The Campus Trilogy

by David Lodge

  “Enough to accommodate all those who want to do women’s studies?”

  “If you like to put it that way, yes,” said Robyn defiantly.

  “Who pays?”

  “You keep bringing everything back to money.”

  “That’s what you learn from business. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Who said that?”

  Robyn shrugged. “I don’t know. Some right-wing economist, I suppose.”

  “Had his head screwed on, whoever he was. I read it in the paper somewhere. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” He gave his gruff bark of a laugh. “Someone always has to pick up the bill.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, I suppose I’d better show you round the estate. Just give me a few minutes, will you?” He stood up, seized his jacket and thrust his arms into the sleeves.

  “Aren’t I supposed to follow you everywhere?” said Robyn, rising to her feet.

  “I don’t think you can follow me where I’m going,” said Wilcox.

  “Oh,” said Robyn, colouring. Then, recovering her poise, she said, “Perhaps you would direct me to the Ladies.”

  “I’ll get Shirley to show you,” said Wilcox. “Meet me back here in five minutes.”

  …

  Jesus wept! Not just a lecturer in English literature, not just a woman lecturer in English literature, but a trendy lefty feminist lecturer in English literature! A tall trendy leftist feminist lecturer in English literature! Vic Wilcox scuttled into the Directors’ Lavatory as if into a place of sanctuary. It was a large, dank, chilly room, empty at this moment, which had been lavishly appointed, in more prosperous times, with marble washbasins and brass taps, but was now badly in need of redecoration. He stood at the urinal and peed fiercely at the white ceramic wall, streaked with rusty tear-stains from the corroding pipes. What the hell was he going to do with this woman every Wednesday for the next two months? Stuart Baxter must be off his trolley, sending someone like that. Or was it a plot?

  It was strange, strange and ominous, that he had seen her before, outside the University last week. Her hair, glowing like a brazier through the early-morning mist, her high boots and her cream-coloured quilted jacket with its exaggerated shoulders, had drawn his gaze as he sat impatiently in a line of cars while the pickets argued with the driver of an articulated wagon that was trying to enter the University. She had been standing on the pavement, holding some silly banner—“Education Cuts Are Not Comic,” or something like that—talking and laughing excitedly with a big-bosomed woman stuffed into a scarlet ski-suit and pink moon boots, and he remembered thinking to himself: so it’s finally happened—designer industrial action. The two women, the copperhead in particular, had seemed to epitomise everything he most detested about such demonstrations—the appropriation of working-class politics by middle-class style. And now he was stuck with her for two months.

  There was a marble-topped table in the centre of the flagged floor, bearing, like an altar, a symmetrical arrangement of clothes brushes and men’s toiletries that Vic had never seen anyone disturb since he came to Pringle’s. In his anger and frustration, he picked up a long, curved clothes brush and banged it down hard on the surface of the table. It broke in half.

  “Shit!” said Vic, aloud.

  As if on cue, a cistern flushed and the door of one of the WC cubicles opened to reveal the emerging figure of George Prendergast, the Personnel Director. This was not a total surprise, since Prendergast suffered from Irritable Bowel Syndrome and was frequently to be encountered in the Directors’ Lavatory, but Vic had thought he was alone, and felt rather foolish standing there with the stump of the clothes brush, like an incriminating weapon, in his fist. For the sake of appearances, he picked up another brush and began swatting at the sleeves and lapels of his suit.

  “Smartening yourself up for your Shadow, Vic?” said Prendergast jocularly. “I hear she’s quite a, er, that is…” Catching sight of Vic’s expression, he faltered into silence. His pale blue eyes peered anxiously at Vic through thick rimless spectacles. He was the youngest of the senior management team and rather overawed by Vic.

  “Have you seen her?” Vic demanded.

  “Well, no, not actually seen, but Brian Everthorpe says—”

  “Never mind what Brian Everthorpe says, he’s only interested in the size of her tits. She’s a women’s libber, if you don’t mind, a bloody Communist too, I shouldn’t be surprised. She had one of those CND badges on. What in the name of Christ am I—” He stopped, struck by a sudden thought. “George—can I borrow your phone?”

