or you'll both end up in hospital.' Smiling at his own

  'A con trick. O'Shea is just saving money.'

  joke, he held up the traffic for them to proceed against the to8

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  lights. Morris waved his thanks. He got Mary Makepeace to timetable clashes, but the real problem was their reluctance the station with five minutes to spare.

  to teach before ten o'clock in the morning or after four in the afternoon or in the lunch period or on Wednesday after-Driving back to the University, Morris took the newly noons or any time at weekends. That scarcely left them time opened section of the Inner Ring, an exhilarating complex of to open their mail, let alone teach. Unaware of this gentle-tunnels and flyovers that was part of the proposed Grand manly tradition, Morris had fixed one of his tutorials at Prix circuit. He leaned back in the bucket seat and drove nine am, much to the disgust of the students concerned, and with straight, extended arms in the style of a professional it was to meet this group that he now stepped out to his racing driver. In the longest tunnel, safe from police ob-office — not with excessive haste, for they were invariably servation, he put his foot down and heard with satisfaction late.

  the din of the Lotus's exhaust reverberating from the walls.

  The English Department had changed its quarters since He came out of the tunnel like a bullet, into a long canted his arrival at Rummidge. It was now situated on the eighth curve elevated above roof level. From here you got a floor of a newly built hexagonal block, one of those he had panorama of the whole city and the sun came out at that surveyed from the Inner Ring. The changeover had taken moment, shining like floodlighting on the pale concrete place in the Easter vacation amid much wailing and gnashing facades of the recent construction work, tower blocks and of teeth. Oy, oy, Exodus was nothing in comparison. With a freeways, throwing them into relief against the sombre mass characteristically whacky, yet somehow endearing tender-of nineteenth-century slums and decayed factories. Seen ness for individual liberty over logic and efficiency, the from this perspective, it looked as though the seeds of a whole Administration had allowed each faculty member to decide twentieth-century city had been planted under the ground a which items of furniture he would like transferred from his long time ago and were now beginning to shoot up into the old accommodation to the new, and which he would like light, bursting through the caked, exhausted topsoil of replaced. The resulting permutations were totally confusing Victorian architecture. Morris found it an oddly stirring to the men carrying out the work and innumerable errors sight, for the city that was springing up was unmistakably were made. For days two caravans of porters could be seen American in style - indeed that was what the local blimps tottering from one building to the other, carrying almost as were always beefing about - and he had the strange feeling many tables, chairs and filing cabinets out of the new one as of having stumbled upon a new American frontier in the they carried into it. For a new building, the Hexagon had most unexpected place.

  already acquired quite a mythology. It was built on a pre-But one thing was for sure, they had a long way to catch fabricated principle and confidence in the soundness of the up in music on radio. The clock in the campanile was striking structure had been undermined by hastily issued restrictions nine and one godawful disc jockey was handing over to on the weight of books each faculty member was allowed on another on Radio One as he swept through the main gates his bookshelves. The more conscientious members of staff of the University. The security man saluted smartly: since were to be observed in the first weeks of their occupation his success in ending the sit-in Morris had become a well-resentfully weighing their books on kitchen or bathroom known and respected man-about-campus, and the orange scales and adding up long columns of figures on pieces of Lotus made him instantly identifiable. There was, naturally, paper. There were also restrictions on the number of persons no difficulty in finding parking space this early in the allowed into each office and classroom, and it was alleged morning. The Rummidge faculty liked to complain about that the windows on the West side were sealed up because if 910

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  all the occupants of those rooms were to lean out at the same the top and bottom and rising or dropping into the light time the building would fall over. The exterior had been again, perpetual motion readily symbolizing all systems and faced with glazed ceramic tiles guaranteed to resist the cosmologies based on the principle of eternal recurrence, corrosion of the Rummidge atmosphere for five hundred vegetation myths, death and rebirth archetypes, cyclic years, but they had been attached with an inferior adhesive theories of history, metempsychosis and Northrop Frye's material and were already beginning to fall off here and theory of literary modes.

  there. Notices bearing the motto 'Beware of Falling Tiles'

  This morning, however, he contented himself with a decorated the approach to the new building. These warnings direct journey to the eighth floor. His tutorial students were were not superfluous: a tile fell in fragments at Morris's already waiting, slumped against the wall beside the door of feet just as he mounted the steps at the entrance.

