by David Lodge
He turned the card over and re-read the message, written unevenly in pencil:
Dear Timothy,
So glad you arrived safely. What is the weather like? It has been wet here, but the sun is out this morning so can’t complain. Mrs. Watkins asked after you. How is Kath? Give her our love. Will she see to your washing? Expect you are having an interesting time. Dad sends his love. Love from, Mother
There was a P.S.: What a shame about the pie.
It had taken him some time to place this reference. It seemed to have happened a long time ago.
He took from his pocket the coloured postcard he had purchased earlier in the day in the Market Square, from one of the souvenir stalls that clung to the skirts of the Holy Ghost church. He was sitting, now, in almost exactly the position from which the picture had been taken, on the north bank of the river, just downstream from the Old Bridge, looking over its pinky-brown arches and creamy, helmet-capped towers, at the rambling, ruined castle beyond, that seemed to grow out of the green mountainside as naturally as the trees. The colours of the postcard were not quite true – the greens were too vivid, losing the bluish haze that seemed to smoke from the trees all day, softening the outline of the castle. All the lines in the picture were too sharp. Whether it was because of the atmosphere, or the weathering of centuries, there wasn’t a hard edge to be seen in old Heidelberg. Nevertheless his postcard, he felt, would put sad, segmented, black-and-white Worthing in the shade.
He turned it over and took out the ball-point pen he had purchased at the P.X. to scribble a message to his parents. But the pen remained poised above the blank space. He couldn’t put into words, even with much more space than a postcard afforded, all that he had seen and experienced in the past ten days. He put the card aside, and took up his drawing pad, with its half-finished sketch of the Old Bridge. Perhaps he should just send them that, with Love from Timothy on the back. But then, he thought to himself, if he were to send a purely pictorial message, it would have to be like the Worthing postcard after all, with several little pictures: not only the Old Bridge and the Castle, but also the riverside swimming pool, a white Mercedes coupé racing dangerously down a twisting mountain road, the gilded, mirrored Grande Salle of the Baden-Baden Casino, the glittering counters of the P.X., and a basket heaped with Chicken-in-the-Rough and French Fries.
At first, most of all, it was the food that impressed him. He had never eaten so much or so well in his life. He went initially for plain American fare – chicken, steaks, hamburgers, banana splits and apple pie with ice cream. Then, when he had sated his first, astonished appetite, he became more adventurous, tried food he had never had before – trout, lobster, venison, and even German dishes like Wiener Schnitzel, which usually turned out to be much less alarming than they sounded. Among desserts, nothing quite equalled the sheer magic of Baked Alaska, but he had enjoyed crêpes Suzettes, fresh pineapple steeped in kirsch, chocolate mousse and baba au rhum.
He ate a good breakfast every morning in the Stadtgarten, and then managed with a snack or two until the evening, when Kate took her main meal. Usually they ate out, at a restaurant, but once they stayed in her room and she prepared steak and salad. Even if it was, as she half-jokingly said, the only meal she could cook, it was jolly good. She talked a lot about food that evening, blaming her fatness on a bad diet in childhood and youth.
– It was partly the war, of course, you couldn’t get enough nourishing food, so we filled ourselves with stodge, potatoes and bread-and-jam. It was terrible at school. I remember when I first joined the Americans at Cheltenham, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I went into the canteen, and they were all eating steaks, great big juicy steaks, and looking as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And when I saw some of them get up from the table leaving their portions half-eaten, it made me quite angry. I used to steal food while I was at Cheltenham . . . Oh, just little bits and pieces, sugar lumps and butter pats and cookies. Sometimes a chicken leg. Dropped my napkin over them and slipped them into my handbag. I used to give them to some friends in the town. It was hardly worth the trouble, but it made me feel better.
– But didn’t it make you fatter, all that food?
