by David Lodge
“We never thought of Ursula as the marrying type. She always enjoyed a dance, or party, but she never had a steady boyfriend. She would always give them the brush-off if they started getting serious. A bit of a flirt, she was, to tell you the truth. That was why it was such a shock when she threw herself at that Yank. Anyway, off she went on the first passage she could get, the Mauritania I think it was, to ‘Noo Jersey’, to marry Rick. At first everything in the garden was lovely. We had letters and postcards going into kinks about America, the honeymoon in Florida, the size of their house, the size of their car, the size of the refrigerator and every blessed item of booze and grub there was in it. You can imagine how that cheered us up, with the rationing like it was just after the War.”
“She used to send us food parcels, though,” said Bernard. “I remember.” He had a sudden memory-picture of a jar of peanut butter, a substance he had never seen or heard of before, on the kitchen table, and his mother saying curtly, when he asked where it had come from, “Your aunt Ursula, where else?” The jar had borne a label depicting a smiling, anthropomorphized peanut, with a balloon coming out of its mouth, saying “Dee-lish-us!” He’d had his head smacked for dipping his finger into the jar for an experimental taste of the queer, cloying paste, hesitating between sweet and savoury.
“It was the least she could do,” said Mr Walsh. “Anyway, the letters got further and further apart. Rick got a new job in California, he was doing well, working in the aircraft industry, and they moved out there. Then one day we got a letter saying she was coming back to England for a holiday, on her own.”
“I remember that visit,” said Bernard. “She had a white dress with red spots.”
“Mother of God, she had a dress for every day of the week, and enough spots on ’em to drive you crosseyed,” said Mr Walsh. “But she had no husband. She had to admit that Rick had left her, months ago, run off with another woman. She couldn’t say we hadn’t warned her. Fortunately there were no children.”
“Was she thinking of returning to England?”
“It may have been in the back of her mind. But she didn’t like it here. Kept complaining of the cold, and the dirt. So she went back to California. Divorced Rick and got a handsome settlement, so we understood. She got some kind of job, secretary to a dentist, or something. Then she worked in a law firm. She was always changing jobs, moving from place to place. We lost track of her.”
“She never re-married?”
“No. Once bitten, twice shy.”
“And never came back?”
“No. Not even when our father was dying. She claimed that she never got the letter till months afterwards. There was more bad feeling about that. Well, it was her own fault that we sent it to an old address.”
They drank their tea in silence for a moment.
“I think you ought to come to Hawaii with me, Daddy,” said Bernard at length.
“It’s too far. How far is it?”
“It’s a long way,” Bernard admitted. “But by air it takes less than a day.”
“I’ve never been up in an aeroplane in my life,” said Mr Walsh, “and I don’t intend to start now.”
“There’s nothing to it. Everybody flies nowadays – old people, babies. It’s the safest form of travel, statistically.”
“I’m not in fear of it,” said Mr Walsh with dignity. “I just don’t fancy it.”
“Ursula has offered to pay our fares.”
“How much?”
“Well, I’ve been offered a special cheap fare of seven hundred and twenty-nine pounds.”
“God in Heaven! Each?”
Bernard nodded. He could tell that his father was impressed, in spite of his next remark.
“I suppose she thinks that makes it all right. Stays away from her family for nearly forty years, and thinks that she only has to crook her little finger and we’ll all come running, as long as she pays the fare. The almighty dollar.”
“If you don’t come, you may regret it later.”
“Why should I regret it?”
“I mean, if she dies – when she dies, you may be sorry that you didn’t go to see her when she asked.”
“She has no right to ask,” his father mumbled uneasily. “It’s not fair on me. I’m an old man. It’s all right for you. You go.”
“I hardly know her. It’s you she wants to see.” He added, injudiciously, “It’s one of the corporal works of mercy: to visit the sick.”
“Don’t you presume to lecture me about my religious duties,” the old man lashed back, two red spots colouring his high cheekbones. “You of all people.”
