by David Lodge
“That’s a phrase you’ve picked up from Jeremy, isn’t it, blue movie? It sounds nicer than pornographic film.”
“Whatever you call them.”
“I think they’re sinful,” she said, “since you ask.”
Michael looked taken aback. Even to her own ear, “sinful” had a slightly archaic ring. “I don’t see what harm they can do to adults,” he mumbled, “married people.” Then, with a sly grin he added, “You might even learn a thing or two.”
“Ah ha!” She pounced on the inference. “Look, I know how it’s done, I just don’t want to do it.” She met his eyes and held them, conscious that their talk was wobbling on a perilous edge between badinage and a serious quarrel. Michael opted for badinage.
“It’s only a harmless protein,” he said. It was an old joke between them, a line from the sex instruction film they had watched together long ago.
“I get quite enough protein, thank you,” said Miriam. “No way.”
“That’s a phrase you’ve picked up from Jeremy,” said Michael.
“Oh, I don’t deny that his style is contagious,” said Miriam. “I just don’t believe he has any principles.”
Jeremy and Polly were waiting for them in the hall, draped in matching kimonos and wearing wellington boots. “There’s only one snag about the sauna,” said Jeremy. “You have to go through the yard to get to it, and there’s a fair amount of snow on the ground. So watch your footing. Here are some wellies for you two.”
Shrieking and gasping at the shock of the cold night air, and clutching their bathrobes around them, they galumphed across the yard in their rubber boots, leaving deep footprints in the snow. Jeremy threw open the door of one of the outbuildings, and they tumbled inside. Gertrude looked up, startled, from a slatted pine bench where she was lying, swathed in a hooded dressing gown. There were a couple of other benches, a shower cubicle, and in one corner what looked like a rustic garden shed.
“Is it good and hot, Gertrude?” Jeremy asked.
“Perfect,” she replied. “One hundred degrees already.”
Jeremy distributed big blue towels, which they exchanged for their bathrobes with varying degrees of decorum.
The heat inside the sauna made Miriam gasp. “Oh!” she said. “I shall never be able to stand this. It’s burning my nostrils.”
“Breathe through your mouth,” said Polly. “And sit down low.”
There were two stepped benches on each side of the tiny cabin, with the boxed-in stove on the floor between them. The two couples divided and sat facing each other. MIRIAM, sitting at the lowest level, found herself staring up between Jeremy’s thighs at his surprisingly large genitals. She looked hastily away, then examined his face to see if his self-exposure had been deliberate. His grin, however, was no more mischievous than usual. “OK, MIRIAM?” he said.
“Now I know what a leg of lamb feels like inside a Romertopf,” she said.
“It’s more comfortable without a towel.”
“Thanks, I’ll put up with the discomfort.”
“Jeremy,” said Polly, “leave MIRIAM alone.”
“I want to make a hedonist of her,” said Jeremy. “It’s a challenge.”
“You’re banging your head against a brick wall,” said Michael. “I’ve been trying all our married life.”
“You weren’t much of a hedonist yourself, once,” said Polly. “Remember how I shocked you when I came back from Italy? You must have changed.”
“The world has changed,” said Michael, “and I’ve been trying to catch up. But Miriam won’t let me.”
“When did the world change?” said Polly.
“The world changed on or about the tenth of June, 1968.”
“Don’t you mean May?” said Jeremy. “Paris? Les évnèments?”
“No, on the tenth of June, 1968, I was in Oxford, checking into a hotel….” He recounted the story of the undergraduate in the white suit who had asked the price of a double room. “I realized then that people were no longer ashamed to admit they wanted to fuck. Now on my own honeymoon – that would have made a programme and a half, Jeremy.…” Michael told the story of the twin beds. “I was legally married, dammit. All I wanted was a reasonably comfortable bed to consummate the marriage. God knows, we’d waited long enough. And I was tongue-tied with embarrassment. Beads of perspiration literally stood out on my face.”
“Talking of perspiration,” said Miriam, who had not enjoyed this narrative, “how much longer do we have to stay in here?”
