by David Lodge
‘Right. When Bush was re-elected I felt I just had to get out of the country. I’d been working for the Kerry campaign for months and I was so depressed . . .’
‘You were a volunteer?’ I asked.
‘No, I was paid. I’d been thinking of working in government actually, but I decided to go back to school, try for an academic career. I like England, I spent some time here when I was a kid - my dad had a job at the Embassy in London. And doing a PhD here costs a whole lot less than in the States. I didn’t realise when I applied that’s because they don’t teach you anything.’ She laughed as I showed my surprise at this judgement. ‘I mean there are no courses, no exams, just the dissertation, which you’re expected to do on your own, with an occasional meeting with your supervisor.’>
‘Surely there’s a research seminar of some kind?’ I said.
‘You mean where people get to talk about what they’re working on, and everyone else is terribly polite and supportive and asks easy questions? Yeah, we have that,’ she said drily. ‘Fortunately I like working on my own. The system suits me fine, or it would do if the supervisions were any good.’
‘You don’t get on with Professor Butterworth?’ I asked. I began to understand why she had not wanted to meet me on the campus.
‘That’s an understatement,’ she said.‘I read an article by him about the effect of email on epistolary style which made me think he would be a good person to work with, that’s why I applied to come here, but he’s really been no help at all.’
‘He probably just doesn’t have enough time,’ I said. ‘He’s probably too busy attending meetings, and preparing budgets, and making staff assessments, and doing all the other things that professors have to do nowadays instead of thinking.’
‘Maybe, but he’s not very smart either,’ Alex said.
I could not suppress a faint smile of complicity in this judgement. I have always thought Butterworth’s reputation is somewhat inflated, owing more to his instinct for trendy subjects, and his popularity with the media as a pundit on contemporary linguistic usage, than to original scholarship. But I was disconcerted by her next remark.
‘That’s why I want you to supervise me.’ She said that she had been reading a lot of my work lately and been very impressed by it. ‘I’d read some things before, of course, way back, when I was doing my Master’s at Columbia, but when I found out you actually taught here till recently, I was really excited . . . I’ve read everything by you in the Library. I think you’re just the adviser I need.’
‘But I’m retired,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘But I’ve heard that some retired faculty go on supervising graduate students.’
‘Those would be students they were supervising before they retired,’ I explained.‘They’re just seeing them through to the completion of their dissertations. But one can’t take on new students after full retirement.’
‘Can’t one?’ she said, with a little pouting smile. ‘Can’t he make a special arrangement?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘Putting aside the question of whether I were willing -’
‘Are you, in principle?’ she interposed.
‘Putting that aside, it would be incredibly insulting to Professor Butterworth if I were hauled out of retirement to take over one of his research students. He would never agree to it. And the University would never wear it. It’s just not on, I’m afraid.’
I was glad to have this well-founded reason for declining her request, because otherwise I might have been a little bit tempted by it. The idea of getting involved in some research again, applying my knowledge and expertise to this rather bizarre but undoubtedly interesting topic, and meeting this obviously intelligent and articulate and, let us be honest, very personable young woman on a regular basis to discuss it, was not unattractive. But experience has taught me that postgraduate supervision can be a complex and worrying business: you easily find yourself becoming somehow responsible for the student’s achievement, self-esteem, destiny, and it goes on for years. It was a good thing that I didn’t even have to weigh up the pros and cons in this case before saying no.
‘Oh. I’m very disappointed,’ she said disconsolately.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I drained a cup of tea that had gone cold, and glanced at my watch. ‘Perhaps I should be going.’
‘Oh, no, please don’t go,’ she said. ‘Have some more tea.’ She refilled my cup.
‘Tell me a bit more about your research,’ I said. ‘Where do you get your raw data from?’
