Paradise News

by David Lodge

  “Not a lot of money,” said Mr Best. “Don’t get the idea we’re rich.”

  “No, no,” said Bernard.

  “I took a fancy to Hawaii,” said Mrs Best. “But things always look different on the television, don’t they? Like this video. I don’t suppose it’s a bit like that really.”

  They all looked at the screen.

  “Bask in the sun on sparkling sandy beaches, frolic amid waterfalls and fountains, or let yourself be carried along by the current of a meandering riverpool …”

  “I wish we could have gone there instead of Waikiki,” said the young boy. “It looks good fun.”

  “Yeah,” said the girl. “It looks like Center Parc.”

  Bernard enquired what Center Parc was and the girl explained, in a sudden spasm of volubility, that it was a holiday village in the middle of Sherwood Forest. She had gone there the previous summer with her friend Gail’s family. You lived in a little house in the woods and cars were not allowed, everybody rode about on bicycles. There was a huge covered swimming-pool in the middle, with water chutes and a wave machine and palm trees and a Jungle River. It was called a Tropical Paradise.

  “You should talk to that man over there,” said Bernard, pointing to Roger Sheldrake. “He’s writing a book about tropical paradises. I’ll introduce you, if you like.”

  “I don’t think so, thank you very much,” said Mr Best. His smile had vanished.

  “No, we don’t want to be in a book,” said Mrs Best.

  Bernard wished them a safe journey home and moved on to where Roger Sheldrake stood in front of the television, flanked by Sue and Dee, though perceptibly closer to Dee. “Hallo, old man,” said Sheldrake. “Do you know these two young ladies?”

  Bernard reminded him that he himself had introduced Sheldrake to them. Sue asked after Mr Walsh, and Dee bestowed upon him a smile that might almost have been described as warm. “Sorry I didn’t manage to call in before,” Bernard said, “but I’ve been rather busy. What’s it like staying here?”

  “Wonderful service,” said Sheldrake. “I recommend it. This is their latest venture.” He gestured at the TV screen. “It put them back twenty million dollars.”

  “Enjoy the mile-long museum walkway lined with antique art treasures of Oriental and Polynesian cultures. Stroll along the flagstone paths with brilliantly plumaged tropical birds as your companions …”

  “Must have had their wings clipped,” said Dee.

  “Oh don’t, Dee! Isn’t it lovely though?”

  “It’s what they call a fantasy resort hotel,” said Sheldrake. “Very popular with big corporations who want to reward their top managers and salesmen. Incentive vacations, they’re called. The wives get invited along.”

  “That’s not what I’d call an incentive,” said Brian Everthorpe, who was standing nearby, and was playfully punched by his wife for this witticism. She was resplendent in a flounced cocktail dress of some shiny purple material. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt covered with blue palm trees on a pink ground, and smoking a green cigar.

  “A complete health spa offering everything from aerobics to meditation counselling to aromatherapy … Dine privately on your own lanai to the soothing sound of waves caressing the shore, or sample the menu of our eight gourmet restaurants …”

  “I don’t care what they call it,” said Sue wistfully. “It looks like heaven to me.”

  “And you can sign up for a whole range of fantasy excursions and activities: the Lauhala Point Fantasy Picnic, on a clifftop site accessible only by helicopter, . . the Sunset Sail and Secluded Beach Fantasy … The Kahua Ranch Fantasy, with authentic ‘Paniolo’ cowboys . . the Big Island Hunting Safari: hunt wild Russian boar, Mouflon and Corsican sheep, pheasant, and wild turkey, depending on season …”

  “Sheep?” said Dee. “Did he say, hunt sheep?”

  “Wild sheep,” said Michael Ming, recharging their glasses from his jug. “Which have been proven to be detrimental to the environment due to over-grazing. But if you have any conscientious objection to shooting the animals you can photograph them instead. Mr Sheldrake, another Mai Tai? Or can I get you something from the bar?”

  “No, this stuff is fine,” said Roger Sheldrake, extending his glass.

  “I wouldn’t mind something from the bar,” said Brian Everthorpe, but Michael Ming didn’t appear to hear him.

  “And the most popular of our special attractions – the Dolphin Encounter.”