Jeremy glanced at a clock embedded in the wall. “You two could go and have your shower now. Polly and I will stay a bit longer.”
Michael and MIRIAM emerged from the sauna to find that Gertrude had gone. “Let’s shower together,” said Michael.
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” said Miriam, as they peeled off their towels and donned shower caps.
“What word?”
“You know.”
“Everybody uses it nowadays.”
Miriam stepped into the shower stall and Michael squeezed in beside her. “I don’t,” she said.
“You’re not suggesting I picked it up from Jeremy, are you? Actually, I picked it up from D.H.Lawrence. Tha’s got a loovely coont, lass,” he said, putting his hand between her legs.
Miriam pulled the lever behind his head. Michael yelled and she herself gasped as the cold water drenched them. But the sensation was not unpleasant. They wrapped themselves in their towels again, and Michael knocked on the door of the sauna, receiving a muffled acknowledgement from within. He said quickly as he sat down beside her, “Look, do me a favour – just relax and let me enjoy my weekend, eh? Just this once, indulge me. I don’t often get the chance to enjoy la dolce vita.”
“What good does it do you?”
“I just want to know what it’s like. I don’t want to die a virgin, ladolcevitawise.”
“You’re such a baby,” she scoffed. But she allowed herself to be persuaded back into the sauna for a second go. Jeremy filled a ladle with water and sprinkled a few drops on the stove, which hissed and exhaled a puff of steam. As he moved back to his seat, stepping over Polly, his towel slipped from his waist.
“Oops!” he exclaimed. “Oh, to hell with it, I’m sorry, Miriam, but it just isn’t a proper sauna with a towel.” He sat down naked.
“I’m going to take mine off too,” said Michael, suiting the action to the deed.
“Goodness, how shy-making,” said Polly. “Hadn’t we better do the same, Miriam?”
“No,” said Miriam. Polly hesitated, her breasts already half-exposed, but stayed decent. Miriam was angry, but uncertain what to do. To get up and leave would, she felt, be an admission of defeat as well as making an embarrassing scene. But to sit facing Jeremy’s blatant nakedness and knowing grin was also an embarrassment, and a kind of defeat. In the circumstances, all she could think of doing was to close her eyes and try to meditate (she had been to evening classes in transcendental meditation.) But what she found herself thinking about was how different Jeremy’s penis looked from Michael’s – not only bigger, but a different colour and shape, brown and straight like a heavy rope-end, whereas Michael’s was pale and curved and slightly pointed, reminding her, when it was flaccid, of a mouse asleep with its head in its paws. It was very hot. She felt perspiration trickling down her breastbone and on to her belly and between her legs. She leaned back and rested her head against Michael’s knees. He massaged her head gently with his finger tips, loosening the skin that was tight across the top of her skull. This was an artful move. She was not fooled, of course – she knew that he knew that she liked having her head massaged, and for that matter he knew she knew he knew. But her anger receded. There was certainly something about heat that sapped the will. She wouldn’t have greatly cared, now, if her own towel had slipped off, except that she was self-conscious about her almost non-existent breasts; she imagined Jeremy’s quick, disappointed appraisal, and Polly’s complacent glance. Michael, of cours
e, had always had a thing about big breasts. Well, he was getting an eyeful now, no doubt.
Michael was all enthusiasm for the sauna. He questioned Jeremy about the cost of buying and running the equipment, and talked of installing one himself. “There must be at least twenty-five things we need more urgently than a sauna,” said Miriam. “Where would you put it – in the garage? And cool off under the garden hose?”
“Why not?” said Jeremy. “In Finland they rush outside and roll in the snow.”
“Well, we could do that ourselves tonight,” Polly observed jokingly.
“Great idea!” said Jeremy. “What about it, folks?”
“Anything you say,” said Michael.
“It would be rather a lark,” said Polly.
“You’re all mad,” said Miriam, opening her eyes and sitting up. “You’ll catch your deaths.”
