by David Lodge
The previously unthinkable prospect of a non-academic career now began to be thought—with fear, dismay and bewilderment on Robyn’s part. Of course she was aware, cognitively, that there was a life outside universities, but she knew nothing about it, nor did Charles, or her parents. Her younger brother, Basil, in his final year of Modern Greats at Oxford, spoke of going into the City when he graduated, but Robyn considered this was just talk, designed to ward off hubris about his forthcoming examinations, or an Oedipal teasing of his academic father. When she tried to imagine herself working in an office or a bank, her mind soon went blank, like a cinema screen when the projector breaks down or the film snaps. There was always schoolteaching, of course, but that would entail the tiresome business of acquiring a Postgraduate Certificate of Education, or else working in the independent sector, to which she had ideological objections. In any case, teaching English literature to schoolchildren would only remind her daily of the superior satisfactions of teaching it to young adults.
Then, in 1984, just when Robyn was beginning to despair, the job at Rummidge came up. Professor Philip Swallow, Head of the English Department at Rummidge University, had been elected Dean of the Arts Faculty for a three-year term; and since the duties of this office, added to his Departmental responsibilities, drastically reduced his contribution to undergraduate teaching, he was by tradition allowed to appoint a temporary lecturer, at the lower end of the salary scale, as what was quaintly termed “Dean’s Relief.” Thus a three-year lectureship in English Literature was advertised, Robyn applied, was interviewed along with four other equally desperate and highly qualified candidates, and was appointed.
Glory! Jubilation! Huge sighs of relief. Charles met Robyn off the train from Rummidge with a bottle of champagne in his hand. The three years stretching ahead seemed like a long time, then, worth buying a little house in Rummidge for (Robyn’s father lent her the money for the deposit) rather than paying rent. Besides, Robyn had faith that, somehow or other, she would be kept on when her temporary appointment came to an end. She was confident that she could make her mark on the Rummidge Department in three years. She knew she was good, and it wasn’t long before she privately concluded that she was better than most of her colleagues—more enthusiastic, more energetic, more productive. When she arrived she had already published several articles and reviews in academic journals, and shortly afterwards her much-revised thesis appeared under the imprint of Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein. Entitled The Industrious Muse: Narrativity and Contradiction in the Industrial Novel (the title was foisted on her by the publishers, the subtitle was her own) it received enthusiastic if sparse reviews, and the publishers commissioned another book provisionally entitled, Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females: Woman as Sign and Commodity in Victorian Fiction. She was a popular and conscientious teacher, whose optional courses on women’s writing were oversubscribed. She performed her share of administrative duties efficiently. Surely they couldn’t just let her go at the end of the three years?
(Robyn goes into her long narrow living-room, formed by knocking down the dividing wall between the front and back parlours of the little house, which also serves as her study. There are books and periodicals everywhere—on shelves, on tables, on the floor—posters and reproductions of modern paintings on the walls, parched-looking potted plants in the fireplace, a BBC micro and monitor on the desk, and beside it sheaves of dot-matrix typescript of early chapters of Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females in various drafts. Robyn picks her way across the floor, putting her shapely boots down carefully in the spaces between books, back numbers of Critical Inquiry and Women’s Review, LP albums by Bach, Philip Glass and Phil Collins (her musical tastes are eclectic) and the occasional wineglass or coffee cup, to the desk. She lifts from the floor a leather Gladstone bag, and begins to load it with the things she will need for the day: well-thumbed, much underlined and annotated copies of Shirley, Mary Barton, North and South, Sybil, Alton Locke, Felix Holt, Hard Times; her lecture notes—a palimpsest of holograph revisions in different-coloured inks, beneath which the original typescript is scarcely legible; and a thick sheaf of student essays marked over the Christmas vacation.
Returning to the kitchen, Robyn turns down the thermostat of the central heating and checks that the back door of the house is locked and bolted. In the hall she wraps a long scarf round her neck and puts on a cream-coloured quilted cotton jacket, with wide shoulders and inset sleeves, and lets herself out by the front door. Outside, in the street, her car is parked, a red six-year-old Renault Five with a yellow sticker in its rear window, “Britain Needs Its Universities.” It was formerly her parents’ second car, sold to Robyn at a bargain price when her mother replaced it. It runs well, though the battery is getting feeble. Robyn turns the ignition key, holding her breath as she listens to the starter’s bronchial wheeze, then exhales with relief as the engine fires.)
Three years didn’t seem such a long time when one of them had elapsed, and although Robyn was satisfied that she was highly valued by her colleagues, the talk at the University these days was all of further cuts, of tightening belts, deteriorating staff–student ratios. Still, she was optimistic. Robyn was naturally optimistic. She had faith in her star. Nevertheless, the future of her career was a constant background worry as the days and weeks of her appointment at Rummidge ticked away like a taxi meter. Another was her relationship with Charles.
