Paradise News

by David Lodge

  He returned to his room and made the narrow, iron-framed bed, which he had left untidily rumpled in his eagerness to get out to the travel agency. He sat at his desk and took out his notes on a book about process theology he was reviewing for Eschatological Review. The God of process theology, he read, is the cosmic lover. “His transcendence is in His sheer faithfulness to Himself in love, in His inexhaustibility as lover, and in His capacity for endless adaptation to circumstances in which His love may be active.” Really? Who says? The theologian says. And who cares, apart from other theologians? Not the people choosing their holidays from the travel agent’s brochures. Not the drivers of the car transporters. It often seemed to Bernard that the discourse of much modern radical theology was just as implausible and unfounded as the orthodoxy it had displaced, but nobody had noticed because nobody read it except those with a professional stake in its continuation.

  Somebody knocked on his door and called out that there was a long-distance call for him on the students’ telephone. It was Ursula.

  “Is this a better time?” she said.

  “Yes, it’s fine. Eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  “I’ve been thinking, maybe Jack would come if you brought him with you.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Bernard doubtfully. “I’m not sure it would make any difference.”

  “Give it a try. I really want to see him.”

  “What about the extra expense?”

  “I’ll pay. What the hell, what do I need savings for?”

  “Well, I’ll try and persuade him,” said Bernard. He spoke sincerely, but with a somewhat heavy heart. If he should succeed, the trip to Hawaii would take on a different, less alluring complexion. “I don’t hold out any great hopes,” he added.

  Almost as soon as he had put the receiver back in its cradle, the phone rang again. It was the zoot-suited young man in the travel agency. He had found a fourteen-day package holiday in Waikiki with Travelwise Tours, at a bargain price, leaving the following Thursday, scheduled flight from Heathrow via Los Angeles. “It’s seven hundred and twenty-nine pounds, based on two people sharing one room. There’s a supplement for single occupancy, though, ten pounds a day.”

  “Do you mean I could get two tickets at that price?” Bernard enquired.

  “Well, it is a pair, as a matter of fact. A late cancellation. But I thought you were travelling on your own.”

  “I was. But it’s possible that I may have a companion.”

  “Oh yes?” said the young man, with a kind of aural wink in his voice.

  “My father,” Bernard felt absurdly anxious to explain.

  The young man said he would put the tickets on hold over the weekend and that Bernard would have to confirm on the following Monday.

  He made two attempts to phone his father in the course of the morning without getting an answer. After lunch he tried again without success, then on an impulse dialled Tess’s number. She answered immediately.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said frigidly. The last time they had spoken was three years ago, at the family gathering after his mother’s funeral. Tess had blamed him for bringing on the fatal relapse. He had put down his untasted glass of sherry and walked out of the house. Strained relations.

  He told her about Ursula’s illness, and his offer to visit her in Honolulu.

  “Very noble of you,” she said drily. “Are you hoping for a legacy?”

  “It never crossed my mind,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t think Ursula’s particularly well-off.”

  “I thought her ex-husband was paying her oodles of alimony.”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t know anything about her private life, actually. I was hoping you’d fill me in.”

  “Not now, if you don’t mind. We’ve just got back from Cornwall. Terrible journey. We left at the crack of dawn to avoid the traffic, but it didn’t make any difference.”

  “Nice holiday?”

  “There’s a drought down there, we had to fetch our water from a standpipe. If I’m going to keep house, I’d rather do it at home with running water.”

  “You should get Frank to take you to a hotel.”

  “Have you got any idea how much it costs to take a family of seven to a hotel?”

  Not having any idea, Bernard was silent.

  “Quite apart from the problem of Patrick,” Tess added. Patrick was her retarded son, brain-damaged at birth. He was an amiable, friendly lad, but he dribbled and slurred his speech and was apt to sweep dishes off the table by accident. Bernard bit back an impulse to suggest that Patrick might be separately accommodated for a week or two. Tess was admirably devoted to Patrick’s welfare, but she also used him as a stick with which to beat the rest of the world.

  “Look,” said Bernard, “is Daddy at home? I’ve been trying to phone him all day.”

  “It’s the anniversary of their wedding today,” said Tess. “He would’ve had a mass said for Mummy this morning and then gone up to the cemetery.”

  “Oh,” said Bernard, slightly shamed that he had forgotten the significance of the date. “But he should be back by now, shouldn’t he? I just tried ringing him.”

  “He’s watching Neighbours. He always watches Neighbours after lunch, and he won’t answer the phone while it’s on.”

  “Is that a television programme?”

  “Bernard, you must be the only person in the entire country who doesn’t know what Neighbours is. I’ll tell Daddy about Ursula, if you like. I’ll probably pop over there this evening.”

  “No, I think I’d better do it. I was thinking of going down tomorrow to see him, as a matter of fact.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “To discuss Ursula.”

  “What is there to discuss? It’ll only upset him, stirring up the past.”

  “Ursula wants me to take him to Honolulu.”

  “What?”

