Paradise News

by David Lodge

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Bernard.

  “I have the strangest feeling that if I threw myself over the edge of this cliff now, I wouldn’t feel any pain or terror. My body would fall off me like clothing, and flutter gently down to the beach, and my soul would fly up to heaven.”

  “Well, please don’t try it,” Bernard joked. “I think it would upset the people here.” He gestured at the tourists who stood nearby, clicking and whirring with their cameras.

  “I feel so strangely … light,” said Ursula. “It must be the effect of unburdening myself to Jack. Unburden is a good word. That’s just what it feels like.”

  “So you talked about Sean, then?”

  “Yes. Jack remembered that summer, of course. Perhaps not as vividly as I do, but as soon as I mentioned that old shed at the bottom of our garden in Cork, I could see from the expression on his face that he knew what I was going to say. He said that, at the time, he was frightened to report Sean to our Father and Mother, because Sean had got up to some dirty games with him, too, a couple of years before, and he was afraid it would all come out and all of us would be thrashed within an inch of our lives. Maybe he was right. He was a frightening man, when he was angry, I can tell you, our Father. Jack said he honestly thought I was too young to know what Sean was doing, too young to be harmed by it, and he assumed that in time I forgot all about it. He seemed genuinely shocked when I told him it had destroyed my marriage and pretty well ruined my life. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, Ursula, I’m sorry.’ I believe he is, too. I guess that’s why he asked Father Luke if he could go to confession this afternoon, before he took communion. It was a beautiful service, wasn’t it, the anointing? Some of the words were so beautiful, I wish I could remember them.”

  “I think I probably can,” said Bernard. “I said them often enough. ‘Through this holy anointing, and through his own loving mercy, may the Lord forgive all the faults that you have committed through your eyes.’ And then the same for the nose, mouth, hands and feet.”

  “As matter of interest, how can you sin with your nose?”

  Bernard guffawed. “Oh, that was a favourite teaser in Moral Theology, when I was a student.”

  “And what was the answer?”

  “The textbooks suggested that you could overindulge in smelling perfumes and nosegays. It didn’t seem very convincing. And there was a dark hint about lust being excited by bodily scents, but they didn’t go very deeply into that in the seminary, for obvious reasons.” He had a sharp memory-picture of himself kneeling at Yolande’s feet with his face buried in her crotch, inhaling what smelled like the salty air of a tidal beach.

  “That wasn’t the bit I was thinking of, anyway,” she said. “There was a lesson …”

  “The Epistle of St James. ‘Is any of you sick?’”

  “That’s it. Do you know how it goes?”

  “Is there any of you sick: let her call for the elders of the Church, and let them pray over her, annointing her with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick woman, and the Lord will raise her up; and if she has sinned, she will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”

  “That’s it. What a pity you aren’t a priest any more, Bernard, you say the words so beautifully. Did Father Luke say ‘woman’ when he read that this afternoon?”

  “No,” said Bernard. “I changed it, for you.”

  Ursula was exhausted by the time they got back to Makai Manor. “Exhausted, but content,” she said, when she was back in her bed. She stretched out her hand to clasp his. “Dear Bernard! Thankyou thankyou thankyou!”

  “I’d better leave you to rest,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, but she did not release his hand.

  “I’ll come tomorrow.”

  “I know you will. I’ve come to count on it. I dread the day when you’ll walk out that door for the last time. When I’ll know you won’t be coming back the next day, because you’ll be in an airplane, on your way back to England.”

  “I don’t know yet when I’ll be leaving,” he said, “so there’s no point upsetting yourself about it. It all depends on Daddy’s progress.”

  “He told me he expects to be discharged from the hospital next week.”

  “Tess could take him home, perhaps. I could stay on a few extra days.”

  “You’re very sweet, Bernard. But sooner or later you’ll have to go. You have a job to go back to.”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “There’s an induction course at the College, for African and Asian students, coming up soon. I said I’d run it. It’s supposed to introduce them to life in Britain,” he elaborated, hoping to distract Ursula from her melancholy train of thought. “We have to demonstrate how to light a gas ring and how to eat a kipper, and take them to Marks and Spencer’s to buy winter underwear.”