‘Oh, there are anthologies. And the Internet is useful. I’ll show you.’ She got up and took down a large lever-arch file from the shelves. ‘This is my corpus to date. It’s all on my hard disk, of course, but I keep this as a kind of scrap book to browse through occasionally. ’
The file was heavy on my knees, and metaphorically heavy with human suffering. I leafed through photocopies of suicide notes, some from printed sources, some reproductions of typed and handwritten originals. I can only remember a few of the sentences and phrases which Alex had marked and annotated in a minuscule, almost illegible script. ‘I’m tired of life so I’ve killed myself. This shitty family just takes advantage of you’ . . . ‘The gas is making a noise, it’s hissing fear into me’ . . . ‘I don’t have any choice in the matter. To make everything better I have to die’ . . . ‘The man lying beside me is just an unfortunate coincidence . . .’ This last was by a woman who had evidently picked up an unlucky stranger and had sex with him before turning on the gas while he was asleep. I looked up to find Alex regarding me intently.
‘Interesting reading, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Fascinating - but uncomfortable. Don’t you get depressed working with this material day after day?’
She shrugged. ‘Do pathologists get depressed doing post-mortems day after day?’
‘I suppose you’ve done some statistical searches on your data?’
‘Yeah - know what the most commonly recurring non-grammatical word is?’
‘Kill? Die?’
‘Love.’
‘Hmm. And the collocations?’
‘Oh, no surprises there: names, pronouns, some negatives. I love you, Mom. I love you Dad, I love you Jack, you never really loved me, Mum and Dad never loved me, nobody loves me . . .’
I read a few more of the letters - it’s customary to refer to suicide ‘notes’, but many of them were full-length letters - and commented that there seemed to be often some ambiguity about the addressee. ‘Ostensibly they’re addressed to a relative or partner, but sometimes they contain information well known to both parties, so it’s as if they’re also addressed to the world at large.’
‘Right, and sometimes they’ll throw in something addressed to God as well. As if they want to cover all the bases with their last words,’ she said. ‘You obviously have a feel for this topic. Are you sure you won’t supervise me?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘How far are you into the project?’
‘Well, I started it in the States some time ago, and dropped out. I registered here in the spring and started over.’
‘I don’t recall seeing you on campus.’
‘No, but I’ve seen you. Somebody pointed you out to me in the Library. That’s how I recognised you at the ARC reception.’
‘Ah,’ I said. I had thought that conversation was a chance encounter, but evidently not.
‘I don’t go into the University much, except to the Library. I prefer to work at home. And I have to do other kinds of work to pay the rent.’
‘What kinds?’
‘Casual stuff. Waitress, barmaid. I was hoping to get some teaching in the English Department, but nothing doing.’
‘No, we rarely use postgraduates for teaching, as they do in the States,’ I said.
Then she giggled and said something in a throwaway fashion, in which I caught only the word ‘panty-sniffer’. As she elaborated I gathered that a girl she had worked with for a time in a ba
r had told her about a man who paid for panties that had been worn and not laundered. You sent them through the post, sealed in a freezer bag, once a week, and three days later back came a cheque.You never met him. It was easy money. ‘The easiest money I ever heard of,’ she said. But having missed the introduction to the story I couldn’t tell whether Alex herself had actually become involved in this trade, or was just reporting her friend’s experience. So I was reduced to nodding and smiling and murmuring phatically, taking my cues from Alex’s tone and expression, and maintaining an attitude of urbane unshockable amusement, until I asked a careless question, ‘Does he tell you what style of lingerie he prefers?’ which implied that it had at least crossed my mind that Alex herself might be subsidising her doctoral research in this way.
She gaped at me for a moment and laughed. ‘Professor Bates! You don’t imagine I mail my panties to this guy?’
I blushed deeply - I don’t often blush but I did then - and said, ‘No, no, of course not.’
‘I believe you did!’ she said archly. She didn’t seem to be offended.
‘I said “you” in the sense of “one”,’ I said pedantically.
‘Well, I don’t say one might not be tempted if she were really broke,’ Alex said lightly.