– It didn’t make me any slimmer. I just lived from one meal to the next. Then one day I had a medical. The doctor said I was seriously overweight. That put the wind up me. I was terrified that I’d lose my job on medical grounds. So the doctor put me on a crash diet, and I lost ten pounds in three weeks. I still diet, but I’m not a fanatic. Now the American girls, they either eat far too much or live on crackers and lemon juice. Always extremes. But I like them.
One of the strangest meals he had was at a place called the Headquarters Club (it was inside a barracks, and they had to show their P.X. cards to an armed guard to get in). It wasn’t the food that made it strange, but the fact that you ate a meal while you were watching a film. Between the rows of seats were rows of small round tables, and while the film was going on waiters moved about quietly in the half-darkness, taking orders for food and drink. Kate ordered sandwiches because they were easier to eat in the dark – though not all that easy, because they had three layers, and he nearly dislocated his jaw trying to bite through them all at once.
The film was an American one, about the War in the Pacific, as most American war films were in Timothy’s experience. He preferred them to British ones, which were usually about Bomber Command. They were in black and white, and there were shots of bleak airfields and Lancasters taxiing for takeoff in the dusk, their chins lifted mournfully to the skies, and then coming back at dawn in ones and twos, riddled with bullets or with their undercarriages shot away, and always there was a plane missing. These films usually made him feel rather weepy, perhaps because they reminded him of Uncle Jack. The American films were much less upsetting, although they were more bloody and violent, and the blood was in Technicolor.
The film he saw with Kate at the Headquarters Club was called The Halls of Montezuma, which was the first line of a marching song; and it ended with a terrific battle scene, with the Marines advancing over a grassy plain, and the Mustangs roaring overhead firing rockets into the Jap emplacements, with the music of the march swelling in the background. He watched it with his blood pounding and the mayonnaise from his club sandwich dribbling down his chin. Later he realized that it was a Friday and that there had been chicken and bacon in the sandwich. Kate told him not to worry, there was no fasting or abstinence for Catholics in the Army, because they were considered to be on active service. He sniffed a little sarcastically at that.
A place where he often ate during the day was the P.X., a huge store in the American quarter of the town. Kate took him there on his first Saturday morning to buy him some lightweight clothes. They took one of the yellow Army buses that served as public transport for the U.S. personnel. You had to show your P.X. card to the driver of the bus, and to the soldiers at the gates of the P.X. store. It seemed funny at first to Timothy to have soldiers guarding a shop, but when he got inside it didn’t seem so strange. He could imagine a stampede of people from outside trying to get in if they ever discovered what was there. He had never seen such an intoxicating profusion of goods in his life: food, clothing and sweets and gramophones and cameras and toys and sports equipment and suitcases and gadgets of all kinds that he had never seen before and whose functions he could only guess at. In his first week he went to the P.X. nearly every day, just to walk round the loaded shelves and counters in an orgy of curiosity and covetousness, appeasing his greed by the purchase of some small item like a ball-point pen or a pair of nylon socks.
On his first visit, Kate bought him a lightweight sports jacket made of mohair, a pair of cool, silky trousers to go with it, and three drip-dry shirts, one white, one pale blue, and one of yellow and brown checks that fastened under the collar with a little loop so that it looked neat buttoned up even without a tie. The shirts had the long pointed collars that were the height of fashion at home. He felt guilty about letting
Kate buy him all these clothes, but he couldn’t resist them. It wasn’t just the expense that troubled and excited him like a sin, but the idea of buying so many things all at once. But then Kate started to do her own shopping, casually picking up six pairs of nylons here, four hundred cigarettes there, without even breaking off their conversation, and he began to realize that he was in a whole new world of buying and selling. Outside the store there was a ramp where people drove up and young men helped them to load their cars because they had too much to carry across the car park. The boots of the cars (only the Americans called them trunks) opened greedily like the jaws of whales until they were gorged with paper bags and cartons, then snapped shut, and the cars rolled away across the vast macadamed space where the multicoloured roofs of every make of American automobile shimmered in the sunshine.
Before they left the store, Kate had a coffee and Timothy a chocolate milk-shake at the snack bar.
– Isn’t that the ex-G.I. you met on the train? Kate said.
