“The trouble is,” said Desmond, “that we got attached to the people we want to marry before we had a chance to get sexual experience with anyone else.”
“You know, Des, that's rather neatly put,” said Sally.
It was like old times again: the relaxed camaraderie of their undergraduate days was restored. There was again a lively four-pointed discussion over coffee late at night. But it was not until the penultimate night of their holiday that they faced the fact that there was only one solution to their dilemma. They were sitting on the beds in the girls' room, flushed and bright-eyed from the drinks they had consumed in the course of the evening (rather more than usual, for they were getting reckless with their pesetas) when Desmond put it to them.
“It seems to me,” he said, swirling the coffee dregs in his tooth mug, “that if we all want to have the experience, but we don't want to anticipate marriage, and we don't want to go with tarts or gigolos...”
“Certainly not,” said Sally.
“What a revolting idea,” said Joanna.
“Then there's only one possibility left.”
“Swap, you mean?” said Robin.
“Mmm,” said Desmond. To his surprise, nobody laughed. He glanced swiftly round the group. Their eyes did not meet his, but beneath lowered lids they gleamed with the sly wantonness of children who have been left alone together, for too long, in an empty house, on a wet afternoon.
Some two hours later, Sally knocked at the door of the room she shared with Joanna. Robin opened it almost immediately, pale-faced and staring wildly.
“Have you finished?” Sally whispered.
He nodded, with a puppet-like jerk of the head, and stood aside to admit her. She avoided his eyes. “Goodnight,” she said, and almost pushed him into the corridor. He was still standing there, staring at her, as she closed the door. Inside the room, Joanna was sobbing quietly into her pillow.
“Oh God,” said Sally, “Don't tell me you did it?”
Joanna sat up. “Didn't you, then?”
“No.”
“Oh, thank
heavens
!” Joanna collapsed into renewed tears. “Neither did we.”
“What are you crying about, then?”
“I thought you and Des... You were such a long time.”
“We were waiting for
you
. Des was frantic.”
“Poor Des!”
“I wonder how you can stand him.”
“Rob was
beastly
.”
“Was he?” Sally sounded pleased.
“Oh Sal, what happened to us? How could we ever dream of doing something so awful?”
“I don't know,” said Sally, getting into bed. “Perhaps it's this place. Sultry and adultery and all that.”
“You said it wasn't adultery,” Joanna sniffed.
“It would have been jolly near it this time,” said Sally.
When Robin returned to his room, Desmond was smoking in the darkness. Robin silently took off his robe and got into bed.
“All right?” said Desmond, clearing his throat.
“Yes,” replied Robin. “And you?”
“Oh fine.” He added after a pause, “I meant, you got on all right?”
“Yes. That's what I thought you meant.”
“Oh.”
“Is that what you thought
I
meant when you said 'Fine?'”
“Yes.”
“That's what I thought. What I meant.”
“Ah.” Desmond stubbed out his cigarette. “'Night then.”
“Goodnight.”
They turned and faced their respective walls, wide awake and racked with jealousy and hatred.
Next morning they rose, dressed, and shaved in a hostile silence. Each surreptitiously disposed of an unopened packet of contraceptives before going down to breakfast.
The meal was strained. Joanna and Sally, secure in the knowledge that nothing irreparable had happened the previous night, were inclined to make light of the whole affair. It never occurred to them that Robin and Desmond had not been taken into each other's confidence. To them the boys’ behaviour seemed merely boorish and unsporting; but to the boys the levity of Joanna and Sally seemed heartless and depraved. When, at length, Joanna indulged in her favourite quotation, Desmond leaned across the table and slapped her face, hard and resoundingly. A sudden hush fell over the dining room. A young waiter fled, rattling crockery, to the kitchen. Joanna whimpered, nursing her flushed cheek, her incredulous eyes swamped with tears.
“Des!” Sally exclaimed. “What a foul thing to do!”
“You encouraged her,” Robin accused.
Joanna rose unsteadily to her feet. Sally scrambled to assist her. “You make me sick,” she hissed at Robin and Desmond. “You know what's the matter with you? You're both impotent, so you try to prove your virility by hitting.” Impotent?
Both
impotent? Desmond and Robin looked at each other and illumination flashed between them.
“Jo!”
