I went into my study and called Dad. He answered immediately, as if he was sitting next to the phone. ‘Hallo, who’s that?’ he said in a loud angry tone.
‘It’s Desmond, Dad,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘What’s the matter? I want to know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘I’ve been dumped here, all on my own. That bloke who drove me down here just buggered off without a word of goodbye.’
‘That bloke was me, Dad,’ I said. ‘And I had a cup tea with you before I left.’
‘What d’you mean, it was you? I’m talking about the bloke who lives up north. He has a huge house with four lavs, and curtains that open and close on their own, like a cinema. And a posh wife, called Fred for some reason, and a horde of relatives. He drove me down here, and hardly said a word the whole way.’
‘That’s me, Dad,’ I said. ‘I live up north and I have a big house and a wife called Fred. It’s short for Winifred. She gave you some turkey and ham to take home.’
‘That’s true,’ he said after a pause. ‘I’ve just had some for my tea.’ His tone was troubled. ‘So it was you.’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the matter with me then?’
‘It’s because you’ve been away for a few days, and now you’re back home, you’re a little bit confused. It’s nothing to worry about.’
But it is.
29
th
December
. Cecilia left today. Fred and I took her to the station and put her on the train to Durham. She’s gone to stay with her eldest son and his wife, who live there; she usually spends Christmas with us and New Year with them. So Fred and I are alone at last. I was looking forward to a quiet weekend, apart from a few hours of deafened socialising at a neighbour’s New Year’s Eve party which we always go to, arriving late and sloping off soon after the compulsory kissing and oldlangsyning, but Jakki and Lionel have invited us to join them at a place called Gladeworld. Apparently it’s an up-market holiday camp in a forest, about sixty miles from here. They were planning to spend the New Year holiday there with Lionel’s brother and his wife, but Lionel’s brother is ill in bed with bronchitis and a temperature, so they had to drop out at the last moment, and Jakki asked Fred if we would like to come in their place. Fred relayed Jakki’s description to me: ‘You stay in little chalets scattered among the trees. She says they’re very comfortable, and they’ve booked an executive chalet which is extra-luxurious. En suite bathrooms and so on. You can either cater for yourselves or eat at one of the restaurants. There’s a heated indoor swimming pool under a huge plastic dome with artificial waves and rapids and palm trees, and a spa, and an indoor sports hall and so on. There are no cars: you leave your car in the car park and everybody rents bikes or walks.’
‘It sounds ghastly,’ I said.
‘Well I think it sounds rather fun,’ said Fred. ‘It’s enormously popular - Jakki says you have to book up months ahead. It’s very nice of her and Lionel to think of asking us.’
‘Would we be paying for ourselves?’ I asked.
‘Well of course we’d pay our share.’
I asked her how much, and she named a sum which I thought rather steep. ‘So really we’d be doing them a favour, or Lionel’s brother a favour, rather than the other way round?’ I said.
Fred dismissed this comment with a contemptuous toss of the head. ‘You’re always complaining about how you hate New Year’s Eve, almost as much as you hate Christmas - well, here’s your chance to get away for it, do something different,’ she said. ‘A little exercise, some fresh air, a lot of relaxation. It would do us both good.’
‘Cooped up with Jakki and Lionel for three days?’
‘Jakki is my friend, and Lionel is perfectly pleasant. And we don’t have to do everything together all the time. And it’s only two full days. And anyway,’ Fred concluded, ‘if you won’t go, I’ll go on my own.’
I could see I would have to give in, because I couldn’t risk having a third row with Fred in the same week. I eased the way with a joke.
‘How do you know they aren’t planning one of their theme nights? Wife-Swapping Night, say. With car keys in a bowl and porn videos on the television.’
Fred hooted with laughter. ‘Do you fancy Jakki, darling?’
‘Absolutely not!’
‘Nor I Lionel. Anyway, there wouldn’t be many car keys to choose from. You might draw me.’
‘Or Lionel,’ I said.
She chuckled. ‘You’ll come, then?’
‘I suppose I’d better,’ I said, ‘or they might propose a Troilism Night.’
‘Good, I’ll tell Jakki you agreed - but not why.’ She went off in good humour to phone Jakki.
You might draw me.
