The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by Various

  ‘The French Riviera, Harry?’

  ‘Yes, a little hotel near St Raphael. Brenda got the name out of a book.’

  ‘Going up in the world, aren’t we?’

  ‘Well, it is pricey. But we thought, well, why not be extravagant, while we’re still young enough to enjoy it.’

  ‘Enjoy eyeing all those topless birds, you mean.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Harry, with an innocence that was not entirely feigned. Of course he knew in theory that in certain parts of the Mediterranean girls sunbathed topless on the beach, and he had seen pictures of the phenomenon in his secretary’s daily newspaper, which he filched regularly for the sake of such illustrations. But the reality had been a shock. Not so much the promiscuous, anonymous breast-baring of the beach, as the more intimate and socially complex nudity around the hotel pool. What made the pool different, and more disturbing, was that the women who lay half-naked around its perimeter all day were the same as those you saw immaculately dressed for dinner in the evening, or nodded and smiled politely at in the lobby, or exchanged small talk about the weather with in the bar. And since Brenda found the tree-shaded pool, a few miles inland, infinitely preferable to the heat and glare and crowdedness of the beach (not to mention the probable pollution of the sea), it became the principal theatre of Harry’s initiation into the new code of mammary manners.

  Harry – he didn’t mind admitting it – had always had a thing about women’s breasts. Some men went for legs, or bums, but Harry had always been what the boys at Barnard’s called a tit-fancier. ‘You were weaned too early,’ Brenda used to say, a diagnosis that Harry accepted with a complacent grin. He always glanced, a simple reflex action, at the bust of any sexually interesting female that came within his purview, and had spent many idle moments speculating about the shapes that were concealed beneath their sweaters, blouses and brassieres. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to find this harmless pastime rendered totally redundant under the Provençal sun. He had scarcely begun to assess the figures of the women at the Hotel des Pins before they satisfied his curiosity to the last pore. Indeed, in most cases he saw them half-naked before he met them, as it were, socially. The snooty Englishwoman, for instance, mother of twin boys and wife to the tubby stockbroker never seen without yesterday’s Financial Times in his hand and a smug smile on his face. Or the female partner of the German couple who worshipped the sun with religious zeal, turning and anointing themselves according to a strict timetable and with the aid of a quartz alarm clock. Or the deeply tanned brunette of a certain age whom Harry had privately christened Carmen Miranda, because she spoke an eager and rapid Spanish, or it might have been Portuguese, into the cordless telephone which the waiter Antoine brought to her at frequent intervals.

  Mrs Snooty had hardly any breasts at all when she was lying down, just boyish pads of what looked like muscle, tipped with funny little turned-up nipples that quivered like the noses of two small rodents when she stood up and moved about. The German lady’s breasts were perfect cones, smooth and firm as if turned on a lathe, and never seemed to change their shape whatever posture she adopted; whereas Carmen Miranda’s were like two brown satin bags filled with a viscous fluid that ebbed and flowed across her rib-cage in continual motion as she turned and twisted restlessly on her mattress, awaiting the next phone call from her absent lover. And this morning there were a pair of teenage girls down by the pool whom Harry hadn’t seen before, reclining side by side, one in green bikini pants and the other in yellow, regarding their recently acquired breasts, hemispheres smooth and flawless as jelly moulds, with the quiet satisfaction of housewives watching scones rise.

  ‘There are two newcomers today,’ said Harry. ‘Or should I say, four.’

  ‘Are you coming down?’ said Brenda, at the door. ‘Or are you going to spend the morning peering through the shutters?’

  ‘I’m coming. Where’s my book?’ He looked around the room for his Jack Higgins paperback.

  ‘You’re not making much progress with it, are you?’ said Brenda sarcastically. ‘I think you ought to move the bookmark every day, for appearance’s sake.’

