by David Lodge
Well, we’re going to Tenerife, I’m afraid. Laurence went to a travel agent and said he wanted somewhere warm abroad but not long-haul and that’s what they came up with. I wish I’d made the arrangements myself now. Laurence is not really up to it. Sally always used to book their holidays. The Canary Islands sound nice, the name I mean, but I’ve never heard a good word about them from anybody who’s actually been there. Have you? Been there. No, I don’t suppose you would. Harriet went to Gran Canaria once and said it was ghastly though she tried to deny it yesterday not to depress me. Perhaps Tenerife is nicer. Well, it’s only a few days after all, and at least it will be warm.
I’ve told Zelda that I’m going on business – that Laurence is setting an episode of TPND in the Canaries, a story about a package holiday, and that we’ve got to cast some local people for it. It’s a rather implausible alibi, actually. Not the idea of the Canaries as such, because they do film the occasional episode on location, and in fact Laurence is rather taken with the package holiday idea, imagining the Springfields waking up in their hotel room on their first day, delighted at having escaped from the Davises for a fortnight, only to find them having breakfast on the next balcony, maybe he’ll actually write it if there’s another series – but that I would have to go there to cast it, especially at this stage, is unlikely, if you know anything about the business. Zelda accepted it with a suspicious lack of suspicion. I can’t help feeling that she knows there’s more to this trip than television, but I must say she’s been as sweet as pie about it. She’s been very helpful about advising me what clothes to take. It seems a queer reversal of roles, as if she’s helping me plan my trousseau. I’ve arranged for Zelda to spend the weekend with her friend Serena, so that’s put her in a good mood. And Serena’s mother is a sensible woman so I don’t have to worry about them getting up to mischief. All in all, I’m rather looking forward to the trip. I can do with a few days of la dolce vita in the sun.
Well, as a dirty weekend it was a disaster, to put it bluntly. It wasn’t up to much as a holiday, either, at first. Have you ever been to Tenerife? No, you said, I remember. Well, given a choice between the Siberian salt mines and a four-star hotel in Playa de las Americas, I’d choose Siberia any day. Playa de las Americas is the name of the resort where we stayed. Laurence chose it from the travel agent’s brochure because it’s near the airport, and we were due to arrive late at night. Well, that seemed to make sense, but it turned out to be the most ghastly place you can imagine. Playa is the Spanish for beach, of course, but it doesn’t have a beach, not what I’d call a beach. Just a strip of black mud. All the beaches in Tenerife are black, they look like photographic negatives. The whole island is essentially an enormous lump of coke, and the beaches are made of powdered coke. It’s volcanic, you see. There’s actually a huge great volcano in the middle of the island. Unfortunately it’s not active, otherwise it might erupt and raze Playa de las Americas to the ground. Then it might be worth visiting, like Pompeii. Picturesque concrete ruins with tourists carbonized in the act of parading in wet tee-shirts and pouring sangria down their throats.
Apparently only a few years ago it was just a tract of rocky barren shoreline, then some developers decided to build a resort there, and now it’s Blackpool beside the Atlantic. There’s a gaudy mainstreet called the Avenida Litoral that’s always choked with traffic and lined with the most vulgar bars and cafés and discos you ever saw, emitting deafening music and flashing lights and greasy cooking smells all round the clock, and apart from that there’s nothing except block after block of high-rise hotels and timeshare apartments. It’s a concrete nightmare, with hardly any trees or grass.
We didn’t realize how horrible it was immediately, because it was dark when we arrived, and the taxi from the airport took us by what seemed a suspiciously roundabout route to me, but on reflection perhaps the driver was trying to spare us the full impact of the Avenida Litoral on our very first evening. We didn’t speak much during the drive, except to remark on how warm and humid the air was. There wasn’t much else to talk about because we couldn’t see anything until we reached the outskirts of Playa de las Americas, and then what we saw didn’t excite comment: deserted building sites and immobile cranes and blank cliffs of apartment buildings with just a few windows lit up and De Venta signs outside, and then a long arterial road lined with hotels. Everything was made of ferro-concrete, bathed in a sickly low-wattage yellow light from the streetlamps, and everything looked as if it had been built, very cheaply, the week before last. I could sense Laurence slumping lower and lower in his corner of the back of the car. Both of us already knew we’d come to Pitsville, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to admit it. A dreadful constraint had come over us since we landed: the consciousness of what we had come here to DO, and our anxiety that it should be a success, made us fearful of breathing a word of disappointment about the venue.