The phrase lingered suggestively in my mind, provoking the thought that Gladeworld could assist the healing of relations between us. We haven’t made love since the spanking episode a few weeks ago. Much as I dislike vigorous exercise as a rule, and especially swimming in chlorinated indoor pools, I have to admit that you get a sense of relaxed well-being afterwards that is conducive to sex. And the certainty that Jakki and Lionel would be at it like monkeys in the next bedroom might have an aphrodisiac effect. Though I wouldn’t of course admit it, I am quite looking forward to the weekend.
16
Deaf in the Afternoon
GLADEWORLD. What a strange phenomenon. Like a negative image of a place with properties, such as confinement and induced pain, that you would normally regard as being themselves negative, which has the curious effect of turning them into positives, or so it seems from the contented looks of the inhabitants. A benevolent concentration camp. A benign prison. A happy hell. It is a square mile or two in area, with a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire around the circumference, and a single entrance like a military checkpoint, with a barrier that is raised and lowered as the internees arrive in their cars, have their documents scrutinised by uniformed security guards, and are admitted. Inside the compound, several thousand men, women and children live in one-storey huts, much smaller than the homes they have come from, cunningly distributed among the trees to produce an illusion of privacy. They wear a kind of prison uniform: track suits, shorts, trainers and, in the rain, kagools. They spend their days toiling up and down, backwards and forwards, on foot or on bicycles, along the macadamed roads and paths connecting their huts to various assembly points: for example, a supermarket where you shop, as you shop at home, but less conveniently, because the produce is inferior, and the prices are higher, and you must carry your heavy shopping bags back to your hut because cars are confined to the car park; for example, a large sports hall where, for an additional charge, not negligible, you can play under artificial light and in artificial air various sports (tennis, badminton, squash, racquet ball, billiards, snooker, table tennis, etc.), watched critically by a ring of fellow internees waiting for your allotted time to end and their own to begin; and, most exemplary of all, the Tropical Waterworld, a huge geodesic plastic dome enclosing, in a heated, humid atmosphere, a complex of swimming pools and water features of various shapes and sizes: labyrinthine channels and tunnels with powerful pump-driven currents, steeply angled chutes, spiralling tubular slides, and white-water rapids sculpted in fibreglass, which begin at the very top of the structure in the open air and descend with increasing force and speed, at first outside and then inside the wall of the dome, to end precipitously in a deep pool at the bottom. Although theoretically dedicated to swimming, the place is designed to prevent one from swimming more than a few strokes in any direction.The main pool is randomly shaped with no way of ascertaining which dimension is its length and which its breadth, so people swim in all directions and keep bumping into each other, and every now and again an invisible machine creates a heavy swell in which they cannot swim at all but only bob up and down like survivors of an air crash in the sea waiting for rescue, except that they shriek with pleasure rather than fear.
Change the soundtrack, substitute screams and howls for laughter and badinage, put a red filter on the lens to give a fiery glow to the spectacle, and you would think you were in some modern version of Dante’s Inferno, or the hells depicted by medieval painters. These half-naked crowds tossed in the turbulent waves, or hurtling down the spiralling semi-transparent tubes at terrifying velocity, or tumbled arse over elbow through the rapids, choked with water, blinded by spume, spun round in whirlpools, dragged backwards by undertow, entangled with each other’s limbs, bruised and battered by impact with the fibreglass walls, to be at last tipped into a boiling pit at the bottom, irresistibly recall those antique images of the damned, condemned to endless repetition of their punishment. For as soon as they splash down at the bottom of the rapids, or are spat out from the ends of the spiralling tubes, and clamber out of the water, drenched and dazed, the Gladeworlders obediently mount the stairs that wind upwards between the artificial rocks and join the long lines of people queuing at the upper levels for the tubular slides, or plunge into the steaming open-air pool that leads to the rapids, to endure the terror and the pain all over again.