What was it, exactly, this relationship? Hard to describe. Not a marriage, and yet more like marriage than many marriages: domesticated, familiar, faithful. There was a time, early in their days at Cambridge, when a brilliant and handsome research student from Yale made a determined pitch for Robyn, and she had been rather dazzled and excited by the experience (he wooed her with a heady mixture of the latest postfreudian theoretical jargon and devastatingly frank sexual propositions, so she was never quite sure whether it was Lacan’s symbolic phallus he was referring to or his own real one). But in the end she pulled back from the brink, conscious of Charles’ silent but reproachful figure hovering on the edge of her vision. She was too honest to deceive him and too prudent to exchange him for a lover whose interest would probably not last very long.
When Charles obtained his post at Suffolk, there had been a certain amount of pressure from both sets of parents for them to get married. Charles was willing. Robyn indignantly rejected the suggestion. “What are you implying?” she demanded from her mother. “That I should go and keep house for Charles in Ipswich? Give up my PhD and live off Charles and have babies?” “Of course not, dear,” said her mother. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t still have your own career. If that’s what you want.” She managed to imbue this last phrase with a certain pitying incomprehension. She herself had never aspired to a career, finding complete satisfaction in acting as her husband’s typist and research assistant in the time she had left over from gardening and housekeeping. “Certainly it’s what I want,” said Robyn, so fiercely that her mother let the subject drop. Robyn had a reputation in the family for being strong-willed, or, as her brother Basil less flatteringly put it, “bossy.” There was a much-told tale of her Australian infancy that was held to be prophetic in this respect—about how at the age of three she had, by the sheer force of her will, compelled her uncle Walter (who was taking her for a walk to the local shops at the time) to put all the money he had on his person into a charity collecting-box in the shape of a plaster-of-Paris boy cripple; as a result of which the uncle, too embarrassed to admit to this folly and borrow from his relatives, had run out of petrol on the way back to his sheep station. Robyn herself, needless to say, interpreted this anecdote in a light more favourable to herself, as anticipating her later commitment to progressive causes.
Charles found a pied-à-terre in Ipswich and continued to keep his books and most of his other possessions in the flat at Cambridge. Naturally they saw less of each other, and Robyn was aware that this did not cause her to repine as much as perhaps it should have done. She
began to wonder if the relationship was not, very very slowly, dying a natural death, and whether it would not be sensible to terminate it quickly. She put this calmly and rationally to Charles one day, and calmly and rationally he accepted it. He said that although he was personally quite happy with things as they were, he understood her doubts and perhaps a trial separation would resolve them one way or the other.
(Robyn drives her red Renault zigzag across the south-west suburbs of Rummidge, sometimes with the flow of rush-hour traffic, sometimes against—though the rush hour is almost over. It is 9:20 a.m. as Robyn reaches the broad tree-lined streets that border the University. She takes a short cut down Avondale Road, and passes the five-bedroom detached house of Vic Wilcox without a glance, for she does not know him from Adam, and the house is outwardly no different from any of the other modern executive dwellings in this exclusive residential district: red brick and white paint, “Georgian” windows, a tarmac drive and double garage, a burglar alarm prominently displayed on the front elevation.)
So Charles moved his books and other possessions to Ipswich, which Robyn found rather inconvenient, since she was in the habit of borrowing his books, and occasionally his sweaters. They remained good friends, of course, and called each other up frequently on the telephone. Sometimes they met for lunch or a theatre in London, on neutral ground, and both looked forward to these meetings as if they were occasions of almost illicit pleasure. Neither was short of opportunities to form new relationships, but somehow neither of them could be bothered to do so. They were both busy people, preoccupied with their work—Robyn with her supervisions and the completion of her PhD, Charles with the demands of his new job—and the thought of having to adjust to another partner, to study their interests and minister to their needs, wearied them in anticipation. There were so many books and periodicals to be read, so many abstruse thoughts to be thought.
There was sex of course, but although both of them were extremely interested in sex, and enjoyed nothing better than discussing it, neither of them, if the truth be told, was quite so interested in actually having it, or at any rate in having it very frequently. They seemed to have burned up all their lust rather rapidly in their undergraduate years. What was left was sex in the head, as D. H. Lawrence called it. He had meant the phrase pejoratively, of course, but to Robyn and Charles D. H. Lawrence was a quaint, rather absurd figure, and his fierce polemics did not disturb them. Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite deferment and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted. Charles himself was not an imperious lover. Calm and svelte, stealthy as a cat in his movements, he seemed to approach sex as a form of research, favouring techniques of foreplay so subtle and prolonged that Robyn occasionally dozed off in the middle of them, and would wake with a guilty start to find him still crouched studiously over her body, fingering it like a box of index cards.
During their trial separation, Robyn became deeply involved in a Women’s Group at Cambridge who met regularly but informally to discuss women’s writing and feminist literary theory. It was an article of faith with this circle that women must free themselves from the erotic patronage of men. That is to say, it was not true, as every novel, film, and TV commercial implied, that a woman was incomplete without a man. Women could love other women, and themselves. Several members of the group were lesbians, or tried hard to be. Robyn was quite sure she was not; but she enjoyed the warmth and companionship of the group, the hugging and kissing that accompanied their meetings and partings. And if her body occasionally craved a keener sensation, she was able to provide it herself, without shame or guilt, theoretically justified by the writings of radical French feminists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who were very eloquent on the joys of female autoeroticism.
