Paradise News

by David Lodge

  “Well, thank you for your counsel. I’m sure it’s very sensible.”

  “You’re welcome. I hope your father is better soon.”

  Bernard put down the phone and addressed a surprised “Hmmph!” to the empty room. He discovered, however, that he was more amused than offended by Yolande Miller’s presumptuousness. He also felt suddenly ravenously hungry, and realized that he hadn’t eaten all day. There was nothing in the fridge-freezer except what Mrs Knoepflmacher had provided for their breakfast, and some packets of frozen vegetables and ice cream. He decided to go out and find a restaurant. At that moment the front doorbell rang. Mrs Knoepflmacher stood on the threshold with a plastic carton in her hand.

  “I thought your father might like some home-made chicken soup,” she said.

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Bernard, “but I’m afraid my father’s in hospital.”

  He invited her in and gave her a brief account of the accident. Mrs Knoepflmacher listened, enthralled and appalled. “If you need a good lawyer,” she said when he had concluded, “I can recommend one. You’re going to sue the driver, of course?”

  “Oh, no, it was our fault entirely.”

  “Never say that,” said Mrs Knoepflmacher. “It’s all insurance money, anyway.”

  “Well, I have a lot of more important things to think about,” said Bernard. “Like my aunt.”

  “How is she?”

  “So-so. I’m not too impressed by the place she’s in.”

  Sophie Knoepflmacher nodded sagely as he described Mrs Jones’s establishment. “I know the kind of place. They call it a care home. They’re not properly qualified, you know, the women who run those places. They’re not proper nurses.”

  “That was my impression.”

  “God preserve me from ending my days in one of those places,” said Mrs Knoepflmacher, raising her eyes piously to the ceiling. “Fortunately Mr Knoepflmacher left me very well provided for. Maybe you’d like the soup for yourself?”

  Bernard took it from her hands, thanked her, and put it in the refrigerator. His hunger demanded more than soup.

  He found a restaurant on Kalakaua Avenue called Paradise Pasta which looked inexpensive and reasonably inviting. The waitress, whose name, Darlette, was displayed on a badge pinned to the front of her apron, put a jug of iced water on the table and said brightly, “How are you this evening, sir?”

  “Oh, bearing up,” said Bernard, wondering if the stress of the day’s events had marked him so obviously that even total strangers were concerned for his wellbeing. But he inferred from Darlette’s puzzled expression that her enquiry had been entirely phatic. “Fine, thank you,” he said, and her countenance cleared.

  “Tonight we have a special?” she said.

  “I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Bernard, examining the menu. But apparently the girl’s rising intonation did not signify a question, for she proceeded to tell him what the special was: spinach lasagna. He ordered spaghetti Bolognese and salad, and a glass of the house red.

  Very soon Darlette set before him an enormous bowl of salad and said, “There you go!”

  “Where?” Bernard asked, thinking that perhaps he had to collect his spaghetti himself, but it seemed that this was a phatic utterance too, and that he was expected to eat all the salad before they would bring him the spaghetti. He munched his way obediently through the heap of crisp and colourful but rather tasteless raw vegetables until his jaw ached with the effort. But the pasta, when it came, was appetizing, and the portion generous. Bernard ate greedily, and ordered a second glass of Californian Zinfandel.

  Was it the wine that made him feel less oppressed with guilt and dread than he had been all day, ever since the accident? Perhaps, but it had also been, in an odd and unexpected way, a relief to talk to Yolande Miller on the phone. He felt as if he had confessed, and received absolution. Perhaps counsellors would be the priests of the secular future. Perhaps they already were. Bernard wondered idly in what kind of context she practised her vocation. Yolande Miller. An oxymoron of a name, yoking together the exotic and the banal. He found he had a vivid memory of his last glimpse of her, standing almost to attention in her loose red dress, her brown arms at her sides, black glossy hair falling to her shoulders, frowning thoughtfully as the ambulance pulled away. An olive complexion, with high cheekbones and a deep upper lip. Not a beautiful face, but a strong one.

