by David Lodge
“Oh,” said Vic. “My mistake. Or is it an aporia?”
“No, it’s a mistake,” said Robyn. “I must ask you not to interrupt any more, please, or Marion will never finish her paper.”
Vic lapsed into a hurt silence. He stirred restlessly in his seat, he sighed impatiently to himself from time to time in a way that made the students stall nervously in the middle of what they were saying, he licked his fingers to turn the pages of his book, and flexed it so violently in his hands that the spine cracked noisily, but he didn’t actually interrupt again. After a while he seemed to lose interest in the discussion and to be browsing in the Tennyson on his own account. When the tutorial was over and the students had left, he asked Robyn if he could borrow it.
“Of course. Why, though?”
“Well, I thought if I have a read of it, I might have a better idea of what’s going on next week.”
“Oh, but we’re not doing Tennyson next week. It’s Daniel Deronda, I think.”
“You mean, you’ve finished with Tennyson? That’s it?”
“As far as this group is concerned, yes.”
“But you never told them whether he was optimistic or pessimistic.”
“I don’t tell them what to think,” said Robyn.
“Then how are they supposed to learn the right answers?”
“There are no right answers to questions like that. There are only interpretations.”
“What’s the point of it, then?” he said. “What’s the point of sitting around discussing books all day, if you’re no wiser at the end of it?”
“Oh, you’re wiser,” said Robyn. “What you learn is that language is an infinitely more devious and slippery medium than you had supposed.”
“That’s good for you?”
“Very good for you,” she said, tidying the books and papers on her desk. “Do you want to borrow Daniel Deronda for next week?”
“What did he write?”
“He’s not a he, he’s a book. By George Eliot.”
“Good writer, is he, this Eliot bloke?”
“He was a she, actually. You see how slippery language is. But, yes, very good. D’you want to swap Daniel Deronda for the Tennyson?”
“I’ll take them both,” he said. “There’s some good stuff in here.” He opened the Tennyson, and read aloud, tracing the lines with his blunt forefinger:
“Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine,
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.”
“I might have guessed you would lap up ‘Locksley Hall,’” said Robyn.
“It strikes a chord,” he said, turning the pages. “Why didn’t you answer my letters?”
“Because I didn’t read them,” she said. “I didn’t even open them.”
“That wasn’t very nice.”
“I knew all too well what would be in them,” she said. “And if you’re going to get stupid and sentimental, and sick Tennyson all over me, I’m going to call off The Shadow Scheme Part Two right away.”
“I can’t help it. I keep thinking about Frankfurt.”
“Forget it. Pretend it never happened. Would you like some coffee?”
“It must have meant something to you.”
“It was an aporia,” she said. “A pathless path. It led nowhere.”
“Yes,” he said bitterly. “It left me stuck on a ledge. I can’t go forward, I can’t go back.”
Robyn sighed. “I’m sorry, Vic. Surely you can see that we’re too different? Not to mention the fact that you have other ties.”
“Never mind them,” he said. “I can take care of them.”
“We’re from two different worlds.”
“I could change. I already have changed. I’ve read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I’ve got rid of pin-ups at the factory, I’ve—”
“You’ve what?”
“We’ve been cleaning up the place—I took the opportunity to have the pin-ups taken off the walls.”
“Won’t they just put up new ones?”
“I got the unions to put it to a vote. The shop stewards weren’t keen, but the Asian membership was overwhelmingly in favour. They’re a bit prudish, you know.”
“Well! I’m impressed,” said Robyn. She smiled a benediction on him. This proved to be a mistake. To her dismay he seized her hand, and dropped to his knees beside her chair, in a posture reminiscent of one of the engravings in her old Tennyson Poems.
“Robyn, give me a chance!”
She snatched her hand away. “Get up, you fool!” she said.
At that moment there was a knock on the door and Marion Russell blundered breathlessly into the room. She stopped on the threshold and stared at Vic on his knees. Robyn slid off her chair and on to the floor. “Mr. Wilcox has dropped his pen, Marion,” she said. “You can help us look for it.”
“Oh,” said Marion. “I’m afraid I can’t, I’ve got a lecture. I came back for my bag.” She pointed to a plastic shopping-bag full of books under the chair where she had been sitting.
“All right,” said Robyn, “take it.”
“Sorry.” Marion Russell retrieved her bag, backed towards the door and, with a last stare, left the room.
“Right, that’s it,” said Robyn, as she got to her feet.
“I’m sorry, I got carried away,” said Vic, dusting his knees.
“Please leave now,” said Robyn. “I’ll tell Swallow that I’ve changed my mind.”
“Let me stay. It won’t happen again.” He looked embarrassed and helpless. She was reminded of when they had gone back to her room at the Frankfurt hotel and how he had sprung on her behind the door, and just as abruptly desisted.
“I don’t trust you. I think you’re a bit mad.”
“I promise.”
Robyn waited till he looked her in the eye before she spoke again. “No more references to Frankfurt?”
“No.”
“No more love-stuff?”
He swallowed, and nodded glumly. “All right.”