  “Oh, this is unbelievable,” said Linda Hanama. They watched spellbound as swimsuited holidaymakers fraternized with tame dolphins in the resort’s lagoon: chucking them under the chin, stroking them behind the eyes, and gambolling in the water with them. A young boy grasped a dorsal fin and was towed through the water, laughing ecstatically.

  “Straddling each a dolphin’s back,

  And steadied by a fin,

  Those Innocents re-live their death,

  Their wounds open again,”

  Bernard recited, as much to his own surprise as everyone else’s. He was, however, on his third Mai Tai, and supposed he was a little tipsy.

  “Did you say something, old man?” said Sheldrake.

  “It’s a poem by W. B. Yeats,” said Bernard. “‘News For The Delphic Oracle.’ In neoplatonic mythology, you know, the souls of the dead were taken to the Fortunate Isles on the backs of dolphins. You might find it a useful footnote for your book.”

  “Oh, I’ve re-jigged the thesis of that, to some extent,” said Sheldrake. “I’ve decided that the paradise model is inevitably transformed into the pilgrimage model under the economic imperatives of the tourist industry. It’s a sort of marxist approach, I suppose. A post-marxist marxism, of course.”

  “Of course,” Bernard murmured.

  “I mean, take an island, any island. Take Oahu. Look at the map. What do you see, nine times out of ten? A road going round the edge, forming a circle. What is it? It’s a conveyor belt, for conveying people from one tourist trap to the next, one lot leaving as the other lot arrives. The same applies to cruise itineraries, charter flights –”

  “Just in time,” said Brian Everthorpe.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Sheldrake, not particularly pleased at being interrupted in full flow.

  “It sounds like what we call just-in-time in industry,” said Brian Everthorpe. “Each operation on the assembly line is buffered by a card that instructs the operative to supply the next operation precisely when needed. Eliminates bottlenecks.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Sheldrake, taking out his notebook and ball pen. “Can you give me a reference?”

  “Invented by a Dr Ono, a Jap of course. He worked for Toyota. Hence the expression, ‘Oh no, not another Japanese car.’” Brian Everthorpe guffawed at his own joke and held up a video cassette. “Now that the promotional video seems to have run its course, I’m going to show you lucky people a home movie, so perhaps you’d like to pull up some chairs and make yourselves comfortable.”

  “Oh Gawd!” said Dee under her breath.

  “I haven’t had time to edit this properly, or dub any music on,” said Brian Everthorpe, as the guests gathered round with more or less enthusiasm. “It’s what we call a rough cut, so bear with me. It’s provisionally entitled, Everthorpes in Paradise.”

  “Oh, get on with it, Bri,” said Beryl, smoothing her purple flounces under her haunches as she sat down.

  The film began with a picture of two teenage boys and an elderly lady waving goodbye from the porch of a mock-Jacobean house with leaded windows and integral garage. “Our boys and my mother,” Beryl explained. There followed a long static close-up of a notice board saying “East Midlands Airport”, and then a jerky sequence with a painfully high-pitched whine on the soundtrack showing Beryl, in her red and yellow dress and gold bangles, climbing a steep flight of mobile steps into the cabin of a propeller plane. She stopped suddenly at the top and swept round to wave at the camera, causing the passengers behind and beneath her to cannon
into each other and bury their faces in each other’s bottoms. An orange bounced down the steps and rolled across the tarmac. There followed a blurred and tilted view of the outskirts of West London, seen through the aeroplane’s porthole, and then a wide shot of the crowded Departures Concourse at Heathrow’s Terminal Four. The camera zoomed in on two couriers in Travelwise Livery, one tall, straightbacked and middle-aged, the other young, slight, scowling at the camera. Recognizing these figures, the hitherto bored viewers sat up and began to take notice.

  “Ooh, I remember him,” Sue exclaimed. “The older one. He was nice.”

  “The younger one wasn’t,” said Cecily. “And he had shocking dandruff.”

