by David Lodge
The ambulance came at three. The men moved Ursula out in a wheelchair, which they carried down the front steps, and I brought up the rear with her little holdall. Mrs Jones put on an oily display of sympathetic concern for the benefit of the ambulancemen, patting Ursula’s hand as she was carried over the threshold. The ambulance drove sedately and sirenless along the freeway to the Geyser, and I followed in my car. I took Ursula’s belongings up to her ward, but did not linger. She is in a room with three other women, but the beds are placed in the middle of the floorspace at oblique angles, so that the occupants don’t have to stare at each other across the room, as they do in a British hospital.
Before I left I told Ursula about finding this writing book in her bureau, and asked her if I could have it. She said, “Of course, Bernard, take anything you like. All I have is yours for the asking.” She bought the book a long time ago to write down recipes in, but she had never used it and had forgotten all about it.
Called in again at St Joseph’s on my way home, and was pleasantly surprised to find Mrs Knoepflmacher sitting beside Daddy’s bed, in a bright yellow muu-muu and gold sandals. (She seemed to have re-tinted her hair ash blonde to match – is that possible? Perhaps she wears a wig.) There was a small basket of fruit on the bedside table, gaudy and artificial-looking as millinery. I suppose I must have mentioned the name of the hospital to her yesterday evening, and she decided to visit Daddy. This was a kind gesture, even though Ursula would probably ascribe it to nosiness. I thanked her warmly, and after a few minutes of empty chat, she left us alone.
“Begob, I thought she’d never go,” Daddy said. “I’m bursting. Will you tell the nurse I need a bottle, for the love of Jesus. They never answer when I press this thing.” He indicated the bell push on his bedside table. I found a pretty Hawaiian nurse, who brought him a bottle and drew the curtains round his bed, and I hung about a little selfconsciously outside the screen while he relieved himself. The nurse returned and carried off the bottle.
“A nice thing to be doing at my time of life,” he said bitterly. “Pissing into a bottle and handing it to a strange black woman, wrapped in a towel like it was vintage champagne. And don’t even ask me about the other business.”
I brought him up to date on Ursula, and mentioned that the driver of the car had phoned to enquire about him.
He said, “The other one, Mrs Buttonhole or whatever she is, she thinks we ought to sue her.”
“Daddy, you know it was your fault – our fault. We were crossing in the wrong place. You looked the wrong way.”
“Mrs Whatsername says the lawyers don’t charge you anything unless they win the case.” He looked at me with a gleam of avarice in his eye. I said I had no intention of getting involved in litigation which was bound to cause anxiety and stress for someone I regarded as entirely innocent, and we parted on bad terms. I felt guilty about this as I drove home. Why had I taken such a high moral tone? I could have humoured Daddy instead of browbeating him. The thought of a lawsuit, however fanciful, might have taken his mind off bottles and bedpans. Failed again.
Stayed in this evening and cooked myself a packet of frozen canelloni I discovered in Ursula’s freezer – but not for long enough, or perhaps the temperature of the oven was wrong. At any rate, it wasn’t quite cooked through: steaming and bubbling on the outside, still frozen at the core. It could be a symbol of something. I hope I don’t get food poisoning. All three Walshes in hospital at the same time would be too much. I have a vision of us lying helplessly in three different Honolulu infirmaries while Mrs Knoepflmacher scurries round from one bed to another in various wigs, bringing us chicken soup and baskets of fruit.
I was washing up after this meal, and wondering whether Tess would be getting suspicious at not having heard from me, when the telephone rang. I gave a guilty start, and nearly dropped the plate I was mopping. It wasn’t Tess, though; it was Yolande Miller, enquiring about Daddy again. She must have registered the anxiety in my voice, because she asked me if I was all right. I explained my dilemma, and then on impulse I said, “Do you think I should tell my sister about the accident now? What’s your professional opinion?”
“Is there anything she can do to help?”
“No.”
“And you say he’s recovering OK?”
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t see why you need rush to tell her … unless it would make you feel better.”
“Ah, there’s the rub.”
She gave a little snicker of recognition, and then there was an awkward silence between us. I didn’t want to terminate the conversation, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and neither, it seemed, could she. Then she said, “I was wondering whether you’d like to come to dinner some time.”
“Dinner?” I repeated the word as if I had never heard it before.
“You must be kind of lonely in the evenings, after you’ve done your hospital rounds …”
“Well, er, it’s very kind of you, but, well, I don’t know …” My mumbled words concealed total panic. Analysing this reaction later, I realized that the invitation had stirred up painful memories of Daphne. Our relationship – our personal relationship – had started that way. After she had been to the presbytery for instruction for several weeks, as she got up from the other side of the parlour table to leave one evening, she said, “Would it be proper for me to invite you to lunch one day?” and I laughed and said, “Of course, why not, thank you very much.” Though of course it wasn’t quite proper, and I didn’t tell my housekeeper or my curate where I was going on that fateful Saturday.
“How about tomorrow?” said Yolande Miller. “We usually eat around seven o’clock.” I smiled with relief at the plural pronoun, realizing that it was a family meal I was being invited to share, not an intimate repast à deux. I thanked her and accepted the invitation.