‘I wonder why American English uses ‘one’ in that way?’ I said, desperate to change the subject. ‘Just once at the beginning of a sentence, then shifting to the appropriate personal pronoun, he or she. Whereas we would say “One might not be tempted if one were really broke.”’ I realised that my example had returned us to the subject of my faux pas.
‘I really don’t know,’ she said, smiling at my embarrassment. She took advantage of it to press me again about her research, asking me if I wouldn’t read her stuff and give her some advice, informally and confidentially. Anxious to make my departure, I said I would think about it. She gave me a card with her mobile telephone number on it - she doesn’t have a landline. I tried to think of some way of discouraging her from phoning me at home that wouldn’t sound either rude or conspiratorial, and failed.
Driving back to the house I decided that I must tell Fred about my meeting with Alex before she found out as the result of another phone call. But to tell the whole story as it happened from the beginning - the request I had agreed to at the ARC private view without hearing a word of it, Alex’s phone call after I didn’t show up, the arrangement to meet in her flat, and then the meeting itself - seemed so lengthy and complicated a narrative as to beg the question why I hadn’t mentioned any of it to Fred before. So I prepared a condensed account implying, without explicitly stating, that it all happened this afternoon at the University: ‘You remember that blonde woman I was talking to at the ARC the other night, and couldn’t hear a word she was saying? Well I met her again this afternoon and it turns out she’s a postgraduate in the English Department, an American doing a PhD under Butterworth, on suicide notes of all things. We had a cup of tea. She wanted to pick my brains - dropped a fairly heavy hint that she’d prefer me as a supervisor in fact. I told her that was out of the question, of course. But I might give her a bit of help unofficially. It’s an intriguing topic . . .’
I delivered this speech, or something like it, over dinner this evening, and Fred seemed to receive it without suspicion, or indeed much interest. She was preoccupied with a problem about some expensive Italian curtaining fabric which had been delivered to Décor this morning. It turned out to have a flaw in the weave which ran right through the roll, and so would have to be sent back, but the suppliers didn’t have any more in stock, so it would have to be manufactured again from scratch in Milan, which would take several weeks, and the client had been promised the curtains for Christmas.
‘It’s just possible we could still do it, but it will be touch and go,’ she said. ‘Is it a very noticeable flaw?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘perhaps the customer would accept the material with a discount.’ ‘She might,’ Fred said. ‘But it would niggle at her for as long as the curtains hung in her front room. She would never draw them without being reminded of it. She would always be wondering whether other people noticed, and having to stop herself from telling them. She would always associate us with something less than perfection. I can’t accept that.’ ‘So what will you do?’ ‘We’ll go for it,’ she said with a grin. ‘We’ll get that material in time if I have to fly to Milan myself to fetch it.’ A strong-minded woman, my wife.
Alex Loom is an intriguing person, but a bit of an enigma. Even her name is a puzzle. I couldn’t find ‘Loom’ in the Penguin Dictionary of Surnames. It might be one of those American mutations of an immigrant name. German or Scandinavian perhaps - she has Nordic, ice-maiden looks. Out of idle curiosity I looked up the noun loom in the OED and it has had an extraordinary variety of meanings, some now obsolete, as well as the familiar one of an apparatus for weaving: for instance, an implement or tool, a spider’s web, an open vessel, a boat, the part of an oar between the handle and the blade, a variety of diving birds in northern seas, a glow in the sky caused by reflection of light from a lighthouse, a mirage over water or ice, a bundle of parallel insulated electric wires, and most bizarrely, a penis. The citation for that one is ‘And large was his odd lome the lenthe of a yerde’, from a fifteenth-century alliterative romance coincidentally called Alexander. (I presume her full name is Alexandra Loom.) It would make a good slogan for one of those Internet sex-aid ads: ‘You too can have a lome the lenthe of a yerde.’ The word has fewer meanings as a verb: to appear indistinctly, to come into view in an enlarged and indefinite form, freq. threateningly; of a ship or the sea, to move slowly up and down.
