The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up and Other Stories

by David Lodge

  The following week was my last on the job. Aware of this fact, Ray and Mitch competed fiercely to exceed my takings, while I responded eagerly to the challenge. We ran, literally ran, with our trolleys from platform to platform, as one train departed and another began to fill up. We picked out rich-looking Americans in the boat-train crowd and hung about in their vicinity with our most expensive magazines, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, that cost a whole half-crown each, prominently displayed. We developed an eye for the kind of young man on the Bournemouth Belle who would try to impress his girlfriend with a lavish expenditure of money on magazines that clearly neither of them would be reading. We shuffled our stocks and rearranged them several times a day to appeal to the clientele of the moment. We abbreviated our lunch-hour and took our teabreaks on the move. In takings, Ray and I were neck and neck, day by day: sometimes he was the winner by a few shillings, sometimes myself. But the real needle match between us was on the Friday, which was to be my last day of work, since I had earned some overtime which entitled me to have the last Saturday off. Both Ray and I realised that this Friday would see the record smashed yet again, and perhaps the magic figure of £20 in a single day – the four-minute mile of our world – achieved by one or other of us.

  Recklessly we raced across the station with our trolleys that day, to claim the most favourable pitches beside the first-class compartments of departing expresses; jealously we eyed each other’s dwindling stocks. Like Arab street-traders we accosted astonished passengers and pestered them to buy our wares, forcing our way into intimate circles of tearfully embracing relatives, or tapping urgently on the windows of carriages whose occupants had already settled themselves for a quiet snooze. At one point I saw Ray actually running beside a moving train to complete the sale of a copy of Homes and Gardens.

  At the end of the day, Mitch had taken £15:8s:6d, Ray £20:1s:9d and myself £21:2s:6d. Ray turned away, sick and white, and ground the cigarette he had been smoking under his heel. Mitch swore softly and drew blood from his mutilated finger ends. I felt suddenly sorry for them both. The future stretched out for me as rosy as the table lamps of the Bournemouth Belle. Within a few years, I had reason to hope, it would be I who would be taking his seat for luncheon on the plump Pullman cushions; and although I didn’t actually guess that before many more had passed I would be catching the boat train for the Queen Mary and a Fellowship in the United States, I had a hunch that such extended horizons would one day be mine. While for Ray and Mitch the future held only the prospect of pushing the trolleys from platform to platform, until perhaps they graduated to serving behind the counters of the shop – or, more likely, became porters or cleaners. I regretted, now, that I had won the competition for takings, and denied them the small satisfaction of beating me in that respect at least. But the worst was still to come.

  Mr Hoskyns was paying me off: three one-pound notes and a ten-shilling note. ‘You’ve done well, son,’ he said. ‘Sales from the trolleys have turned up a treat since you came ’ere. You’ve shown these two idle little sods what ’ard work really means. And mark my words,’ he continued, turning to Ray and Mitch, ‘I expect you two to keep up the good work after ’e’s gorn. If you don’t turn in this sort of sum every Friday, from now on, I’ll want to know the reason why – you understand?’

  The next day, I overheard my parents talking in the kitchen. ‘He seems very moody,’ said my mother. ‘Do you think he’s fallen in love?’ My father snorted derisively. ‘In love? He’s probably just constipated.’ ‘He seemed very quiet when he came home from work yesterday,’ said my mother. ‘You’d almost think he was sorry to leave.’ ‘He’s probably wondering whether it’s a good idea to go to university after all,’ said my father. ‘Well, he can come straight into the business now, if he wants to.’

  I burst into the kitchen. ‘I’ll tell you why I’m moody!’ I cried.

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to other people’s private conversations,’ said my mother.

  ‘It’s because I’ve seen how capitalism exploits the workers! How it sets one man against another, cons them into competing with each other, and takes all the profit. I’ll have nothing more to do with it!’