  A book was certainly basic equipment for discreet boob-watching down by the pool: something to peer over, or round, something to look up from, as if distracted by a sudden noise or movement, at the opportune moment, just as the bird a few yards away slipped her costume off her shoulders, or rolled on to her back. Another essential item was a pair of sunglasses, as dark as possible, to conceal the precise direction of one’s gaze. For there was, Harry realized, a protocol involved in toplessness. For a man to stare at, or even let his eyes rest for a measurable span of time upon, a bared bosom, would be bad form, because it would violate the fundamental principle upon which the whole practice was based, namely, that there was nothing noteworthy about it, that it was the most natural, neutral thing in the world. (Antoine was particularly skilled in managing to serve his female clients cold drinks, or take their orders for lunch, stooping low over their prone figures, without seeming to notice their nakedness.) Yet this principle was belied by another, which confined toplessness to the pool and its margins. As soon as they moved on to the terrace, or into the hotel itself, the women covered their upper halves. Did bare tits gain and lose erotic value in relation to arbitrary territorial zones? Did the breast eagerly gazed upon, fondled and nuzzled by husband or lover in the privacy of the bedroom, become an object of indifference, a mere anatomical protuberance no more interesting than an elbow or kneecap, on the concrete rim of the swimming pool? Obviously not. The idea was absurd. Harry had little doubt that, like himself, all the men present, including Antoine, derived considerable pleasure and stimulation from the toplessness of most of the women, and it was unlikely that the women themselves were unaware of this fact. Perhaps they found it exciting, Harry speculated, to expose themselves knowing that the men must not betray any sign of arousal; and their own menfolk might share, in a vicarious, proprietorial way in this excitement. Especially if one’s own wife was better endowed than some of the others. To intercept the admiring and envious glance of another man at your wife’s boobs, to think silently to yourself, ‘Yes, all right matey, you can look, as long as it’s not too obvious, but only I’m allowed to touch ‘em, see?’ That might be very exciting.

  Lying beside Brenda at the poolside, dizzy from the heat and the consideration of these puzzles and paradoxes, Harry was suddenly transfixed by an arrow of perverse desire: to see his wife naked, and lust after her, through the eyes of other men. He rolled over on to his stomach and put his mouth to Brenda’s ear.

  ‘If you’ll take your top off,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll buy you that dress we saw in St Raphael. The one for twelve hundred francs.’

  The author had reached this point in his story, which he was writing seated at an umbrella-shaded table on the terrace overlooking the hotel pool, using a fountain pen and ruled foolscap, as was his wont, and having accumulated many cancelled and rewritten pages, as was also his wont, when without warning a powerful wind arose. It made the pine trees in the hotel grounds shiver and hiss, raised wavelets on the surface of the pool, knocked over several umbrellas, and whirled the leaves of the author’s manuscript into the air. Some of these floated back on to the terrace, or the margins of the pool, or into the pool itself, but many were funnelled with astonishing speed high into the air, above the trees, by the hot breath of the wind. The author staggered to his feet and gaped unbelievingly at the leaves of foolscap rising higher and higher, like escaped kites, twisting and turning in the sun, white against the azure sky. It was like the visitation of some god or daemon, a pentecost in reverse, drawing words away instead of imparting them. The author felt raped. The female sunbathers around the pool, as if similarly conscious, covered their naked breasts as they stood and watched the whirling leaves of paper recede into the distance. Faces were turned towards the author, smiles of sympathy mixed with Schadenfreude. Bidden by the sharp voice of their mother, the English twins scurr
ied round the pool’s edge collecting up loose sheets, and brought them with doggy eagerness back to their owner. The German, who had been in the pool at the time of the wind, came up with two sodden pages, covered with weeping longhand, held between finger and thumb, and laid them carefully on the author’s table to dry. Pierre, the waiter, presented another sheet on his tray. ‘C’est le petit mistral,’ he said with a moue of commiseration. ‘Quel dommage!’ The author thanked them mechanically, his eyes still on the airborne pages, now mere specks in the distance, sinking slowly down into the pine woods. Around the hotel the air was quite still again. Slowly the guests returned to their loungers and mattresses. The women discreetly uncovered their bosoms, renewed the application of Ambre Solaire, and resumed the pursuit of the perfect tan.

