Out of the Shelter

by David Lodge

  Timothy shrugged.

  – I didn’t ask him. I s’pose he thinks war is wrong, or something.

  – Perhaps he didn’t want to get sent to Korea, said Kate, a little harshly.

  – Well, you can’t blame him. You said yourself that the last war didn’t achieve anything.

  – I didn’t say that. What I said was . . . oh, I can’t remember, she exclaimed irritably. But I think that if a man’s called up, he ought to make the best of it.

  There was silence between them for a while. Timothy wondered why he had tried to defend Don, since he inclined towards Kate’s opinion of conscientious objection.

  – What are you doing tomorrow? she asked at length.

  – I’m going for a walk with Don. The Philosophy Way, he said, or something.

  – Oh, the Philosophers’ Way. You get a wonderful view of the town from there.

  He had almost got used to living in the hostel. Going out in the mornings was the trickiest part. He usually waited till nine o’clock, but there was always the risk that someone would see him coming out of Dolores’ room. Usually there were two or three cleaners swabbing the tiled floor of the lobby as he stepped out of the lift. They knelt back on their heels to wring out their cloths, and he sensed their curious, covert glances as he walked past them. He wondered if they thought he had been spending the night with one of the girls in the hostel. The idea amused, embarrassed and piqued him by turns. He had added to his experience lately, but as regards sex the additions were abysses concealing more than they revealed. Perhaps the most astonishing thing he had learned, on his very first evening, was that a woman might say the forbidden word aloud in her love, or lust.

  For the next two nights he kept the door of the cupboard locked and undisturbed. On the third he opened it again. He could hear nothing. Emboldened, he stepped inside and pulled the door almost shut behind him. Immediately he heard the sound of a radio. High up in the corner of the cupboard there was a chink of light, caused by a crumbling of the plaster where some pipes passed through the wall. Evidently the sounds from next door came through this hole, and were amplified by the cupboard when the door was closed.

  He listened again the next night before he went to bed, and the night after that. But he only heard the woman moving about her room, opening and shutting drawers, running water in the basin, turning on the radio, winding up a clock. On the following night there was dead silence at first, and he was about to leave the cupboard when he heard the woman come into the room. She had a man with her, a different one from last time, he thought. They sounded merry and slightly drunk. The woman kept saying Shh! and giggling. He heard the clink of a bottle against a glass. The voices dropped to a low murmur, interrupted by an occasional giggle or guffaw. The light went out behind the chink in the wall. He waited with bated breath for it to begin again: the woman’s moan of pleasure and pain, the no no no no, and then yes, the blunt word of abandonment. But all he heard was the man panting and saying, Oh Jesus! again and again like someone wrestling in prayer. There was silence for a while, and then the woman said, Would you pass me that pack of cigarettes? and the man said, I’m sorry, honey, I really am, and she said, Forget it, and he said, Too much damned bourbon, and she yawned, and he said, I can’t understand it, and she said, Honey, I’m tired, I think you’d better go, and the man said, Maybe if we wait awhile, and the woman said peevishly, Look, let’s forget it, it can happen to anybody. Then the light came on again in the chink, and he heard the taps running, and the man arguing in a low earnest voice, and the woman’s voice hard and clipped. Eventually a door opened and closed and the room was silent except for the noise of a jar dropping in the sink and the woman cursing. Timothy withdrew from the cupboard, mystified and frustrated. He tried to fit pictures to what he had heard, but his speculations petered out in a row of dots, like the interesting passages in the paperback books on Dolores’ bookshelf.

  In the course of his imaginings, he gradually invested the woman next door with a particular physical appearance. He created her out of words and phrases that he associated with sensual love. She was voluptuous, her breasts were like ripe fruit, her hair was lustrous, blue-black, drawn up from the nape, her movements were langorous, she had pouting, sensual lips. It was something of a shock when he actually set eyes on her. He and Kate were in the lift – she had just fetched him to leave for Baden-Baden – when the woman came out of her room. The lift was already descending as she came into sight. Looking up from almost ground level, he glimpsed legs like sticks on steep wedge-heeled shoes, a long skinny figure in a bright green fitted suit, a white triangular face and a coarse hank of ginger hair hanging down over one eye. Then she was gone. It wasn’t exactly, in the phraseology of Dolores’ library, a body made for love, yet it was, in its way, vivid and provocative. He glanced slyly at Kate, but she hadn’t taken any particular notice of the woman.