  “Of course. Something wrong with yours?”

  “No, I just want to make a private call. Give me a couple of minutes, will you? Brush yourself down while you’re waiting. Here.” He thrust the clothes brush into the bewildered Prendergast’s hand, patted him on the shoulder, and made tracks for the Personnel Director’s Office by a circuitous route that did not take him past his own.

  “Mr. Prendergast’s just popped out,” said his secretary.

  “I know,” said Vic, striding past her and shutting the door of Prendergast’s room behind him. He sat down at the desk and dialled Stuart Baxter’s private number. Luckily he was in.

  “Stuart—Vic Wilcox here. My shadow’s just arrived.”

  “Oh yes? What’s he like?”

  “She, Stuart, she. You mean you didn’t know?”

  “Honest to God,” said Stuart Baxter, when he had finished laughing, “I had no idea. Robyn with a ‘y,’ well, well. Is she good-looking?”

  “That’s the only thing anybody seems to be interested in. My managers are poncing about like gigolos and the secretaries are beside themselves with jealousy.” This was admittedly an exaggeration, but he wanted to emphasise the potentially disruptive effect of Robyn Penrose’s presence. “Christ knows what will happen when I take her onto the shop floor,” he said.

  “So she is good-looking.”

  “Some might say so, I suppose. More to the point, she’s a Communist.”

  “What? How d’you know?”

  “Well, a left-winger, anyway. You know what those university types are like, on the arts side. She’s a member of CND.”

  “That’s not a crime, Vic.”

  “No, but we do have MoD contracts. She’s a security risk.”

  “Hmm,” said Stuart Baxter. “Not exactly secret weapons you’re making, are they, Vic? Gearbox casings for tanks, engine components for trucks… Any of your people had to be vetted? Have you signed the Official Secrets Act?”

  “No,” Vic admitted. “But it’s better to be safe than sorry. I think you ought to get her taken off the scheme.”

  After a brief pause for thought, Stuart Baxter said, “No can do, Vic. There’d be the most almighty row if we appeared to be sabotaging an Industry Year project simply because this bird is a member of CND. I can just see the headlines—RUMMIDGE FIRM SLAMS DOOR ON RED ROBYN. If you catch her stealing blueprints, let me know, and I’ll do something about it.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Vic flatly. “You’re a great help.”

  “Why be so negative, about it, Vic? Relax! Enjoy the girl’s company. I should be so lucky.” Stuart Baxter chuckled, and put down the phone.

  3

  “Well—what did you make of it?” Vic Wilcox demanded, an hour or so later, when they were back in his office after what he had referred to as “a quick whistle round the works.”

  Robyn sank down on to a chair. “I thought it was appalling,” she said.

  “Appalling?” He frowned. “What d’you mean, appalling?”

  “The noise. The dirt. The mindless, repetitive work. The… everything. That men should have to put up with such brutalising conditions—”

  “Now just a minute—”

  “Women, too. I did see women, didn’t I?” She had a blurred memory of brown-skinned creatures vaguely female in shape but unsexed by their drab, greasy overalls and trousers, working alongside men in some parts of the factory.

  “We have a few.
I thought you were all for equality?”

  “Not equality of oppression.”

  “Oppression?” He gave a harsh, derisive laugh. “We don’t force people to work here, you know. For every unskilled job we advertise, we get a hundred applicants—more than a hundred. Those women are glad to work here—go and ask ’em if you don’t believe me.”

  Robyn was silent. She felt confused, battered, exhausted by the sense-impressions of the last hour. For once in her life, she was lost for words, and uncertain of her argumentative ground. She had always taken for granted that unemployment was an evil, a Thatcherite weapon against the working class; but if this was employment then perhaps people were better off without it. “But the noise,” she said again. “The dirt!”

  “Foundries are dirty places. Metal is noisy stuff to work with. What did you expect?”