  Ursula smiled wanly. “I just hope I don’t live too long after you’ve gone.”

  “You mustn’t say that, Ursula. It’s upsetting for me as well as for you.”

  “Sorry. I’m just trying to condition myself to doing without you. I’ve been spoiled these last couple of weeks, having you here, and then seeing Jack and Teresa. When you’ve all flown away, I’m going to feel terribly lonely.”

  “Who knows, I may come back to Hawaii.”

  Ursula shook her head. “It’s too far, Bernard. You can’t just hop into an airplane and fly halfway round the world because I’m feeling lonely.”

  “There’s always the telephone,” he said.

  “Yes, there’s always the telephone,” Ursula said drily.

  “And there’s always Sophie Knoepflmacher,” he joked. “I’m sure she’d be glad to visit you, when Daddy has gone.”

  Ursula made a grimace.

  “There’s somebody else who lives in Honolulu,” he said. “Someone I know who would love to visit you – and I know you’d like her.” A vivid proleptic image flashed into his head, of Yolande in her red dress, bounding into the room, swinging her brown tennis-player’s arms, radiating health and energy, smiling at Ursula and pulling up a chair to talk. They would talk of himself, he thought fondly. “I’ll bring her out to meet you tomorrow. Her name’s Yolande Miller. She was the driver of the car that knocked Daddy down – that he walked into, I should say. That’s how we met. We’ve become quite friendly since. Well, very friendly, actually.” He blushed. “You remember when you asked me to go to the Moana for cocktails, to celebrate the discovery of your IBM shares? Well I didn’t tell you at the time, but I invited Yolande.” Without going into explicit detail, he made clear that they had been seeing a lot of each other since.

  “Well, Bernard, you’re a dark horse!” said Ursula, highly amused. “So you have another motive for coming back to Hawaii, apart from seeing your poor old aunt.”

  “Absolutely,” said Bernard. “The only problem is the fare.”

  “I’ll pay your fare, any time you want to come,” said Ursula. “After all, I’m leaving you all my money, anyway.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said Bernard.

  “Why not? Who deserves it more than you do? Who needs it more than you?”

  “Patrick,” said Bernard. “Tess’s Patrick is completely helpless.”

  3

  WITH YOLANDE’S AGREEMENT – indeed, encouragement – Bernard had planned to devote the evening to entertaining Tess. He proposed taking her first to the Travelwise cocktail party at the Wyatt Imperial, staying just as long as its entertainment value seemed to warrant, and then dining out somewhere – Yolande had suggested a Hawaiian garden restaurant with carp pools and strolling musicians, just outside Waikiki. When he returned to the apartment just before six, however, he found Tess lounging on the balcony in the flowered silk robe, having just returned from a swim in the pool. She said she didn’t want to go out in the next hour or two, in case Frank phoned. It was early in the morning in England, and she thought he might phone just before he l
eft home to go to work, as he had the previous day. Bernard sensed some softening in Tess’s attitude to Frank, perhaps connected with the events of the afternoon. She had the quiet, contemplative air of a devout communicant just returned from the altar rail. He gave her a résumé of what Ursula had told him about her conversation with their father, and Tess seemed satisfied. It had been a good day’s work, she said. She urged him to go to the party, and although he had no particular inclination to do so, he acquiesced. He had the impression that she wanted to be on her own. Also it was slightly on his conscience that he had never taken up Roger Sheldrake’s invitation to have a drink at the Wyatt Imperial, and Sheldrake would presumably be at the cocktail party. It was agreed that he would return later to ascertain whether Frank had phoned and what she wanted to do about the evening meal.