  He paid his bill, left the restaurant, and strolled along Kalakaua Avenue. The night was warm and humid, the sidewalk crowded. It was the same crowd that he had observed the night before from Sophie Knoepflmacher’s car (had he been in Waikiki only twenty-four hours? It seemed like a lifetime): a relaxed, sauntering, window-browsing, ice-cream-licking, straw-sucking crowd, most of them lightly and casually dressed in boldly patterned shirts and lettered tee-shirts. Many people had shaped and zippered nylon pouches belted round their stomachs, giving them a faintly marsupial appearance. Popular music poured out of shopping malls and from a brightly lit bazaar called the International Market Place, crammed with cheap jewellery and dubious folk art. The isle was full of noises. Not exactly sweet airs, but

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears

  seemed appropriate enough to the ubiquitous whine of Hawaiian guitars.

  He paused outside the entrance to a huge hotel, from which amplified music with a loud percussive beat was spilling out into the street. Inside the gates, beside an oval swimming-pool, there was a large open space with tables and chairs set out under coloured lights, like a café-terrace in an Impressionist painting, facing a stage on which two female dancers were performing to the music of a three-piece band. Somebody seemed to be waving eagerly to him from one of the tables. It was the girl in the pink and blue tracksuit, though this evening she was wearing, like her companion, a smart cotton dress.

  “Hallo, sit down and have a drink,” she said, as he hesitantly approached their table. “You remember us, don’t you? I’m Sue and this is Dee.” Dee acknowledged his arrival with a thin smile and a slight inclination of her head.

  “Well, perhaps a cup of coffee,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t think we know your name,” said Sue.

  “Bernard. Bernard Walsh. Are you staying at this hotel?”

  “Lord, no, it’s too pricey for us. But anybody can sit here, as long as you have a drink. We’ve had two of these each, already,” she giggled, indicating a tall glass on the table before her, in which lumps of tropical fruit were submerged in a fizzy pink liquid, with two drinking-straws and a miniature plastic umbrella sticking out of the top. “It’s called a Hawaiian Sunrise. Delicious, aren’t they. Dee?”

  “They’re all right,” said Dee, without taking her eyes off the stage. Two bosomy blondes in brassières and skirts made of what looked like shiny blue plastic ribbon were gyrating to a kind of Hawaiian rock music. Their fixed, enamelled smiles raked the audience like searchlights.

  “Hula hula,” Sue observed.

  “It doesn’t look very authentic,” said Bernard.

  “It’s rubbish,” said Dee. “I’ve seen more authentic hula dancing at the London Palladium.”

  “Wait,” said Sue, “wait till we go to the Polynesian Cultural Center. Don’t you know about it?” she said to Bernard when his expression showed curiosity. “You’ve got a voucher for it in your Travelpak. Polynesian arts and crafts, canoe rides, native dancing. It’s like a sort of Disneyland, I think. Well not Disneyland, exactly,” she qualified, as if dimly aware that this description did not instantly evoke ethnic authenticity. “But it’s in a kind of park, on the other side of the island. You go on a bus. You should take your Dad, he’d enjoy it. We were thinking of going on Monday, weren’t we, Dee?”

  “I’m afraid my father won’t be going anywhere for a while,” said Bernard, and told his sorry tale again. He was beginning to feel like the Ancient Mariner. Sue gave little sympathetic cries of pain and dismay as he described the a
ccident and its aftermath: she drew in her breath sharply at the moment of impact, winced as Bernard tried to turn his father over on the pavement, and sighed with relief when the ambulance arrived. Even Dee did not bother to disguise her interest in the story. “Something like that always happens on holiday,” she said darkly. “I always do something, twist my ankle, or get a strep throat, or chip a tooth.”

  “No you don’t, Dee,” said Sue. “Not always.”

  “Well if I don’t, you do,” said Dee. “Look at last year.”

  Sue acknowledged the truth of this riposte with a rueful smile. “Last year I got some kind of eye infection, swimming in the sea at Rimini. It made me cry all the time, didn’t it, Dee? Dee said it put the men off, me sitting there every night in the hotel bar with tears pouring down my cheeks.” She giggled reminiscently.

  “I’m going back to the hotel,” said Dee, standing up abruptly.

  “Oh Dee, not yet!” Sue wailed. “You haven’t finished your Hawaiian Sunrise. Neither have I.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  Bernard stood up. “Are you sure you should walk around here on your own at night?”

  “I’ll be quite all right, thankyou,” said Dee.