  What had she expected? Nothing, certainly, so like the satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution. Robyn’s mental image of a modern factory had derived mainly from TV commercials and documentaries: deftly edited footage of brightly coloured machines and smoothly moving assembly lines, manned by brisk operators in clean overalls, turning out motor cars or transistor radios to the accompaniment of Mozart on the sound track. At Pringle’s there was scarcely any colour, not a clean overall in sight, and instead of Mozart there was a deafening demonic cacophony that never relented. Nor had she been able to comprehend what was going on. There seemed to be no logic or direction to the factory’s activities. Individuals or small groups of men worked on separate tasks with no perceptible relation to each other. Components were stacked in piles all over the factory floor like the contents of an attic. The whole place seemed designed to produce, not goods for the outside world, but misery for the inmates. What Wilcox called the machine shop had seemed like a prison, and the foundry had seemed like hell.

  …

  “There are two sides to our operation,” he had explained, when he led her out of the office block and across a bleak enclosed courtyard, where footsteps had scored a diagonal path through the snow, towards a high windowless wall of corrugated iron. “The foundry, and the machine shop. We also do a bit of assembly work—small engines and steering assemblies, I’m trying to build it up—but basically we’re a general engineering firm, supplying components to the motor industry mostly. Parts are cast in the foundry or brought in and then we machine ’em. The foundry was allowed to go to pot in the seventies and Pringle’s started purchasing from outside suppliers. I’m trying to make our foundry more efficient. So the foundry is a cost-centred operation, and the engineering side is profit-centred. But if all goes well, in time we should be able to sell our castings outside and make a profit on them too. In fact we’ve got to, because a really efficient foundry will produce more castings than we can use ourselves.”

  “What exactly is a foundry?” said Robyn, as they reached a small, scarred wooden door in the corrugated-iron wall. Wilcox halted, his hand on the door. He stared at her incredulously.

  “I told you I didn’t know anything about…” She was going to say “industry,” but it occurred to her that this admission would come oddly from an expert on the Industrial Novel. “This sort of thing,” she concluded. “I don’t suppose you know a lot about literary criticism, do you?”

  Wilcox grunted and pushed open the door to let her through. “A foundry is where you melt iron or other metal and pour it into moulds to make castings. Then in the machine shop we mill and grind them and bore holes in them so that they can be assembled into more complex products, like engines. Are you with me?”

  “I think so,” she said coldly. They were walking along a broad corridor between glass-partitioned offices, lit by bleak fluorescent strip lighting, where sallow-faced men in shirtsleeves stared at computer terminals or pored over sheets of printout.

  “This is production control,” said Wilcox. “I don’t think there’d be much point trying to explain it to you now.”

  Some of the men in the offices looked up as they passed, nodded to Wilcox and eyed Robyn curiously. Few smiled.

  “We should really have started at the foundry,” said Wilcox, “since that’s the first stage of our operation. But the quickest way to the foundry is through the machine shop, especially in this weather. So you’re seeing the production process in reverse.” He pushed through another battered-looking swing door and held it open for her. She plunged into the noise as into a tank of water.

  The machine shop was an enormous shed with machines and work benches laid out in a grid pattern. Wilcox led her down the broad central aisle, with occasional detours to left and right to point out some particular operation. Robyn soon gave up trying to follow his explanations. She could hardly hear them because of the din, and the few words and phrases that she did catch—“tolerances to five thou,” “cross-boring,” “CNC machine,” “indexes round”—meant nothing to her. The machines were ugly, filthy and surprisingly old-fashioned in appearance. The typical operation seemed to be that the man took a lump of metal from a bin, thrust it into the machine, closed some kind of safety cage, and pulled a lever. Then he opened the cage, took out the part (which now looked slightly different) and dropped it into another bin. He did all this as noisily as possible.

  “Does he do the same thing all day?” she shouted to Wilcox, after they had watched one such man at work for some minutes. He nodded. “It seems terribly monotonous. Couldn’t it be done automatically?”

