Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  “Yeah, d’you mind?” said Raymond. “I’ll replace it when I get me next giro.”

  “I don’t mind you drinking the lager,” said Vic, “as long as you don’t puke all over the carpet.”

  “That was Wiggy,” said Raymond, recognising the allusion to an incident some months earlier. “He doesn’t go around with us any more.”

  “Learned some sense, has he?”

  “Nah. He got married.” Raymond grinned and glanced slyly at his friends, who seemed to find this idea as amusing as he did. They belched and guffawed, or shook their shoulders in silent laughter.

  “God help his wife, is all I can say,” said Vic. He stepped over several pairs of outstretched legs to reach the stereo, and turned down the volume and bass controls. “Keep this low,” he said, “or you’ll wake your mother.”

  “A’right,” said Raymond mildly, though he knew as well as Vic that only a bomb would wake Marjorie now. He added, as Vic made his way to the door, “Turn the light out, will you, Dad?”

  As he climbed the stairs, Vic thought he heard the sound of stifled laughter coming from the lounge. It was a sound he was getting increasingly tired of.

  …

  The following morning Vic, while engaged in cleaning the road salt off the underside of his car with a pressure hose in the front drive, saw several of last night’s nomads leave, and by dint of staring hard even compelled two of them to mutter a greeting. Under an agreement negotiated some time ago, Raymond was allowed to have friends to stay in the house overnight only on condition that they slept in his room. This clause, intended to limit the number of his guests, had quite failed of its intended effect since, however many there were, they all somehow managed to squeeze themselves into the available space, curled up on the floor in sleeping bags or wrapped in their overcoats in (as Vic imagined the scene) a snoring, farting, belching heap. From this foetid nest they would emerge, singly and at intervals, in the course of Sunday morning, to pee, not always accurately, in one of the lavatories of the house, and help themselves lavishly to cornflakes in the kitchen, before sloping off to their next pub rendezvous. As usual, Raymond was the last to rise this morning; indeed, he was still having his breakfast when Vic drove off to fetch his father for lunch.

  Since Vic’s elder sister, Joan, had married a Canadian and gone to live in Winnipeg twenty-five years ago, the responsibility of looking after their parents had fallen to him. Mr. Wilcox Senior had retired in 1975 after working all his life, first as a toolmaker, later as a stores supervisor, for one of the largest engineering companies in Rummidge. Vic’s mother had died six years later, of cancer, but Mr. Wilcox insisted on staying on in the terraced house in Ebury Street he had married into, old-fashioned and inconvenient as it was. Bringing him round to Avondale Road for Sunday lunch was a regular ritual.

  Every time Vic drove down Ebury Street, it seemed a little more dejected, but on this overcast January Sunday, with a slow thaw in progress, it seemed especially depressing. Decay had set in at each end of the street, as if the molars had been the first to go in a row of teeth, and was creeping slowly towards the middle, where a few of the long-term residents, like his father, still remained stubbornly rooted. Some of the houses were squats, some were boarded up, and others were occupied by poor immigrants. To this latter group Mr. Wilcox had a curiously divided attitude. Those he knew personally he spoke of in terms of the warmest regard; the rest he anathematised as “bloody blacks and coloureds” who had brought the neighbourhood down. Vic had tried on several occasions to explain to his father that their presence in Ebury Street was an effect, not a cause—that the cause was the expressway striding over the rooftops only thirty yards away on its great bulging concrete legs—but without success. Come to think of it, he had never succeeded in changing his father’s mind about anything.

  Vic drew into the gutter, still clogged with dirty packed snow, and parked outside number 59. Some Caribbean children throwing slushy snowballs at each other desisted for a moment to stare at the big shiny car, as well they might. The Jaguar seemed almost obscenely opulent alongside the bangers parked in this street, old rust-eaten Escorts and Marinas sagging on their clapped-out shock-absorbers. Vic would have felt more comfortable driving Marjorie’s Metro, but he knew that his father got a kick out of being collected in the Jag. It was a message to the neighbours: Look, my son is rich and successful. I’m not like you, I don’t have to live on this shit-heap. I can move out any time I like. I just happen to like living in my own house, the house I’ve always lived in.

