Jumpers

DOTTY: No, I’m a book.

  GEORGE: The Naked and the Dead.

  DOTTY: Stay with me!

  (The four lines have been rapid. GEORGE is now at the door, ready to leave. DOTTY has sat up on the bed.)

  DOTTY: Play with me….

  GEORGE (hesitating): Now…?

  DOTTY: I mean games——

  (GEORGE makes to leave.)

  Be nice, (GEORGE moves. Desperate.) I’ll let you!

  (GEORGE leaves, shutting the door and thus revealing the corpse to the audience. He re-enters, and the corpse is obscured again.)*

  GEORGE: Do I say ‘My friend the late Bertrand Russell’ or ‘My late friend Bertrand Russell’? They both sound funny. (Pause.)

  DOTTY: Probably because he wasn’t your friend.

  GEORGE: Well, I don’t know about that.

  DOTTY (angrily): He was my friend. If he hadn’t asked me who was that bloke always hanging about, you’d never have met him.

  GEORGE: Nevertheless, I did meet him, and we talked animatedly for some time.

  DOTTY: As I recall, you talked animatedly for some time about language being the aniseed trail that draws the hounds of heaven when the metaphysical fox has gone to earth; he must have thought you were barmy.

  GEORGE (hurt): I resent that. My metaphor of the fox and the hounds was an allusion, as Russell well understood, to his Theory of Descriptions.

  DOTTY: The Theory of Descriptions was not what was on his mind that night. For one thing it was sixty years since he’d thought it up, and for another he was trying to telephone Mao Tse Tung.

  GEORGE: I was simply trying to bring his mind back to matters of universal import, and away from the day-to-day parochialism of international politics.

  DOTTY: Universal import! You’re living in dreamland!

  GEORGE: Oh really? Well, I wouldn’t have thought that trying to get the local exchange to put you through to Chairman Mao with the wine-waiter from the Pagoda Garden hanging on to the bedroom extension to interpret, showed a grasp of the real world. (Hegoes to leave.) Thumper! Where are you, Thumper?

  DOTTY: Georgie!—I’ll let you.

  (He halts.)

  GEORGE: I don’t want to be ‘let’. Can’t you see that it’s an insult?

  (DOTTY drops back on to the bed in a real despair, and perhaps a real contrition.)

  DOTTY: Oh God… if only Archie would come.

  GEORGE (coldly): Is he coming again?

  DOTTY: I don’t know. Do you mind?

  GEORGE: Well, he’s dropped in to see you every day this week. What am I supposed to think?

  DOTTY: I don’t believe I like your tone.

  GEORGE: I have no tone. But I would like tonelessly to make the point that if he intends to visit you on a regular basis then either he should come after lunch or you should get up before it. Receiving in the bedroom is liable to get a woman talked about, unless it is an authentic salon.

  DOTTY: How dare you?—Go on, get out and write your stupid speech for your dreamland debating society! I thought for once—I mean I seriously thought I might get a little—understanding—yes, finding myself in a bit of a spot, I seriously considered trusting you—for a little panache, without a lot of pedantic questions and hadn’t-we-better-inform-the-authorities, I mean we should be able to rise above that—but not you, oh no, do you wonder I turn to Archie——?

  (She lies down on the bed and pulls the cover over her.)

  GEORGE (reckless, committed): I can put two and two together, you know. Putting two and two together is my subject. I do not leap to hasty conclusions. I do not deal in suspicion and wild surmise. I examine the data; I look for logical inferences. We have on the one hand, that is to say in bed, an attractive married woman whose relationship with her husband stops short only of the issue of a ration book; we have on the other hand daily visits by a celebrated ladies’ man who rings the doorbell, is admitted by Mrs. Thing who shows him into the bedroom, whence he emerges an hour later looking more than a little complacent and crying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll let myself out!’

  (He lapsed into a calm suavity.)

  Now let us see. What can we make of it all? Wife in bed, daily visits by gentlemen caller. Does anything suggest itself?

  DOTTY (calmly): Sounds to me he’s the doctor.

  (GEORGE is staggered.)

  GEORGE (pause): Doctor?… The Vice-Chancellor?

  DOTTY (spiritedly): You know he’s a bloody doctor!

