Lying beside Brenda at the poolside, dizzy from the heat and the consideration of these puzzles and paradoxes, Harry was suddenly transfixed by an arrow of perverse desire: to see his wife naked, and lust after her, through the eyes of other men. He rolled over on to his stomach and put his mouth to Brenda's ear.
“If you'll take your top off,” he whispered, “I'll buy you that dress we saw in St Raphael. The one for twelve hundred francs.”
The author had reached this point in his story, which he was writing seated at an umbrella-shaded table on the terrace overlooking the hotel pool, using a fountain pen and ruled foolscap, as was his wont, and having accumulated many cancelled and rewritten pages, as was also his wont, when without warning a powerful wind arose. It made the pine trees in the hotel grounds shiver and hiss, raised wavelets on the surface of the pool, knocked over several umbrellas, and whirled the leaves of the author’s manuscript into the air. Some of these floated back on to the terrace, or the margins of the pool, or into the pool itself, but many were funnelled with astonishing speed high into the air, above the trees, by the hot breath of the wind. The author staggered to his feet and gaped unbelievingly at the leaves of foolscap rising higher and higher, like escaped kites, twisting and turning in the sun, white against the azure sky. It was like the visitation of some god or daemon, a Pentecost in reverse, drawing words away instead of imparting them. The author felt raped. The female sunbathers around the pool, as if similarly conscious, covered their naked breasts as they stood and watched the whirling leaves of paper recede into the distance. Faces were turned towards the author, smiles of sympathy mixed with
Schadenfreude
. Bidden by the sharp voice of their mother, the English twins scurried round the pool's edge collecting up loose sheets, and brought them with doggy eagerness back to their owner. The German, who had been in the pool at the time of the wind, came up with two sodden pages, covered with weeping longhand, held between finger and thumb, and laid them carefully on the author's table to dry. Pierre, the waiter, presented another sheet on his tray. “
C'est le petit mistral
,” he said with a
moue
of consideration. “
Quel
dommage
!” The author thanked them mechanically, his eyes still on the airborne pages, now mere specks in the distance, sinking slowly down into the pine woods. Around the hotel the air was quite still again. Slowly the guests returned to their loungers and mattresses. The women discreetly uncovered their bosoms, renewed the application of Ambre Solaire, and resumed the pursuit of the perfect tan.
“Simon! Jasper!” said the Englishwoman. “Why don't you go for a walk in the woods and see if you can find any more of the gentleman's papers?”
“Oh, no,” said the author urgently. “Please don't bother. I'm sure they're miles away by now. And they're really not important.”
“No bother,” said the Englishwoman. “They'll enjoy it.”
“Like a treasure hunt,” said her husband. “or rather, paperchase.” He chuckled at his own joke. The boys trotted off obediently into the woods. The author retired to his room to await the return of his wife, who had missed all the excitement, from St Raphael.
“I've bought the most darling little dress,” she announced as she entered the room. “Don't ask me how much it cost.”
“Twelve hundred francs?”
“Good God, no, not as much as that. Seven hundred and fifty, actually. What's the matter, you look funny?”
“We've got to leave this hotel.”
He told her what had happened.
“I shouldn't worry,” said his wife. “Those little brats probably won't find any more sheets.”
“Oh yes they will. They'll regard it as a challenge, like the Duke of Edinburgh Award. They'll comb the pine woods for miles around. And if they find anything, they're sure to read it.”
“They wouldn't understand.”
“Their parents would. Imagine Mrs Snooty finding her nipples compared to the nose tips of small rodents.”
The author's wife spluttered with laughter. “You are a fool,” she said.
“It wasn't my fault,” he protested. “The wind sprang out of nowhere.”
“An act of God?”
“Precisely.”
“Well, I don't suppose He approved of that story. I can't say I cared much for it myself. How was it going to end?”
The author's wife knew the story pretty well as far as he had got with it because he had read it out to her in bed the previous night.
“Brenda accepts the bribe to go topless.”
“I don't think she would.”
“Well, she does. And Harry is pleased as Punch. He feels that he and Brenda have finally liberated themselves, joined the sophisticated set. He imagines himself telling the boys back at Barnard Castings about it, making them ribaldly envious. He gets such a hard-on that he has to lie on his stomach all day.”