In spite of the embarrassing conclusion to my visit, I don’t regret making it. It’s a long time since I did something that wasn’t part of my predictable daily routine - even the canalside location was a part of the city I’ve never seen before. And Alex’s thesis topic is undoubtedly interesting. I think I might give her some unofficial help with it - the idea of covertly supplementing, even subverting, Butterworth’s supervision is rather seductive. I can imagine him being startled when she comes up with some bright idea that she actually owes to me . . . it makes me smile just to think of it.
8
9th November. There was a strange sequel to my visit to Alex Loom. I was getting ready this afternoon to go to the bank and the post office in our local high street, and decided to wear my overcoat. I hadn’t worn it since Tuesday, because yesterday the weather was mild and wet, but today was chilly again. As I was buttoning up the coat and checking my appearance in the hall I noticed a slight bulge over my chest, as if there was a bunched-up handkerchief or small scarf in the inside breast pocket of the overcoat. I slid my hand into the pocket and, like an involuntary conjurer, drew out a pair of women’s knickers. I held them out, extended between my index fingers and thumbs, and stared at them. They were made of white cotton, with a narrow lace trim. I realised instantly how they had got into my pocket: I had used Alex’s toilet before I made my departure - the cups of tea having exerted an uncomfortable pressure on my bladder - and she must have taken the opportunity to stuff a pair of her knickers - or ‘panties’ as she would call them - into my overcoat as some kind of postscript to our conversation. But what was the import of it?
They were not unworn, but they were freshly laundered - I did not have to sniff them to ascertain that, for they were spotless and the material was soft and springy to the touch. I peered inside the waistband and found a faded Bloomingdale’s label attached, confirmation that they belonged to Alex - not that I could think of any other suspect who might have played this trick in the last forty-eight hours. It occurred to me that I might easily have pulled them out of my pocket in the presence of Fred. If for instance I had worn the overcoat instead of my raincoat yesterday evening, when we went to a press night at the Playhouse, I might have done so here in the hall as we were going out, or in the foyer of the theatre as I was checking my coat into the cloakroom, surrounde
d by curious and amused spectators. ‘What on earth . . . ?’ I imagined myself saying, drawing the folded panties from my inside pocket and holding them out, gaping at them as people laughed and nudged each other and Fred looked astonished and then furious. In either scenario she would have demanded an explanation, and what could I have given, without revealing my visit to Alex’s flat and making it look a much more guilty action than it was? I was seized with a spasm of anger at Alex’s reckless behaviour.
I looked at myself in the hall mirror, a gaunt, grey-haired man in a formal dark overcoat holding up a pair of white knickers, like a detective with a piece of incriminating evidence, and wondered what to do with them. To put them out with the garbage was my first thought, but there have been occasions in the past when Fred lost her keys or a piece of jewellery and made a meticulous search of our garbage bins, laying out their contents on sheets of newspaper in the back yard, and fate might decide that she should do so again before our next refuse collection. I thought of burning them, but we don’t have any solid fuel fires indoors, and if I did it outdoors, on the barbecue say, there was always a chance that I would be observed by a neighbour, turning over the charred panties with a pair of tongs. I thought of cutting them up with scissors into small pieces and flushing them down the lavatory; but the plumbing in this old house is not its strongest point, and what would happen if the soil pipe got blocked and Dyno-Rod retrieved a sodden ball of cotton fragments, one bearing a Bloomingdale’s label? These scenarios got more and more bizarre and paranoid as I ruminated. In the end I put the cause of all this agitation in a jiffy bag addressed to Alex at Wharfside Court, and enclosed a postcard with a curt message: ‘I believe this undergarment is yours. I don’t understand why it came to be in the inside pocket of my overcoat, but it was a very foolish action which could have caused me acute embarrassment. In the circumstances I cannot undertake to give you any assistance or advice concerning your research. D.B.’ I mailed the package at the post office on my way to the bank. I sent it first class, wanting her to feel the force of my displeasure as soon as possible.
