The Campus Trilogy

by David Lodge

  “Don’t worry about me,” said Désirée. “Forget about me.”

  “How can I?”

  “I’ll just say one thing. I’ve no intention of marrying again. Just in case it had crossed your mind.”

  “You’re going to get a divorce, aren’t you?”

  “Sure. But from now on I’m a free woman. I stand on my own two feet and without a pair of balls round my neck.” Perhaps he looked hurt, for she continued: “Nothing personal, Philip, you know I like you a lot. We get on fine together. The kids like you too.”

  “Do they? I often wonder.”

  “Sure, you take them out to the park and suchlike. Morris never did that.”

  “Funny, that’s one of the things I thought I was getting away from when I came out here. It must be compulsive.”

  “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. Or go. Feel entirely free to do what you think best.”

  “I have felt very free these last few weeks,” he said. “Freer than I’ve ever felt in my life.”

  Désirée flashed him one of her rare smiles. “That’s nice.” She got out of bed and scratched herself through her cotton nightdress.

  “I just wish we could go on like this indefinitely. You and me and the twins here. And Hilary and the children quite happy and not knowing.”

  “How much longer d’you have?”

  “Well, the exchange ends officially in a month’s time.”

  “Could you stay on at Euphoric State if you wanted to? I mean, would they give you a job?”

  “Not a hope.”

  “Somebody told me you got a terrific write-up in the last Course Bulletin.”

  “That was just Wily Smith.”

  “You’re too modest, Philip.” Pulling the nightdress over her head, Désirée walked into the adjoining bathroom. Philip followed her appreciatively, and sat on the toilet cover while she showered.

  “Couldn’t you get a job in one of the smaller colleges around here?” she called through the hiss of hot water.

  “Perhaps. But there would be problems about visas. Of course, if I married an American citizen, there’d be no problem.”

  “That sounds like blackmail.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.” He stood up, and his reflection rose to face him in the mirror over the handbasin. “I must shave. This conversation is getting more and more unreal. I’ll go back in a month’s time, of course. Back to Hilary and the children. Back to Rummidge. Back to England.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “You could work for me if you like.”

  “For you?”

  “As a housekeeper. You do it very well. Much better than me. I want to go back to work.”

  He laughed. “How much would you pay me?”

  “Not much. But there’d be no visa problems. Would you get me a towel from the closet, honey?”

  He held the towel open as she stepped glistening from the shower, and began rubbing her down briskly.

  “Mmm, that’s nice.” After a while she said: “You really ought to write home, you know.”

  “Have you told Morris?”

  “I don’t owe Morris any explanations. Besides, he’d be round to your wife like a shot.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Of course, they both know I’ve been staying here…”

  “But they think Melanie is here too, as chaperone. Or is it me who’s supposed to be keeping an eye on you and Melanie? I’ve lost track.”

  “I lost track weeks ago,” said Philip, rubbing less briskly. He was on his knees now, drying her legs. “You know this is rather exciting.”

  “Cool it, baby,” said Désirée. “You have a vigil to keep, remember?”

  Darling,

  Many thanks for your last letter. I’m glad to hear you have got over your cold. I haven’t started my hay fever yet and am hoping that I won’t be allergic to Euphoric pollen. By the way, I’m having an affair with Mrs. Zapp. I should have mentioned it before but it slipped my…

  Dear Hilary,

  Not “Darling” because I’ve forfeited the right to that term of endearment. Only a few months after the Melanie affair…

  Dearest Hilary,

  You were very perceptive when you said I seemed more relaxed and cheerful in my last few letters. Not to put too fine a point on it, I have been getting laid by Désirée Zapp three or four times a week lately, and it’s done me the world of good…