  The Wyatt Imperial was built on Babylonian scale. Two high tower blocks were joined by an atrium that enclosed shopping arcades, restaurants and cafés, a 100-foot waterfall, palm groves, and a sizeable stage, on which, providing a striking change from the usual twangling guitar music, a Bavarian band dressed in Lederhosen and kneesocks was performing for the entertainment of patrons sitting at the café tables or promenading nearby. The Wyatt Imperial didn’t seem like a hotel at all at ground level, and if it hadn’t been for the carpet underfoot, he might have assumed that he was still in the street, or in some public square. After wandering about for some minutes, deafened by the amplified yodelling and accordion-squeezing of the suspiciously swarthy Bavarian musicians, Bernard found an escalator that took him to the Registration desk on the mezzanine floor, from which he was directed to the Spindrift Bar.

  The decor of the Spindrift Bar had a heavy marine accent, with fishing nets draped across the roughcast walls, portholes for windows, and wall lamps in the form of navigation lights. Linda Hanama, the author of the invitation, standing just inside the door, smiled brilliantly and ticked off Bernard’s name on a list. He recognized her as the airport facilitator of their first evening; it seemed that in the meantime she had been promoted to resort controller. She introduced a slim, eager young man with Chinese features, wearing a black silk suit, as Michael Ming, Director of Public Relations for the hotel. He shook Bernard’s hand and thrust into it a tall glass brimming with fruit, ice-cubes, plastic bric-à-brac and a rum-flavoured fruit punch. “Welcome. Have a Mai Tai. Help yourself to some pupu.” He gestured to a table laid out with finger snacks.

  There were only about twenty people present, but the decibel level was high. The first person he focused on was the young man of the red braces. What caught Bernard’s eye this evening, however, was the thick white bandage round his head. He also had a lei round his neck, and his arm round the waist of Cecily, who wore a strapless white dress and was similarly garlanded. They looked flushed and happy and appeared to be the centre of attention, together with a couple of broadshouldered young men with neat furry moustaches, who were also vaguely familiar to Bernard. A professional-looking photographer was taking flash-photos of this quartet, and Brian Everthorpe was pointing his video camera at them.

  “You made it, then!”

  Bernard felt a hand on his arm, and turned to find Sidney and Lilian Brooks grinning at him.

  “I thought I’d look in,” said Bernard. “What has that young man done to his head?”

  “Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? Didn’t you see the local paper this morning?” they exclaimed, interrupting and overlapping with each other in their eagerness to tell him the story. It appeared that the previous day – “just about the time when we were chatting with you at the hospital it must have been, Sidney’s all right, by the way, passed fit to fly” – the young man had sustained the injury while surfing, struck on the head by his own surfboard, and the Brookses’ son Terry, and his Australian friend Tony, had saved him from drowning – carried him bleeding and unconscious from the sea, and laid him at the feet of the distraught Cecily, who had given him the kiss of life. Brian Everthorpe had been on hand to record the whole drama on videotape. “He’s going to show it when this thing is over,” said Sidney, jerking his thumb in the direction of a large television on a mobile stand. Bernard became aware that part of the noise level in the room was contributed by a voice-over commentary for what was presumably the video presentation promised in his invitation.

  “Wyatt Haikoloa,” drawled a mellow American baritone, “the new resort on the Big Island, where your wildest dreams come true …” Between the heads of Sidney and Lilian, Bernard glimpsed luridly coloured images of a massive marble staircase and colonnade rising out of a lagoon, tropical birds stalking through a hotel lobby, rope bridges slung across swimming-pools, monorail trains snaking between palm trees. It looked like the set for a Hollywood epic that hadn’t quite decided whether it was to be a sequel to Ben Hur, Tarzan of the Apes or The Shape of Things to Come.

  “Terry and Tony knew him, you see,” said Lilian. “They saw him down at the beach every day, trying to learn how to surf.”

  “Gave him a few tips, you know,” said Sidney. “There’s a knack to it, like everything else.”

  “They had no idea he was on the same package as us, though,” said Lilian.

  “Here,” said Sidney. “Have a look at this. This morning’s paper.” He took a folded newspaper cutting from his wallet and handed it to Bernard.

  Underneath a smudgy photograph of the two young men with moustaches smiling at the camera, and a headline, “AUSSIE WIZARDS OF SURF SAVE BRITISHER,” was a short report of the incident.