  Vic knocked on the front door. His father opened it almost immediately, neatly dressed in his Sunday best: a checked sports jacket with grey flannels, a woolly cardigan under the jacket, collar and tie, and brown shoes gleaming like freshly gathered conkers. His thin grey hair was slicked down with haircream, which, Vic reflected, thinking of Raymond’s friends, seemed to be coming back into fashion—not that fashion had anything to do with Mr. Wilcox’s use of it.

  “I’ll just get my coat,” he said, “I was airing it. D’you want to come in?”

  “I might as well,” said Vic.

  The air seemed almost as damp and chill in the hall as outside on the pavement. “You ought to let me put central heating in this house,” Vic said, as he followed the dark shape of his father—short and broad-shouldered like his own, but with less flesh on the bones—down the hall. Correctly predicting the reply, he silently mouthed it in unison.

  “I don’t ’old with central ’eating.”

  “You wouldn’t have to air your clothes in front of the kitchen stove.”

  “It’s bad for the furniture.”

  Somewhere Mr. Wilcox had picked up the idea that central heating dried up the glue in furniture, causing it eventually to collapse and disintegrate. The fact that Vic’s furniture was still intact after many years in a centrally heated environment had not shaken this conviction, and of course it could not be pointed out to Mr. Wilcox that his own furniture, mostly bought from the Co-op in the nineteen-thirties, was in any case hardly worth careful preservation.

  The back kitchen was at least cosy and warm, which was just as well, since Mr. Wilcox virtually wintered in it, sitting in his highbacked armchair facing the stove, with the TV perched precariously on top of the sideboard and a pile of the old books and magazines he bought from jumble sales within easy reach. The door of the solid-fuel boiler was open, and in front of it a navy-blue overcoat was slumped like a drunk over the back of an upright chair. Mr. Wilcox closed the door of the boiler with a bang, and Vic helped him on with the coat.

  “You could do with a new one,” he said, noticing the threadbare cuffs.

  “You can’t get material like this any more,” said Mr. Wilcox. “That thing you’ve got on doesn’t look as if it’s got any warmth in it.”

  Vic was wearing a quilted gilet over a thick sweater. “It’s warmer than it looks,” he said. “Nice for driving—leaves your arms free.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Fifteen pounds,” said Vic, halving the actual price.

  “Good God!” Mr. Wilcox exclaimed.

  Whenever his father asked him the price of anything, Vic always halved it. This formula, he found, ensured that the old man was agreeably scandalised without being really upset.

  “Picked up an interesting book yesterday,” said Mr. Wilcox, brandishing a volume with limp red covers, somewhat soiled and creased. “Only cost me fivepence. ’Ave a look.”

  The book was the AA Guide to Hotels and Restaurants 1958. “Bring it with you, Dad,” said Vic. “We’d better be on our way, or the dinner’ll spoil.”

  “Did you know, in 1958 you could get bed and breakfast in a one-star hotel in Morecambe for seven-and-six a night?”

  “No, Dad, I didn’t.”

  “How much d’you reckon it would cost now. Seven quid?”

  “Easily,” said Vic. “More like twice that.”

  “I don’t know how folk manage these days,” said Mr. Wilcox,
with gloomy satisfaction.

  …

  Sunday lunch, or dinner as Vic called it in deference to his father, hardly varied through the year, also in deference to Mr. Wilcox: a joint of beef or lamb, with roast potatoes and sprouts or peas, followed by apple crumble or lemon meringue pie: Once Marjorie had experimented with coq au vin from a recipe in a magazine, and Mr. Wilcox had sighed unhappily as his plate was put before him and said afterwards that it was very nice but he had never been much of a one for foreign food and there was nothing like the good old English roast. Marjorie had taken the hint.

