by Lodge, David
“I could use those glass dishes I got in the Sales for the avocados,” Marjorie conceded. This idea seemed to please her, and she accepted the idea of a starter.
“And tell Raymond I don’t want him walking in from the pub in the middle of lunch this Sunday,” said Vic.
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
“He listens to you.”
“He listens to me because you won’t talk to him.”
“I’d only lose my temper.”
“You should make an effort, Vic. You don’t talk to any of us. You’re that wrapped up in yourself.”
“Don’t start on me,” he said.
“I’ve lent him the money, any road.”
“What money?”
“For their demo tape. For the band.” Marjorie looked defiantly at him. “It’s my own money, from my Post Office account.”
At another time, in another mood, Vic would have had a blazing row with her. As it was, he merely shrugged and said, “More fool you. Don’t forget paper serviettes.”
Marjorie looked blank.
“For Sunday.”
“Oh! I always have serviettes when we have guests.”
“Sometimes we run out,” said Vic.
Marjorie stared at him. “I’ve never known you give a second’s thought to serviettes in your life before,” she said. In her pale, tranquillised eyes, he saw, like something stirring indistinctly under water, a flicker of fear, a shadow of suspicion; and realized for the first time that she had grounds for these feelings.
3
Half of Vic’s apprehension about the Sunday lunch was relieved when Robyn rang on the Saturday morning to say her boyfriend, Charles, had a cold, and wouldn’t be coming to Rummidge that weekend after all. She herself arrived rather late, and they sat down at table almost immediately. There were paper serviettes at every place setting and, reposing in blue-tinted glass dishes, halves of avocado pear. These last excited much wonderment and derision from the children.
“What’s this?” Gary demanded, sticking a fork into his half, and lifting it into the air.
“It’s avocado, stupid,” said Sandra.
“It’s a starter,” said Marjorie.
“We don’t usually have a starter,” said Raymond.
“Ask your father,” said Marjorie.
All looked at Vic, including Robyn Penrose, who smiled, as if she recognised that the avocado was his personal tribute to her sophistication.
“I thought it would make a change,” Vic said gruffly. “Don’t eat it if you don’t want to.”
“Is it a fruit or a veg?” said his father, poking doubtfully at his portion.
“More like a vegetable, Dad,” said Vic. “You pour oil and vinegar dressing into the hole and eat it with a spoon.”
Mr. Wilcox scooped out a small spoonful of the yellow flesh and nibbled it experimentally. “Queer sort of taste,” he said. “Like candle-grease.”
“They cost five pounds each, Grandad,” said Raymond.
“What!”
“Take no notice, Dad, he’s having you on,” said Vic.
“I wouldn’t give you five pee for them, to be honest with you,” said his father.
“They taste much nicer with the vinaigrette, Mr. Wilcox,” said Robyn. “Won’t you try some?”
“No thanks, love, olive oil doesn’t agree with me.”
“Gives you the squits, does it, Grandad?” said Gary.
“You’re so vile, Gary,” said Sandra.
“Aye, it does, lad,” said Mr. Wilcox. “We used to call ’em the backdoor trots when I was a lad. That’s because—”
“We know why, Dad, or we can guess,” Vic interrupted him with an apologetic glance at Robyn, but she seemed to be amused rather than offended by this exchange. He began cautiously to relax.
Thanks to Robyn, the meal was not the social minefield he had feared. Instead of talking a lot herself and making the family feel ignorant, she drew them out with questions about themselves. Raymond told her about his band and Sandra told her about hairstyling and Gary told her about computer games and his father told her about how he and Vic’s mother had married on thirty-five bob a week and hadn’t considered themselves poor. Whenever the old man looked like getting onto the subject of “the immigrants,” Vic managed to head him off by some provocative remark about the cost of living. Only Marjorie had defeated Robyn’s social skills, absorbing all her questions with monosyllabic murmurs or faint, abstracted smiles. But that was Marjorie for you. She always kept herself in the background, or in the kitchen, when they had guests. But she’d served up a cracking good dinner, apart from the avocados, which were underripe and rather hard.
The nearest approach to a snag in the smooth running of the proceedings came when Robyn tried to take a hand in washing up after the meal, and Marjorie strongly resisted. For a moment there was a polite struggle of wills between the two women, but in the end Vic arranged a compromise by taking charge of the operation himself, conscripting the children to help. He proposed a short walk afterwards before it got dark, but Marjorie excused herself on the grounds that it was too cold, Raymond went off to rehearse with his mates in somebody’s garage, Sandra curled up in front of the telly with an emery board to manicure her nails and watch Eastenders, and Gary implausibly pleaded a prior commitment to homework. Mr. Wilcox agreed to come out, but when Vic returned to the lounge after completing the washing up, he was asleep and snoring faintly in an armchair. Vic didn’t wake him, or make any effort to persuade the other members of the family. A walk with Robyn on her own was what he had been secretly hoping for.
“I’d no idea your children were so grown-up,” she said, as soon as they were clear of the house.
“We’ve been married twenty-three years. We started a family straight away. Marjorie was only too glad to give up work.”
“What work was that?”