  Terry Brooks and his buddy Tony Freeman, from Sydney, Australia, rescued surfing novice Russell Harvey, of London, England, from drowning off Waikiki beach Tuesday morning. Russ, 28, is in Honolulu honeymooning with his blonde wife Cecily, who was watching him through a dime telescope when he was struck on the head by his surfboard. “I was horrified,” she said later. “I saw the board fly up in the air, then Russ disappeared under a huge wave, and when he came up, he was lying face down in the water. The surfboard was floating beside him. I was completely frantic, and began running towards the sea, screaming for help, but of course he was much too far out for anybody on the beach to get to him. Thank God those two Australian boys spotted him and pulled him out of the water. They brought him in on one of their surfboards. I think they deserve a medal.”

  “Very nice,” said Bernard, returning the cutting to Sidney. “You must be proud of your son.”

  “Well, it’s only natural,” said Sidney. “I mean, it’s not everybody who could react to an emergency like that, is it?”

  “Not so much a hotel as a whole resort. Not so much a resort as a way of life. So extensive, that after checking in you will be transported to your room by monorail tram or canal barge …”

  Bernard caught sight of the Best family sitting against the wall, eating pupu from paper plates balanced on their knees, and glancing furtively at the video show. He gave a little wave to the freckled girl and she smiled timidly in response. “No indeed,” he said to Sidney. “And I’m delighted to see that the honeymooners are back on good terms with each other. They seemed to be having a bit of a tiff on the plane coming over.”

  “More than a tiff, by all accounts,” said Lilian. “But apparently the accident has brought them together. Cecily says she discovered she really loved him when she thought he was lost.”

  “They got married again this afternoon,” said Sidney.

  “Really?” said Bernard. “Is that allowed?”

  “It’s called a Renewal of Vows,” said Linda Hanama, who was passing with a tray of pupu. “There’s a chapel at the other end of Kalakaua that does a special deal, with the Hawaiian Wedding Song performed by authentic local artists. It’s very popular with second honeymooners, I don’t think we’ve ever had a request from first-timers before, but Russ and Cecily felt they wanted to mark his narrow escape in a special way.”

  “Another Mai Tai?” Michael Ming was coming round with a jug.

  “Could I have mine without the f
ruit juice?” said Sidney.

  “Sorry, the complimentary drinks are pre-mixed.”

  “I thought we were only entitled to one,” said Lilian holding out her glass.

  “To tell you the truth, we over-catered, but what the hell, this is a very unique occasion.” Michael Ming turned to address the photographer, who was on his way to the door. “Don’t forget to mention us in the caption.” The man nodded. “Great publicity for the company,” Michael Ming said complacently. “Human interest. You can’t beat it. Have you folks seen the video? It’s really something. I told Mr Sheldrake he just had to see it.” Michael Ming pronounced the name of Sheldrake with peculiar unction.

  “Wyatt Haikoloa covers 65 acres, boasts two golf courses, four swimming-pools, eight restaurants and ten tennis courts …”

  Bernard picked out the domed head of Sheldrake, watching the television with Sue and Dee, and edged towards them, pausing to greet the Bests. “Have you enjoyed your holiday?” he said sociably to the freckled girl. She blushed and lowered her eyes. “It was all right,” she murmured.

  “We’ll be glad to get home, though,” said Mrs Best.

  “Best part of a holiday, I always think,” said her husband. “No pun intended.” He bared his teeth and gums in a rare smile. “When you push open the front door, pick up the letters, put the kettle on for a cup of tea, go out and see how the garden’s survived. And you think to yourself, well, that’s that for another year.”

  “It seems a long way to come for the pleasure of getting back home,” Bernard said.

  Mr Best shrugged. “Florence saw a programme about Hawaii on the box.”

  “Well, we’ve been to the usual places, Spain, Greece, Majorca,” said Mrs Best. “We went to Florida once. Then we came into a bit of money, so we thought we’d try something more adventurous this year.”