  After lunch they sat in the lounge and Mr. Wilcox diverted himself and, he fondly supposed, the rest of the family, by reading aloud extracts from the AA Guide to Hotels and Restaurants, and inviting them to guess the 1958 rate for a week’s half board at the best hotel in the Isle of Wight or the price of bed and breakfast at a class A boarding house in Rhyl. “I don’t even know what seven-and-six means, Grandpa,” said Sandra irritably, while Gary had to be restrained from giving his grandfather a patronising lecture on inflation. Sandra and Gary squabbled over the TV, Sandra wanting to watch the Eastenders omnibus and Gary wanting to play a computer game. He had a black-and-white set of his own upstairs, but the game required colour. When Vic upheld Sandra’s claim, Gary sulked and said it was time he had a colour set of his own. Mr. Wilcox asked how much the set in the living-room cost and Vic, looking fiercely at the rest of the family, said two hundred and fifty pounds. Marjorie was reading, with great concentration and hardly moving her lips at all, a mail-order brochure that had come with her credit-card account and kept proposing to purchase various items of useless gadgetry—a keyring that bleeped when you whistled for it, an alarm clock that stopped bleeping if you shouted at it, an inflatable neck-pillow for sleeping on aeroplanes, a battery-operated telescopic tie-rack, a thermostatically controlled waxing machine for removing unwanted hair, and a jacuzzi conversion kit for the bathtub—until Mr. Wilcox’s relentless quiz about 1958 hotel prices reminded her of summer holidays and she began to go through the Sunday papers and the TV guides cutting out coupons for brochures. Sandra said she was sick of family holidays and why didn’t they buy their own apartment in Spain or Majorca, then they could all go separately and stay with their friends, a proposal enthusiastically backed up by Raymond, who came in from the kitchen, where he had been eating his warmed-up lunch because as usual he had come in from the pub too late to sit down at table. He also asked Vic if he would lend him and his mates two hundred and fifty pounds to have a “demo tape” of their band made, a request Vic had the satisfaction of turning down flat. Caught in the crossfire between a parent who regarded all nonessential expenditure as a form of moral turpitude and a wife and children who would spend his annual salary five times over if given the chance, Vic gave up the attempt to read the Sunday papers and relieved his feelings by going outside and shovelling away the slush on the front drive. Nothing depressed him more than the thought of summer holidays: a fortnight of compulsory idleness, mooning about in the rain in some dreary English seaside resort, or looking for a bit of shade on a sweltering Mediterranean beach. Weekends were bad enough. By this point on a Sunday afternoon he was itching to get back to the factory.

  3

  For Robyn and Charles weekends were for work as well as recreation, and the two activities tended to blend into each other at certain interfaces. Was it work or recreation, for instance, to browse through the review pages of the Observer and the Sunday Times, mentally filing away information about the latest books, plays, films, and even fashion and furniture (for nothing semiotic is alien to the modern academic critic)? A brisk walk in Wellington boots to feed the ducks in the local park was, however, definitely recreation; and after a light lunch (Robyn cooked the omelettes and Charles dressed the salad), they settled down for a few hours’ serious work in the congested living-room study, before it would be time for Charles to drive back to Suffolk. Robyn had a stack of essays to mark, and Charles was reading a book on Deconstruction which he had agreed to review for a scholarly journal. The gas fire hissed and popped in the the hearth. A harpsichord concerto by Haydn tinkled quietly on the stereo. Outside, as the light faded from the winter sky, melting snow dripped from the eaves and trickled down the gutters. Robyn, looking up from Marion Russell’s overdue assessed essay on Tess of the D’Urbervilles (which was actually not at all bad, so perhaps the modelling job was turning out to be a sensible decision), caught Charles’ abstracted gaze and smiled.

  “Any good?” she enquired, nodding at his book.

  “Not bad. Quite good on the de-centring of the subject, actually. You remember that marvellous bit in Lacan?” Charles read out a quotation: “‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I think not… I am not, wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am wherever I don’t think I am thinking.’”

  “Marvellous,” Robyn agreed.

  “There’s quite a good discussion of it in here.”

  “Isn’t that where Lacan says something interesting about realism?”

  “Yes: ‘This two-faced mystery is linked to the fact that the truth can be evoked only in that dimension of alibi in which all “realism” in creative works takes its virtue from metonymy.’”

  Robyn frowned. “What d’you think that means, exactly? I mean, is ‘truth’ being used ironically?”