At least, I consoled myself, the hotel is bound to be all right. Four stars, Laurence had assured me. But four stars in Tenerife doesn’t mean what it means in England. Four stars in Tenerife is your just-slightly-above-average package holiday hotel. I dread to think what a one-star hotel in Tenerife is like. My heart sank – and it was already somewhere near my knees – when we walked into the lobby and took in the vinyl-tiled floor and the plastic-covered sofas and the dusty rubber plants wilting under the fluorescent ceiling lights. Laurence checked in and we followed the porter up in the lift in silence. Our room was bare and functional, clean enough, but smelling strongly of disinfectant. There were twin beds. Laurence looked at them with dismay and told the porter he had ordered a double room. The porter said all the rooms in the hotel had twin beds. Laurence’s shoulders slumped a few degrees lower. When the porter had gone he apologized dolefully and vowed vengeance on the travel agent when he got home. I said gamely that it didn’t matter and opened the sliding windows to step out on to the little balcony. The swimming pool was spread out below – a random shape, like a blot in a Rorschach test, set among artificial rocks and palm trees. It was lit from under the water, and glowed a brilliant blue in the night. The pool was the only thing we had seen so far that was remotely romantic, but the effect was spoiled by the powerful public-baths odour of chlorine that rose from the water, and the thump of the bass notes from a disco still in deafening progress on the far side. I closed the shutters against the noise and the smell and turned on the air-conditioning. Laurence was dragging the beds together, making a frightful noise as the bed-legs squeaked on the tiled floor and revealing that the room wasn’t quite as clean as it had first looked because there was dust behind and underneath the bedside cabinets, and discovering that the leads on the bedside lamps weren’t long enough to stretch to the new positions, so we ended up putting the beds back where they were. I was secretly relieved because it made it easier to suggest that we went straight off to sleep. It was late and I was exhausted and I felt about as sexy as a sack of Brussels sprouts. I think Laurence felt much the same, because he agreed readily enough. We used the bathroom decorously, one after the other, and then kissed chastely and got into our respective beds. Immediately I could feel through the thin sheets that my mattress was plastic-covered. Can you believe it? I thought only babies and elderly incontinents were given plastic-covered mattresses. Not so – package tourists too. I can tell you’re fidgeting, Karl – you want to know whether we DID IT in the end, or not, don’t you? Well, you’ll just have to be patient. This is my story and I’m going to tell it in my own way. Oh, is it? Already? Well, till tomorrow, then.
Well, what do you think has happened? You’ll never guess. Sally has moved back into their house in Rummidge and announced that she’s going to stay, living separate lives. Yes, that’s what it’s called, “separate lives”, it’s a recognized legal term. It means you share the marital home while divorce proceedings are going on, but you don’t live together. Don’t cohabit. Laurence got back home yesterday – he spent the night in his London flat – to find Sally waiting for him wit
h a typewritten sheet of proposals about how they should share the house, who should have which bedroom, and what hours they should each have the use of the kitchen and what days use of the washing machine. Sally was very explicit about not doing Laurence’s laundry. She’d already bagged the master bedroom with the en suite bathroom, and had a new lock fitted on the bedroom door. He found all his suits and shirts and things had been very carefully moved and neatly put away in the guestroom. He’s absolutely furious, but his lawyer says there’s nothing he can do about it. Sally chose her moment well. She’d asked if she could collect some clothes from the house last weekend, and he said yes, any time, because he’d be away, and she had her own keys to the house of course. But instead of taking her clothes away she moved back in, when he wasn’t there to try and stop her. No, she doesn’t know that he was in Tenerife with me. In fact, she mustn’t know.