  – I hope you slept well, she said, it’s going to be a long day.

  – I always do.

  – Quiet here at night, is it?

  – Oh yes, very quiet, he assured her.

  Two cars were drawn up outside the hostel: Vince’s milkwhite Mercedes, with its hood down, and Mel Fallert’s huge grey Oldsmobile, his new Olds, as he quaintly called it. Mel was leaning forward in the driver’s seat, with his chin resting on the steering wheel, revving his engine with a wanton disregard for petrol consumption. Dot waved from the back seat as Kate and Timothy emerged from the hostel, and Ruth hopped out to greet them.

  – Hi Kate! Hi Timothy! How d’ya like my leisurewear?

  She was dressed entirely in an electric shade of blue – slacks, sweater, high-heeled sandals and a baseball cap with a long peak. Even her earrings were blue — two large discs with a number imprinted on them in gold.

  – Marvellous, Ruth, said Kate politely. Where did you get the earrings?

  – See what they are? Ruth cocked her head to one side like a parakeet. Cute, huh?

  – Why, they’re chips! Casino chips!

  – Right. Hundred-Mark chips. I brought them back with me last time we won at Baden. Mel was furious. He said, Only my wife would spend two hundred Marks on a pair of plastic earrings. She emitted her harsh cawing laugh.

  There was some discussion about who should travel in which car. Eventually Timothy was awarded the privilege of riding with Vince, and the rest of the party got into the Oldsmobile.

  – No speeding now, Vince, Kate cautioned.

  – O.K., honey.

  Speed restrictions were very strict for American drivers in Germany, Vince explained, because of the high accident rate. Sometimes he took his car over the frontier into France just for the pleasure of putting his foot down. But even at the permitted miles-per-hour, the low-slung, open car gave an exhilarating sensation of speed, and when they got among the mountains of the Black Forest, and the road coiled itself in tight loops, Vince did not slow down. The long white bonnet seemed to be pointing straight at a continuous curving wall of trees that swept round Timothy in a blur, first this way and then that. Sometimes he closed his eyes, but always he had complete confidence in Vince’s driving. Cradled in the deep, soft seat, he felt a seamless part of the car, and the car was an extension of Vince’s strong brown hands. No tension was visible in his face, except a slight, elated baring of the teeth under the fair moustache.

  After a while, Vince slowed down to allow the others to catch up with them. The noise of the engine, and the rush of wind, subsided and made conversation possible. They got talking about Hitler and the Nazis again.

  – Nobody’s satisfactorily explained Hitler, as far as I know, said Vince. He’s a mystery, an enigma. What d’you think of when I say, Hitler?

  – I dunno, said Timothy. I suppose I think of his face – you know, the toothbrush moustache and the cowslick of hair.

  – Right, said Vince, as if he were putting Timothy through some kind of test. And the face, does it seem like an ordinary human face?

  – No, not really. Mor
e like a Guy Fawkes mask.

  – A mask, exactly! No matter how many photographs of Hitler you look at, you always get this sense of a mask. Never a human expression. Always that fixed, frozen look, even when he’s smiling, which wasn’t often. You don’t get that with any other war leader – Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. You always feel that they were people as well as being quote great men unquote. Hitler always looks ridiculous in pictures.

  – He used to frighten me, Timothy said. I used to dream about him.

  – Yeah, frightening too. Ridiculous and frightening. He was so ridiculous it wasn’t funny any more, you know what I mean? Take the cartoonists — he must have seemed like a gift, with his little moustache and all, but nobody really succeeded in caricaturing him. He was a caricature already.

  – In that case, said Timothy, why did the Germans obey him?