“Tut, tut!” said his wife. “How crude.”
“He can’t wait to get to bed that night. But just as they're retiring, they separate for some reason I haven't worked out yet, and Harry goes up to their room first. She doesn't come at once, so Harry gets ready for bed, lies down and falls asleep. He wakes up two hours later and finds Brenda still missing. He is alarmed and puts on his dressing gown and slippers to go in search of her. Just at that moment, she comes in.
Where the hell have you been?
he says. She has a peculiar look on her face, goes to the fridge in their room and drinks a bottle of Perrier water before she tells him her story. She says that Antoine intercepted her downstairs to present her with a bouquet. It seems that each week all the male staff of the hotel take a vote on which female guest has the shapeliest breasts, and Brenda has come top of the poll. The bouquet was a mark of their admiration and respect. She is distressed because she left it behind in Antoine's room.
“Antoine's room?”
“Yes, he coaxed her into seeing his room, a little chalet in the woods, and gave her a drink, and one thing led to another, and she ended up letting him make love to her.”
“How improbable.”
“Not necessarily. Taking off her bra in public might have released some dormant streak of wantonness in Brenda that Harry had never seen before. Anyway, she's rather drunk and quite shameless. She taunts him with graphic testimony to Antoine's skills as a lover, and says he is much better endowed than Harry.”
“Worse and worse,” said the author's wife.
“At which point Harry slaps her.”
“Oh, nice. Very nice.”
“Brenda half undresses and crawls into bed. A couple of hours later, she wakes up. Harry is standing by the window staring down at the empty pool, a ghostly blue by the light of the moon. Brenda gets out of bed, comes across and touches him on the arm.
Come to bed
, she says.
It wasn't true what I told you
. He turns his face slowly towards her.
Not true?
He says.
No, I made it up
, she says.
I went and sat in the car for two hours with a bottle of wine and I made it up.
Why?
he says.
I don't know why
, she says.
To teach you a lesson, I suppose. I was fed up with
you. But it was a stupid idea.
Come to bed
. But Harry just shakes his head and turns back to stare out of the window.
You always used to say size didn't matter
, he says.
Well, it doesn't, not to me
, she says.
I told you, I made it all up
. Harry just shakes his head disbelievingly, gazing down at the blue, breastless margins of the pool. That's how the story was going to end: 'he gazed down at the blue, breastless margins of the pool.' “
As he spoke these words, the author was himself standing at the window, looking down at the hotel pool from which all the guests had departed to change for dinner. Only the solitary figure of Pierre moved among the umbrellas and tables, collecting discarded bathing towels and soiled teatrays.
“Hmm,” said the author's wife.
“Harry's fixation on women's breasts, you see,” said the author, “has been displaced by an anxiety about his own body from which he will never be free.”
“Yes, I see that. I'm not totally without critical acumen, you know.” The author's wife came to the window and looked down. “Poor Pierre,” she said. “He wouldn't dream of making a pass at any of us women. He's obviously gay.”
“Fortunately, said the author, “I hadn't got that far with my story when the wind scattered it all over the countryside. But you'd better get out the Michelin and find another hotel. I can't stand the thought of staying on here on tenterhooks all the time in case one of the guests comes back from a walk in the woods with a compromising piece of fiction in their paws. What an extraordinary thing to happen.”
“You know,” said the author's wife. It's really a better story.”
“Yes,” said the author. “I think I'll write it. I'll call it 'Tit for Tat'.”
“No, call it ‘Hotel des Boobs',” said the author's wife. “Theirs and yours.”
“What about yours?”
“Just leave them out if it, please.”
Much later than night, when they were in bed and just dropping off to sleep, the author's wife said:
“You don't really wish I would go topless, do you?”
“No, of course not,” said the author. But he didn't sound entirely convinced, or convincing.