  “Oh, I think so, yes. It’s implied by the word ‘alibi,’ surely? There is no ‘truth,’ in the absolute sense, no transcendental signified. Truth is just a rhetorical illusion, a tissue of metonymies and metaphors, as Nietzsche said. It all goes back to Nietzsche, really, as this chap points out.” Charles tapped the book on his lap. “Listen. Lacan goes on: ‘It is likewise linked to this other fact that we accede to meaning only through the double twist of metaphor when we have the unique key: the signifier and the signified of the Saussurian formula are not at the same level, and man only deludes himself when he believes that his true place is at their axis, which is nowhere.’”

  “But isn’t he making a distinction there between ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’? Truth is to meaning as metonymy is to metaphor.”

  “How?” It was Charles’ turn to frown.

  “Well, take Pringle’s, for example.”

  “Pringle’s?”

  “The factory.”

  “Oh, that. You seem quite obsessed with that place.”

  “Well, it’s uppermost in my mind. You could represent the factory realistically by a set of metonymies—dirt, noise, heat and so on. But you can only grasp the meaning of the factory by metaphor. The place is like hell. The trouble with Wilcox is that he can’t see that. He has no metaphorical vision.”

  “And what about Danny Ram?” said Charles.

  “Oh, poor old Danny Ram, I don’t suppose he has any metaphorical vision either, otherwise he couldn’t stick it. The factory to him is just another set of metonymies and synecdoches: a lever he pulls, a pair of greasy overalls he wears, a weekly pay packet. That’s the truth of his existence, but not the meaning of it.”

  “Which is… ?”

  “I just told you: hell. Alienation, if you want to put it in Marxist terms.”

  “But—” said Charles. But he was interrupted by a long peal on the doorbell.

  “Who on earth can that be?” Robyn wondered, starting to her feet.

  “Not your friend Wilcox, again, I hope,” said Charles.

  “Why should it be?”

  “I don’t know. Only you made him sound a bit…” Charles, uncharacteristically, couldn’t find the epithet he wanted.

  “Well, you needn’t look so apprehensive,” said Robyn, with a grin. “He won’t eat you.” She went to the window and peeped out at the front porch. “Good Lord!” she exclaimed. “It’s Basil!”

  “Your brother?”

  “Yes, and a girl.” Robyn did a hop, skip and jump across the cluttered floor and went to open the front door, while Charles, displeased at the interruption, marked his place in th
e book and stowed it away in his briefcase. The little he knew about Basil did not suggest that deconstruction was a likely topic of conversation in the next hour or two.

  Basil’s decision to go into the City, announced to an incredulous family in his last undergraduate year at Oxford, had not been an idle threat. He had joined a merchant bank on graduating and after only three years’ employment was already earning more than his father, who had related this fact to Robyn at Christmas with a mixture of pride and resentment. Basil himself had not been at home for Christmas, but skiing in St. Moritz. It was in fact some time since Robyn had seen her brother, because, for their parents’ sake, they deliberately arranged their visits home to alternate rather than coincide, and they had little desire to meet elsewhere. She was struck by the change in his appearance: his face was fatter, his wavy corn-coloured hair was neatly trimmed, and he seemed to have had his teeth capped—all presumably the results of his new affluence. Everything about him and his girlfriend signified money, from their pastel-pale, luxuriously thick sheepskin coats that seemed to fill the threshold when she opened the front door, to the red C-registration BMW parked at the kerb behind Charles’ four-year-old Golf. Underneath the sheepskin coats Basil was wearing an Aquascutum cashmere sports jacket, and his girlfriend, whose name was Debbie, an outfit remarkably like one designed by Katherine Hamnett illustrated in that day’s Sunday Times. This classy attire was explained partly by the fact that they had been to a hunt ball in Shropshire the previous evening, and had decided on impulse to call in on their way back to London.

  “A hunt ball?” Robyn repeated, with a raised eyebrow. “Is this the same man whose idea of a good night out used to be listening to a punk band in a room over a pub?”

  “We all have to grow up, Rob,” said Basil. “Anyway, it was partly business. I made some useful contacts.”