Bernard thought he had dished whatever chance he might have had of persuading his father, especially as Tess turned up a few minutes later, having driven over from her leafier suburb on the Kent border with the ill-concealed motive of monitoring the discussion. Tess, living nearest to Mr Walsh of all his children (Brendan was Assistant Registrar at a northern university, and Dympna’s husband was a vet in East Anglia) inevitably had most to do with him, a responsibility she shouldered with a certain amount of self-righteous grumbling to her siblings, and mild bullying of her father. As soon as she entered the house, she began to pick up items of clothing that she declared needed washing, ran her finger over the ledges to complain of the dusting standards of the home help, and sniffed the contents of the refrigerator, tossing whatever failed this test summarily into the rubbish bin. She moved heavily about the kitchen, making the china on the shelves tremble, a big woman, with broad, child-bearing hips, and her father’s beaky nose and mass of thick woolly hair, black with flecks of silver in it.
“So what d’you think of this idea of going to see Ursula?” she said to her father, much to the surprise of Bernard, who had been expecting a scornful dismissal of the proposal. Mr Walsh, sulking at the decimation of his food stocks, looked surprised too.
“You’re not thinking I should go, are you?”
“I’d go myself,” said Tess, “if I could just drop everything like Bernard. I wouldn’t mind a trip to Hawaii, all expenses paid.”
“It’s not going to be exactly fun, you know,” said Bernard. “Ursula’s dying.”
“So she says. How d’you know she’s not just panicking? Did you speak to her doctor?”
“Not personally. But she told me he’s only given her months to live, even with chemotherapy, and she’s refused that.”
“Why?” said Mr Walsh.
“She said she wanted to die with her own hair on.”
Mr Walsh produced a faint, wintry smile. “That sounds like Ursula,” he said.
“Perhaps you should go, Daddy, if you can face the journey,” said Tess, putting her hand on his shoulder. “After all, you are her closest surviving relative. She may want you there to … settle her affairs.”
Mr Walsh became thoughtful. Bernard instantly decoded the message that had passed between them. If Ursula was dying, she would have money to leave, perhaps a lot of money. She had no husband or children. Her brother Jack was her closest surviving relative. If he inherited her wealth, it would in due course be distributed to his children, and their children, as he saw fit, according to their deserts, which would include such factors as filial devotion, respectability, and the burden of handicapped offspring. If Bernard went to Hawaii on his own, there was a risk that his grateful aunt would leave all her money to him, the black sheep.
“Well, perhaps I should go,” said Mr Walsh, with a sigh. “After all, she is my sister, poor soul.”
“Good,” said Bernard, pleased for Ursula’s sake at this decision, even if its motives were selfish and its practical consequences for himself discouraging. “I’ll confirm the tickets, then. We leave next Thursday.”
“Next Thursday!” Tess exclaimed. “How can Daddy possibly be ready to leave by next Thurday? He doesn’t even have a passport. And what about visas?”
“I’ll queue up for a passport at Petty France,” said Bernard. “And you don’t need a visa for a short visit to A
merica these days.” The young man at the travel agency had advised him of this.
“I’d better make a list,” said Mr Walsh. He wrote on a piece of paper “Make list” and sellotaped it to the side of the dresser.
“Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” said Tess to Bernard, as if she had finally yielded to his prolonged arm-twisting. “I hold you entirely responsible for Daddy’s welfare.”
3
“SURE THIS IS the only way to travel, if I’d known it was this easy I’d have done it long ago, sittin’ here like Lord Luck, waited on hand and foot, nice young gels bringin’ you your dinner on a tray, and free booze to go with it – more than you get with Meals on Wheels, I can tell you. Oh, darlin’, next time you’re passin’, could I trouble you for another of these dinky little bottles?”
“Just one moment, sir!”
“You’ve had enough already, Daddy.”
“Go ’way, I can hold me liquor as well as any man. I could drink you under the table any day of the week.”
“You’ll feel bad later. Alcohol dehydrates you.”