  Wilcox led her to a slightly quieter part of the shop floor. “If we had the capital to invest in new machines, yes. And if we cut down the number of our operations—for the part he’s making it wouldn’t be worth automating. The quantities are too small.”

  “Couldn’t you move him to another job occasionally?” she said, with a sudden burst of inspiration. “Move them all about, every few hours, just to give them a change?”

  “Like musical chairs?” Wilcox produced a crooked smile.

  “It seems so awful to be standing there, hour after hour, doing the same thing, day after day.”

  “That’s factory work. The operatives like it that way.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “They don’t like being shunted about. You start moving men about from one job to another, and they start complaining, or demanding to be put on a higher grade. Not to mention the time lost changing over.”

  “So it comes back to money again.”

  “Everything does, in my experience.”

  “Never mind what the men want?”

  “They prefer it this way, I’m telling you. They switch off, they daydream. If they were smart enough to get bored, they wouldn’t be doing a job like this in the first place. If you want to see an automated process, come over here.”

  He strode off down one of the aisles. The blue-overalled workers reacted to his passage like a shoal of minnows in the presence of a big fish. They did not look up or catch his eye, but there was a perceptible tremor along the work benches, a subtle increase in the carefulness and precision of their movements as the boss passed. The foremen behaved differently. They came hurrying forward with obsequious smiles as Wilcox stopped to ask about a bin of components with “WASTE” chalked on the side, or squatted beside a broken-down machine to discuss the cause with an oily-pawed mechanic. Wilcox made no attempt to introduce Robyn to anyone, though she was aware that she was an object of curiosity in these surroundings. On all sides she saw glazed abstracted eyes click suddenly into sharp focus as they registered her presence, and she observed sly smiles and muttered remarks being exchanged between neighbouring benches. The content of these remarks she could guess all too easily from the pin-ups that were displayed on walls and pillars everywhere, pages torn from softporn magazines depicting glossy-lipped naked women with bulging breasts and buttocks, pouting and posturing indecently.

  “Can’t you do something about these pictures?” she asked Wilcox.

  “What pictures?” He looked around, apparently genuinely puzzled by
the question.

  “All these pornographic pin-ups.”

  “Oh, those. You get used to them. They don’t register, after a while.”

  That, she realized, was what was peculiarly degrading and depressing about the pictures. Not just the nudity of the girls, or their poses, but the fact that nobody was looking at them, except herself. Once these images must have excited lust—enough to make someone take the trouble to cut them out and stick them up on the wall; but after a day or two, or a week or two, the pictures had ceased to arouse, they had become familiar—faded and tattered and oil-stained, almost indistinguishable from the dirt and debris of the rest of the factory. It made the models’ sacrifice of their modesty seem poignantly vain.

  “There you are,” said Wilcox. “Our one and only CNC machine.”

  “What?”

  “Computer-numerically controlled machine. See how quickly it changes tools?”

  Robyn peered through a Perspex window and watched things moving round and going in and out in sudden spasms, lubricated by spurts of a liquid that looked like milky coffee.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Machining cylinder heads. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Not the word I’d choose.”

  There was something uncanny, almost obscene, to Robyn’s eye, about the sudden, violent, yet controlled movements of the machine, darting forward and retreating, like some steely reptile devouring its prey or copulating with a passive mate.

  “One day,” said Wilcox, “there will be lightless factories full of machines like that.”

  “Why lightless?”

  “Machines don’t need light. Machines are blind. Once you’ve built a fully computerised factory, you can take out the lights, shut the door and leave it to make engines or vacuum cleaners or whatever, all on its own in the dark. Twenty-four hours a day.”

  “What a creepy idea.”

  “They already have them in the States. Scandinavia.”

  “And the Managing Director? Will he be a computer too, sitting in a dark office?”

  Wilcox considered the question seriously. “No, computers can’t think. There’ll always have to be a man in charge, at least one man, deciding what should be made, and how. But these jobs”—he jerked his head round at the rows of benches—“will no longer exist. This machine here is doing the work that was done last year by twelve men.”