E
mma Dobson, everyone who knew her agreed, was a young woman of strong character. “Emma has a clear vision of her goals and priorities,” the headmistress of the Sixth Form College where she was Head Girl wrote in her final report, “and she has the ability and determination to realise them.” This prediction proved accurate. She obtained a good 2.1 in modern languages at Bath University (a degree highly valued by employers because of its emphasis on current affairs rather than literature) and a Master's degree in Business Studies at Warwick. During the postgraduate course she lived conveniently and economically at home, a spacious modern house in the leafiest part of Solihull, and at the end of it was accepted for a fast-track training scheme by a national bank. She joined their Midland headquarters in Birmingham, where she was soon promoted to a responsible position in the Private Clients department. Her father, who was MD of a company in Coventry which manufactured components for the car industry, gave her an interest-free loan to put down the deposit on a one-bedroom flat on the seventh floor of a new building overlooking a canal in the middle of the city, part of a system of drab industrial waterways recently transformed into an environment for leisure pursuits and stylish urban living.
At a course on new developments in financial services she met a young accountant called Neville Holloway who also worked for a Birmingham-based firm, and started going out with him. He was a good-looking young man with dark brown eyes and beautiful white teeth which he frequently exposed in an engaging smile. Emma's teeth were a disappointment to her, small and irregular, so she had got into the habit of not smiling very much, but she was a natural blonde with otherwise pleasing features and a shapely size 12 figure. Catching sight of herself in a mirror standing or sitting beside Neville, she thought they made a handsome couple. After a while Neville moved into Emma's flat and contributed his fair share to the mortgage repayments and other expenses. They could walk to their respective workplaces, and at weekends they went jogging along the canal towpaths. They ate out a good deal in the numerous restaurants of varied ethnic character that had sprung up in the city centre. It was an agreeable life.
Emma's parents, who had grown up under the influence of a more puritanical moral code, did not really approve of their daughter's cohabitation with Neville, but they liked him well enough and reluctantly accepted that it was the way of young people nowadays, so they refrained from reproachful comment. One day, however, when the relationship was about three years old, Mrs Dobson, unable to contain her feelings any longer, asked Emma if she and Neville had any plans for the future. “You mean marriage?” Emma asked. “Well, yes dear,” Mabel Dobson said nervously. “As a matter of fact, I have been thinking about it lately,” Emma said, to her mother's great relief. Emma had always had very clear plans for her future, in which marriage had its place. She and Neville had been living happily together long enough for her to feel comfortable about upgrading the relationship. Her mother's question was timely: it gave her a pretext for raising the matter with Neville, and she did so the very next evening.
He seemed surprised, and rather disconcerted. “Aren't we quite happy as we are?” he said. “Yes, but we can't go on like this indefinitely,” she said. “I want to have children. That is, I don't positively want them at this moment,” she added scrupulously, “but I know I will eventually, and if you leave it too late there are all kinds of health risks.” “I take your point, Em,” Neville said, “but there's no immediate hurry, is there?” “It takes a long time to organize a wedding these days, especially the kind I want,” she said. “What kind is that?” he asked. “One to remember,” Emma said. “For instance, I want to have the reception at Longstaffe Hall and I happen to know they're booked up for at least a year ahead for summer Saturdays.” Longstaffe Hall was an eighteenth-century country house in the green belt just outside Solihull, converted into a hotel. Neville had dined there with the Dobsons to celebrate Mrs Dobson's birthday, and was conscious of its attractions as a venue. “Does it have to be a Saturday - or in summer?” he said, smiling his engaging smile. “Yes, it does,” Emma said, unsmiling. “In June, before everyone you want to invite starts going on holiday.”
Emma had always promised herself a really memorable wedding, a sumptuous, extravagant, classic wedding, to mark the end of her single state. It would be a kind of reward for all the disciplined hard work that had made her life a success so far, and also a foil to it. She was aware that other people, her family and friends, especially girlfriends, thought of her as too disciplined for her own good, lacking warmth, incapable of spontaneity, tone-deaf to romance. Well, her wedding would show them they were wrong, that she was not indifferent to imagination, emotion, and pleasure. But of course, being Emma, she brought to the preparation for this event the same methodical concentration, the same insistence on controlling every detail, which she had applied in other departments of her life. Outside business hours she made the planning of the wedding her mission, her passion, her all-consuming occupation.