  While he listened patiently to a stream of expostulation from Tess, to the effect that their father would not dream of it, that she herself would not permit it, that the journey and the heat would be too much for him, that Ursula was being unreasonable, etc. etc., Bernard felt a gentle tug on his sleeve and turned to find a Filipino nun at the head of a small line of people waiting to use the phone. “Sorry, Tess, I can’t talk any more now,” he said. “This is a pay phone and people are waiting.”

  “What are you, Bernard, forty-four, and you haven’t even got a phone of your own,” said Tess contemptuously. “What a mess you’ve made of your life.”

  Bernard didn’t dispute the general point, though the lack of a private phone was the least of his regrets.

  “Tell Daddy to expect me tomorrow afternoon,” he said, and rang off.

  Bernard took the coach from Rummidge to London the next day. The journey was scheduled to take two and a quarter hours, but the motorway was choked with traffic, cars laden with holiday luggage, some towing caravans and boats, mixed up incongruously with cars and buses packed with football fans, striped scarves fluttering like streamers from their windows, on their way (he was informed by the man sitting next to him) to Wembley for the Charity Cup game, the first of the season. So they were late arriving in central London.

  The capital was seething with humanity. Victoria was chaotic – foreign tourists frowning over streetmaps, young hikers shouldering massive backpacks, families on their way to the seaside, weekenders on their way to the country, rowdy football fans – all jostling and pushing and banging into each other. The air was full of shouts, oaths, snatches of football songs, and fragments of French, German, Spanish, Arabic. There were long looping queues for taxis, and for tickets in the Underground. Bernard had never been so struck by the restless mass mobility of the modern world, or felt so harassed and buffeted by it. If there were by any chance a Supreme Being, it would be pleasing to imagine Him suddenly clapping His hands like the exasperated teacher of an unruly class, and saying, in the chastened silence, “Will you all stop talking and go quietly back to you
r places.”

  Getting to the family home in South London was a tedious business at the best of times. You had to take a scruffy electric train, with an interior decor of ripped seats and felt-tip graffiti, from London Bridge to Brickley, then either walk for nearly a mile or wait for a bus to the bottom of Haredale Road, then toil up the hill to number 12, nearly at the top. Bernard felt a wave of emotion wash over him, with an effect more like nausea than nostalgia, as he turned the corner and commenced his climb. How many times he had bowed his shoulders, weighed down with a satchel full of schoolbooks, against this incline. The uniform terraced houses still stretched up the hill in two staggered rows, each with its railinged area and flight of stone steps up to the front door. And yet there was a subtle difference from the street he remembered from childhood: a variety of detail, a proud display of ownership, in blinds, shutters, porches, aluminium window-frames, hanging flower-baskets. And of course, another change: the road was lined with cars on both sides, parked bumper to bumper. It seemed that even Brickley had shared in the property boom of the nineteen-eighties, though the profusion of “For Sale” boards showed that the bubble had burst here, as everywhere else.

  Number 12 looked noticeably shabbier than its neighbours, the paint cracking and peeling on the sash window-frames. There was a shiny new Volkswagen Golf parked outside, whose owner was no doubt pleased that Mr Walsh didn’t own a vehicle. Bernard mounted the steps, panting slightly from his climb, and pressed the doorbell. The stippled and tinted shape of his father’s face swam up behind the stained glass in the front door as the old man peered through it to identify him. Then he opened the door. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, unsmilingly. “Come in.”

  “I’m surprised you can still manage that climb,” said Bernard, following his father down the dark hall to the back kitchen. A faint odour of meat and cabbage hung on the air.

  “I don’t go out much,” said his father. “I have a home help does my shopping, and I get my dinner from Meals on Wheels. They bring me two dinners on a Friday and I have one of them warmed up on Saturday. Have you eaten?”

  He seemed relieved when Bernard replied that he had. “But I wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea,” said Bernard. His father nodded and went to the sink to fill the kettle. Bernard took a turn around the little room. It had always been the main focus of the house, and now it looked as if his father spent most of his time in it. It had the look of an overcrowded nest: the television was in here, and his father’s favourite armchair, and souvenirs that used to be in the front sitting-room.

  “The house is a bit big for you now, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Don’t you start on me, for the love of God. Tess is always nagging me to sell up and move into a flat.”

  “Well, it’s not a bad idea.”

  “You can’t sell anything round here at the moment. Didn’t you see the For Sale signs on your way up?”

  “Surely you’d get enough to buy a little flat?”

  “I’m not going to give it away,” said Mr Walsh.

  Bernard, sensing that he was touching a sore topic, did not pursue it. He inspected the family shrine on the dresser. Grouped around a faded studio portrait of his mother in her youth were photographs of his brother and sisters and their families: Tess and Frank and their five children, Brendan, his wife Frances and their three, Dympna, her husband Laurie and their two adopted boys. Some of these people appeared more than once, in prams, in school groups, in wedding dresses, and graduation robes. There were no pictures of Bernard in this gallery. Pinned to the sides of the dresser with drawing-pins were handwritten lists and memos: pay electricity; get laundry ready for Mrs P; mass for M. Friday; stamps; milk bottles; Neighbours 1.30.