“Dehydrates my arse. Oh, excuse my French, my love, it was a slip of the tongue. A momentary lapse into the vernacular, it won’t happen again. Only this fella exasperates me, treatin’ me like a child. What’s this your name is, my dear? Ginny? Oh, Jeannie! That’s a lovely name. ‘I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair …’”
The old man warbles the line in a cracked tenor voice, and then begins to cough – a long, lung-racking cough that seems to be drawn up from some deep artesian well of phlegm.
“It’s all right my dear, I’m fine,” he gasps at last. “Don’t you worry about me. Just a frog in me throat. All I need to settle it is a fag or two. You may laugh, but I’m tellin’ you, it never fails. A hair of the dog. Here, have one of these.”
“Daddy, I told you, this is a no-smoking area.”
“Oh, I forgot. Trust your man to get us a no-smoking seat. Only thinks of himself. Like Ursula, that’s my sister. We’re on our way to visit her in Honolulu. She’s ill, very ill. You know what I mean? Cancer!”
The old man pronounces the word in a hissing whisper that carries, like everything else he has been saying for the last hour, past the unfortunate Jeannie and her boyfriend, to Roger Sheldrake, sitting one seat in from the starboard aisle in this central row of six in the tourist cabin of the jumbo jet. Roger Sheldrake frowns, trying to concentrate on his reading matter, a file of statistical tables supplied to him by the Hawaiian Visitors’ Bureau, which he is obliged to hold awkwardly in the air above the remains of his lunch, or dinner, or whatever it is, at this now indeterminate time, somewhere above the North Atlantic.
“If you don’t want that bit of cheese, Jeannie, my dear, I’ll relieve you of the responsibility. Oh, and look, you left some butter too.” The old man begins to scavenge for packets of cellophane-wrapped cheese and biscuits and miniature tubs of butter among the debris on his neighbour’s tray, stuffing them into his jacket pockets.
“Daddy, for God’s sake, what d’you think you’re doing? That stuff will melt and stain your clothes.”
“No it won’t, they’re her-met-ic-ally sealed.”
“Give them to me.”
The old man reluctantly hands over his loot, which his son wraps in a paper napkin and stows away in his briefcase.
“We’ll be catering for ourselves, you see,” the old man explains to Jeannie. “And who knows whether the shops will be open when we arrive? We might be very glad of a bit of cheese to keep us going. Are you heading for Hawaii yourself, by any chance?”
“No, only as far as L.A.,” says Jeannie, perhaps revising her travel plans at that instant, dismayed at the prospect of having to listen to the tiresome old fool for an additional five hours.
He has been a source of distraction and disturbance ever since they began boarding the aircraft at Heathrow. First, he caused a blockage in the gangway leading to the aircraft by refusing to board at all, in a sudden last-minute panic at the prospect of flying, clinging obstinately to the handrail at the end of the ramp, while his son and various airline officials cajoled and scolded him. Then, finally persuaded to board, and strapped into his seat, he groaned and whimpered and muttered prayers under his breath, clutching a holy medal that he had fished out from under his shirt. Then, with a piercing wail of grief, he remembered a bottle of duty-free whiskey that he, or his son, had left under a seat in the air terminal, and had to be forcibly restrained from going back to fetch it, since the plane was already taxiing to the runway. He gaped fearfully at the video-recorded demonstration, by a smiling flight attendant, of how to put on a life-jacket, his attention particularly excited by the apparition of a female signer, relaying the instructions for the benefit of deaf passengers, in a round, haloed insert in the left-hand corner of the screen. “What’s that, what’s that female thing up there? Is it a fairy or a ghost or what is it?” he cried. As the plane thundered down the runway, he shut his eyes tightly, gripped the arms of his seat with whitened knuckles, gabbled “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” over and over; and then, as they rose into the air, and the undercarriage retracted with a thump, he shrieked, “Oh Mother of God, was that a bomb going off?”
