The British Museum is Falling Down Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Lodge

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The British Museum is Falling Down is a brilliant comic satire of academia, religion and human entanglements. First published in 1965, it tells the story of hapless, scooter-riding young research student Adam Appleby, who is trying to write his thesis but is constantly distracted – not least by the fact that, as Catholics in the 1960s, he and his wife must rely on ‘Vatican roulette’ to avoid a fourth child.

  About the Author

  David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks . . ., Author, Author, Deaf Sentence and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

  ALSO BY DAVID LODGE

  Fiction

  The Picturegoers

  Ginger, You’re Barmy

  Out of the Shelter

  Changing Places

  How Far Can You Go?

  Small World

  Nice Work

  Paradise News

  Therapy

  Home Truths

  Thinks . . .

  Author, Author

  Deaf Sentence

  A Man of Parts

  Criticism

  Language of Fiction

  The Novelist at the Crossroads

  The Modes of Modern Writing

  Working with Structuralism

  After Bakhtin

  Essays

  Write On

  The Art of Fiction

  The Practice of Writing

  Consciousness and the Novel

  The Year of Henry James

  Drama

  The Writing Game

  Home Truths

  To

  Derek Todd

  (in affectionate memory of B.M. days)

  and to

  Malcolm Bradbury

  (whose fault it mostly is that I

  have tried to write

  a comic novel)

  The British Museum is Falling Down

  David Lodge

  Life imitates art.

  OSCAR WILDE

  I would be a Papist if I could. I have fear enough, but an obstinate rationality prevents me.

  DR JOHNSON

  CHAPTER I

  There were moments of happiness in the British Museum reading-room, but the body called him back.

  GRAHAM GREENE

  IT WAS ADAM APPLEBY’S misfortune that at the moment of awakening from sleep his consciousness was immediately flooded with everything he least wanted to think about. Other men, he gathered, met each new dawn with a refreshed mind and heart, full of optimism and resolution; or else they moved sluggishly through the first hour of the day in a state of blessed numbedness, incapable of any thought at all, pleasant or unpleasant. But, crouched like harpies round his bed, unpleasant thoughts waited to pounce the moment Adam’s eyelids flickered apart. At that moment he was forced, like a drowning man, to review his entire life instantaneously, divided between regrets for the past and fears for the future.

  Thus it was that as he opened his eyes one November morning, and focused them blearily on the sick rose, three down and six across, on the wallpaper opposite his bed, Adam was simultaneously reminded that he was twenty-five years of age, and would soon be twenty-six, that he was a post-graduate student preparing a thesis which he was unlikely to complete in this the third and final year of his scholarship, that the latter was hugely overdrawn, that he was married with three very young children, that one of them had manifested an alarming rash the previous evening, that his name was ridiculous, that his leg hurt, that his decrepit scooter had failed to start the previous morning and would no doubt fail to start this morning, that he had just missed a first-class degree because of a bad Middle English paper, that his leg hurt, that at his primary school he had proved so proficient in the game of who-can-pee-highest-up-the-wall of the boys’ outside lavatory that he had wetted the biretta of the parish priest who happened to be visiting the playground on the other side of the wall at the time, that he had forgotten to reserve any books at the British Museum for this morning’s reading, that his leg hurt, that his wife’s period was three days overdue, and that his leg hurt.

  But wait a minute . . . One of these mental events was unfamiliar. He could not recall any sensation of pain in his leg on retiring the previous night. And it was not, he reflected bitterly, as if he had enjoyed any strenuous physical activity after retiring. When Barbara’s period was overdue, neither of them felt much inclination for sex. The thought of another pregnancy had a dampening effect on desire, even though they knew the issue must be already settled, one way or another, in Barbara’s womb. At the thought of that womb plumping with another life, a spasm of cold terror coursed through Adam’s bowels. In a year’s time he should, with luck, have completed his Ph.D. and obtained some kind of job. It was essential that they should avoid conceiving another child at least until then. And if possible for ever.

  How different it must be, he thought, the life of an ordinary, non-Catholic parent, free to decide—actually to decide, in calm confidence—whether to have or not to have a child. How different from his own married state, which Adam symbolised as a small, over-populated, low-lying island ringed by a crumbling dyke which he and his wife struggled hopelessly to repair as they kept anxious watch on the surging sea of fertility that surrounded them. It was not that, having produced the three children, he and Barbara would now, given the opportunity, actually will them back into non-existence; but this acceptance of new life was not infinitely elastic. Its extension had limits, and Adam thought they had now been reached, at least for the foreseeable future.