  He composed letters to Hilary in his head all the way to the campus, tearing them up, mentally, almost as soon as he had started them. His thoughts seemed to spin out of control, into absurdity, sentimentality, obscenity, as soon as he tried to bring into a single frame of reference images of home, Rummidge, Hilary and the children, and the image of his present existence. It was difficult to believe that by boarding an aeroplane he could be back, within hours, in that grey, damp, sedate environment from which he had come. As easy to believe that he could step through Désirée’s dressing-table mirror and find himself back in his own bedroom. If only he could send home, when the time came, some zombie replica of himself, a robot Swallow programmed to wash dishes, take tutorials, make mortgage repayments on the 3rd of every month, while he himself lay low in Euphoria, let his hair grow and grooved quietly with Désirée… No one would notice in Rummidge. Whereas if he went back in person, in his present state of mind, they would say he was an impostor. Will the real Philip Swallow please stand up? I should be interested to meet him myself, Philip thought, steering the Corvair round the tight bends of Socrates Avenue, tyres squealing softly on the smooth tarmac, houses and gardens rotating dizzily in the rear-view mirror. He had ended up driving Morris Zapp’s car after all. “You might as well keep the battery charged,” Désirée had said, a few days after he moved into the house. “I can’t watch you going off to catch the bus every morning with that car idle in the garage.”

  It all started, you see, on the night of the landslide. Mrs. Zapp and I had been invited to the same party again, and she offered me a lift home, because there was a kind of tropical storm… Pythagoras Drive was like a river in flood. The rain swept in great folds across the beam of the headlights, drummed on the roof and almost overpowered the windscreen wipers. The streetlamps were out, shorted probably. It was like driving on the bottom of the sea. “Jesus Christ,” Désirée muttered, peering through the flooded windshield. “I think I’ll sit this out, when I’ve dropped you.”

  For politeness’ sake he invited her in for a cup of coffee, and to his surprise she accepted. “You’re going to get awfully wet, I’m afraid,” he said.

  “I’ve got an umbrella. We can run for it.”

  They ran for it—straight into the side of the house.

  “I can’t understand it,” he said. “The front door should be here.”

  “You must be drunk,” said Désirée unsympathetically. Despite her umbrella, she was getting very wet. Philip was totally saturated. Furthermore they appeared to be standing in several inches of mud, instead of the garden path.

  “I’m perfectly sober,” he said, groping in the dark for the porch steps.

  “Somebody must have moved the house,” she said sarcastically.

  Which, in a manner of speaking, was quite true. Rounding a corner of the building in search of the front door, they came upon three terrified girls in mud-stained nightwear—Melanie, Carol and Deirdre—who had just been jolted out of their beds as the house slewed round in a great are (lucky Charles Boon was warm and dry in his snug studio). “We thought it was the earthquake,” they said. “We thought it was the end of the world.”

  “You’d better all come home with me,” Désirée said.

  It was, you see, purely an act of charity, and meant to be a very temporary arrangement. Just to give us a roof over our heads until we could return to Pythagoras Drive, or make other arrangements… Carol and Deirdre soon moved on. Melanie set up with Charles Boon in the South Campus area—they had thrown themselves wholehearte
dly into the cause of the Garden, and wanted to be near the scene of the action. Eventually, of the refugees from the landslip, only Philip was left in the Zapps’ house. He hung on, waiting to see if the house on Pythagoras Drive would be made safe: Désirée told him not to worry. He began to look desultorily for another apartment: Désirée told him to take his time. He didn’t feel too bad about imposing on her because she was often out in the evenings at meetings and he saved her the trouble of getting baby-sitters. Also she was a slow riser and appreciated his willingness to make breakfast for the twins and see them off to school. Imperceptibly they settled into a routine. It was almost like being married. On Sundays he would drive the twins into the State Park on the other side of the Plotinus hills and take them for rambles through the pine-woods. He felt himself reverting to a more comfortable, loose-fitting version of his life in England. The interregnum of Pythagoras Drive seemed like a drugged dream as it receded into the past. There had been something unnatural, unhealthy about it, after all, something ignoble and ridiculous about the role he had played there, a middle-aged parasite on the alternative society, hanging around the young folk with a doggy, ingratiating look, anxious to please, anxious not to offend, hoping for a game that never materialized: the game he had seen developing that first evening in the girls’ downstairs apartment, with the Cowboy and the Confederate Soldier and the black wrestler. They never seemed to play it again, or else they took care to play it when he was out. He never sniffed the hint of an orgy from that night onwards, though he kept his senses alert for a sign. The nearest he got to group sex was reading the swingers’ small ads in Euphoric Times. Perhaps he should have put one in himself. British Professor, not especially well hung, likes Jane Austen, Top of the Pops, gin and tonic, seeks orgy, suitable beginner. Or a personal message. Melanie. Give me a second chance. I need you but can’t speak. I am awake in my room and waiting for you. Awake and sweating into the darkness, listening to the muffled sounds of her and Charles Boon making love in the next room. It had been sick, really. The landslip had swept away a whole Sodom and Gomorrah of private fantasies and unacted desires. He felt a new man in the calm, initially sexless atmosphere of Désirée Zapp’s luxurious eyrie high up on the peak of Socrates Avenue. He began to eat better, sleep better. Together he and Désirée gave up smoking. “If you’ll throw away that stinking pipe, I’ll throw away my stinking cigarettes, is that a deal?” It was the karate that determined her to quit, she said, she felt humiliated gasping for breath after ten minutes’ exercise. Philip found it surprisingly easy and decided that he’d never really liked the pipe anyway. He was glad to be free of the paraphernalia of smoking. Now the days were warm and he could wear lightweight trousers and slimline shirts without displaying unsightly bulges like cysts all over his torso. Admittedly he drank more these days: usually a couple of gin and tonics before dinner, and wine or beer with the meal, and perhaps a Scotch afterwards as they watched the day’s rioting on television. One evening when they were doing this he said, “I found quite a nice apartment today. On Pole Street.”