“Sal! Wait”
They rose to pursue the girls, but a little Spaniard with a moustache interposed himself and inflated his chest. The proprietress bustled in with the young waiter in tow, grasping a saucepan, like a weapon, in her hand. The girls disappeared upstairs. Desmond and Robin decided to leave the premises. As they emerged into the street, the two Americans passed in a hired pony and trap. They winked and raised their eyebrows interrogatively. One grasped his bicep and flexed his forearm; the other formed a circle with his finger and thumb.
“Oh go to hell,” said Robin.
The quarrel was soon made up, and the misunderstanding erased. That afternoon, the last of their holiday, they took their siestas as before, Desmond with Joanna and Sally with Robin. Three months later, Desmond and Joanna got married rather suddenly, Sally being the bridesmaid and Robin the best man. A few weeks later the roles were reversed.
The two couples continued to take their summer holidays together. Having three children apiece, of approximately the same ages, they found the arrangement worked well. Now those children are themselves grown up, and fly off on package holidays for the under-30s whose advertising copy is a positive incitement to sexual promiscuity. As for Des and Rob and Jo and Sal, they have all become enthusiastic golfers in middle age, and spend their summer holidays exploring the links on the east coast of Scotland, where the climate is generally described as “bracing.”
“
H
otel des Pins!” said Harry. “More like Hotel des Boobs.”
“Come away from that window,” said Brenda. “Stop behaving like a Peeping Tom.”
“What d'you mean, a Peeping Tom?” said Harry, continuing to squint down at the pool area through the slats of their bedroom shutters. “A Peeping Tom is someone who interferes with someone else's privacy.”
“This is a private hotel.”
“Hotel des Tits. Hotel des Bristols. Hey, that's not bad!” He turned his head to flash a grin across the room. “Hotel Bristols, in the plural. Geddit?”
If Brenda got it, she wasn't impressed. Harry resumed his watch. I'm not interfering with anyone's privacy,” he said. “If they don't want people to look at their tits, why don't they cover them up?
“Well go and look, then. Don't peep. Go down to the pool and have a good look.” Brenda dragged a comb angrily through her hair. “Hold an inspection.”
“You're going to have to go topless, you know, Brenda, before this holiday's over.”
Brenda snorted derisively.
“Why not? You've nothing to be ashamed of.” He turned his head again to leer encouragingly at her. “You've still got a fine pair.”
“Thanks very much, I'm sure,” said Brenda. “But I intend to keep them covered as per usual.”
“When in Rome,” said Harry.
“This isn't Rome, it's the Côte d'Azur.”
“Côte des Tits,” said Harry. “Côte des Knockers.”
“If I'd known you were going to go on like this,” said Brenda, “I'd never have come here.”
For years Harry and Brenda had taken family holidays every summer in Guernsey, where Brenda's parents lived. But now that the children were grown up enough to make their own arrangements, they had decided to have a change. Brenda had always wanted to see the South of France, and they felt they'd earned the right to treat themselves for once. They were quite comfortably off, now that Brenda, a recent graduate of the Open University, had a full-time job as a teacher. It had caused an agreeable stir in the managerial canteen at Barnard Castings when Harry dropped the name of their holiday destination in among the Benidorms and Palmas, the Costas of this and that, whose merits were being debated by his colleagues.
“The French Riviera, Harry?”
“Yes, a little hotel near St Raphael. Brenda got the name out of a book.”
“Going up in the world, aren't we?”
“Well, it is pricey. But we thought, well, why not be extravagant, while we're still young enough to enjoy it.”
“Enjoy eyeing all the topless birds, you mean.”
“Is that right?” said Harry, with an innocence that was not entirely feigned. Of course he knew in theory that in certain parts of the Mediterranean women sunbathed topless on the beach, and he had seen pictures of the phenomenon in his secretary's daily newspaper, which he filched regularly for the sake of such illustrations. But the reality had been a shock. Not so much the promiscuous, anonymous breastbaring of the beach, as the more intimate and socially complex nudity around the hotel pool. What made the pool different and more disturbing, was that the women who lay half-naked around its perimeter all day were the same as those you saw immaculately dressed for dinner in the evening, or nodded and smiled politely at in the lobby, or exchanged small talk about the weather within the bar. And since Brenda found the tree-shaded pool, a few miles inland, infinitely preferable to the heat and glare and crowdedness of the beach (not to mention the probable pollution of the sea), it became the principal theatre of Harry's initiation into the new code of mammary manners.