  At that moment the waiter came up with Bernard’s coffee, and demanded immediate payment. When this business was completed, Dee was already threading her way through the tables to the exit, holding her head at a dignified angle and only a little unsteady in her high-heeled sandals.

  “Oh, dear,” Sue sighed. “Dee’s so touchy. You know why she left like that? Because of what I just said about putting off the men at Rimini last year. You know what she’ll say to me when I get back? ‘That Bernard will think we were laying in wait for him.’”

  Bernard smiled. “Well, you can assure her that no such thought crossed my mind.”

  As Sue talked, her tongue loosened by the Hawaiian Sunrises, Bernard gradually formed a picture of the curious symbiosis that existed between the two women. They had met at a Teachers’ Training College, and taken jobs in the same comprehensive school in a new town near London. They always went on holiday together – first to resorts on the South Coast of England, then more adventurously to the Continent and the Mediterranean – Belgium, France, Spain, Greece. Always, at the back of their minds, was the hope of meeting Someone Nice. Their holiday routine was simple and repetitive. Each morning they put on their swimming-costumes and went down to the beach or the pool to acquire the statutory tan. Each evening they changed into cotton frocks and got mildly tiddly over cocktails and a shared bottle of wine at dinner. They were frequently approached by men, either natives of the country in question or fellow-tourists. But somehow they never met Anyone Nice. Inexperienced as Bernard was in such matters, it seemed to him that while they laid themselves out to attract men, they distrusted the sort of men who made overtures to women in holiday resorts. He visualized them, when they were accosted, turning their backs haughtily, or hobbling away on their high-heels, giggling and nudging each other.

  So it went on, year by year: Yugoslavia, Morocco, Turkey, Tenerife. Then suddenly, Sue met Someone Nice at home, in Harlow. Desmond was a junior manager at the local branch of the building society where Sue had a savings account. They moved in together. “I expect we’ll get married one day, but Des says he’s not in a hurry. When the question of the next holiday came up, I asked Des if Dee could come along with us, she was on her own of course, and he said it was either him or her, I’d have to choose. Des never hit it off with Dee, unfortunately. So there was only one solution.”

  Ever since that time, it appeared, Sue Butterworth had taken two holidays every summer – a package holiday with Dee, and a camping holiday with Des. It was fortunate that Desmond’s tastes in this department were simple and inexpensive, but even so the double vacation was a considerable drain on Sue’s income, especially as Dee’s choice of destinations became more and more ambitious. “Florida last year, Hawaii this. I don’t know where it will end. When she meets Someone Nice, I suppose.” Sue sucked on a straw and looked hopefully at Bernard from under her fluffy curls.

  Bernard glanced at his watch. “I think I’d better be going.”

  “Me too,” said Sue, groping under her seat for her handbag. “It’s a shame, Dee’s ever so nice, really, but she puts people off.”

  As they left their table, the two buxom blondes were still swaying their hips and grinning indefatigably, though they had changed into green plastic skirts, or perhaps it was the lighting that had changed. A pomaded male singer, wielding a hand microphone like a whip, was leading the audience in the chorus of a song called, “I Love Hawaii.”

  “Nice here, isn’t it,” said Sue. “Lively.”

  Bernard hesitated on the sidewalk outside the gates, wondering whether he should offer to escort Sue back to her hotel. Politeness seemed to require it, but he did not wish to be misinterpreted. Fortunately it turned out that the hotel was on his own way home. Three youths tumbled hilariously out of a bar in their path, pushing and shouting at each other. One of them wore a tee-shirt inscribed, “Get Lei’d in Waikiki.” Sue shrank closer to Bernard as they ran past. “I hope Dee got back all right,” she said.

  “I’m sure she can look after herself,” said Bernard, filled with wonder at this young woman’s self-sacrifice. She had sentenced herself to an unwanted second holiday every year, for life, it seemed, simply because Dee could not find anyone else to keep her company.

  “Have you ever thought of shaving off your beard?” she said suddenly.

  “No,” he said, smiling with surprise. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, nothing, I just wondered. This is our hotel. The Waikiki Coconut Grove.”

  Bernard stared up at the façade of a white concrete tower, honeycombed with a thousand identical windows. “Where’s the grove?” he wondered aloud.