Sunday 13th
This morning I visited two of the cheapest private nursing homes on the list Dr Gerson gave me. They weren’t keen for me to come on a Sunday, but I explained that the matter was urgent. (Gerson won’t keep Ursula in the Geyser a day longer than necessary, and if I haven’t found a nursing home by then, she’ll have to go back to Mrs Jones, or some similar place.) It was a deeply discouraging experience – worse, somehow, than a geriatric ward in an NHS hospital at home, though God knows they can be bad enough – perhaps because of the contrast between the outside and the inside.
You drive through impressive gates, tyres purring on the smooth tarmacadam, park your car in the landscaped car-park, and enter the lobby with its polished wood and comfortable sofas. The receptionist smiles and takes your name and asks you to be seated. Then a lady comes to show you round the establishment. Her smile is less ready, her greeting less fulsome, than the receptionist’s: she knows what it is like behind the locked double doors on the far side of the lobby.
The first thing that hits you is the ammoniac stench of urine. You comment on this. The lady explains that many of their residents are incontinent. Many of them are evidently senile, too. They shuffle to the doors of their rooms in pyjamas and dressing-gowns, staring at us as if trying to place our faces, grinning with toothless gums, or muttering incomprehensible questions. Long threads of spittle dangle from their chins. Some scratch their ribs or rub their crotches absent-mindedly. Many are propped up in bed, their limbs twitching feebly like dying insects, staring listlessly at the passing scene, or asleep, their eyes closed, their mouths open. The beds are close together, two or four to a room. The walls are painted with glossy institutional paint, green and cream. There is a kind of lounge with high-backed chairs, upholstered (for obvious reasons) with shiny plastic, where the more mobile residents sit and read magazines, or watch TV, or just stare vacantly into space. The staff, mostly coloured women in cotton overalls and flapping slippers, humour and cajole the residents as they move through the wards and corridors, pushing trolleys of medicines before them like soft-drink vendors.
Ursula could not possibly toler
ate such conditions, nor would I dream of subjecting her to them. But this is evidently where the old and the sick end up in Paradise, if they have no families to look after them, and are not rich enough to buy themselves decent nursing care, or poor enough to qualify for State Welfare. This is the bargain basement of private geriatric nursing homes. My escort knows it, and lets me know it. Her expression and her tone of voice say to me: if we had both been more successful in life, I wouldn’t be working in this dump and you wouldn’t be thinking of putting your aunt in it. At the end of the tour, I thank her and take my leave, accepting a brochure and tariff for politeness’ sake.
The second home was only marginally superior, and they didn’t have a vacancy anyway. Hard to believe there could be a waiting list to get into such a dismal and depressing place.
Feeling pretty dismal and depressed myself, I drove back into Waikiki, and sat on the beach. A mistake. The sun was fierce, and the few patches of shade under the palm trees at the back of the beach were occupied. The sea was a blinding dazzle, and the sand painful to walk on in bare feet. Most of the people around me wore rubber flip-flops with thongs between the toes, and had straw mats to lie on, though how they can bear to spreadeagle themselves under this brutal sun baffles me. Sweat trickled down my sides from under my armpits, but I dared not take off my shirt for fear of getting sunburned. I rolled up my trouser bottoms in traditional British-seaside-style, and paddled for a while at the edge of the ocean. The water was warm and cloudy. Scraps of paper and plastic rubbish lapped against the coarse sand. A continuous procession of people trying to keep cool in the same way trudged up and down the margin of the sea, all ages, shapes and sizes, many of them clasping drinks, ice-creams or hot-dogs in their hands. Americans seem to like to eat on the move, like grazing cattle. Most of them, of course, were dressed in swimming-costumes, which do not flatter the elderly and obese. The young men seem perversely to favour rather baggy knee-length bathing shorts, that cling uncomfortably to their thighs when wet, while the young women’s swimsuits are sleek and cut very high at the hip. Twice in half an hour very professional-looking beachcombers came past, festooned with bags and pouches, wearing headphones and wielding electronic metal-detectors with which they tested the sand for buried valuables.
The breeze was light and wavering. Out to sea, the swimmers bobbed up and down in the swell, trying without much success to bodysurf on the sluggish rollers, and, further out still, serious surfers sat astride their boards, waiting for a big wave to break. A large catamaran with a yellow sail, crewed by Polynesians with skins like oiled teak, was moored a little further up the beach, announcing its imminent departure for a cruise with blasts on what sounded like an amplified conch shell. Out to sea, in the direction of Diamond Head, people were paddling, or being paddled, in outrigger canoes, and a tiny figure dangling from a parachute was being towed across the sky by a speedboat. It was hard to connect this scene of harmless if mindless pleasure with my mental images of the nursing homes I had just visited, the swimmers and the sunbathers in all the pride of their flesh with the drooling, emaciated figures haunting the dreary wards and corridors just a couple of miles away. I felt like a tongue-tied prophet who had come back from the kingdom of the dead, as if I should give a message or utter a warning, but did not know what to say – except perhaps, “Use a sunblock with a protection factor of fifteen,” and most of the people on the beach seemed to know that already, since they spent so much time smearing their dead and dying skin cells with various creams and lotions.
