A Touch of Love by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online Page B

which provided a radical and provocative overview of the previous twenty years. He and I are old friends. We came to the university at exactly the same time.’
    ‘When was that?’
    ‘Sixteen years ago.’
    As Ted pondered this information, the professor finally arrived and Hugh rushed to get him a seat, which he sank into, wheezing like an asthmatic. Christopher drew up a fourth chair and put the tray down in the middle of the table.
    ‘So,’ said Hugh, after a pause, ‘are you well? How are things in the department?’
    ‘Oh, not too bad, not too bad,’ said Davis, helping himself to sugar.
    His students hung on these words and nodded sagely after he had spoken them. Then there was another silence. When he seemed about to speak again, Hugh and Christopher leaned forward in anticipation.
    ‘The trouble with getting sugar in lumps,’ he said, ‘is that two is never enough, and three is always too much. Don’t you find that?’
    He continued sipping his coffee, thoughtfully.
    ‘I see you’ve got Kronenburg’s new book on narrative aesthetics,’ said Christopher, picking up Hugh’s library book. He turned to Davis. ‘You’ve read this, of course?’
    ‘It looked a bit too German and theoretical to me,’ he said, with a benign smile. ‘I gave my review copy away to a nephew in Chipping Sodbury.’
    Christopher handed the book back to Hugh.
    ‘The older one gets,’ said Davis, with his mouth full of cake, ‘the less useful critical theory seems.’
    ‘You mean one should go back to texts?’ asked Hugh.
    ‘Yes, perhaps. But then, the more one reads them, the less interesting the texts themselves appear to become.’
    ‘This essentially is what you’ve been arguing in your new book,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s a radical and provocative viewpoint, if I may say so.’
    Davis nodded his acquiescence.
    ‘But does this mean,’ Hugh asked carelessly, ‘the end of literature as we know it?’
    ‘As we know it?’
    ‘As it is taught in our schools and universities.’
    ‘Ah! No, no… indeed not. Far from it. In fact I think –’ here there was an almighty pause, far surpassing any that had gone before ‘– I think…’ Suddenly he looked up, the gleam of insight in his eye. The tension in the air was palpable. ‘I think I’d like another macaroon.’
    Ted took an immediate liking to Professor Davis. He found him entirely free of a trait which was, in his experience, the failing of most academics, that of excessive commitment to his own discipline. Despite the repeated attempts of Hugh and Christopher to involve him in abstruse and specialized discussions, he refused to be drawn, and seemed far more anxious to talk about computers and the nature of Ted’s job. He spent some time trying to convince him of the university’s suitability as a venue for his employers’ next sales conference; and in return, Ted outlined the many advantages, to a man in his position, of a varied and flexible package of word-processor software. Professor Davis was impressed with the labour-saving potential of his programmes, and admitted that he had long been searching for an alternative to the tedious process of correcting his manuscripts by hand. By the time they parted, they had built up a solid respect for one another, and Ted left with a highly satisfied sense of having dealt with a shrewd and very practical businessman.
    ∗
    ‘Professor Davis is a brainless dick,’ said Robin, as he sat in the passenger seat of Ted’s car. It was late in the afternoon and they were driving back towards Coventry. ‘The only radical and provocative thing about him is the number of macaroons he manages to get through in a single day. I don’t know what Hugh sees in him.’
    ‘I don’t know what you see in Hugh,’ Ted answered. ‘He’s not at all the sort of person you would have chosen as a friend at Cambridge. From what I can gather he does nothing all day but hang around at the university drinking coffee and eating