  “You like Neighbours, do you?” he remarked, thinking this would be a safer topic; but his father seemed displeased at having his television viewing habits exposed. “It’s a lot of codswallop,” he said testily. “But it makes me sit down and digest my dinner.” He poured boiling water into the teapot and stirred it. “So what brings you here after all this time?” he said.

  “It’s been a long time, Daddy, because I had the impression you didn’t want to see me.” Daddy. The term had excited some ridicule when he was a boy, for the other kids in the street called their fathers “Dad.” But it was the Irish way. Mr Walsh, his back turned to Bernard, said nothing. “Didn’t Tess tell you why I’ve come?”

  “She said something about Ursula.”

  “Ursula’s seriously ill, Daddy.”

  “It happens to us all,” said his father, so calmly that Bernard was sure Tess had told him the whole story.

  “She wants to see you.”

  “Ha!” His father uttered a brief, mirthless laugh. He brought the teapot to the table and set it down.

  “I’ve offered to go out there, but it’s you she really wants to see.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re her closest relative, aren’t you?”

  “What if I am?’

  “She’s dying, Daddy, all alone, on the other side of the world. She wants to see her family. It’s only natural.”

  “She should have thought of that when she settled in that place, whadyoucallit, Hawaiee.” He twanged the final vowel derisively, like a banjo string.

  “Why did she settle there?”

  His father shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I haven’t had any contact with Ursula for donkey’s years. She went there for a holiday, I believe, liked the climate and decided to stay. She could please herself where she lived, she had no ties. That was always Ursula’s trouble, she always pleased herself. Now she’s paying for it.”

  “She told me to tell you that she’s gone back to the Church.”

  Mr Walsh digested this information in silence for a moment. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said drily.

  “Why did she leave the Church in the first place?”

  “She married a divorced man.”

  “Oh, that was it! You and Mummy were always so secretive about Aunt Ursula. I never did quite know what it was all about.”

  “No reason why you should. You were only a child in 1946.”

  “I remember when she came back to England, that would have been about 1952.”

  “Yes, just after her husband had run off.”

  “He left her so soon?”

  “It was a doomed marriage from the start. We all told her so, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  Gradually, prompted and coaxed by Bernard, Mr Walsh sketched in Ursula’s history. She was the youngest of five siblings, and the only girl. The family – the Walshes – had emigrated from Ireland to England in the mid nineteen-thirties, when she would have been about thirteen. At the outbreak of World War Two she was living at home, working as a shorthand typist in the City. She had wanted to join one of the women’s services, but her parents had dissuaded her, partly because they feared for her morals, partly because all their sons had been called up, and they didn’t want to be totally deserted. When their eldest son, Sean, was killed, torpedoed in a troopship (he had an honoured place in the family shrine, a full-length snapshot of a lance-corporal in battledress, standing at ease and laughing at the camera) they held on to her more tightly than ever. So she continued to live at home throughout the War, through the Blitz and the various waves of V-weapons, working in a Government Department in Whitehall, until in 1944 she met an American airman, a staff sergeant in communications, posted to England prior to D-Day, and fell in love with him. Bernard had seen enough old newsreels to contextualize this narrative: the blacked-out London streets, the huge floor of the palais-de-dance with its revolving couples of crop-haired men in uniform and long-haired girls in short, square-shouldered frocks, the climate of danger and excitement and uncertainty, the sirens, searchlights, telegrams and banner headlines. His name was Rick Riddell. “Rick, what kind of a name is that,” his father commented. “It should have been a warning to her.” Rick turned out to have a wife back in the USA. There was a huge family row. Rick was posted to France an
d Germany for the closing stages of the war in Europe. When he was demobilized he divorced his wife, who had been playing fast and loose while he was abroad, and wrote to Ursula from America asking her to marry him. “She went like a shot,” said Mr Walsh bitterly. “Never mind that it broke her parents’ hearts, that were already broken by Sean’s death. Never mind that she was abandoning them in their old age.”

  “But,” Bernard interjected, “weren’t you and Uncle Patrick and Uncle Michael back from the war by then?” This was a slightly flattering reference to Mr Walsh’s war service: he had had a low medical rating and spent most of these years as a member of a barrage-balloon unit in South London.

  “We had our own families to look after,” said Mr Walsh, getting to his feet to fetch the kettle, which he had set to boil again. “And times were hard. There wasn’t much money about. What Ursula brought home every week made all the difference to the old folk. But it wasn’t just the money. They needed her to help them get over the death of Sean. They idolized him, you see. Their first-born.” Mr Walsh recharged the teapot with hot water, then, with the empty kettle in his hand, went over to the dresser and peered at the photograph of the laughing lance-corporal. “His body was never recovered,” he said. “It made it difficult for all of us to believe he was really dead.”

  “Surely she was bound to get married eventually?”