David Lodge
Copyright
First published in Great Britain 2013
Foreword, copyright © Hearst Magazines UK (The National Magazine Company Limited) 2013
“Where the Climate's Sultry”, copyright © David Lodge 1987
“Hotel Des Boobs”, copyright © David Lodge 1986
“A Wedding to Remember”, copyright © David Lodge 2013
Afterword, copyright © David Lodge 2013
The right of David Lodge to be identified as the author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act of 1988.
The expression GOOD HOUSEKEEPING as used in the title of this book is the registered trademark of the National Magazine Company Ltd and the Hearst Corporation INC. The use of this trademark other than with the express permission of the National Magazine Company or the Hearst Corporation is strictly prohibited.
ISBN: 9781905563852
Published by Hearst Magazines UK (The National Magazine Company Limited), 72 Broadwick Street, London W1F 9EP
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
About David Lodge
D
avid Lodge taught English Literature at the University of Birmingham for many years before retiring to focus on his writing full time. His novels have received the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice. He has also written stage plays, screenplays for TV (including adaptations of his novel Nice Work and Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit) and several esteemed volumes of literary criticism. In 1998, he was awarded a CBE for services to literature.
Foreword
I
t is often said that women's magazines have kept the short story alive, and
Good Housekeeping
can certainly claim much of the credit, having regularly published short fiction by some of the greatest living writers from the 1920s to the present day.
It is therefore fitting that our first digital collection of short stories should be written by David Lodge, widely regarded as one of the best writers of his generation. His many novels - written over a period of fifty years - are masterful satires, clever, satisfying and often hilarious, with memorable characters who live on long after each book is finished.
David Lodge's skill as a short story writer is less well known but just as expert, so it is with much pleasure that
Good Housekeeping
can bring these three stories together for our Modern Voices series. Years separate the stories from each other but each tale reveals David's consistently sharp eye for human folly, his genius for irony and his warm affection for his characters.
David has also contributed an enlightening
Afterword
which puts all three stories in context.
I hope you enjoy the collection, and if you haven't already discovered the joys of David Lodge's novels, I recommend that you try them. You'll be hooked.
Lindsay Nicholson
Editorial Director
Good Housekeeping
London, 2013
Where the Climate's Sultry
L
ong, long ago, in August 1955, before the Pill or the Permissive Society had been invented, four young people from England struggled inexpertly with their sexual appetites on the island of Ibiza, which, as a place of popular British resort, also had yet to be invented. Ibiza was still an exotic destination in those days, one the departing holiday-maker might let drop without self-deprecation - with, indeed, a certain air of adventurousness. It was certainly an adventure for Desmond, Joanna, Robin and Sally.
Des, Jo, Rob and Sal - thus were they known to each other, the less essential syllables of their names having worn away under continual use - had first met and paired off at a Freshers' Hop in their second week at a redbrick provincial university. Elective affinities drew them together in that milling throng of anxious and excitable youth. Each of them, unnerved by the sexual competitiveness of their new environment, was looking, half-consciously, for an agreeable, presentable companion of the opposite sex who would settle, once and for all, the question of who to “go around with”. They chose well. Over the next three years, while their contemporaries changed partners with fickle frequency, or remained forever starved and solitary on the edge of the dance, while all around them jilted boys took to drink, and forsaken girls wept into their tutors' handkerchiefs, while rash engagements were painfully dissolved, and nervous breakdowns spread like flu, the twin relationships of Desmond and Joanna, Robin and Sally, remained serene and stable: a fixed, four-starred constellation in an expanding and fissile universe.
Both girls were doing a general Arts degree, and the boys were doing Chemistry. Outside lectures, they formed an inseparable quartet. In their second year, as University regulations permitted, the girls rented a bed-sitting room, and here all four ate and studied together in the evenings. At ten o'clock they made a final cup of coffee and dimmed the lights. Then for half an hour or so, until it was time for the boys to return to their digs, they reclined on twin divans for a cuddle. Nothing more than a cuddle was possible in the circumstances, but this arrangement suited them well. Joanna and Sally were nice girls, and Desmond and Robin were considerate young men. Both couples vaguely assumed that eventually they would get married, but this possibility seemed at once too remote and too real to be anticipated. If three was a crowd, four was company in this situation. Indeed, while fondling each other on their respective divan beds, the two couples would often maintain a lively four-pointed conversation across the space between them.
All worked hard as Finals approached. They planned to reward themselves, and round off their undergraduate careers, with what Desmond described as “a slap-up Continental holiday, somewhere off the beaten track,” to be financed by a month's work in a frozen food factory. It was a measure of what sensible, responsible young people they were that not one of the eight parents concerned raised any objection to this plan. They perhaps reckoned without the effect of a Mediterranean atmosphere upon placid English temperaments. As Joanna, who had prepared a question on Byron for Finals, liked to quote, with almost obsessive frequency, in Ibiza:
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
There was no airport in Ibiza in those days. A student charter flight in a shuddering old Dakota took them to Barcelona, where they embarked the same evening on a boat bound for the Balearic Islands. Desmond and Robin sat up on deck, where the girls joined them at dawn to watch, with suitable exclamations, the white, steeply raked façade of the town of Ibiza rise slowly out of the turquoise Mediterranean. They breakfasted on rolls and coffee outside a quayside café, feeling the sun already burning between their shoulder-blades. Then they took a bus across the island, where they had booked into a
pensión
at a more sheltered resort with a beach.
