by David Lodge
Seeing to the wine meant going to his study for a top-up of the Savigny, after which he re-entered the throng in the drawing room again and was greeted by a woman in a purple sleeveless trouser suit whose name he had forgotten but who, he recalled, worked in advertising. ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘What kind of a Christmas Day did you have?’ and she said something in reply which he couldn’t hear, during which time he racked his brain for a conversational topic.Advertising, advertising . . . ah yes, he knew what to talk about.
‘You know when you see an advertisement and you don’t really understand it - well you probably don’t have that experience - but it happens quite often to me. I see an advertisement on a hoarding, and either I don’t understand what it’s selling or I don’t understand what it’s saying, and the more ubiquitous the advert is, the more it puzzles you and the more difficult it becomes to admit to anyone that you don’t actually understand it.You think to yourself that there must be some simple explanation which is so obvious that you would look a fool by asking for it. On the other hand you wonder if everybody else isn’t just pretending to understand it, or overlooking some contradiction or anomaly in the ad that only you have perceived. But in due course the advertising campaign comes to an end, the posters disappear, and there is no longer any opportunity to casually ask someone what they think the ad means, and you have to go through the rest of your life with this unresolved enigma. For instance, I never understood - and this is the first time I have ever admitted it to anyone - I’ve never understood that famous Wonderbra advertisement, the one with the blonde girl in her underwear saying,‘Hallo boys!’ - she’s either saying it or thinking it, it’s not entirely clear which - you know the one I mean?’ The woman nods in a rather curt fashion and the social smile she has been wearing fades from her features to be replaced by something very like a frown. He wonders belatedly whether this is really a suitable subject to explore with a female guest he hardly knows, and who, it now strikes him, has a rather prominent bosom under her purple tunic, but it is too late to change course now, so he carries on: ‘Well I could never work out who or what she is addressing. Who or what are the “boys”? Is it a literal reference or a metaphorical expression? If you examine the picture closely you see that she is looking down, at such a steep angle that you can’t actually see her eyes at all, just the lids, which have a lot of mascara on them. She is either looking down and admiring her breasts, newly shaped and uplifted by the Wonderbra, with delighted surprise, in which case “boys” is metaphorical - but would a woman address her own breasts as “boys”? It seems unnatural - surely she would personify them as female? She would say, “Hallo girls!” Alternatively she is addressing actual boys, and we are to assume that she is looking down at some young men who are below her, out of the frame of the picture. But where are they - where would this scene be taking place? Is there a knock on her door, perhaps, and she opens it in her underwear, liberated young woman that she is, looks down and sees these boys who have been irresistibly attracted by her wonderful bust, and have prostrated themselves at her feet? It seems improbable. And in that case they are in the worst possible position to view and appreciate her bust. They can’t see her cleavage from where they are lying. You see the problem? I tried googling the phrase, but for once it didn’t shed much light. There was a book of patriotic First World War poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox called Hello, Boys! which doesn’t seem very relevant, and apparently in competitive gymnastics the phrase ‘Hallo Boys’ is colloquially applied to a particular move by male gymnasts when they spread their legs while performing a handstand, presumably because it reveals the shape of their testicles under their tights, which rather supports my point about personification, but doesn’t explain what “boys” means in the Wonderbra ad . . .’ It occurred to him that his addressee, who was showing signs of impatience, might know the answer to the puzzle and be about to give it to him, in which case he would have to pretend to understand it, but fortunately her attention was distracted by the sight of some other guest, evidently a dear friend, whom she turned to greet and kiss on both cheeks, bringing their conversation to a convenient end.
After that he expounded to a musicologist from the University a theory he had long entertained that it had been of enormous advantage to song writers of American popular music that so many American place names, because of their Spanish or native Indian origins, were anapaestic, the stress falling on the third syllable, like California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Carolina, San Francisco, or iambic, like Chicago, Atlanta, Missouri, words which were easily set to syncopated music, whereas English place names were typically dactylic, like Birmingham and Manchester or trochaic, like Brighton and Leicester, inherently unmusical. To illustrate the point he crooned, ‘When you go to Birmingham, Be sure to wear a flower in your hair’, and in a creditable imitation of Frank Sinatra, ‘Leicester, Leicester, that toddling town, Leicester, Leicester, I’ll show you around’. Amused heads turned around the room.The musicologist, who had seemed disposed to challenge his argument, seemed impressed, and was certainly silenced, by this demonstration.