Robyn thought of the tableau they must have presented to Marion Russell, and giggled. “Come on, let’s get some coffee,” she said.
…
As usual at this hour of the morning, the Senior Common Room was crowded, and they had to join a short queue for coffee. Vic looked about him in a puzzled way.
“What’s going on here?” he said. “Are these people having an early lunch?”
“No, just morning coffee.”
“How long are they allowed?”
“Allowed?”
“You mean they can doss around here as long as they like?”
Robyn looked at her colleagues lounging in easy chairs, smiling and chatting to each other, or browsing through the newspapers and weekly reviews, as they drank their coffee and nibbled their biscuits. She suddenly saw this familiar spectacle through an outsider’s eyes, and almost blushed. “We all have our own work to do,” she said. “It’s up to us how we do it.”
“If you don’t start till ten and you knock off for a coffee-break at eleven,” said Vic, “I don’t see where you find the time.” He seemed to recognise no intermediate point in manners between self-abasement and truculence. The first having failed, he switched straight into the second.
Robyn paid for two cups of coffee and led Vic to a couple of vacant chairs beside one of the full-length windows that overlooked the central square of the campus. “Surprising as it may seem to you,” she said, “a lot of the people in this room are working at this moment.”
“You could’ve fooled me. What kind of work?”
“Discussing university business, settling committee agendas. Exchanging ideas about their research, or consulting about particular students. Things like that.”
It was unfortunate that at this moment the Professor of Egyptology, who was sitting nearby, said very audibly to his neighbour, “How are your tulips this year, Dobson?”
“If I was in charge,” said Vic, “I’d shut this place
down and have that woman behind the counter going up and down the corridors with a trolley.”
The Professor of Egyptology turned in his seat to stare at Vic.
“Scruffy lot, aren’t they, the men in here? No ties, most of ’em. And look at that bloke over there, he’s got his shirt hanging out.”
“He’s a very distinguished theologian,” said Robyn.
“That’s no excuse for looking as if he’d slept in his clothes,” said Vic.
Philip Swallow approached them with a coffee cup in one hand and a thick sheaf of committee papers in the other. “May I join you?” he said. “How are you getting on, Mr. Wilcox?”
“Mr. Wilcox is scandalised by our lax habits,” said Robyn. “Open-necked shirts and open-ended coffee-breaks.”
“It wouldn’t do in industry,” said Vic. “People would take advantage.”
“I’m not sure that some of our colleagues don’t take advantage,” said Swallow, looking round the room. “You do tend to see the same faces in here, taking their time over coffee.”
“Well, you’re the boss, aren’t you?” said Vic. “Why don’t you give them a warning?”
Philip Swallow gave a hollow laugh. “I’m nobody’s boss. I’m afraid you’re making the same mistake as the Government.”
“What’s that?”
“Why, supposing that universities are organized like businesses, with a clear division between management and labour, whereas in fact they’re collegiate institutions. That’s why the whole business of the cuts has been such a balls-up. Excuse my French, Robyn.”
Robyn waved the apology aside.
“You see,” said Philip Swallow, “when the Government cut our funding they obviously hoped to improve efficiency, get rid of overmanning, and so on, like they did in industry. Well, let’s admit that there was room for some of that—it would be a miracle if there hadn’t been. But in industry, management decides who shall be made redundant in the labour force, senior management decides who shall go from junior management, and so on. Universities don’t have that pyramid structure. Everybody is equal in a sense, once they pass probation. Nobody can be made redundant against their will. Nobody will vote to make their peers redundant.”
“I should think not,” said Robyn.
“That’s all very well, Robyn, but nobody will even vote for a change of syllabus that threatens to make anyone redundant. I wouldn’t like to count the hours I’ve spent on committees discussing the cuts,” said Philip Swallow wearily, “and in all that time I can’t remember a single instance in which anybody admitted that there was any aspect of our existing arrangements that was dispensable. Everybody recognises that there have to be cuts, because the Government controls the purse-strings, but nobody will actually make them.”
“Then you’ll soon be bankrupt,” said Vic.
“We would be already, if it wasn’t for early retirements,” said Swallow. “But of course the people who have volunteered to take early retirement are not always the people we can most afford to lose. And then the Government had to give us a lot of money to make the terms attractive. So we ended up paying people to go away and work in America or for themselves or not at all, instead of spending the money on bright young people like Robyn here.”
“It sounds like a shambles,” said Vic. “Surely the answer is to change the system. Give management more muscle.”
“No!” said Robyn hotly. “That’s not the answer. If you try to make universities like commercial institutions, you destroy everything that makes them valuable. Better the other way round. Model industry on universities. Make factories collegiate institutions.”
“Ha! We wouldn’t last five minutes in the marketplace,” said Vic.
“So much the worse for the marketplace,” said Robyn. “Maybe the universities are inefficient, in some ways. Maybe we do waste a lot of time arguing on committees because nobody has absolute power. But that’s preferable to a system where everybody is afraid of the person on the next rung of the ladder above them, where everybody is out for themselves, and fiddling their expenses or vandalising the lavatories, because they know that if it suited the company they could be made redundant tomorrow and nobody would give a damn. Give me the University, with all its faults, any day.”