  His mind turned, as it not infrequently did, to the circumstances which had brought them to this pass. Their marriage more than four years ago had been a hurried affair, precipitated by the announcement that Adam, who was doing his National Service after graduation, was to be posted to Singapore. Shortly afterwards he had proved to be suffering from an ear condition which had restricted him to home postings. This had been a source of joy to them at the time, but in gloomy moments Adam wondered retrospectively whether it had been altogether fortunate. In spite of, or perhaps because of being widely separated—he in Yorkshire and Barbara with her parents in Birmingham—and coming together only on weekend leaves, they had managed to produce two children during his army service.

  They had embarked on marriage with vague notions about the Safe Period and a hopeful trust in Providence that Adam now found difficult to credit. Clare had been born nine months after the wedding. Barbara had then consulted a Catholic doctor who gave her a simple mathematical formula for calculating the Safe Period—so simple that Dominic was born one year after Clare. Shortly afterwards Adam was released from the Army, and returned to London to do research. Someone gave Barbara a booklet explaining how she could determine the time of her ovulation by recording her temperature each morning, and they followed this procedure until Barbara became pregnant again.

  After Edward’s birth they had simply abstained from intercourse for six months of mounting neurosis. Having managed, with some dif
ficulty, to enter the married state as virgins after three years’ courtship, they found it hard that they should have to revert to this condition while sharing the same bed. A few months ago they had applied for help to a Catholic Marriage counselling organisation, whose doctors had poured a kindly scorn on their amateurish attempts to operate the basal temperature method. They had been given sheets of graph paper and little pieces of cardboard with transparent windows of cellophane to place over the graphs, and recommended, for maximum security, to keep to the post-ovulatory period.

  For three anxious months they had survived. Unfortunately, Barbara’s ovulation seemed to occur late in her monthly cycle, and their sexual relations were forced into a curious pattern: three weeks of patient graph-plotting, followed by a few nights of frantic love-making, which rapidly petered out in exhaustion and renewed suspense. This behaviour was known as Rhythm and was in accordance with the Natural Law.

  From the next room came a muffled thump and a sharp cry, which modulated into a low whining that Adam attributed hesitantly to his youngest child, Edward. He glanced sideways at his wife. She lay on her stomach, sucking a thermometer. A small peak in the bed-clothes further down indicated the presence of a second thermometer. Unable to decide on the relative accuracy of the oral and rectal methods of taking her temperature, Barbara had decided to employ both. Which would be all right as long as she could be relied upon not to confuse the two readings. Which Adam doubted.

  Catching his eye, Barbara muttered something rendered unrecognisable as a human utterance by the presence of the thermometer, but which Adam interpreted as, ‘Make a cup of tea.’ An interesting example of the function of predictability in casual speech, he mentally observed, as he pulled back the bedclothes. The lino greeted his feet with an icy chill, and he pranced awkwardly round the room on tip-toe, looking for his slippers. It was difficult, he found, to limp and walk on tip-toe at the same time. He discovered his slippers at last in his shirt-drawer, a minute plastic doll made in Hong Kong nestling in the toe of each. He hurriedly donned his dressing-gown. There was a distinct nip in the air: winter was contending with autumn. It made him think of electricity bills. So, when he looked out of the window, did Battersea Power Station, looming vaguely through the morning fog.

  After filling and switching on the electric kettle in the kitchen, Adam made his way to the bathroom. But his eldest child had forestalled him.

  ‘I’m passing a motion,’ Clare announced.

  ‘Who else is voting?’ he cracked uneasily. In theory, Adam fully supported his wife’s determination to teach the children an adult vocabulary for their physical functions. But it still disconcerted him—perhaps because it was not a vocabulary he had ever used himself, even as an adult. And it seemed to him positively dangerous to encourage the articulacy of a child so precociously fascinated by physiology as Clare. When Barbara had been in labour with Edward, and a kindly neighbour had hinted archly, ‘I think you’re going to have a baby brother or sister,’ Clare had replied: ‘I think so too—the contractions are coming every two minutes.’ Such feats were the source of a certain pride in Adam, but he couldn’t help thinking that Clare was missing something of the magic and mystery of childhood.

  ‘What’s voting?’ asked his daughter.

  ‘Will you be long?’ he countered.

  ‘I don’t know. You just can’t tell with these things.’

  ‘Well, don’t be long, please. Daddy wants to use the lavatory.’

  ‘Why don’t you use Dominic’s pot?’

  ‘Daddies don’t use pots.’

  ‘Why don’t they?’

  At a loss for an answer, Adam retreated to the kitchen. Where he had gone wrong, of course, was in categorically denying that Daddies used pots. Daddies often used pots. Eighty per cent of the rural dwellings in Ireland had no sanitation of any kind, for example. The correct gambit would have been: ‘I don’t use pots.’ Or, better still: ‘You don’t use pots any more, do you, Clare?’