  The scene shifted to the long perspective of one of Heathrow’s interminable walkways, with passengers, their backs to the camera, streaming towards the numbered gates. A small wheeled vehicle like a golf-cart appeared in the middle distance, travelling in the opposite direction, and suddenly, to the accompaniment of shouts and laughs from those around him, Bernard beheld himself, bearded and grim-faced, and his father, grinning and waving jauntily, on the back seat of the buggy. They filled the screen for a second, then passed out of the frame. It was an extraordinary and disconcerting apparition, like a fragment of a broken dream, or a scene from one’s past life reviewed at the moment of drowning. How staid and depressed he looked! What dingy clothes he wore, and what a mangy, unconvincing beard it had been.

  They reappeared, he and his father, along with other members of the Travelwise party, who saluted themselves with hoots of laughter, cheers and jeers – sitting in the waiting area beside the gate, queueing for toilets on the flight to Los Angeles, and undergoing the lei greeting at Honolulu airport. “Hey,” said Linda Hanama. “That’s neat. Can I have a copy of that? We could use it for training.”

  Then the film became more exclusively Everthorpian, beginning with a slightly embarrassing sequence depicting Beryl rising from her hotel bed, clad in a diaphanous nightdress. There were whoops and wolf-whistles from the spectators. Beryl reached across and punched her husband in the small of the back. “You never told me that nightie was so see-through,” she said.

  “Hey, Brian, are you going into the blue-movie business?” Sidney enquired.

  “Well I’ve seen worse on our hotel’s adult video channel,” said Russ Harvey. “Much worse.”

  “But you won’t be watching that any more, will you, darling?” said Cecily, with just the hint of an edge to her voice.

  “ ’Course not, pet.” Russ squeezed his wife’s waist and kissed her on the nose.

  On the screen, Beryl donned a negligée and sauntered towards the balcony, yawning affectedly. The murmur of traffic coming from the open french windows was suddenly augmented by the penetrating wail of an ambulance siren. The voice of Brian Everthorpe was heard crying, “Cut!” Beryl stopped sauntering and turned to frown at the camera. Then she appeared to get back into bed and to wake up all over again.

  “Had to do two takes of this, because of the ambulance,” said Brian Everthorpe. “I’ll cut the first one out of the finished film, of course.”

  “What day was that?” Bernard asked.

  “Our first morning.”

  Bernard felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  There was a very thorough coverage of the Sunset Beach Luau floorshow, with hula dancers and fire-eaters performing energetically on a stage in front of a vast crowd seated in rows that seemed to stretch to infinity. Then a blurred but unmistakable shot of Bernard shaking hands with Sue outside the Waikiki Coconut Grove hotel, at night.

  “ ’Allo, ’allo!” said Sidney, nudging Bernard. “You’re a dark horse.”

  “Didn’t know you were being watched, did you?” said Brian Everthorpe.

  “Don’t take any notice, Bernard,” said Sue. “He was just escorting me home,” she explained to the company, “like any gentleman would.” She gestured airily with her hand, forgetting that it was holding her glass, and spilled some Mai Tai over her dress. “Oops! Never mind, going home tomorrow.”

  The film then became tedious again as it began to trace the Everthorpes’ peregrinations around Oahu. Since Brian was always operating the camera, Beryl was required to provide the point of human interest in most of these sequences, posed against beaches, buildings and palm trees, smirking into the lens or gazing raptly into the distance. As if sensing the audience’s restiveness, Beryl herself requested Brian to “gee it up a bit”, and he rather reluctantly pressed the fast-forward button on his remote control. This certainly had the effect of making the film more amusing. At Pearl Harbor, a naval cutter surged out towards the Arizona with the speed of a torpedo boat, and disgorged a cluster of tourists who swarmed all over the Memorial for a few seconds before being sucked back into the vessel and returned abruptly to shore, At the Sea Life Park, killer whales burst from the surface of the pool like Polaris missiles. The coastline of Oahu and its pleated volcanic mountains flashed past in a blur. The Polynesian Cultural Center erupted in a frenzy of ethnic activity: weaving, woodcarving, war-dancing, canoeing, pageantry, music and drama.

  The scene shifted to a sandy beach, and Brian Everthorpe switched the video machine back to normal speed. He had evidently persuaded someone else to hold the camera for this sequence, for it depicted himself and Beryl in swimming-costumes, stretched out at the water’s edge. The recorded Everthorpe winked at the camera and rolled over on top of his spouse. There were more whoops and whistles from the viewers.