It was indeed Don, reading a book over a cup of coffee on the other side of the horseshoe-shaped counter. He smiled his recognition, and came round to greet them.
– Well, hi, Timothy! How d’you like this temple of conspicuous consumption?
– You mean this shop? It’s smashing.
– Seen much of the town yet?
– A bit, yes. I’ve been to the Castle.
– Are you still living in Heidelberg, Don? said Kate. Timothy tells me you’ve just been discharged from the Army.
– That’s right. I’m supporting myself by doing some teaching at the Army School.
– In no hurry to get home, then?
– Don’s going to the London School of Economics, Timothy explained.
– Are you! Kate said with interest.
– Well, I’m hoping to, said Don. I haven’t heard the result of my interview yet. What about your exam results, Timothy?
– I’d forgotten all about them, he said honestly. But aren’t the schools on holiday here?
– I’m teaching a special class of slow learners – or lazy learners. If the kids fail to get their grades in the school year, they have a chance to make up by doing a summer session. It’s only mornings . . . Maybe I could show you around the town one afternoon, Timothy?
Kate welcomed this offer enthusiastically, and they made an arrangement to meet.
– What a nice boy, she remarked, as he loped off, with his book in his hand. I thought he was well-educated when you first introduced him. Some of the G.I.s are pretty crude. He may turn out to be a very useful friend, Timothy. Of course, he’s nearer my age than yours, but I don’t know any teenagers . . . I know one or two officers with families – perhaps I could find you some friends that way.
– I’m all right, said Timothy. I like being on my own.
The American boys and girls of his own age that he saw, mainly at the open-air swimming pool down by the river, seemed to belong to another race. The boys were like seals in and out of the water, strangely smooth and sleek with their cropped bullet heads and tanned, fleshy torsos. The girls tended to be plump, too, and wore curiously old-fashioned swimming costumes with skirts to mid-thigh that billowed out as they plumped heavily, feet-first, into the water. They arrived and departed in large groups, boys and girls together, dressed in bright shirts worn outside their jeans, talking loudly and unselfconsciously, though what they were talking about he could never quite catch. He felt that it would be almost as difficult to communicate with them as with the German boys he saw swimming in the river.
– They’re not supposed to, Kath remarked, as they walked to the pool after their shopping expedition, but you can’t blame them in this weather.
– Why not?
– The river’s polluted. There’s a risk of typhoid. The Americans requisitioned the only pool in town, and the Germans are pretty bitter about it. There’s talk of building them a new one on the outskirts of town.
You needed your P.X. card, of course, to get into the pool. In a few days, Timothy had developed a superstitious attachment to this small square of cardboard. It seemed like a talisman of magical powers that admitted him to a world of privilege and pleasure. His constant fear was that he would lose it and find himself excluded from the friendly, protective enclaves of the Americans. The swimming pool, the Stadtgarten, the P.X., Kate’s room – these were his bases, safe barricaded positions between which he carefully plotted his daily movements so that he always found himself near one or the other when he needed rest or refreshment. For, though he responded to the beauty and charm of Heidelberg and its setting, a measure of unease, an indefinable sense of risk, never left him as he strolled the public German streets. It was not that people looked hostile, or resentful. They didn’t even look particularly defeated. On the whole they seemed quite ordinary, decently clothed and well fed, bustling about the town on their business, not given to smiling overmuch, perhaps, but placid and self-possessed. Only once did Timothy glimpse the Germany of his imagination. But that occasion affected him deeply.
He was walking up one of the cobbled streets behind the University that led to the Castle. About halfway up there was a recess in the wall on the right-hand side where water trickled from a spout above a little stone bowl. The man walking in front of Timothy stopped to drink, stooping and twisting his head to catch the water in his mouth. It was a hot day and the climb was tiring. Timothy slowed his pace, intending to cool his face and hands in the water, if not to take the risk of drinking it. Then, as he approached, the man straightened up, and turned to face Timothy, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. It was a face of such coarse brutality that, in spite of the warm day, Timothy turned cold with fear. A bumpy, shaven iron-grey skull, small bloodshot eyes, flared nostrils, thick lips elongated into a sneer by a scar that curved down to the jawline – he took in this much as he swerved aside and stumbled on up the hill.