As I was standing in the tepid shallows, squinting out to sea, a swimmer suddenly surfaced a few yards away like a submarine, and then reared out of the water. He wore a glazed rubber mask and a plastic tube protruded from his mouth. He stumbled and waved his arms urgently, so that at first I thought he was in distress; but then he removed his mask and I recognized Roger Sheldrake. He staggered towards me, impeded by enormous webbed rubber flippers on his feet, a very land-fish. He seemed excessively glad to see me.
“Snorkelling,” he said explanatorily, as he divested himself of his equipment. “All part of the fieldwork.”
I asked him if he had seen any interesting fish and he said no, only plastic bags, but conditions were not good off this beach – the water was too murky. There was a place on the other side of Diamond Head that had been recommended to him, Hanauma Bay. “Perhaps you’d care to join me one day?” I said I had my hands full at present, and gave him a résumé of my experiences since we arrived in Hawaii. He clucked his tongue sympathetically. “Still, you must need a bit of relief from geriatric duty – come back to my hotel and have a drink. The management keep sending up bottles of champagne to my room. I’ve got quite a stockpile.” I excused myself, as I had still to make calls at both hospitals before my dinner engagement with the Millers, so he bought me, from a kiosk at the back of the beach, a huge paper cup full of fruit-flavoured slush, apparently a local delicacy known as shave-ice. Mine had melted under the broiling sun long before I got to the bottom of the container. Everything is too big in this country: the steaks, the salads, the ices. You weary of them before you can finish them.
We sat side by side on a straw mat where Sheldrake had left his clothes, eating our shave-ice, and I asked him how his research was going. He said quite well, he had collected quite a lot of Paradise references already. He took a notebook out of his shirt pocket and ran through the list: “Paradise Florist, Paradise Gold, Paradise Custom Packing, Paradise Liquor, Paradise Roofing, Paradise Used Furniture, Paradise Termite and Rat Control …” He had spotted these names on buildings or the sides of vans or in newspaper advertisements. I asked him if it wouldn’t be simpler to look up the Honolulu telephone directory under “Paradise”, and he seemed rather offended. “That’s not the way we do fieldwork,” he said. “The aim is to identify totally with your subjects, to experience the milieu as they experience it, in this case to let the word ‘Paradise’ impinge on your consciousness gradually, by a slow process of incrementation.” I inferred that it would be improper for me to pass on any Paradise motifs I happened to come across, but he seemed prepared to stretch a point, so I told him about Paradise Pasta and he wrote it down in his little book with a ball pen that was leaking in the heat.
He is working on the theory that the mere repetition of the paradise motif brainwashes the tourists into thinking they have actually got there, in spite of the mismatch between reality and archetype. The beach we were sitting on certainly didn’t bear much rememblance to the one on the front of the Travelwise brochure. “As a matter of fact,” he said, when I commented on this, “Waikiki is now one of the most densely populated places on earth. It’s only one-seventh of a square mile, that’s smaller than the main runway of Honolulu airport, but at any one time there are a hundred thousand people living here.”
“Yet it’s also one of the most isolated places on earth,” I said, remembering the lights of Honolulu suddenly appearing out of the black abyss of the Pacific night. “That’s what makes it a rather mythical place, in spite of all the crowds and the commercialism.”
Sheldrake pricked up his ears at the word “mythical”.
“Like the Gardens of the Hesperides, or the Fortunate Isles, in classical mythology,” I elaborated. “The winterless home of the happy dead. They were supposed to be on the extreme western rim of the known world.”
He got rather excited at this, and asked me for references. I told him to look up Hesiod and Pindar, and he wrote down these names in his notebook with inky fingers.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “the idea of paradise as an island is essentially pagan rather than Judaeo-Christian. Eden wasn’t an island. Some scholars think the Insulae Fortunatae were really the Canaries.”
“Oh God,” he said. “You wouldn’t call them fortunate today. Have you been to Tenerife lately?”
When I asked him whether he ever took his wife with him on his research trips, he said rather curtly that he wasn’t married. “My mistake,” I said, in s
ome confusion, “pardon me.”
“I was engaged once,” he said, “but she broke it off, after I started my PhD. She said I spoiled her holidays, analysing them all the time.”
At that moment I was startled to be hailed by a female voice crying “Hallo, Bernard!” and looked up to find the young woman called Sue smiling down at me, with her friend Dee in attendance. They were wearing shiny one-piece swimming-costumes and straw hats, and carrying the usual beach paraphernalia in plastic shopping bags. I struggled to my feet and made introductions. Sue said that they were on their way to purchase tickets for a sunset cruise, and invited Sheldrake and myself to join them. She gave me a conspiratorial wink, while Dee looked away as if to dissociate herself from this proposition. I excused myself, but encouraged Sheldrake to go. He did not appear unwilling. He seems to be as lonely as me, and to mind it more.