Michael begged her with his eyes to join in, and as they were mustering by the door of the outbuilding, murmured, “Come on, darling, be a sport.” She shook her head, and pulled her bathrobe more tightly around her. The whole prank, she was now convinced, was being staged-managed by Jeremy to get them all naked together. “I’ll watch you make fools of yourselves,” she said.
“Right, strip off, children, and away we go,” said Jeremy. “Across the yard and into the paddock. Last one to roll in the snow is a cissy.” He dropped his towel from his hips and raced barefoot into the night, followed by Michael. MIRIAM watched Polly’s broad buttocks jouncing in the light that streamed out across the snow from the open door as she waddled after them, squealing and shrieking. In the paddock they raced in circles, yelling and laughing, throwing snowballs, tipping each other up in flurries of powdery snow, rubbing handfuls of it into each other’s bare skin. More light was shed on the scene from windows in the house, as curtains were drawn and sashes thrown up. Cries of wonder and encouragement came from the children, hilariously delighted at this untoward behaviour in their parents. It was, MIRIAM had to admit, a surprisingly innocent and appealing spectacle, a cold pastoral. The wagging breasts and penises, the dark smudges of pubic hair, seemed quite unshocking in that crystal setting. MIRIAM began to regret that she had not, after all, joined in. It seemed possible, suddenly, that she had been quite mistaken in resisting the momentum of the whole evening, that there was nothing after all to be afraid of, that there might be a kind of pagan salvation, a way back to that state of innocence the poets called the Golden Age, in this shared nakedness, without shame, without erotic intent, this pure, childlike play of naked bodies in the snow. Miriam’s hand plucked at the belt of her bathrobe. But it was too late. The others were already running back. Then, as she watched, Michael seemed to stumble and fall, and did not get up. Jeremy and Polly stooped over him, and began dragging and carrying him towards the open door. MIRIAM ran out to meet them.
“You’ve killed him!” she screamed.
“He’s all right, he’s breathing,” gasped Jeremy.
“Breathing! I should hope he is breathing,” Miriam shouted. “Otherwise there’ll be a few other people not breathing around here.”
Michael soon recovered when they got him inside, wrapped him up and chafed his limbs. “Don’t say ‘I told you so’,” were his first words to Miriam.
“I can’t understand it,” said Jeremy. “The Finns do it all the time.”
“Michael doesn’t happen to be a Finn,” said Miriam.
“I’ll phone Doctor Gordon,” said Polly. “Just to be on the safe side.”
“I’m perfectly all right,” said Michael. “Please don’t bother.”
“Phone him,” said Miriam.
The doctor came and examined Michael, probed him with a stethoscope and took his pulse.
“You fainted because of the shock to your body,” he said. “The sudden change of temperature.”
“But the other two didn’t faint,” Michael pointed out.
“Well, they’ve probably got stronger hearts,” said the doctor.
“You mean, I’ve got a weak heart?”
“Only relatively. But I wouldn’t go rolling about in the snow without any clothes on again, especially after getting overheated and putting away a fair amount of drink.”
After the doctor had gone, Michael allowed himself to be taken off to bed, without any further reference to mulled wine or Deep Throat. In bed, he clung to MIRIAM more like a child than a lover, his penis as small and soft as a mouse. “So I’m not going to die young of cancer, after all,” he said. “I’m going to die young of a heart attack.”
“Oh, be quiet and go to sleep,” said Miriam. She did not confess that she had been on the point of rushing out into the snow herself. “By the way,” she said, for it seemed a good moment to make the announcement, “I’ve applied to the Poly for admission to the social workers’ course.”
Michael gave out a grunt which she interpreted as resigned acceptance.
In the kitchen, where they were tidying up, Jeremy said to Polly, “Pity about that. I hope he’ll be all right.”
“What were you up to, anyway?” said Polly. “What was your little game?”
“What do you think?”
“You must be mad,” she said, “to think that you had any chance at all with those two.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jeremy. “Michael was hypnotized by your boobs.”
“He always was,” said Polly.
“And Miriam kept sneaking glances at my prick.”