  GEORGE: I know he’s a qualified psychiatrist, but he doesn’t practise. I mean he isn’t a chap who goes around looking down people’s throats. His line is psychotics… manic depressives—schizos—fantasisers——

  (DOTTY picks up her mirror and starts brushing her hair.) (Catching up.) You mean you’re bad again? (Pause.) I’m sorry…. How was I supposed to know you were…

  DOTTY: I’m all right in here.

  (Pause.)

  GEORGE: Why did he bring you flowers? Not that there’s any reason, of course, why he shouldn’t bring you flowers.

  DOTTY: Quite.

  GEORGE: I mean, he’s our friend, more or less. He likes you.

  Do you like him?

  DOTTY: He’s all right in his way.

  GEORGE: What way is that?

  DOTTY: Oh, you know.

  GEORGE: No. What does he do?

  DOTTY: He’s a doctor.

  (Pause.)

  He keeps my spirits up.

  GEORGE: Does he? That’s… good.

  DOTTY: I won’t see him any more, if you like. (Turns to him.) I’ll see you. If you like.

  (GEORGE examines the new tone, and decides the moment is genuine.)

  GEORGE (softening): Oh, Dotty…. The first day you walked into my class… I thought, ‘That’s better!’… It was a wet day… your hair was wet… and I thought, ‘The hyacinth girl’… and ‘How my hair is growing thin’.

  DOTTY: And I thought, ‘I’ll sit quiet and they won’t find out I’m stupid’… and ‘What a modest way with lovely words’, and ‘How his hair is growing thin’.

  GEORGE: And you started to sit nearer the front.

  DOTTY: You didn’t look any younger.

  GEORGE (pang): And then you fell among theatricals.

  DOTTY: But it was still all right.

  GEORGE: Oh yes, for a time. And then again, it wasn’t. And then again, it sometimes is, even now, when all else fails you.

  DOTTY (going to him): George, I’m in a bit of a spot.

  GEORGE: What?

  DOTTY (touching him): Promise not to be stuffy.

  GEORGE (responding to the touch): We’ll be unstuffy together… if you like.

  DOTTY (touching his face): You haven’t shaved. You look awful.

  GEORGE: I’ll shave then… if you like.

  DOTTY: All right… I feel a bit starved.

  GEORGE: So do I.

  DOTTY: Food, I meant…

  GEORGE: Afterwards.

  DOTTY: Before.

  GEORGE (moving away): On second thoughts…

  DOTTY: Haven’t you invented God yet?

  GEORGE: Nearly; I’m having him typed out.

  (She restrains him from leaving.)

  DOTTY: Please…. Shave.

  GEORGE (pause): All right.

  (The jets come back, screaming over the house. GEORGE stares out of thefrench window. DOTTY looks up at the ceiling.)

  A parade!

  DOTTY: A parade!

  GEORGE: Oh yes, the Radical Liberals…. It seems in dubious taste…. Soldiers… fighter planes…. After all, it was a general election, not a coup d’état.

  DOTTY: It’s funny you should say that.

  GEORGE: Why?

  DOTTY: Archie says it was a coup d’état not a general election.

  GEORGE: Glib nonsense. It is unthinkable that the Radical Liberal Party could manipulate the democratic process.

  DOTTY: Democracy is all in the head.

  GEORGE: And anyway, you can’t get away with that sort of thing. Everything comes out in t
he wash, sooner or later.

  DOTTY: Then God help me and the Government.

  GEORGE: Furthermore, I had a vote.

  DOTTY: It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting, Archie says.

  GEORGE (angrily): Archie this, Archie that! Just for today I don’t want to know anything about anything remotely to do with Archie! (He moves away.) I’m going to shave.

  DOTTY: You may as well grow a beard.

  GEORGE (to the goldfish): Good morning! (to DOTTY.) His water needs changing.

  (GEORGE disappears into the Bathroom but reappears almost immediately, with a can of shaving foam. He applies the foam to his face, giving himself a white beard.)

  What did you mean, God help you and the Government?

  DOTTY (suddenly merry and mischievous): I only mentioned God reflexively (and sees him), old man, not as a true invocation.

  GEORGE (with asperity): Whenever you are like this I always think how unjust it is that so many people must have looked at us and said, ‘What on earth made her marry him?’

  (He disappears back into the Bathroom.)