  ‘Simon! Jasper!’ said the Englishwoman, ‘Why don’t you go for a walk in the woods and see if you can find any more of the gentleman’s papers?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the author urgently. ‘Please don’t bother. I’m sure they’re miles away by now. And they’re really not important.’

  ‘No bother,’ said the Englishwoman. ‘They’ll enjoy it.’

  ‘Like a treasure hunt,’ said her husband. ‘Or rather, paperchase.’ He chuckled at his own joke. The boys trotted off obediently into the woods. The author retired to his room, to await the return of his wife, who had missed all the excitement, from St Raphael.

  ‘I’ve bought the most darling little dress,’ she announced as she entered the room. ‘Don’t ask me how much it cost.’

  ‘Twelve hundred francs?’

  ‘Good God, no, not as much as that. Seven hundred and fifty, actually. What’s the matter, you look funny?’

  ‘We’ve got to leave this hotel.’

  He told her what had happened.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said his wife. ‘Those little brats probably won’t find any more sheets.’

  ‘Oh yes they will. They’ll regard it as a challenge, like the Duke of Edinburgh Award. They’ll comb the pine woods for miles around. And if they find anything, they’re sure to read it.’

  ‘They wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Their parents would. Imagine Mrs Snooty finding her nipples compared to the nose tips of small rodents.’

  The author’s wife spluttered with laughter. ‘You are a fool,’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he protested. ‘The wind sprang out of nowhere.’

  ‘An act of God?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose He approved of that story. I can’t say I cared much for it myself. How was it going to end?’

  The author’s wife knew the story pretty well as far as he had got with it, because he had read it out to her in bed the previous night.

  ‘Brenda accepts the bribe to go topless.’

  ‘I don’t think she would.’

  ‘Well, she does. And Harry is pleased as Punch. He feels that he and Brenda have finally liberated themselves, joined the sophisticated set. He imagines himself telling the boys back at Barnard Castings about it, making them ribaldly envious. He gets such a hard-on that he has to lie on his stomach all day.’

  ‘Tut, tut!’ said his wife. ‘How crude.’

  ‘He can’t wait to get to bed that night. But just as they’re retiring, they separate for some reason I haven’t worked out yet, and Harry goes up to their room first. She doesn’t come at once, so Harry gets ready for bed, lies down, and falls asleep. He wakes up two hours later and finds Brenda is still missing. He is alarmed and puts on his dressing gown and slippers to go in search of her. Just at that moment, she comes in. Where the hell have you been? he says. She has a peculiar look on her face, goes to the fridge in their room and drinks a bottle of Perrier water before she tells him her story. She says that Antoine intercepted her downstairs to present her with a bouquet. It seems that each week all the male staff of the hotel take a vote on which female guest has the shapeliest breasts, and Brenda has come top of the poll. The bouquet was a mark of their admiration and respect. She is distressed because she left it behind in Antoine’s room.’

  ‘Antoine’s room?’

  ‘Yes, he had coaxed her into seeing his room, a little chalet in the woods, and gave her a drink, and one thing led to another, and she ended up letting him make love to her.’

  ‘How improbable.’

  ‘Not necessarily. Taking off her bra in public released some dormant streak of wantonness in Brenda that Harry had never seen before. She is rather drunk and quite shameless. She taunts him with graphic testimony to Antoine’s skill as a lover, and compares Harry’s genital equipment unfavourably to the Frenchman’s.’

  ‘Worse and worse,’ said the author’s wife.

  ‘At that point Harry hits her.’

  ‘Oh, nice. Very nice.’