Desmond expounded this analogy to Fred, Jakki and Lionel, at the end of their first full day. It was New Year’s Eve and they had decided to cook their own dinner in their ‘villa’, as the two-bedroomed chalet was rather grandly called, because the only eating place inside Gladeworld which looked remotely promising was fully booked, and so, almost certainly, was every restaurant in the neighbourhood - ‘even if the security guards at the entrance would let us out for a few hours,’ Desmond had remarked, when the arrangements for the meal were under discussion. ‘Of course they’d let us out,’ said Jakki, whose sense of irony was not highly developed. ‘Take no notice of him,’ said Winifred. ‘It’s just his way.’ In spite of this advice Jakki reacted with the same literal-minded antagonism to his metaphorical description of the Tropical Waterworld. ‘Terror and pain?’ she said, frowning at him. ‘I don’t know what you mean.You can see how much everybody is enjoying themselves.’
‘It’s a joke, love,’ said Lionel. ‘Desmond’s only joking. Do you know,’ he went on, ‘this place has ninety-five per cent occupancy all year round? Ninety-five per cent. They must be doing something right.’
‘Well, I think it’s marvellous for families,’ said Fred. ‘I’m going to recommend it to Marcia and Peter. I’m sure the children would love it.’
‘Of course you’ve got to be an active sort of person to get the best out of it,’ said Jakki. She and Lionel had been out jogging before breakfast and cycling on their rented bikes in the woods before lunch; Desmond and Winifred had volunteered to do the shopping for dinner, and walking the mile or so from their chalet to the supermarket and back again, burdened with bulging plastic bags, had been quite enough strenuous exercise, as far as Desmond was concerned anyway. The afternoon had been designated a time for relaxation in the Tropical Waterworld. He thought he had never been in a less relaxing place in his life than the Tropical Waterworld, beginning with its changing area, a slimy-floored maze of cubicles each with two doors, one leading to the pool and one to the entrance/exit, that locked and opened simultaneously by a simple mechanism which it took him twenty minutes to work out, and lined with lockers that on the insertion of a one-pound coin would allow the key to be turned and extracted, attached to a rubber band which you wore round your wrist or ankle. On returning to the changing area rather earlier than his companions, having left his glasses and hearing aid safe in the locker, he was unable to read the number imprinted on his rubber band, and when he asked passing bathers to read it for him he was unable to hear their replies, so eventually he handed his key to a small child who led him like a helpless imbecile to his locker and opened it for him.
In between these humiliations he limited his activities under the dome to swimming around slowly in circles, a few strokes at a time, in the main pool and in the heated open-air pond at the top, keeping well away from the weir that led to the rapids. Nevertheless, even that small amount of immersion and exertion had imparted an agreeable inner warmth, a kind of sensuous lassitude, to his limbs; and now, after a good dinner - coq au vin prepared by Winifred and baked apples stuffed with dates cooked by Jakki - and especially after a generous share of the two bottles of Pomerol which he had prudently brought with him from home, he felt relaxed enough to forget the irritations and frustrations of the day, and let his thoughts play idly over the amorous prospects for the night.
One of the two bedrooms was a double, and the other a twin. Jakki and Lionel, who had got inside the chalet first, had bagged the double. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Jakki had said, adding with a little smirk, ‘You can always push the singles together.’ ‘I don’t think we’ll bother,’ Winifred had said, which was unpromising. On the other hand, that was yesterday evening, after a drive made tedious by a long hold-up on the motorway and all the effort of unloading the cars and driving them back to the car park and walking back to their chalet, which seemed to be as far from the car park as it was possible to be within the confines of the perimeter fence. He and Winifred were both weary, retired early, and slept soundly under their duvets in the separate beds. But tonight, he thought, Winifred might be disposed to intimacy. Her nervous system would also have been flooded with endorphins released by exercise, she too would be experiencing the same transient but agreeable sense of well-being as himself, and it seemed to him that when their eyes met occasionally across the dinner table hers had a soft and inviting glow, and her smile a genuine warmth.
It was unfortunate, therefore, that it happened to be New Year’s Eve, so that when, after they had cleared the table and stacked the soiled dishes in the dishwasher (this appliance, Jakki emphasised, being a luxury exclusive to the executive villas, along with jacuzzi baths in the en suite bathrooms and a private sauna on the back porch), and had partaken of decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea, Desmond declared, with a covert wink at Winifred, that he felt pleasantly tired and ready for bed, Jakki and Lionel protested that this was out of the question, and insisted that they must all sit up and see the New Year in. And it was doubly unfortunate that Lionel had brought with him a bottle of single malt to, as he waggishly put it, ‘get the right spirit into us’.