He glanced fearfully over his shoulder as, panting for breath, he reached the brow of the hill, but the man had disappeared, presumably up one of the steep lanes that branched from the road. Timothy passed into the cool shade of the Castle grounds, but did not stop until he had reached the sunny parapet of the western wall. There he sat, feeling the warmth of the stone through his trousers. The roofs and steeples of the town shimmered beneath him; long, low barges plied up and down the river, threading the arches of the Old Bridge; somewhere a clock or church bell chimed. But it was a long time before the peaceful scene calmed him. Meeting the ugly man had been like kicking a stone in a summer garden and uncovering a loathsome nest of insects – it made you distrust the smiling surface of things. The face had been the very image of the concentration-camp commander – the Beast of Belsen and other bogeymen who had scowled and strutted through the newspapers and nightmares of his childhood.
It was a heatwave, Kate said. You could feel the heat coming even in the early morning, when the mist was still rising from the river. By midday the sun was beating down fiercely out of a clear sky, and you took care to walk in the shade. The heat made the swimming pool not a place for exercise, but an oasis for rest and refreshment. He found it strangely voluptuous, this living dangerously in the heat – letting the sun daze and dehydrate you, then cheating it by slipping into the pool, or tipping an ice-cold drink down your throat in the shade of a tree. Kate had warned him not to sunbathe for more than a few minutes at a time at first, but he was impatient to be tanned like her friends. Beside them he felt as white as a root just plucked from the soil. On that first Saturday afternoon they swam immediately, and afterwards Kate rubbed some pleasant-smelling suntan lotion into his back and shoulders. He lay face down on his towel, with his eyes shut against the glare, rapt by overlapping sensations of warmth and coolness. His blood was still cool from the swim, but his skin was already warm from the sun; the sweet-smelling lotion was chill on his skin, but the firm pressure of Kate’s hand was warm.
Afterwards, he performed the same service for her, kneeling at the side o
f her prostrate body, anointing her back and shoulders. Her flesh was warm and malleable, it flopped under his hands like water slapping a rock. He was embarrassed when she asked him to oil the backs of her thighs. They were her least attractive feature, colossal pillars of flesh, a legacy of the old fat Kath that she normally concealed under her skirts.
Most of Kate’s closest friends seemed to be at the pool that afternoon, grouped in a circle: Vince and Greg, an American couple called Melvin and Ruth Fallen, and two girls from Kate’s office – Dorothy, an Australian called Dot for short, and Maria, who was Dutch. Mel and Ruth were an oddly matched pair. He was a rather quiet, heavily-built man, good-looking in a grizzled sort of way. His wife was small and round and ugly, and her appearance was grotesque. She was stuffed into a gold lamé swimsuit several sizes too small for her dumpy figure, and her toenails were painted gold to match. She wore sunglasses whose frames were encrusted with sparkling synthetic stones, and a white plastic shield like a beak over her nose to protect it against sunburn. She looked like a fat little bird that had tricked itself out in stolen trinkets and she had a tireless, grating voice to match.
– Ruth’s a real New Yorker, Kate whispered to Timothy. Jewish, of course, but she’s got a heart of gold. It’s her third marriage and his second . . .
Ruth was certainly humorous and good company, but Timothy couldn’t imagine what had possessed Mel to marry her. Intercepting some of the looks he directed at hs wife, Timothy suspected that Mel found it equally puzzling.
Dot was a tall bronzed girl, whose excellent figure was sadly let down by her features: small eyes set rather close together, a long nose, and buck teeth projecting in a goofy smile. Maria was a neat little person with straight, cropped hair and a turned-up nose. She smiled all the time, but her eyes looked sad and anxious, as if she was uncertain of pleasing, or belonging.