Harry - he didn't mind admitting it - had always had a thing about women's breasts. Some men went for legs, or bums, but Harry had always been what the boys at Barnard's called a tit-fancier. “You were weaned too early,” Brenda used to say, a diagnosis that Harry accepted with a complacent grin. He always glanced, a simple reflex action, at the bust of any sexually interesting female that came within his purview, and had spent many idle moments speculating about the shapes that were concealed beneath their sweaters, blouses and brassieres. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to find this harmless pastime rendered totally redundant under the Provençal sun. He had scarcely begun to assess the figures of the women at the Hotel des Pins before they satisfied his curiosity to the last pore. Indeed, in most cases he saw them half-naked before he met them, as it were, socially. The snooty Englishwoman, for instance, mother of twin boys and wife to the tubby stockbroker never seen without yesterday's
Financial Times
in his hand and a smug smile on his face. Or the female half of the German couple who worshipped the sun with religious zeal, turning and anointing themselves according to a strict timetable and with the aid of a quartz alarm clock. Or the deeply tanned brunette of a certain age whom Harry had privately christened Carmen Miranda, because she spoke an eager and rapid Spanish, or it might have been Portuguese, into the cordless telephone which the waiter Antoine brought to her at regular intervals.
Mrs Snooty had hardly any breasts at all when she was lying down, just boyish pads of what looked like muscle, tipped with funny little turned-up nipples that quivered like the noses of two small rodents when she stood up and moved about. The German lady's breasts were perfect cones, smooth and firm as if turned on a lathe, and never seemed to change their shape whatever posture she adopted; whereas Carmen Miranda's were like two brown satin bags filled with a viscous fluid that ebbed and flowed across her ribcage in continual motion as she turned and twisted restlessly on her mattress, awaiting the next phone call from her absent lover. And this morning there were a pair of teenage girls down by the pool whom Harry hadn't seen before, reclining side by side, one in green bikini pants and the other in yellow, regarding their recently acquired breasts, hemispheres smooth and flawless as jelly moulds, with the quiet satisfaction of housewives watching scones rise.
“There are two newcomers today,” said Harry, “or should I say, four.”
“Are you coming down?” said Brenda, at the door. “Or are you going to spend the morning peering through the shutters?”
“I'm coming. Where's my book?” He looked around the room for his Jack Higgins paperback.
“You're not making much progress with it, are you?” said Brenda sarcastically. “I think you ought to move the bookmark every day, for appearance's sake.” A book was certainly basic equipment for discreet boobwatching down by the pool: something to peer over, or round, something to look up from, as if distracted by the sudden noise or movement, at the opportune moment, just as the bird a few yards away slipped her costume off her shoulders, or rolled on to her back. Another essential item was a pair of sunglasses, as dark as possible, to conceal the precise direction of one's gaze. For there was, Harry realized, a protocol involved in toplessness. For a man to stare at, or even let his eyes rest for a measurable span of time upon, a bared bosom, would be bad form, because it would violate the fundamental principle upon which the whole practice was based, namely, that there was nothing noteworthy about it, that it was the most natural thing in the world. (Antoine was particularly skilled in managing to serve his female clients cold drinks, or take their orders for lunch, stooping low over their prone figures, without seeming to notice their nakedness.) Yet this principle was belied by another, which confined toplessness to the pool and its margins. As soon as they moved on to the terrace, or into the hotel itself, the women covered their upper halves. Did bare bosoms gain and lose erotic value in relation to arbitrary territorial zones? Did the breast eagerly gazed upon, fondled or nuzzled by husband or lover in the privacy of the bedroom, become an object of indifference, a mere anatomical protuberance no more interesting than an elbow or kneecap, on the concrete rim of the swimming pool? Obviously not. The idea was absurd. Harry had little doubt that, like himself, all the men present, including Antoine, derived considerable pleasure and stimulation from the toplessness of most of the women, and it was unlikely that the women themselves were unaware of this fact. Perhaps they found it exciting, Harry speculated, to expose themselves knowing that the men must not betray any sign of arousal; and their own menfolk might share in a vicarious proprietorial way in this excitement. Especially if one's own wife was better endowed than some of the others. To intercept the admiring and envious glance of another man at your wife's boobs, to think silently to yourself, “Yes, all right, matey, you can look, as long as it's not too obvious, but only I'm allowed to touch 'em, see?” That might be very exciting.