  his office, yawning and scratching themselves. He greeted All in all, it was hardly surprising that the move was the them and unlocked the door, which bore his name on a slip subject of bitter complaint by members of the English De-of paper pasted over the nameplate of Gordon Masters. As partment; but there was one feature of the new building soon as he got inside, the communicating door opposite that entirely redeemed it in Morris's eyes at least. This was a opened and Alice Slade inched her way apologetically into type of elevator which he had never seen before, quaintly the room, clutching a large stack of files.

  named a paternoster, that consisted of an endless belt of

  'Oh,' she said, 'are you teaching, Professor Zapp? I open compartments moving up and down two shafts. The wanted to ask you about these postgraduate applications.'

  movement was slower, naturally, than that of a normal ele-

  'Yeah, teaching till ten, Alice, O K ? Why don't you ask vator, since the belt never stopped and one had to step into Rupert Sutcliffe about it ?'

  it while it was moving, but the system eliminated all tedious

  ' Oh, all right. Sorry I disturbed you.' She backed out.

  waiting. It also imparted to the ordinary, quotidian action of

  'Siddown,' he said to the students, thinking to himself taking an elevator a certain existential edge of drama, for that he would have to move back into Swallow's room. On one had to time one's leap into and out of the moving com-accepting the job of mediator between the Administration partment with finesse and positive commitment. Indeed for and the students he'd asked for secretarial assistance and an the elderly and infirm the paternoster constituted a for-outside telephone line - requests which had been promptly midable challenge, and most of them preferred to labour and economically satisfied by moving him into the office made up and down the staircase. Admittedly the notice pasted vacant by the abrupt departure of Gordon Masters. You beside the red-painted Emergency device on every floor did could still tell from the marks on the walls where the hunt-not inspire confidence: ' I n case of emergency, pull the red ing trophies had hung. Although his work as mediator was lever downwards. Do not attempt to free persons trapped in virtually finished, it hardly seemed worthwhile moving back the paternoster or its machinery. The maintenance staff will into Swallow's room, but in the meantime the Departmental attend to malfunctions at the earliest possible opportunity.'

  Secretary, conditioned to refer all problems, inquiries and One day there would be a conventional elevator as well, but decisions to Masters, had begun to bring them, as though as yet it wasn't in operation. Morris didn't complain: he compelled by a deep-seated homing instinct, to him, Morris loved the paternoster. Perhaps it was a throwback to his Zapp, although Rupert Sutcliffe was supposed to be the childhood delight in fairground carousels and suchlike; but Acting Head of the Department. In fact Sutcliffe himself he also foun
d it a profoundly poetic machine, especially if one was inclined to come to Morris with oblique appeals for stayed on for the round trip, disappearing into darkness at advice and approval, and other members of staff too.

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  Suddenly freed from Masters* despotic rule after thirty thought she loved. Readers of Jane Austen, he emphasized, years, the Rummidge English Department was stunned and gesturing freely with his cigar, should not be misled by the frightened by its own liberty, it was going round and round absence of overt reference to physical sexuality in her fiction in circles like a rudderless ship, no, more like a ship whose into supposing that she was indifferent or hostile to it. On tyrannical captain had unexpectedly fallen overboard one the contrary, she invariably came down on the side of Eros dark night, taking with him sealed instructions about the against Agape - on the side, that is, of the private com-ship's ultimate destination. The crew kept coming out of munion of lovers over against the public communion of habit to the bridge for orders, and were only too glad to take social events and gatherings which invariably caused pain them from anyone who happened to be occupying the and distress (think for instance of the disastrous nature of captain's seat.

  group expeditions, to Sotherton in Mansfield Park, to Box Admittedly it was a comfortable seat - a padded, tip-Hill in Emma, to Lyme Regis in Persuasion). Getting into his back, executive's swivel chair — and for that reason alone stride, Morris demonstrated that Mr Elton was obviously Morris was reluctant to move back into Philip Swallow's implied to be impotent because there was no lead in the room. He leaned back into it, put his feet on the desk and lit pencil that Harriet Smith took from him; and the moment in a cigar. 'Well now,' he said to the three dejected-looking Persuasion when Captain Wentworth lifted the little brat students.' What are you bursting to discuss this morning ?'

  Walter off Anne Elliot's shoulders . . . He snatched up the

  'Jane Austen,' mumbled the boy with the beard, shuffling text and read with feeling:

  some sheets of foolscap covered with evil-looking hand-

  ' ". . . she found herself in the state of being released from writing.

  him . . . Before she realized that Captain Wentworth had