  ‘Brenda half undresses and crawls into bed. A couple of hours later, she wakes up. Harry is standing by the window staring down at the empty pool, a ghostly blue in the light of the moon. Brenda gets out of bed, comes across and touches him gently on the arm. Come to bed, she says. It wasn’t true, what I told you. He turns his face slowly towards her. Not true? No, she says, I made it up. I went and sat in the car for two hours with a bottle of wine, and I made it up. Why? he says. I don’t know why, she says. To teach you a lesson, I suppose. But I shouldn’t have. Come to bed. But Harry just shakes his head and turns back to stare out of the window. I never knew, he says, in a dead sort of voice, that you cared about the size of my prick. But I don’t, she says. I made it all up. Harry shakes his head disbelievingly, gazing down at the blue, breastless margins of the pool. That’s how the story was going to end, with those words, “the blue, breastless margins of the pool.” ’

  As he spoke these words, the author was himself standing at the window, looking down at the hotel pool from which all the guests had departed to change for dinner. Only the solitary figure of Pierre moved among the umbrellas and tables, collecting bathing towels and tea-trays.

  ‘Hmm,’ said the author’s wife.

  ‘Harry’s fixation on women’s breasts, you see,’ said the author, ‘has been displaced by an anxiety about his own body from which he will never be free.’

  ‘Yes, I see that. I’m not stupid, you know.’ The author’s wife came to the window and looked down. ‘Poor Pierre,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t dream of making a pass at me, or any of the other women. He’s obviously gay.’

  ‘Fortunately,’ said the author, ‘I didn’t get that far with my story before the wind scattered it all over the countryside. But you’d better get out the Michelin and find another hotel. I can’t stand the thought of staying on here, on tenterhooks all the time in case one of the guests comes back from a walk in the woods with a compromising piece of fiction in their paws. What an extraordinary thing to happen.’

  ‘You know,’ said the author’s wife. ‘It’s really a better story.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the author. ‘I think I shall write it. I’ll call it “Tit for Tat”.’

  ‘No, call it “Hotel des Boobs”,’ said the author’s wife. ‘Theirs and yours.’

  ‘What about yours?’

  ‘Just leave them out of it, please.’

  Much later that night, when they were in bed and just dropping off to sleep, the author’s wife said:

  ‘You don’t really wish I would go topless, do you?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said the author. But he didn’t sound entirely convinced, or convincing.

  * * *

  BERYL BAINBRIDGE

  * * *

  CLAP HANDS, HERE COMES CHARLIE

  Two weeks before Christmas, Angela Bisson gave Mrs Henderson six tickets for the theatre. Mrs Henderson was Angela Bisson’s cleaning lady.

  ‘I wanted to avoid giving you money,’ Angela Bisson told her. ‘Anybody can give money. Somehow the whole process is so degrading… taking it… giving it. They’re reopening the Empire Theatre for a limited season. I wanted to give you a treat. Something you�
��ll always remember.’

  Mrs Henderson said, ‘Thank you very much.’ She had never, when accepting money, felt degraded.

  Her husband, Charles Henderson, asked her how much Angela Bisson had tipped her for Christmas.

  Mrs Henderson said not much. ‘In fact,’ she admitted, ‘nothing at all. Not in your actual pounds, shillings and pence. We’ve got tickets for the theatre instead.’

  ‘What a discerning woman,’ cried Charles Henderson. ‘It’s just what we’ve always needed.’

  ‘The kiddies will like it,’ protested Mrs Henderson. ‘It’s a pantomime. They’ve never been to a pantomime.’

  Mrs Henderson’s son, Alec, said Peter Pan wasn’t a pantomime. At least not what his mother understood by the word. Of course, there was a fairy-tale element to the story, dealing as it did with Never-Never land and lost boys, but there was more to it than that. ‘It’s written on several levels,’ he informed her.

  ‘I’ve been a lost boy all my life,’ muttered Charles Henderson, but nobody heard him.

  ‘And I doubt,’ said Alec, ‘if our Moira’s kiddies will make head nor tail of it. It’s full of nannies and coal fires burning in the nursery.’

  ‘Don’t talk rot,’ fumed Charles Henderson. ‘They’ve seen coal fires on television.’

  ‘Shut up, Charlie,’ said Alec. His father hated being called Charlie.

  ‘Does it have a principal boy?’ asked Mrs Henderson, hopefully.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Alec. ‘Not in the sense you mean. Don’t expect any singing or any smutty jokes. It’s allegorical.’