“Well,” said Vic, “it’s nice work if you can get it.” He turned his head and looked out of the full-length window, which was open to the warm day, at the central square of the campus.
Robyn followed the direction of his gaze with her own eyes. The students in their summer finery were scattered like petals over the green lawns, reading, talking, necking, or listening to their discoursing teachers. The sun shone upon the façade of the Library, whose glazed revolving doors flashed intermittently like the beams of a lighthouse as it fanned readers in and out, and shone upon the buildings of diverse shapes and sizes dedicated to Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Education and Law. It shone on the botanical gardens, and on the sports centre and the playing fields and the running track where people would be training and jogging and exercising. It shone on the Great Hall where the University orchestra and choir were due to perform “The Dream of Gerontius” later in the term, and on the Student Union with its Council Chamber and committee rooms and newspaper offices, and on the privately endowed art gallery with its small but exquisite collection of masterpieces. It seemed to Robyn more than ever that the university was the ideal type of a human community, where work and play, culture and nature, were in perfect harmony, where there was space, and light, and fine buildings set in pleasant grounds, and people were free to pursue excellence and self-fulfilment, each according to her own rhythm and inclination.
And then she thought, with a sympathetic inward shudder, of how the same sun must be shining upon the corrugated roofs of the factory buildings in West Wallsbury, how the temperature must be rising rapidly inside the foundry; and she imagined the workers stumbling out into the sunshine at midday, sweatstained and blinking in the bright light, and eating their snap, squatting on oil-stained tarmac in the shade of a brick wall, and then, at the sound of a hooter, going back in again to the heat and noise and stench for another four hours’ toil.
But no! Instead of letting them go back into that hell-hole, she transported them, in her imagination, to the campus: the entire workforce—labourers, craftsmen, supervisors, managers, directors, secretaries and cleaners and cooks, in their grease-stiff dungarees and soiled overalls and chain-store frocks and striped suits—brought them in buses across the city, and unloaded them at the gates of the campus, and let them wander through it in a long procession, like a lost army, headed by Danny Ram and the two Sikhs from the cupola and the giant black from the knockout, their eyes rolling white in their swarthy, soot-blackened faces, as they stared about them with bewildered curiosity at the fine buildings and the trees and flowerbeds and lawns, and at the beautiful young people at work or play all around them. And the beautiful young people and their teachers stopped dallying and disputing and got to their feet and came forward to greet the people from the factory, shook their hands and made them welcome, and a hundred small seminar groups formed on the grass, composed half of students and lecturers and half of workers and managers, to exchange ideas on how the values of the university and the imperatives of commerce might be reconciled and more equitably managed to the benefit of the whole of society.
Robyn became aware that Philip Swallow was talking to her. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “I was daydreaming.”
“The privilege of youth,” he said, smiling. “I thought for a moment you might be getting a little hard of hearing, Robyn.”
2
“The next question,” said Philip Swallow, “is what we do about the Syllabus Review Committee’s report.”
“Throw it in the wastepaper basket,” Rupert Sutcliffe suggested.
“It’s easy for Rupert to sneer,” said Bob Busby, who was Chairman of the Syllabus Review Committee, “but it’s no easy matter, revising the syllabus
. Everybody in the Department wants to protect their own special interests. Like all syllabuses, ours is a compromise.”
“A thoroughly unworkable compromise, if I may say so,” said Rupert Sutcliffe. “I calculate that it would entail setting a hundred and seventy-three different Finals papers every year.”
“We haven’t gone into the question of assessment yet,” said Bob Busby. “We wanted to get the basic structure of courses agreed first.”
“But assessment is vital,” said Robyn. “It determines the students’ whole approach to their studies. Isn’t this an opportunity to get rid of final examinations altogether, and go over to some form of continuous assessment?”
“Faculty Board would never accept that,” said Bob Busby.
“Quite right too,” said Rupert Sutcliffe. “Continuous assessment should be confined to infant schools.”
“I must remind you,” said Philip Swallow wearily, “as I shall have to remind the full Department Committee in due course, that the object of this exercise is to economise on resources in the face of the cuts. Three colleagues will be leaving, for various reasons, at the end of this year. It’s more than likely that there will be further losses next year. If we go on offering the present syllabus with fewer and fewer staff, individual teaching loads will rise to intolerable levels. The Syllabus Review Committee was set up to confront this problem, not to devise a new syllabus that all of us, in ideal circumstances, would like to teach.”
“Rationalisation,” said Vic from the far end of the table.
The others gathered in Philip Swallow’s room, including Robyn, turned their heads and looked at Vic in surprise. He did not normally speak at the committee meetings to which he followed her—nor, since his first day, had he intervened in tutorials. On his weekly visits to the University he sat in the corner of her room, or at the back of the lecture theatre, quietly attentive, and followed her about the corridors and staircases of the Arts Faculty like a faithful dog. Sometimes she wondered what he was making of it all, but most of the time she simply forgot he was there, as she had done this morning. It was the fourth week of term, and they were attending a meeting of the Department Agenda Committee.