  DOTTY (still merry): And yet, Professor, one can’t help wondering at the persistence of the reflex, the universal constant unthinking appeal to the non-existent God who is presumed dead. Perhaps he’s only missing in action, shot down behind the thin yellow lines of advancing Rad-Libs and getting himself together to go BOO!

  (He returns holding his razor.)

  GEORGE: Have you been shaving your legs?

  DOTTY: And so our tutorials descended, from the metaphysical to the merely physical… not so much down to earth as down to the carpet, do you remember?

  (New tone. GEORGE, half foamed, bibbed, sits on the bed.)

  That was the year of ‘The Concept of Knowledge’, your masterpiece, and the last decent title left after Ryle bagged ‘The Concept of Mind’ and Archie bagged ‘The Problem of Mind’ and Ayer bagged ‘The Problem of Knowledge’—and ‘The Concept of Knowledge’ might have made you if you had written it, but we were still on the carpet when an American with an Italian name working in Melbourne bagged it for a rather bad book which sold four copies in London, three to unknown purchasers and the fourth to yourself. He’d stolen a march while you were still comparing knowledge in the sense of having-experience-of, with knowledge in the sense of being-acquainted-with, and knowledge in the sense of inferring facts with knowledge in the sense of comprehending truths, and all the time as you got more and more acquainted with, though no more comprehending of, the symbolic patterns on my Persian carpet, it was knowing in the biblical sense of screwing that you were learning about and maybe there’s a book in you yet——

  (GEORGE throws down his bib.)

  —or did you mean about me and the government?

  (As she crosses to pick up the goldfish bowl. GEORGE stops and turns, with dignity.)

  GEORGE: I don’t believe you know anything about it. You are the wife of an academic: that means you are twice removed from the centre of events.

  DOTTY: Archie says that the academics can look forward to rather more radicalism than liberalism.

  (She takes the goldfish bowl into the Bathroom.)

  GEORGE (carefully reassuring himself): Radicalism has a fine and honourable tradition in this country. It will always involve a healthy scepticism about inherited means and ends, that is all.

  (DOTTY re-enters with the goldfish bowl, emptied and upside down, over her head. She walks with the leaden-footed gait of a moon-walker, GEORGE ignores her.)

  I mean, it would be presumptuous to condemn radical ideas simply because they appear to me to be self-evidently stupid and criminal if they do happen to be at the same time radical, (DOTTY, moonwalking, affects to find and stoop for a small coin, which she holds up for GEORGE, who does not pause.) ‘The Moon and Sixpence’.

  It is, after all, a radical idea to ensure freedom of the individual by denying it to groups.

  (DOTTY takes off the fish bowl and replaces it on its table, somewhat pointlessly now.)

  Indeed, any party which calls itself radical might be said to have forfeited this claim if it neglected to take over the broadcasting services and send the Church Commissioners to prison——

  DOTTY: It wasn’t the Church Commissioners, it was property companies and Masters of Foxhounds.

  GEORGE: I thought the Church Commissioners were a property company.

  DOTTY: They were dispossessed, retroactively, as a humane gesture.

  (She tosses him a ‘Times’ newspaper from the table beside the bed.)

  GEORGE: Well, what about the Church Commissioners who were also Masters of Foxhounds?

  DOTTY: I don’t know—Darling, I’m starving—

  GEORGE (turns a page. Morosely): There’s a photograph here of the Association of National Newspaper Proprietors sitting in the back of a police car with a raincoat over their heads.

  DOTTY: At least it’s a government which keeps its promises.

  GEORGE (flinging down the paper): This isn’t political theory! To think that these simplistic score-settlers should have appropriated the battle-scarred colours of those true radicals who fought for universal suffrage and the repeal of the Corn Laws——! (Raving.) And how is the Church to pay its clergy? Are they going to pull down the churches?

  DOTTY: Yes. (He gapes.) The Church is going to be rationalized.

  GEORGE: Rationalized? (Furiously.) You can’t rationalize the Thirty-Nine Articles!

  DOTTY: No, no… not the faith, the fabric. You remember how they rationalized the railways?—well, now they’re going to rationalize the Church. (Pause.) There was an announcement on television.

  GEORGE: Who by?

  DOTTY: The Archbishop of Canterbury. Clegthorpe.