“Typing pool.”
“Ah.”
“Marje is no intellectual,” said Vic, “as you probably noticed. She left school without any O-Levels.”
“Does that bother her?”
“No. It bothers me, sometimes.”
“Why don’t you encourage her to do a course of some kind, then?”
“What—O-Levels? Marjorie? At her time of life?” His laughter rang out in the cold air, harsher than he had intended.
“It doesn’t have to be O-Level. There are extra-mural courses she could do, or WEA. And the Open University has courses you can follow without doing the examinations.”
“Marjorie wouldn’t be up to it,” said Vic.
“Only because you’ve made her think she isn’t,” said Robyn.
“Rubbish! Marjorie’s perfectly content. She has a nice house, with an en suite bathroom and four lavatories, and enough money to go shopping whenever she feels like it.”
“I think that’s an unbelievably patronising thing to say about your own wife,” said Robyn Penrose.
They walked on in silence for a while, as Vic considered how to respond to this rebuke. He decided to let it pass.
He led Robyn by an aimless route through the quieter residential streets. It was a cold, misty afternoon, with a low red sun glowing through the branches of the leafless trees. They met few other people: a lone jogger, a couple with a dog, some disconsolate-looking African students waiting at a bus stop. At every intersection, marking the nocturnal passage of marauding vandals, uprooted traffic bollards lay on their sides, with all their wiring exposed.
“It’s my kids who should be worrying about getting qualifications,” said Vic. “Raymond dropped out of university last year. Failed his first-year exams and the resits.”
“What was he doing?”
“Electrical Engineering. He’s clever enough, but never did any work. And Sandra says she doesn’t want to go to university. Wants to be a hairdresser, or ‘hairstylist,’ as they call it.”
“Of course, hair is very important in youth culture today,” Robyn mused. “It’s a f
orm of self-expression. It’s almost a new form of art.”
“It’s not a serious job, though, is it? You wouldn’t do it for a living.”
“There are lots of things I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t work in a factory. I wouldn’t work in a bank. I wouldn’t be a housewife. When I think of most people’s lives, especially women’s lives, I don’t know how they bear it.”
“Someone has to do those jobs,” said Vic.
“That’s what’s so depressing.”
“But Sandra could do something better. I wish you’d talk to her, about going to university.”
“Why should she take any notice of me?”
“She won’t take any notice of me, and Marjorie isn’t interested. You’re nearer her age. She’d respect your advice.”
“Does she know I shall probably be out of a job next year?” Robyn asked. “Not much of an advertisement for the academic life, is it? She’d probably make much more money out of hairdressing.”
“Money isn’t—” Vic pulled himself up.
“Everything?” Robyn completed his sentence, with arched eyebrows. “I never thought to hear you say that.”
“I was going to say, money isn’t something she understands,” he lied. “None of my kids do. They think it comes out of the bank like water out of a tap—or it could if mean old Dad didn’t keep his thumb over the spout.”
“The trouble is, they’ve had it too easy. They’ve never had to work for their living. They take everything for granted.”
“Right!” Vic agreed enthusiastically, then saw, too late, by her expression, that she was parodying him. “Well, it’s true,” he said truculently.
Their stroll had brought them to the landscaped site of the University’s halls of residence, and Robyn proposed that they should turn in through the gates and walk round the lake.
“It’s private, isn’t it?” said Vic.
“Don’t worry, I know the password,” she said, mocking him again. “No, of course it’s not. Anyone can walk around.”
In the winter dusk the long buildings, backlit by a red sunset, looked like great liners at anchor, their lighted windows mirrored in the dark surface of the lake. A frisbee flew back and forth like a bat between a group of tracksuited young men, who shouted each other’s names as they threw. A couple stood on a curved wooden bridge throwing crusts to a splashing, fluttering throng of ducks and Canadian geese.
“I like this place,” said Robyn. “It’s one of the University’s few architectural successes.”
“Very nice,” Vic agreed. “Too nice for students, if you ask me. I never did understand why they had to have these massive three-star hotels built especially for them.”
“They’ve got to live somewhere.”
“Most of ’em could live at home and go to their local colleges. Like I did.”
“But leaving home is part of the experience of going to university.”
“And a very expensive part, too,” said Vic. “You could build a whole polytechnic for the price of this little lot.”
“Oh, but polytechnics are such ghastly places,” said Robyn. “I was interviewed for a job at one once. It seemed more like an overgrown comprehensive school than a university.”
“Cheap, though.”
“Cheap and nasty.”
“I’m surprised you defend this élitist set-up, considering your left-wing principles.” He gestured at the handsome buldings, the well-groomed grassy slopes, the artificial lake. “Why should my workers pay taxes to keep these middle-class youths in the style to which they’re accustomed?”
“The universities are open to everyone,” said Robyn.
“In theory. But all those cars in the car park back there—who do they belong to?
“Students,” Robyn admitted. “I agree, our intake is far too middle-class. But it needn’t be. Tuition is free. There are grants for those who need them. What we need to do is to motivate more working-class children to go to university.”
“And kick out the middle-class kids to make room?”
“No, provide more places.”