Altogether he feels he is doing pretty well in finding topics on which he can expatiate that are appropriate to the guests he encounters. His disquisition on ‘Very flat, Norfolk’ was, he has to admit to himself, as he tops up his wine glass in the quiet refuge of his study, a little forced, prompted only by the name of his interlocutor, but he hopes she found the brilliance of his explication an adequate compensation. At that moment his wife comes into the room, shuts the door behind her, and says something. ‘What?’ he says. She speaks again, louder, and more deliberately, and he reads her lips without difficulty.
‘What. Do. You. Think. You’re. Doing?’
Fred was angry. Very angry. She got even angrier when I answered her question by saying I was topping up my wine glass from one of the bottles Richard had given me for Christmas. She launched into a tirade in which I could only distinguish occasional phrases: ‘too much to drink . . . insulting my guests . . . you and your father . . . wrecking my party . . .’ I held up my hands placatingly.
‘It’s no use, Fred, I can’t hear what you’re saying.’
She stopped ranting and said something I took to be a question about my hearing aid.
‘Both batteries packed up at the same time, just before the party started. I didn’t tell you - I thought you had enough on your plate.’
She said something in which I lip-read the phrase ‘spare batteries’.
‘I thought I had some, but I haven’t. The ones I’ve got in my drawer are the wrong size.’
She rolled her eyes and raised them to the ceiling.
‘I bought them by mistake. It’s easily done.’
She said something like: ‘Which drawer is it?’
‘That one,’ I said, indicating the top drawer of the steel multi-drawer unit where I keep my hearing-aid accessories. A small knot of unease was already forming in my gut. The shock of finding the wrong type of batteries in the place where I had such a confident expectation of finding the right type had perhaps prevented me from making a thorough search of the drawer.
Fred pulled out the drawer and emptied its contents on to the surface of my desk in a single movement. She rifled through a heap of leaflets, instruction manuals, pouches, boxes and purses belonging to past generations of hearing aids, some containing little brushes and widgets and impregnated cloths for their cleaning and maintenance, old broken NHS behind-the-ear aids with bits of plastic tubing sticking out of them, dead, discarded batteries of various sizes, and picked out of this debris a carousel bubble pack which enclosed four empty circular concave spaces and two batteries. She handed them to me with a question which ended with the words, ‘right size?’ They were 312ZA batteries, with their little brown plastic tabs in place and intact.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She waited and watched with silent contempt as I fitted the batteries into my hearing instruments, inserted the latter in my ears and confirmed that they we
re working. Then she denounced my boorish behaviour in detail. I had drunk too much wine, and talked too loudly - talked at, rather than to, whoever was unfortunate enough to engage me in conversation, without pausing for breath or allowing them to say a word themselves, on topics which were either of no interest to them or positively upsetting. It appeared that the lady in the purple trouser suit was not in advertising at all, but the headmistress of Lena’s primary school, who had had a mastectomy and wore a prosthetic brassiere, so she had not appreciated my playful deconstruction of the Wonderbra ad; while Mrs Norfolk, one of Décor’s most valued customers, who was in the process of ordering curtains for every room in a recently acquired second home, had clearly been baffled and faintly insulted by my manic analysis of the negative connotations of her name; and the left-wing playwright, who sat on the governing board of the Playhouse, and whom Fred had invited to parties and dinner parties on numerous occasions without ever persuading him to come until today, had been talking to his girlfriend in a corner, with his back turned to the rest of the company, ever since I spoke to him. And what did I mean by singing in the drawing room? It was bad enough to have my father singing in the kitchen, after being caught peeing in the front garden.
‘What was that again?’ I said. ‘About Dad?’
I didn’t put the full story together until some hours later, from various witnesses and Dad himself. He had declined to take Fred’s hints yesterday that he should feel free to absent himself from the party, a noisy, crowded gathering of people mostly unknown to him, as she presented it, eating foreign food which he probably wouldn’t like, so he might prefer to have a plate of cold turkey and pickles in his own room, with a portable television for company which he could turn up as loud as he liked without disturbing anybody. Instead he took a great deal of time over his morning toilet, dressed himself in his best clothes - Harris tweed sports jacket, sharply creased worsted trousers, a clean shirt and a tie with only a small and inconspicuous gravy stain - came downstairs about half an hour before the party was due to start, and announced that he was going for a walk. This was just before my hearing aid packed up. I asked him where he was thinking of going. He said to our local high street. I reminded him that all the shops would be closed, but he thought he might find a newsagent open where he could buy a lottery ticket, and anyway he needed a breath of air. I thought he couldn’t come to any harm on such an excursion, so let him go, and asked Anne and Jim if they would look after him when he came back, if I were otherwise occupied, and see that he got something to eat and drink. I have to admit that after that I forgot all about him in the stress of my hearing-aid crisis, and the false euphoria of the conversational feats with which I sought to conceal it.