  “Remind you of anything?” he quizzed them, as a wave spent itself on the sand and broke over the entwined Everthorpes.

  “Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr,” said an Australian voice from the back of the room. “From Here To Eternity.”

  “Bingo!” said Brian. “And this is the very beach where they shot that scene.”

  “Belly, shoulder, bum

  Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs

  Copulate in the foam,”

  Bernard murmured.

  “What was that, old man?” said Sheldrake.

  Bernard didn’t know why Sheldrake had taken to addressing him in this slightly condescending manner, unless it was the effect of Michael Ming’s obsequiousness, or the the admiring way Dee looked at him every time he opened his mouth.

  “It’s the same poem,” said Bernard. “‘News For The Delphic Oracle.’”

  “It sounds a bit rude to me,” said Dee.

  “The Neo-platonists assumed there was no sex in heaven,” said Bernard. “Yeats thought he had news for them.” It occurred to him that he should have quoted the lines to Ursula; on second thoughts, perhaps not.

  “Bonking on the beach, eh?” said Brian Everthorpe. “A much overrated pastime, in my opinion.”

  “What would you know about it?” Beryl demanded.

  “Every engineer will tell you sand is very bad for moving parts,” said Brian Everthorpe, skipping nimbly out of Beryl’s reach.

  At an order from Mr Best, the Best family stood up and began to file out of the room.

  “Oh, don’t go now!” Brian Everthorpe called out. “The best bit is just coming up. Aussies to the rescue. The drowned bridegroom restored to his bride.”

  The young Best girl hung back and looked wistfully at the screen.

  “Come along Amanda, don’t dawdle.”

  Amanda pulled a face at her father’s back and, seeing that she was observed by Bernard, blushed. He smiled and waved, sad to see them go, forever self-excluded from life’s feast.

  The scene of the film now shifted to Waikiki beach, with the familiar blunted peak of Diamond Head in the background, and long shots of Terry, Tony and Russ surfing. The Australians were skilful and exhilarating to watch. Russ managed quite well when kneeling on his board, but tended to overbalance when he tried to stand up.

  There was a distracting confabulation at the door of the room, where someone was saying, “No, I haven’t got an invitation. We’re friends of Mr Sheldrake, he’s a guest here,” and Michael
Ming was heard to reply, “Oh, come in, come in, any friend of Mr Sheldrake’s is welcome.”

  Roger Sheldrake said, “Ah, good, they’ve come,” and hurried across to the door to shake hands with the new arrivals. On the TV screen the images began to lose cohesion as the aim of the camera swung wildly between beach, sky and sea.

  “Bit of camera wobble here, I’m afraid,” said Brian Everthorpe. “I was running with it, see?”

  Roger Sheldrake ushered his guests, a middle-aged man and a young woman, into seats just in front of Bernard. “So glad you could make it. Dee, this is Lewis Miller, the chap I was telling you about.”

  “Hi,” said the man. “And this is Ellie.”

  “Hi,” said Ellie, listlessly.

  Handshakes were exchanged. Seeing Bernard staring at the new arrivals, Sheldrake drew him into the introductions. “Lewis is an old conference crony of mine,” Sheldrake explained. “I ran into him this morning in the University Library. I’d completely forgotten he taught here. Let me get you both a drink. I believe they’re called Mai Tais.”

  “God, no,” said Ellie. “I’ll have a vodka martini.”

  “Bourbon on the rocks, please Roger,” said Lewis Miller.

  The picture on the TV screen had stopped swaying violently about. There was a close-up of Cecily screaming and gesticulating at the water’s edge, pictures of people running to and fro on the beach, and long shots of heads and surfboards bobbing up and down in the sea in the distance. It was dramatic footage, but Bernard’s attention kept wandering to the two new arrivals. Lewis Miller was not as he had, for some reason, imagined him–tall, handsome and athletic – but surprisingly small and slight, with yellowy-grey hair brushed across his scalp to cover a bald patch, and a long-chinned, slightly lugubrious countenance. His companion was several inches taller, a handsome, haughty young woman with long reddish-brown hair, plaited like a heavy rope, falling down over one breast.