“And more landscaped halls of residence, with artificial lakes and ducks on them?”
“Why not?” said Robyn defiantly. “They enhance the environment. Better these halls than another estate of executive houses with Georgian windows, or is it Jacobean now? Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn’t have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria. The trouble is, ordinary people don’t understand what they’re about, and the universities don’t really bother to explain themselves to the community. We have an Open Day once a year. Every day ought to be an open day. The campus is like a graveyard at weekends, and in the vacations. It ought to be swarming with local people doing part-time courses—using the Library, using the laboratories, going to lectures, going to concerts, using the Sports Centre—everything.” She threw out her arms in an expansive gesture, flushed and excited by her own vision. “We ought to get rid of the security men and the barriers at the gates and let the people in!”
“It’s a nice idea,” said Vic. “But it wouldn’t be long before you’d have graffiti sprayed all over the walls, the toilets vandalised and the Bunsen burners nicked.”
Robyn let her arms fall back to her sides. “Who’s being élitist now?”
“I’m just being realistic. Give the people polytechnics, with no frills. Not imitation Oxford colleges.”
“That’s an incredibly condescending attitude.”
“We live in the age of the yob. Whatever they don’t understand, whatever isn’t protected, the yobs will smash, and spoil it for everybody else. Did you notice the traffic bollards on the way here?”
“It’s unemployment that’s responsible,” said Robyn. “Thatcher has created an alienated underclass who take out their resentment in crime and vandalism. You can’t really blame them.”
“You’d blame them if you were mugged going home tonight,” said Vic.
“That’s a purely emotive argument,” said Robyn. “But of course you support Thatcher, don’t you?”
“I respect her,” said Vic. “I respect anybody with guts.”
“Even though she devastated industry round here?”
“She got rid of overmanning, restrictive practises. She overdid it, but it had to be done. Any road, my dad will tell you there was worse unemployment here in the thirties, and much worse poverty, but you didn’t get youths beating up old-age pensioners and raping them, like you do now. You didn’t get people smashing up roadsigns and telephone booths just for the hell of it. Something’s happened to this country. I don’t know why, or exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line a lot of basic decencies disappeared, like respect for other people’s property, respect for the old, respect for women—”
“There was a lot of hypocrisy in that old-fashioned code,” said Robyn.
“Maybe. But hypocrisy has its uses.”
“The homage vice pays to virtue.”
“What?”
“Somebody said hypocrisy was the homage vice pays to virtue. Rochefoucauld, I think.”
“He had his head screwed on, whoever it was,” said Vic.
“You put it down to the decline of religion, then?” said Robyn, with a slightly condescending smile.
“Maybe,” said Vic. “Your universities may be the cathedrals of the modern age, but do you teach morality in them?”
Robyn Penrose paused for thought. “Not as such.”
As if on cue, a church bell began to toll plangently in the distance.
“Do you go to church, then?” she asked.
“Me? No. Apart from the usual—weddings, funerals, christenings. What about you?”
“Not since I left school. I was rather pious at school. I was confirmed. That was just before I discovered sex. I think religion served the same psychological purpose—something very personal and private and rather intense. Do you believe in God?”
“What? Oh, I don’t know. Yes, I su
ppose so, in a vague sort of way.” Vic, distracted by Robyn’s casual reference to her discovery of sex, was unable to focus his mind on theological questions. How many lovers had she had, he wondered. “Do you?”
“Not the patriarchal God of the Bible. There are some rather interesting feminist theologians in America who are redefining God as female, but they can’t really get rid of all the metaphysical baggage of Christianity. Basically I suppose I think God is the ultimate floating signifier.”
“I’ll buy that,” said Vic, “even though I don’t know what it means.”
Robyn laughed. “Sorry!”
But Vic didn’t resent her high-flown language. That she used it unselfconsciously in conversation with him, whereas she had spoken normal English to the rest of the family, he took as a kind of compliment.
…
When they returned to the house, Robyn declined to take off her coat and have a cup of tea. “I must be getting back,” she said. “I have a lot of work to do.”
“On a Sunday, love?” Mr. Wilcox protested.
“I’m afraid so. Marking essays, you know. I’m always behind. Thanks for the lovely lunch,” she said to Marjorie, who gave a watery smile in acknowledgement. “Sandra—your father wants me to talk to you about the advantages of a university education.”
“Oh, does he?” said Sandra, with a grimace.
“Perhaps you’d like to come and see me in the University one day?”
“All right,” said Sandra, with a shrug. “I don’t mind.”
Vic longed to box his daughter’s ears or pull her hair or smack her bottom, or better still, to do all three at once. “Say thank you, Sandra,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said sullenly.
Vic saw Robyn to her car. “Sorry about my daughter’s manners,” he said. “It’s the Yobbish Tendency.”
Robyn dismissed the matter with a laugh.
“I’ll see you Wednesday, then,” said Vic.
“All being well,” she said, getting into her car.
Vic went back into the lounge. His father was alone in the room, thirstily sipping hot tea from the saucer. “Nice young wench, that,” he observed. “What she call herself Robin for? Boy’s name, innit?”