At first they were quite content with swimming, sunbathing and the other simple diversions of the little resort: the cafés and
bodegas
where alcohol was so absurdly cheap, the shops selling gaudy basket-work and leather goods, and the rather pretentiously named “nightclubs” where, for the price of a bottle of sweet Spanish champagne, you could dance on a concrete floor to the jerky rhythm of a three-piece band and occasionally witness an amateurish but spirited performance of flamenco dancing. The young people conducted themselves with their habitual decorum and amiability, and the proprietress of the
pensión
, who had regarded them somewhat suspiciously on their arrival, now beamed at them as they came in for the somewhat repetitive, but decent fare she served: soup, fish or veal, chips, salad and water melon.
The loss of innocence began, perhaps, with an awareness of their enhanced physical attractiveness. The pallor of study and factory work was burned away by the southern sun in a matter of days, and they looked at each other as into an artfully tinted ballroom mirror, with little thrills of pleasurable surprise. How handsome, how pretty, they were! How becoming was Joanna's freckled tan against her sun-bleached hair, how trim and limber Sally's brown limbs in her yellow swim-suit, how fit and virile the boys looked on the beach, or dressed for the evening in white shirts and natty lightweight slacks.
Then the rhythm of the Spanish day was itself an invitation to sensual indulgence. They got up late, breakfasted and went to the beach. At about two they returned to the
pensión
for lunch, with which they drank a good deal of wine. They then retired to their rooms for a siesta. At six, showered and changed, they took a stroll and an aperitif. They dined at eight-thirty, and afterwards went out again, into the silky Mediterranean night, to a favourite
bodega
where, sitting round a bare wooden table, they conscientiously sampled every liqueur known to the Balearic Islands. Sometime after midnight they returned to the
pensión
, a little unsteady on their feet, giggling and shushing each other on the stairs. They all went into the girls' room and Joanna brewed them instant coffee with a little electric gadget that you immersed in a cup of water. Then they cuddled for a while on the twin beds. But the hours they learned to identify as the most erotically exciting were those of the siesta, when they lay on their beds in their underclothes, replete with food and drink, sleepy but seldom asleep, dazed by the heat that pressed against the closed shutters, limp, unresisting vessels of idle thoughts and desires. One afternoon Desmond and Robin were lying on their beds in their Y-fronts, Robin browsing listlessly in an old copy of the
New Statesman
he had brought with him, and Desmond staring, hypnotised, at the closed shutters, where sunlight was seeping through the cracks like molten metal, when there was a knock on the door. It was Sally.
“Are you decent?”
Robin answered: “No.”
“In the nude?”
“No.”
“That's all right then.”
Sally came into the room. Neither boy moved to cover himself. Somehow it seemed too much of an effort in the heat. In any case, Sally's own knickers were clearly visible beneath the shirt, borrowed from Robin, that she was wearing by way of a negligee.
“What d'you want?” said Robin.
“Company. Jo's asleep. Move up a bit.”
Sally sat down on Robin's bed.
“Ouch, mind my sun-burn,” he said.
Desmond closed his eyes and listened for a while to the whispers, giggles, rustlings and creakings from the other bed. “In case you haven't noticed,” he said at length, “I'm trying to have a siesta.”
“Why don't you take my bed, then?” said Sally. “It's quiet in there.”
“Good idea,” said Desmond, getting up and putting on his bathrobe.
After he had left, Sally snickered.
“What?” said Robin.
“Jo's got nothing on.”
“Really nothing?”
“Not a stitch.”
Desmond knocked on the door of the girls' room. There was no reply, so he put his head around the door. Joanna was asleep, with her back towards him. Her buttocks, white against her tan, shone palely, like twin moons, in the shuttered room. He hastily closed the door and stood still in the corridor, his heart thumping. Then he knocked again, more firmly.
“What? Who is it?”
“It's me - Des.”
“Just a mo. All right.”
He went in. Joanna had covered herself with a sheet. She was flushed and her hair was stuck to her forehead with perspiration. “Is it time to get up?” she asked.
“No. Rob and Sal are larking about in our room, so I've come to have my siesta in here.”
“Oh.”
“Is that all right?”
“Make yourself at home.”
Desmond lay down on Sally's bed in the attitude of a soldier standing to attention.
“You don't look very relaxed,” said Joanna.
“Can I lie down with you?”
“All right.” He was across the room in a flash. “As long as you stay outside the sheet,” she added.
“Why?”
“I've got nothing on.”
“Haven't you?”
“It's so hot.”