  – Oh, said Vince smiling, now you’ve asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question . . . The thing about Hitler, if you look at his record, on paper, up to about 1942, he’d not only gotten Germany off its knees – he’d gotten control of most of Europe, too. Well, just going on the record, he looks like some kind of genius, like Napoleon or Alexander the Great and those guys. But when you get close and look at the man himself for some kind of explanation of how he did it, it all just dissolves. You’ve got some ratty little guy, with no education, no humanity, no background, no ideas of his own, just hollow really, a hollow man spouting crazy slogans about blood and iron and the Volk and the Jews being in league with the Communists . . . He didn’t even have any vices – he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink – d’you know what he got his kicks from?

  – No?

  – Cream cakes. Cream cakes, for Chrissake. Every time some country collapsed, all the Nazis went off to celebrate with coffee and cream cakes.

  – What about Eva Braun? Timothy said.

  – Ah, Eva Braun . . . I often wonder if Hitler ever screwed her. Did you know he only had one ball?

  An organ-like car horn blared behind them. Vince glanced in the rear-view mirror.

  – They’ve caught us up.

  Timothy turned round to see the great grey car rising and falling slowly on its springs like a raft. Kate, sitting on the front seat between Mel and Ruth, smiled and waved. Not for the first time, his mind returned to the questions about her that he had brought with him to Germany, along with his Harris tweed sports jacket and four changes of underpants. That she was no longer a practising Catholic made it easier to imagine that she was having some illicit affair, but if so, who was it with? Vince seemed the obvious candidate – even Timothy could feel the magnetism of his blond good looks, his casual mastery of life. But that was just the problem: Timothy had to admit that, although Kate’s looks had improved, she was still no great beauty, and never would be. Why should Vince, who could surely have any girl he liked come running to him at the beck of his finger, choose poor old Kate, with her almost too big breasts and her definitely too big legs? True, there was no apparent rival to Kate, and he seemed to spend much of his spare time with her – but always in the company of Greg, and usually others too. Surely, if there was anything between them, they would want more privacy? But he had never felt that his own presence was an embarrassment or encumbrance; or, if he had, it was in relation to all three of them. There was nothing which suggested an understanding between Kate and Vince which didn’t include Greg too. Were they both in love with Kate, then, and she unwilling or unable to choose between them? If so, they were remarkably relaxed in their rivalry. Then could it be – the thought suddenly flashed upon him – that they were both her lovers, that they were sharing her between them? He tried to speculate how such an arrangement might work out in practice, and was surprised to realize how little shocked he was by the idea. Everything seemed so strange and new to him here, everyone seemed to live by notions so different from those that obtained at home, that almost anything was imaginable.

  – Why do they call it the Philosophers’ Way? he asked Don.

  – I suppose it was always a favourite walk with the faculty at the University. A good place to muse on the eternal verities.

  – It’s a stiff climb.

  – It levels off in a moment.

  They tackled the last steep bend of the road in silence. Years ago, at school, a boy had asked in class what philosopher meant, and the master had said that a philosopher was a man who tried to explain what was real and what was true. Some philosophers had believed that nothing was real, including themselves. The class had roared with laughter.

  – There you are, said Don, as they came out on to a level path. They took a rest leaning on a stone wall, looking down across the river at the castle on the far side. Wherever you stood, Heidelberg composed itself effortlessly into a picture. Don pointed out the buildings of the University.

  – Which university will you go to, Timothy?

  – I dunno. I might not go to university at all. My Dad wants me to do an apprenticeship instead.

  – What kind of apprenticeship?

  – Architectural drawing.

  – You could study architecture at a university, couldn’t you?

  – Mmm. But you’d have to be terrifically good to get in.

  – Well, you never know – maybe you are terrifically good.

  Timothy made no comment, and Don went on:

  – If you were an architect, what would you want to build?

  – I dunno. Churches, maybe.

  – Churches? Don seemed amused.

  – What’s wrong with churches? Timothy said defensively.

  – Nothing. Nothing at all. I just wonder whether we need any more churches.