Oh yes, where was I? Well, nothing happened the first night, as I said, except that we slept in our separate beds – till quite late, in spite of the incontinents’ mattresses, because we were both so tired. We ordered breakfast in our room. It wasn’t encouraging: canned orange juice, limp cardboard-flavoured croissants, jam and marmalade in little plastic containers – the continuation of airline food by other means. We tried eating out on our little balcony, but were driven inside by the sun, which was already surprisingly hot. The balcony faced east and didn’t have an awning or an umbrella. So we ate in the room with the shutters closed. Laurence re-read the Evening Standard which he’d bought the day before in London. He offered to share it with me, but I felt his reading over breakfast at all was not quite comme il faut, in the circs. When I made a little joke about it, he frowned in a puzzled sort of way and said, “But I always read the paper over breakfast,” as if it were a fundamental law of the universe. It’s extraordinary how as soon as you have to share space with somebody, you begin to see them in a completely different light, and things about them irritate you which you never expected. It reminded me of my first months of married life. I remember how appalled I was by the way Saul used to leave the toilet, with streaks of shit in the bowl, as if nobody had ever explained to him what a toilet-brush was for, but of course it was years before I could bring myself to mention it. Sharing the toilet in Tenerife was a bit of a nightmare, too, as a matter of fact, but the less said about that the better.
We decided to spend our first morning lazing beside the – Oh, yes, you would want to know about that, wouldn’t you? Well, the bathroom was windowless, as they usually are in modern hotels, and the extractor fan didn’t seem to be working, at least it wasn’t making any kind of noise, so I made sure I used the bathroom first after breakfast. It won’t surprise you in the light of our previous discussions about toilet training that, how shall I put this, that when I manage to do number twos the stools are rather small, hard, dense little things. Are you sure you want me to go on? Well, the fact is that this Tenerife toilet simply couldn’t cope with them. When I pulled the chain they danced about merrily in the water like little brown rubber balls, and refused to disappear. I kept pulling the chain and they just kept bobbing back to the surface. Talk about the return of the repressed. I got quite frantic. I just couldn’t leave the bathroom until I got rid of them. I mean, it’s not very pleasant to find someone else’s turds floating in the toilet just as you’re going to use it, and it certainly puts a damper on romance, wouldn’t you say? I couldn’t bring myself to apologize or explain to Laurence, or make a joke of it. You have to be married to somebody for at least five years to do that. What I really needed was a good bucket of water to slosh into the toilet bowl, but the only container in the bathroom was a waste-paper bin made of plastic latticework. Eventually I got rid of my little pellets by pushing them round the U-bend one by one with the toilet brush, but it’s not an experience I would care to repeat.
Well, as I say, we decided to spend our first morning lazing beside the pool. But when we got down there, every lounger and every parasol was taken. People were sprawled all over the place, soaking up the skin cancer. Laurence is very fair-skinned and he has an extraordinary amount of hair on his torso which soaks up suntan lotion like blotting-paper but lets all the harmful rays through. I tan easily, but I’ve read so many bloodcurdling articles in women’s magazines lately about the effect on your skin that now I’m terrified of exposing a single inch. The only bit of shade was a scruffy patch of grass right up against the wall of the hotel and miles from the poolside. We sat there uncomfortably on our towels for a while and I began to work up a grudge against the people who had claimed loungers by dumping their belongings on them and then buggered off for a late breakfast. I suggested to Laurence that we should requisition a pair of these unoccupied loungers, but he wouldn’t. Men are such cowards about things like that. So I did it on my own. There were two loungers side by side under a palm tree with folded towels on them, so I just moved a towel from one lounger to the other and made myself comfortable. After about twenty minutes a woman came up and glared at me, but I pretended to be asleep and after a while she picked up both towels and went away, and Laurence came over rather sheepishly and took the other lounger.