  “Why don’t you stay on here?” Désirée said, without taking her eyes from the screen. “There’s plenty of room.”

  “I can’t go on imposing on you.”

  “You can pay me rent if you like.”

  “All right,” he said. “How much?”

  “How about fifteen dollars a week for the room plus twenty dollars a week for food and liquor plus three dollars heating and lighting that makes thirty-eight dollars a week or one hundred and sixty dollars per calendar month?”

  “Goodness me,” said Philip. “You’re very quick off the mark.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. It seems like a very convenient arrangement to me. Are you in tomorrow night, by the way? I have a consciousness-raising workshop.”

  Philip stopped at a red light and wound down his window. The buzz of a helicopter told him he was now in the militarized zone, though you wouldn’t otherwise have guessed that there was any trouble at the University on this side of the campus, he thought, as he steered the car through the broad entrance on the West perimeter, past lawns and shrubberies where the spume of rotating water sprinklers rainbowed in the sun and a solitary security man in his shelter lifted a lazy hand in salute. But as he approached Dealer, the signs of conflict became more evident: windows smashed and boarded up, leaflets and gas canisters littering the paths, Guardsmen and campus police watchfully patrolling the paths, guarding buildings, muttering into walkie-talkies.

  He found a vacant space in the car park behind Dealer, driving in beside Luke Hogan, just arrived in his big green Thunderbird.

  “Nice car you’ve got there, Phil,” said the Chairman. “Morris Zapp used to have one just like it.”

  Philip shifted the subject of conversation slightly. “One thing to be said for the troubles on campus,” he observed, “it makes parking easier.”

  Hogan nodded dolefully. The crisis was no fun at all for him, sandwiched between his radical and conservative colleagues. “I’m real sorry, Phil, that you had to visit us at a time like this.”

  “Oh, it’s quite interesting really. Perhaps more interesting than it ought to be.”

  “You’ll have to come back another year.”

  “Supposing I asked you for a permanent job?” Philip asked, half-seriously, recalling his conversation with Désirée.

  Hogan’s response was entirely serious. An expression of great pain passed over his big, brown face, parched and eroded like a Western landscape. “Gee, Phil, I wish I could…”

  “I was only joking.”

  “Well, that was a mighty fine review you had in the Course Bulletin… And these days, teaching counts, really counts.”

  “I haven’t got the publications behind me, I know that.”

  “Well, I have to admit Phil…” Luke Hogan sighed. “To make you an offer appropriate to your age and experience, we should expect a book or two. Now if you were black, of course, it would be different. Or better still, Indian. What I wouldn’t give for an indigenous Indian with a PhD,” he murmured wistfully, like a man on a desert island dreaming of steak and chips. Part of the settlement of the previous quarter’s strike had been an undertaking by the University to employ more Third World faculty, but most other universities in the country were pursuing the same quarry, so the supply was running short.