  The kettle began to boil. Adam suddenly wondered whether he had over-estimated the function of predictability in casual speech. Supposing Barbara had not said, ‘Make a cup of tea’, but ‘Edward has fallen out of his cot’, or ‘My rectal thermometer is stuck’? He hastened back to the bedroom, pausing only to peep into the children’s room to assure himself of Edward’s safety. He was quite all right—placidly eating strips of wallpaper which Dominic was tearing off the wall. Adam made Edward spit them out and, holding the moist pulp in his outstretched hand, proceeded to the bedroom.

  ‘You did want me to make a cup of tea?’ he enquired, putting his head round the door.

  Barbara took the thermometer from her mouth and squinted at it. ‘Yes,’ she said, and replaced the thermometer.

  Adam returned to the kitchen, disposed of the pulp and made the tea. While waiting for it to draw he mentally composed a short article, ‘Catholicism, Roman, for a Martian encyclopaedia compiled after life on earth had been destroyed by atomic warfare.

  ROMAN CATHOLICISM was, according to archaeological evidence, distributed fairly widely over the planet Earth in the twentieth century. As far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned, it appears to have been characterised by a complex system of sexual taboos and rituals. Intercourse between married partners was restricted to certain limited periods determined by the calendar and the body-temperature of the female. Martian archaeologists have learned to identify the domiciles of Roman Catholics by the presence of large numbers of complicated graphs, calendars, small booklets full of figures, and quantities of broken themometers, evidence of the great importance attached to this code. Some scholars have argued that it was merely a method of limiting the number of offspring; but as it has been conclusively proved that the Roman Catholics produced more children on average than any other section of the community, this seems untenable. Other doctrines of the Roman Catholics included a belief in a Divine Redeemer and in a life after death.

  Adam put the tray on the floor outside the bathroom, and entered purposefully. ‘Come on, you’re finished,’ he said, lifting Clare from the seat.

  ‘Wipe my bottom, please.’

  He obliged, washing his hands afterwards to set a good example. Then he guided Clare firmly to the door.

  ‘Can I stay and watch?’

  ‘No. There’s a biscuit for you on the kitchen table, and one each for Dominic and Edward.’

  Adam micturated, and considered whether to wash his hands a second time. He decided against it. On re-entering the bedroom, he found Dominic urging his mother to rise.

  ‘Up, up!’ screamed the child. ‘Dominic, leave your mother alone. She’s busy,’ said Adam. Burdened with the tray, he was too slow to prevent Dominic from pulling off the bedclothes. Barbara was the Callipygian type, but the thermometer spoiled the effect. Adam interposed himself between Dominic and the bed. ‘Dominic, go away,’ he said, and thoughtlessly remarked to Barbara: ‘You look like a glass porcupine with all those things sticking out of you.’

  Barbara yanked at the bedclothes and plucked the thermometer from her mouth. ‘Don’t be rude. Do you think I enjoy this performance every morning?’

  ‘Well, yes, I do, as a matter of fact. It’s like Camel and his pipe. You were both weaned too early. But this latest development . . . It strikes me as a bit kinky.’

  ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll break these damn things over my knee and—’

  ‘Have a cup of tea’ said Adam conciliatingly.

  ‘Just a minute.’ Barbara entered the readings of her two thermometers in a small Catholic diary. This was not a conscious irony on her part, but Adam followed the relationship between the liturgical year and his wife’s temperature chart with interest. He practised a special devotion to those saints whose feast-days fell within the putative Safe Period, and experienced disquiet when a virgin martyr was so distinguished.

  ‘Up, up!’ shouted Dominic, red with anger.

  ‘Dominic,’ said Adam, ‘Clare has got a bikky for you.’

&n
bsp; The child trotted out. They sipped their tea.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t use those silly baby-words, Adam.’

  ‘Sorry. I keep forgetting. What was your temperature?’ At this stage of Barbara’s cycle, her temperature was of largely academic interest, except that marked changes from day to day might indicate that conception had taken place. Another cold wave of fear rippled through Adam’s frame at the thought.

  ‘One said 97.8 and the other 98.2.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s down a bit . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you . . . You haven’t started your period yet?’ he asked wistfully.

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Go and find out,’ he wheedled.

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  How lovely it would be if she came back from the bathroom and said yes. How happy his day would be. How transfigured the British Museum would appear. With what zest he would collect his books and set to work . . . But he had forgotten to reserve any books. That meant a long delay this morning . . .

  ‘Eh?’ he said, conscious that Barbara had asked him a question.

  ‘You haven’t listened to a word I’ve been saying.’

  ‘Yes I have,’ he lied.

  ‘What did I ask you, then?’

  He groped around in his mind for a likely question. ‘You said, why was I limping?’

  ‘There, you see? I said, “Have you looked at Edward’s rash?”’

  ‘I didn’t exactly look. But I don’t remember noticing it.’

  ‘I hope it isn’t measles. Why are you limping anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I must have pulled a muscle.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the night.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. How could you pull a muscle when you were asleep?’

  ‘That’s what I don’t understand. Perhaps I run in my sleep.’