This small victory put me in a good mood for a while, but it soon wore off. I’m not much of a swimmer and Laurence has to be careful because of his knee, and the pool which looked all right from the balcony was actually rather unpleasant to swim in, the wrong shape and overcrowded with boisterous children and reeking of chlorine. I read somewhere that it’s not the chlorine itself that makes the smell but the chemical reaction with urine, so those kids must have been peeing in the water for all they were worth, and kept going back to the Coke machine to refuel. After we’d had our dip, there wasn’t anything to do except read, and the loungers weren’t really designed for reading, they were that cheap sort that you just can’t adjust. The tubular steel frame bends upwards a bit at the end, but not enough to support your head at a comfortable reading height, so that you have to hold the book up in the air and after about five minutes your arms feel as if they’re going to drop off. I’d brought A.S. Byatt’s Possession with me, and Lorenzo had something by Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling I think it was called, which didn’t sound very appropriate to the occasion. You could tell what kind of people the other guests in the hotel were by what they were reading: Danielle Steel and Jeffrey Archer and the English tabloids which had arrived in the middle of the morning. Most of them looked to me like car workers from Luton but I didn’t say so because Laurence has a thing about metropolitan snobbery.
Neither of us had brought swimming-towels from home, thinking that a four-star hotel would provide them, but this one didn’t, and there was only one smallish bathtowel per person in the room, so we decided to go for a walk and do a little shopping. We needed sunhats, too, and rubber flip-flops, because the concrete round the pool was hot as hell by this time. So we got dressed again and out we went into the noonday sun, which was beating off the pavement and bouncing off the walls of the timeshare apartment buildings like laser beams. According to the hotel’s streetplan we were only a couple of blocks from the sea, so we thought we’d walk in that direction and look for a beach shop, but there was no beach and no shop, just a low wall at the end of a cul-de-sac, and below it a narrow strip of what looked like wet cinders being churned by the sea. We turned round and walked back to the main road where there was a little shopping centre, built underground for some reason, a dismal tunnel of shops selling souvenir tat and tourist requisites. It seemed impossible to buy anything that hadn’t got the word “Tenerife” blazoned on it, or a map of the island printed on it. Something in me rebelled against buying a towel I wouldn’t be seen dead with once I got home, so we followed the main road into the centre of the town to see if we could find a wider selection. It turned out to be a walk of well over a mile, almost completely devoid of shade. At first it was boring, and then it got horrible. There was an especially horrible bit on the Avenida Litoral called the Veronicas, densely packed with bars and club
s and restaurants offering “Paella and chips” and “Beans on the toast”. Most of these places had disco music blaring into the street from the loudspeakers to attract customers, or else they were showing at maximum volume videos of old British sitcoms on wall-mounted television sets. It seemed to sum up the total vacuousness of Playa de las Americas as a holiday resort. Here were all these Brits, sitting on an extinct volcano in the middle of the sea two thousand miles from home, buying drinks so they could watch old episodes of Porridge and Only Fools and Horses and It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. “Did you ever see anything so pathetic?” I said to Laurence, and just then we came up to a café that was showing The People Next Door. It wasn’t getting a very good audience rating, I’m afraid. In fact there were only four people in the place, a middle-aged couple looking like scalded giant crabs, and a pair of sulky young women with punk hairstyles. Of course, Laurence had to go in. I never knew a writer yet who could avert his eyes from a television screen when his own work is being shown. Laurence ordered a beer for himself and a g & t for me, and sat there mesmerized, with a fond smile on his face, like an infatuated parent watching a home movie of his infant son’s first steps. I mean, nobody is more of a fan of Laurence’s work than me, but I hadn’t come all this way to sit in a bar and watch golden oldies from The People Next Door. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I tossed back my g & t and ordered another one, a double. Laurence had another beer, and we shared a microwaved pizza, and then we had a brandy each with our coffee. Laurence suggested that we go back to the hotel for a siesta. In the taxi on the way back he put his arm round my shoulder, so I guessed what kind of a siesta he had in mind. Oh, is it time already? Till tomorrow then. Yes, of course I’ve heard of Scheherazade, what about her …?