Robyn had two casual heterosexual encounters at this time, both one-night stands after rather drunken parties, both unsatisfactory. She took no new live-in lover, and as far as she was aware, neither did Charles. So then it became a question, what was the point of separation? It was just costing them a lot of money in phone calls and train tickets to London. Charles moved his books and sweaters back to Cambridge and life went on much as before. Robyn continued to give much of her time and emotional energy to the Women’s Group, but Charles did not object; after all, he considered himself a feminist too.
But when, two years later, Robyn was appointed to Rummidge, they had to split up again. It was impossible to commute from Rummidge to Ipswich or vice versa. The journey, by road or rail, was one of the most tedious and inconvenient it was possible to contrive in the British Isles. To Robyn, it seemed a providential opportunity to make another—this time decisive—break with Charles. Much as she liked him, much as she would miss his companionship, it seemed to her that the relationship had reached a dead end. There was nothing new in it to be discovered, and it was preventing them from making new discoveries elsewhere. It had been a mistake to get together again—a symptom of their immaturity, their enslavement to Cambridge. Yes (she swelled with the certainty of this insight) it had been Cambridge, not desire, that had reunited them. They were both so obsessed with the place, its gossip and rumours and intrigues, that they wanted to spend every possible moment together there, comparing notes, exchanging opinions: who was in, who out, what X said about Y’s review of P’s book about Q. Well, she was sick and tired of the place, tired of its beautiful architecture housing vanity and paranoia, glad to exchange its hothouse atmosphere for the real if smoky air of Rummidge. And to make the break with Cambridge somehow entailed breaking finally with Charles. She informed him of this conclusion, and with his usual calm he accepted it. Later she wondered if he was counting on her not sticking to her resolution.
Rummidge was a new leaf, a blank page, in Robyn’s life. She had at the back of her mind the thought that some new male companion might figure in it. But no such person manifested himself. All the men in the University seemed to be married or gay or scientists, and Robyn had no time or energy to look further afield. She was fully stretched preparing her classes, on a whole new range of subjects, marking her essays, researching Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females, and making herself generally indispensable to the Department. She was fulfilled and happy, but, occasionally, a little lonely. Then sometimes she would pick up the telephone and natter to Charles. One day she rashly invited him to stay for a weekend. She had in mind a purely platonic visit—there was a guestroom in the little house; but in the event, perhaps inevitably, they ended up in bed together. And it was nice to have someone else caress your body, and release the springs of pleasure hidden within it, instead of having to do the job yourself. She had forgotten how nice it was, after so long an interval. It seemed, after all, that they were indispensable to each other; or, if that was putting it too strongly, they fulfilled a mutual need.
They did not go back to “living together” even in the purely conceptual sense of many academic couples they knew, separated by their jobs. When Charles came to visit, he did so as a guest, and when he departed he left no possessions behind him. However, on these occasions they invariably slept together. An odd relationship, undoubtedly. Not a marriage, not a living-together, not an affair. More like a divorce in which the two parties occasionally meet for companionship and sexual pleasure without strings. Robyn is not sure whether this is wonderfully modern and liberated of them, or rather depraved.
…
So these are the things that are worrying Robyn Penrose as she drives through the gates of the University, with a nod and a smile to the security man in his little glass sentry box: her lecture on the Industrial Novel, her job future, and her relationship with Charles—in that order of conspicuousness rather than importance. Indeed, her uneasiness about Charles scarcely counts as a conscious worry at all; while the worry about the lecture is, she is well aware, a trivial and mechanical one. It is not that she does not know what to say, it is that th
ere is not enough time to say all she knows. After all, she worked on the nineteenth-century industrial novel for something like ten years, and even after publishing her book she went on accumulating ideas and insights about the subject. She has boxes full of notes and file cards on it. She probably knows more about the nineteenth-century industrial novel than anyone else in the entire world. How can all that knowledge be condensed into a fifty-minute lecture to students who know almost nothing about it? The interests of scholarship and pedagogy are at odds here. What Robyn likes to do is to deconstruct the texts, to probe the gaps and absences in them, to uncover what they are not saying, to expose their ideological bad faith, to cut a cross-section through the twisted strands of their semiotic codes and literary conventions. What the students want her to do is to give them some basic facts that will enable them to read the novels as simple straightforward reflections of “reality,” and to write simple, straightforward, exam-passing essays about them.
Robyn parks her car in one of the University’s landscaped car parks, lugs her Gladstone bag from the front passenger seat, and makes her way to the English Department. Her gait is deliberate and stately. She holds her head erect, her red-gold curls like a torch burning in the grey, misty atmosphere. You would not think her unduly burdened with worries, if you watched her crossing the campus, smiling at people she knows, her eyes bright, her brow unfurrowed. And indeed, she carries them lightly, her worries. She has youth, she has confidence, she regrets nothing.