  – We do in England – Catholic ones, anyway. The ones we’ve got are crowded out.

  – If I were an architect, I’d go in for building schools and universities – they’re the churches and cathedrals of our age. I guess you must be grateful that you came along just as the British educational system began to expand?

  – I don’t know about grateful. They wouldn’t let me take my O-Levels when I was ready for it.

  – Who are they?

  – The rotten Government, of course.

  – Hitler, said Vince, stroking the Mercedes round a hairpin bend, you have to admire him in a way. He had the true nihilist spirit. Death and destruction. And he was consistent to the end. D’you know what he said? We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us, a world in flames. And, by God, he did. You should have seen Berlin in ’45. A world in flames. Götterdämmerung.

  – What’s that mean? Timothy asked.

  –The Twilight of the Gods. It’s an opera by Wagner. Hitler was very fond of Wagner.

  –The Twilight of the Gods, Timothy repeated slowly. The words were strangely stirring.

  – It ends with whatsername, Brunnhilde, throwing herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre.

  – Wasn’t Hitler’s corpse burned with Eva Braun’s?

  – Right. In the Chancellery garden, with the Russians half a mile away. Buildings on fire and shells exploding all over. All it needed was the music. And d’you know something? The name of the guy who married them was Wagner. Can you beat that?

  – But they never found the bodies, did they?

  – So the Russians say. Vince grinned, glancing across at Timothy. You think he may still be alive, holed up somewhere?

  – No, said Timothy, looking at the endless waves of trees, dense and impenetrable. Where had he read or heard a story about Hitler and his staff hiding in a convent, disguised as nuns? He couldn’t remember. A cloud passed over the sun and darkened the foliage. He could see why they called it the Black Forest.

  Don laughed.

  – You’re a real little Tory, aren’t you, Timothy?

  – It’s not that, he said. But Attlee is such a drip. It would be all right if Churchill was Prime Minister.

  – You admire Churchill?

  – He won the war, Timothy said, simply. It was a rotten trick to throw
him out.

  – There’s not another country in the world that would have done it. That’s what was so splendid about it.

  – Splendid? I call it rotten.

  – But do you realize what it means, Timothy? There’s not another country in the world that would have voted out a man who had just led them to victory in a major war. Can you imagine the Germans doing it, even if they’d had the chance? Or the French? Or the Americans? It means you British put politics above patriotism, that’s what it means. That’s why you could never have a dictatorship in Britain.

  – What about America?

  – We have a contender, said Don. His name’s McCarthy.

  Baden-Baden was a holiday town of brightly painted buildings, green lawns, flower beds, fountains and flags. A narrow river rushed helter-skelter through the centre of the town in a series of shallow falls, and everywhere there was the murmur of running water. Baden was in the French Zone, and slim, sallow French soldiers, with flashes of scarlet on their tight-fitting uniforms, mingled with the civilians sitting in the sun or strolling by the river.

  They checked into a hotel, halfway up one of the steep cobbled streets in the centre of town, with an atmosphere of dignified, old-fashioned luxury. Thick carpets and high ceilings muffled the excited chatter of their party, and the heavy gilt-framed mirrors on the walls of the long corridors seemed to reflect their jazzy sports clothing almost reproachfully as they passed. Timothy had a room to himself with its own adjoining bathroom. The bath had three sets of taps, marked Brause, Susswasser and Thermalwasser; and on the wall was a large thermometer with a wooden handle, and an hour-glass. He was playing absorbedly with this apparatus when Kate came to fetch him to drive to the golf club. On the way she pointed out the Casino: a huge, white, neo-classical building with Corinthian columns, unexpectedly chaste and decorous. He had expected something more lurid.

  The golf course was in the foothills about two miles outside the town. They had lunch on the clubhouse terrace, overlooking the last green, where white tablecloths were spread under gaily striped umbrellas. German, French and American accents mingled with the soft clash of cutlery and the chinking of glasses. The long green fairways sprawled beneath them, and to their left he noticed a small timbered hotel, buried up to its eaves in trees, with a small oval swimming pool winking in the sun.