  My father sank on to a kitchen chair with a groan, and covered his face with his hands. ‘I knew it, I knew it would happen one day. My only son, who I have been slaving for all these years, has had a brainstorm. What have I done to deserve that this should happen to me?’

  So that was how I became a sociologist. My first job was also my last. (I don’t call this a job – reading books and talking about them to a captive audience; I would pay to do it if they weren’t paying me.) I didn’t, as you see, go into business; I went into academic life, where the Protestant ethic does less harm to one’s fellow men. But the faces of Ray and Mitch still haunt me, as I last saw them, with the realisation slowly sinking in that they were committed to maintaining that punishing tempo of work, that extraordinary volume of sales, indefinitely, and to no personal advantage, or else be subjected to constant complaint and abuse. All because of me.

  After my lecture on Weber, I usually go back to Marx and Engels.

  Where the Climate’s Sultry

  Long, 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 for ever 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 her 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 artificially tinted ballroom mirror, with little thrills of pleasurable surprise. How handsome, how pretty they were! How becoming was Joanna’s freckled tan against her sunbleached hair, how trim and limber Sally’s brown limbs in her yellow swimsuit, 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 round 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.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it.’ Desmond took off his bathrobe.

  ‘And so they make a group that’s quite antique . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Half-naked, loving, natural and Greek.’ Joanna blushed slightly. ‘Byron.’

  ‘Him again! Pretty sexy type, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he was, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Like me,’ said Desmond complacently, stroking Joanna through the sheet.

  The next day, after lunch, there was a little embarrassed hesitation on the landing before they separated for the siesta. Then Desmond said to Robin, ‘Why don’t you go in Sally’s room this time?’ and a few moments later Robin and Joanna passed each other in the corridor wearing bathrobes and bashful smiles. The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that. They formed a silent, thoughtful group over the late-night coffee. The communal cuddle was a rather perfunctory ritual now: all had tasted headier pleasures in the afternoon. Afterwards they found it difficult to sleep in their hot, dark bedrooms.

  ‘Des . . .’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Have you ever, you know . . .?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Done it with a girl.’

  After a longish pause, Desmond answered, ‘I don’t know.’

  Robin sat up in his bed. ‘Either you have or you haven’t!’

  ‘I tried once, but I don’t think I did it properly.’

  ‘What, you and Jo?’

  ‘Good God, no!’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘I’ve forgotten her name. It was years ago, I was camping, with the Scouts, in the Dales. These two local girls used to hang about the camp at night. Me and this other chap went for a walk with them one night. The one I was with suddenly said, “You can do me if you like.”’

  ‘Ye gods,’ Robin b
reathed enviously.

  ‘It was sopping wet on the ground, so we stood up against a tree. I kept slipping on the roots and I couldn’t see a damned thing. Afterwards she said, “Well, I wouldn’t give thee a badge for that, lad.”’

  Robin laughed aloud and gratefully.

  ‘What about you?’ Desmond enquired.

  Robin was glum again. ‘Never.’

  ‘What made you ask?’

  ‘These afternoons with Sal. It’s driving me mad.’

  ‘I know. We nearly went the whole way today.’

  ‘So did we.’

  ‘We’d better give it some serious thought.’

  ‘I think about it all the time.’

  ‘I mean precautions.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I suppose it would be risky.’

  ‘Risky!’

  ‘You didn’t bring any with you, I suppose, what d’you call ’em . . .’

  ‘French letters?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, someone of your experience . . .’

  ‘What experience?’

  ‘In the Scouts.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘What shall we do, then?’

  ‘We could try the local shops.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Robin was doubtful. ‘Catholic country, you know. Probably illegal. Anyway, what are they called in Spanish?’

  ‘Let’s look in the phrase book.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Robin jumped out of bed and turned on the light. Together they bent their heads over The Holidaymaker’s Spanish Phrase Book.

  ‘What will it be under?’

  ‘Try “The Chemist’s Shop”, or “At the Barber’s”.’