As the plane climbed smoothly through the cloud cover, and sunlight poured into the cabin, and the noise of the engines diminished somewhat, the old man relapsed into a watchful silence, still gripping his seat arms as if he thought he was personally holding the plane aloft by this means, his eyes blinking and swivelling like a caged bird’s as he observed the nonchalant behaviour of his fellow-passengers and the cabin crew. Gradually he began to relax, a process greatly accelerated by the appearance of the drinks trolley. He ordered Irish whiskey, and accepted Scotch with a quip that made the stewardess smile and encouraged her unwisely to slip him two Haig miniatures instead of one. Within fifteen minutes he had lost all fear and inhibition, and launched into a non-stop flow of talk, addressed first to his longsuffering son, and then to his neighbour to his right, the Californian student Jeannie, which lasted all through the meal and shows no sign of drying up.
“Yes, my sister Ursula emigrated to the States just after the War, she was a whadyoucallit, a GI bride, married a Yank soldier, but he was no good, ran off with another woman, fortunately there were no children and he had to pay her a lot of whadyoucallit, ali-money, so she could please herself where she lived, and she chose Hawaii, she could hardly get further away from her family, could she, and now she’s on her deathbed it’s us that has to traipse halfway round the world to see her …”
In 1988 approximately 6.1 million tourists visited Hawaii spending 8.14 billion dollars and staying for an average of 10.2 days. This compared with 4.25 million visitors in 1982, and only 0.7 million visitors in 1965. The steep rise in the volume of visitors was clearly related to the introduction of the jumbo jet in 1969. In 1970 the number of visitors arriving by sea had dwindled to 16,735 compared to 2.17 million arriving by air, and became too insignificant to be tabulated after 1975. Roger Sheldrake frowns, trying to concentrate on the statistics and shut out the jabber of the old man’s monologue. The fact that he and his son are not ordinary tourists makes the distraction doubly irritating, for it is not as if he is gleaning from it any anecdotal evidence relevant to his research.
“Best student of his year at the English College in Rome, they said … He could have been something. A monsignor. A bishop, even. But he threw it all away. A wasted life I call it …”
The old man is talking now in a kind of confidential undertone, his head turned away from his son who is evidently the topic of conversation. Jeannie looks embarrassed by these confidences, but Roger Sheldrake pricks up his ears.
“Just a part-time teacher at some whadyoucallit, theological college … must be a queer sort of theology they get from the likes of him …”
Roger Sheldrake leans forward to peer along the row of seats at the subject of these revelations. The bearded man is asleep, or praying, or meditating – at an
y rate, his eyes are closed and his hands rest loosely splayed on his thighs. His chest and diaphragm heave and subside rhythmically.
“All the theology you need is in the Penny Catechism, that’s what I always say.…”
Who made you?
God made me.
Why did God make you?
God made me to know him, love him and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him for ever in the next. (Note: no mention of being happy in this world.)
To whose image and likeness did God make you?
God made me to his own image and likeness. (Awkward, that construction – should be “in whose image”, surely? Some subtle theological point in the preposition, perhaps.)
Is this likeness to God in your body, or in your soul?
This likeness is chiefly in my soul. (Note the “chiefly.” Not “exclusively.” God as man-shaped. Father-shaped. Long white beard, white hair, in need of a trim. White face too, of course. Frowning slightly, as if he might fly into a nasty temper if provoked. Sitting on his throne in heaven, Jesus on his right, Holy Spirit hovering overhead, chorus of angels, Mary and the saints standing by. Carpet of cloud.)
When did you cease to believe in this God?
Perhaps when I was still training for the priesthood. Certainly when I was teaching at St Ethelbert’s. I can’t remember, exactly.
You can’t remember?
Who remembers when they stopped believing in Father Christmas? It’s not usually a specific moment – catching a parent in the act of putting your presents at the end of the bed. It’s an intuition, a conclusion you draw at a certain age, or stage of growth, and you don’t immediately admit it, or force the question, is there a Father Christmas? into the open, because secretly you shrink from the negative answer – in a way, you would prefer to go on believing that there is a Father Christmas. After all, it seems to work, the presents keep coming, and if they’re not exactly the ones you wanted, well, there are ways of painlessly rationalizing the disappointment when they come from Father Christmas (perhaps he didn’t get your letter), but if they come from your parents all kinds of difficult implications arise.