  “I dunno. Dee says they must’ve built the hotel on top of it.”

  Bernard shook Sue’s hand and bade her goodnight.

  “See you again, I hope,” she said. “Waikiki’s quite a small place, really, isn’t it?”

  “It seems to be,” he said. “Horizontally, anyway.”

  “Isn’t that the man from the plane, the one with the old man that made such a fuss about getting on at Heathrow?” says Beryl Everthorpe to her husband. They are sitting in a coach locked in traffic on Kuhio Avenue, on their way back from the Sunset Cove Luau. The brochure for this attraction, open seven days a week including holidays, lies open on her knees. “Nightly at Sunset Cove, guests are greeted with an exotic Mai Tai (Hawaiian fruit punch with rum), songs, dances, chants of Old Hawaii, with an Imu ceremony where the Royal Court oversees the preparation of the pig for roasting in the fire pit. Plus a beautiful Hukilau (traditional shoreline fish-gathering ceremony in which guests lend a hand to pull in the huge net). Then a sumptuous Luau including gorgeous hula dancers, intrepid fire-eatersy, steel-guitar music and much much more!” It had been a bit of shock at first to discover that something like a thousand people had been bussed to Sunset Cove for the evening, to be seated at plastic-topped refectory tables, laid out in rows as if in some kind of refugee camp; but fortunately they were only fifty yards from the stage for the floor show, so Brian had plenty of scope for his video camera. Most of the food looked as if it was cooked in microwaves rather than the fire pit, and was not noticeably exotic in character, but you could eat as much as you liked.

  Brian Everthorpe belches, and says, “Who?”

  “That man over there, with the beard.” Beryl points across the wide, traffic-filled avenue at the entrance to a big hotel.

  Brian Everthorpe shoulders his video camera, and aims it across the road. He picks out the figures of a man and a woman in his viewfinder, and zooms in. “Yeah,” he says. “He looks familiar. So does the bird he’s with. She wore a jogging suit on the plane.”

  “Oh yes, I remember. I didn’t think they were together.”

  “Well, they are now,” says Brian Everthorpe. He
pushes the record button on his camera and the motor whirrs.

  “What are you filming them for? What are they doing?”

  “Shaking hands.”

  “Is that all?”

  “You never know,” says Brian Everthorpe. “They might be passing drugs.” He is only half-joking. He lives in hope of being on the spot with his video camera when some crime or other public drama is occurring – a bank robbery, say, or a fire, or a suicide leap from a bridge. He has seen such sequences on the television news, fuzzy, jerky, but hypnotically gripping, with the caption “Amateur Video” across them. “After all, what’s he doing in Hawaii with his old man? You can’t tell me they’re on holiday together. They could be Mafia.”

  Beryl snorts incredulously. The bus moves forward, removing the bearded man and the girl from their vision. “Seeing them reminds me: you remember the honeymoon couple on the plane?” she says.

  “The Yuppie and the Ice Maiden?”

  “I saw them on the beach today, while you were filming those girls.”

  “What girls?”

  “You know what girls. She said hallo. He didn’t look too cheerful, I must say.”

  “Probably got frostbite in his dick.”

  “Ssh!”

  “Speaking of which,” says Brian Everthorpe, running a hand along Beryl’s thigh, “what about starting this second honeymoon properly tonight?”

  “All right,” says Beryl. “As long as you’re not planning to film it.”

  Back in Ursula’s apartment, Bernard opened the French windows to let the breeze blow through the living-room, and stepped out on to the balcony. The balmy night air beat gently against his face; the palm trees swayed in the wind, rustling their skirts like hula dancers; a crescent moon sailed across the sky, towing a bright star. He scanned the façade of the neighbouring block, half hoping, half-fearing to see the mysterious couple of the previous night. He could see into several of the rooms, where the lights were on and the blinds not drawn. In one, a fat woman dressed only in her underwear was hoovering the carpet. In another, a man was eating a meal from a tray on his knees, staring the while at what must be a television, just out of Bernard’s sight. In a third, a woman in a bathrobe was drying her hair, flicking it from side to side like a horse’s tail under the hairdryer’s nozzle. It was shiny black hair, and reminded him of Yolande Miller’s. The couple of the previous night were not, however, to be seen, and he couldn’t even be sure which balcony they had occupied.