  GEORGE: Clegthorpe? Sam Clegthorpe?

  DOTTY: It’s been made a political appointment, like judges.

  GEORGE: Are you telling me that the Radical Liberal spokesman for Agriculture has been made Archbishop of Canterbury?!!

  DOTTY: Don’t shout at me… I suppose if you think of him as a sort of… shepherd, ministering to his flock…

  GEORGE: But he’s an agnostic.

  DOTTY (capitulating): I absolutely agree with you—nobody is going to have any confidence in him. It’s like the Chairman of the Coal Board believing in oil.

  GEORGE (shouts): No, it is not! (An exhausted pause.) You’re making it up. You just like to get me going.

  DOTTY: Do you find it incredible that a man with a scientific background should be Archbishop of Canterbury?

  GEORGE: How the hell do I know what I find incredible?

  Credibility is an expanding field…. Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight. ‘Archbishop Clegthorpe? Of course! The inevitable capstone to a career in veterinary medicine!’ What happened to the old Archbishop?

  DOTTY: He abdicated… or resigned or uncoped himself—

  GEORGE (thoughtfully): Dis-mantled himself, perhaps.

  (DOTTY turns on the TV: the Moon.)

  Good God! (At window.) I can actually see Clegthorpe!—marching along, attended by two chaplains in belted raincoats.

  DOTTY: Is he wearing a mitre?

  GEORGE: Yes. He’s blessing people to right and left. He must be drunk.

  (He stares out of the window, DOTTY stares at the TV.)

  DOTTY: Poor moon man, falling home like Lucifer. (She turns off the TV: Screen goes white.)… Of course, to somebody on it, the moon is always full, so the local idea of a sane action may well differ from ours. (Pause; stonily.) When they first landed, it was as though I’d seen a unicorn on the television news…. It was very interesting, of course. But it certainly spoiled unicorns. (Pause.) I tried to explain it to the analyst when everybody in sight was asking me what was the matter ‘What’s the matter, darling?’… ‘What happened, baby?’ What could I say? I came over funny at work so I went home early. It must happen often enough to a working girl. And why must t
he damned show go on anyway? So it stopped right then and there, and in a way my retirement was the greatest triumph of my career. Because nobody left.

  GEORGE (to himself): Sam Clegthorpe!

  DOTTY: For nearly an hour they all sat out front, staring at that stupid spangled moon, and they weren’t waiting for their money’s worth, they were waiting for news. Is she all right?… Oh yes, not bad for a bored housewife, eh?—not at all bad for a one-time student amateur bored with keeping house for her professor. And they’re still waiting!—my retirement is now almost as long as my career, but they’re waiting for me to come back out, and finish my song. And writing me love letters in the mean time. That’s right, not so bloody bad for a second-class honours with a half-good voice and a certain variety of shakes. It’s no good, though. They thought it was overwork or alcohol, but it was just those little grey men in goldfish bowls, clumping about in their lead boots on the television news; it was very interesting, but it certainly spoiled that Juney old moon; and much else besides…. The analyst went barking up the wrong tree, of course; I should never have mentioned unicorns to a Freudian.

  (GEORGE turns back from the view.)

  GEORGE (serenely): Archbishop Clegthorpe! That must be the high point of scientism; from here on the Darwinian revolution declines to its own origins. Man has gone ape and God is in the ascendant, and it will end as it began, with him gazing speculatively down on the unpeopled earth as the moon rises over the smoking landscape of vulcanite cliffs and lakes of clinker—not another Herculaneum, but the ash itself.

  DOTTY: Do you think it is… significant that it’s impossible to imagine anyone building a church on the moon?

  GEORGE: If God exists, he certainly existed before religion. He is a philosopher’s God, logically inferred from self-evident premises. That he should have been taken up by a glorified supporters’ club is only a matter of psychological interest.

  DOTTY: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.

  GEORGE: If Archie ever chose to relinquish his position as an eminent Vice-Chancellor he would make an excellent buffoon; but since he manages to combine both roles without strain, I don’t suppose he ever will. (He turns and shouts at her with surprising anger.)

  The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality!—and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover’s favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans! (He picks up his tortoise and balances it lovingly on the palm of his hand, at the level of his mouth.) (Apologetically.) Wouldn’t it, Pat?