  “That’s another thing, I haven’t got a PhD,” Philip observed.

  This was a fact known to Hogan but he evidently considered it bad taste on Philip’s part to draw attention to it, for he made no reply. They entered Dealer, and waited for the lift, in silence. A roughly painted notice on the wall said, “ENGLISH FACULTY VIGIL, DEALER STEPS 11 A.M.” As the lift door slid open and they entered, Karl Kroop hurried in beside them. He was a short, bespectacled man with thinning hair—a disappointingly unheroic figure, Philip had thought when he first identified him. He still wore a KEEP KROOP button in his lapel, as a veteran might wear a combat medal. Or perhaps he wore it merely to embarrass Hogan, who had presided over his firing and rehiring.

  “Hi, Luke, hi, Philip,” he greeted them jauntily. “See you guys on the steps later?”

  Hogan responded with a sickly smile. “’Fraid I’m going to be tied up in a committee this morning, Karl.” He leapt out of the lift as soon as it opened, and disappeared into his office.

  “Motherfucking liberal,” Kroop muttered.

  “Well, I’m a liberal,” Philip demurred.

  “Then I wish,” said Kroop, patting Philip on the back, “that there were more liberals like you, Philip, prepared to lay their liberalism on the line, to go to jail for their liberalism. You’re coming to the vigil?”

  “Oh yes,” said Philip, blushing.

  As he entered the Department Office to check his mailbox, Mabel Lee greeted him. “Oh, Professor Swallow, Mr. Boon left a note in your mailbox.” She simpered. “Hear you’re going to be on his show tonight. I’ll be sure to listen.”

  “Oh dear, I
wouldn’t recommend it.”

  He took a copy of the Euphoric State Daily from the pile on the counter and scanned the front page: RESTRAINING ORDER ISSUED AGAINST SHERIFF O’KEENE… OTHER CAMPUSES PLEDGE SUPPORT… PHYSICIANS, SCIENTISTS PROBE ALLEGED BLISTER GAS… WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN PROTEST MARCH TO GARDEN. There was a photograph of the Garden, now rapidly reverting to a dusty waste lot, with a few pieces of play equipment and some withered shrubs in one corner, surrounded by the familiar wire fence. A few stolid soldiers inside, a crowd of women and children outside, like some surrealistic inversion of a concentration camp. Something for the Charles Boon Show? “Who, one wonders, are the real prisoners here? Who is inside, and who is outside the fence?” Etc., etc. He lifted the flap on what he still called, to the immense amusement of his American colleagues, his pigeonhole. A small, queerly shaped package addressed in Hilary’s handwriting gave him a moment of queasiness until he saw that it had come by surface mail and had been posted months ago. Mail from outside Euphoria disturbed him these days, reminding him of his connections and responsibilities beyond its borders; especially did he shrink from Hilary’s airletters, pale blue, wafer-thin missives, the very profile of the Queen in the right-hand corner transmitting, to his guilty eye, a pained disapproval of his conduct. Not that the actual text of Hilary’s recent letters had expressed any sense of grievance or suspicion. She chatted amiably enough about the chilren, Mary Makepeace, and Morris Zapp, who seemed to be taking quite a leading part in affairs at Rummidge these days, having successfully sorted out a spot of student bother they seemed to be having there… really, he had scarcely taken in her news, skimming the lines of neat, round script as quickly as he could to reassure himself that no rumour of his infidelity had been wafted to Rummidge to rebound in a cry of outrage and anger. It was no secret around Plotinus that he was living in the Zapps’ house, but people seemed too preoccupied with the Garden troubles to inquire further. Either that or, as Désirée maintained, they thought Philip was gay because he had taken Charles Boon into his apartment and that she was a lesbian because of the Women’s Liberation bit, so didn’t imagine that the two of them might be having an affair. Also, Howard Ringbaum, prime suspect as author of the poison-pen letter about Melanie (the Cowboy, being one of his students, could have been his source of information) had left Euphoria, having been offered a job in Canada and released at short notice by a relieved Hogan.