“So I noticed. But they’re still just about the last couple in the world…. Apart from the fact that I’m not interested in that sort of carry-on, as you very well know.”
“Well, that was it, you see. It struck me that if I could persuade a couple of square RCs to have a go at group sex, you couldn’t very well drop out.”
“That was quite clever of you, I must admit,” said Polly. “Then the silly bugger has to spoil it all by passing out,” said Jeremy.
“Poor Michael,” said Polly. “How awful if he’d died!”
“Not a bad way to go, actually,” said Jeremy. He got out a bottle of whisky and held it up to the light. “I can think of worse deaths.”
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” said Polly.
“No, I think I’ll do some work,” he said. “Have we got any books on the Catholic Church? I really think that there may be a programme in this Festival thing.”
“I think I’ve got a biography of John XXIII somewhere,” said Polly. “Will you read in bed?”
“No, I’ll go in the study,” said Jeremy. “Just tell me where the book is.”
Jeremy read for an hour and a half with total concentration. Then he closed his book and turned out the lights on the ground floor. Quietly he climbed the staircase and entered his bedroom. Polly was asleep, breathing deeply, a glass of water and a bottle of Nembutal tablets on her bedside table. Jeremy touched her shoulder lightly, but she did not stir. He left the bedroom and went softly along to one of the three bathrooms in the house. A few minutes later he emerged, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, but instead of returning to his bedroom he turned in the opposite direction and climbed another flight of stairs to Gertrude’s room. He entered quietly, without knocking.
The next morning the snow was beginning to thaw, but MIRIAM insisted on leaving immediately after breakfast in case the roads got worse, and no one attempted to resist her will. The drive home through the slush was slow and nerve-racking and it was dark by the time they arrived. When Miriam opened the door of the house the phone was ringing. It was Angela.
“Is Dennis there?”
“No, why?”
“We’ve had a row. He’s walked out.” “What about?”
“He’s been having an affair with his secretary.” “Dennis! I don’t believe it.”
“I found a letter in his wallet. I was looking for money for mass this morning.”
“Oh, Angela!”
“She came round on Christmas morning with a present for Nicole. I thought she was just being nice. She’s n
ot really all that pretty. Young, of course.”
“Listen, I don’t understand,” said Miriam. “Why did she write him a letter if they see each other every day at work?”
“Apparently that’s what she does, she slips love letters into his correspondence. This one was to tell him that she’d been on the Pill for over a month.”
“You mean, they haven’t actually….”
“According to Dennis, they both got drunk at the Christmas booze-up at the factory and he took her home and he was going to sleep with her because he thought he ought to –”
“Ought to?”
“Because they’d been snogging, he thought it was expected. He thought she’d be hurt if he didn’t.”
Miriam couldn’t help laughing. “He would! Just like Dennis.”
“But then he discovered that she wasn’t on the Pill, so they didn’t.”
“This doesn’t sound so bad, after all,” said Miriam. Michael came into the room and cocked an enquiring eyebrow. She gestured him away.
“Yes, but then we had this terrible row and I think he’s gone to her,” said Angela.
“Why?”
“Because I told him to.”
“Why did you?”
“Because of this terrible row.” Angela sounded impatient, as if Miriam were being slow on the uptake. “He said he’d worshipped me with his body and I’d never shown any gratitude. So I told him to try his secretary.”
Miriam was silent, not knowing what to say. It was hard to imagine Dennis moved to the pitch of invoking his marriage vows.
“He said I use Nicole as an excuse for ignoring his needs.”
“That was unkind,” said Miriam loyally. “And untrue.”
“It was unkind,” said Angela. “I suppose it might be true. I told him I hadn’t got anything out of our sex life for years. That was unkind, but true.” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm and slightly drowsy.
“Are you all right, Angela?” said Miriam. “Have you taken anything?”
“Just a couple of Valium. Then I had some sherry.”
“That’s going to knock you out. You’d better go to bed. I’d come over, but we’ve only just got back from Kent and the roads are terrible.”