It seems that in the course of his walk he went into a pub for a half-pint of draught bitter - something he hasn’t done in London for years. Some atavistic memory of Christmases long ago, perhaps before he was married, when all the men of the family would go for a drink as soon as the pubs opened on Boxing Day, and then go on to watch a football match, may have prompted this unwonted indulgence, and the knowledge that there would be only wine and fizzy canned lager to drink at the party may have contributed to it. Anyway he enjoyed his half-pint and imprudently ordered another one. On the way home the pressure on his bladder became acute. As he approached our house he doubted whether he would be able to make it to the front door without wetting himself, and was certain that if by any chance the downstairs loo were occupied when he got inside he would be quite incapable of mounting the stairs to the first-floor bathroom. So with some presence of mind he pushed his way into the thick laurel bushes beside our front gate and relieved himself against the inside of the boundary wall. A late-arriving guest noticed him and reported, as he was taking off his coat, that a vagrant appeared to be committing a nuisance in the shrubbery. Cecilia, overhearing this, summoned Fred and recommended calling the police, but Anne said, ‘It’s probably Granddad taken short,’ and sent Jim out to bring him in, which he did. They took Dad into the kitchen, sat him down at the kitchen table and, not knowing that he had already imbibed a pint of beer, gave him a large glass of sweet white wine and persuaded him to taste the Thai curry, which to his own surprise he pronounced very tasty and ate with appetite. Ben and Maxine relieved Anne and Jim in chatting to him, and Ben poured him another glass of wine. Dad began to get into the party mood and invited Maxine to sit on his knee, which she sportingly did for a while until he said his leg was going numb. He told them about his career as a dance-band musician before the war, and about the one and only recording he had made as a singer, ‘The Night, the Stars and the Music’, with the band of Arthur Roseberry, who composed the words and music; and when Maxine said she’d love to hear it, he sang it to her. It’s what is known in the business as a ballad, and the tune was imprinted on my memory from many playings of the old 78 vinyl disc on the radiogram at home, which Dad later transferred on to an audio cassette. He gave me a copy which I have somewhere. ‘The night, the stars and the music / The magic of the something something . . .’ Apparently he stood up and sang two choruses without missing a word or a beat, got a round of applause from the people in the kitchen, sat down, farted loudly because of the curry, looked over his shoulder and called out ‘Taxi!’ (which made Ben laugh so much he choked on his lager), said he thought he’d better go and lie down for a bit, tried to walk out of the kitchen unassisted, stumbled over the threshold, recovered his balance by throwing his arms round Cecilia who entered the kitchen at that moment with a tray full of dirty glasses, causing her to tip them on to the tiled floor, and had to be helped upstairs to his room by Jim and Ben. ‘I don’t blame him,’ Fred said. ‘He’s an old man. I blame you. He was your responsibility.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know anything about it.’ I had distinguished none of the various sounds associated with this episode in the general muffled background noise of the party.
There was a knock on the door of my study and Marcia put her head round it. ‘Mother, the Jessops are going. Do you want to say goodbye?’
‘Already?’ Fred exclaimed. She turned fiercely on me. ‘You see? You’ve driven people away, you and your father between you.’ She swept out of the room past Marcia, who shot me a hostile look and hurried after her. I followed at a slower pace.
Actually the Jessops had double-booked themselves and apologised profusely for leaving early. Most of the other guests were enjoying their puddings and showed no sign of wanting to leave, and most had had enough to drink not to be worried by a bit of falling down and broken glass in the kitchen. But Fred had an idea of how a party should be conducted, with elegance and decorum, and between us Dad and I had wrecked this one in her eyes. When she had said goodbye to the Jessops she went back into the drawing room, and from the hall, where I skulked dejectedly, I saw her chatting and smiling serenely, but I had no doubt that inwardly she was still seething and that I would be in her bad books for some considerable time.
The doorbell chimed. Who the hell could that be coming to the party at this hour, I wondered. ‘I’ll get it,’ I called out to anyone who might be listening, and went to open the front door. Alex Loom was standing in the porch, in her shiny black quilted coat and a red knitted pixie hat, holding a bunch of cut flowers wrapped in cellophane.
‘Hi!’ she said, with a smile. ‘I guess you’re surprised to see me.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be in America,’ I said.
‘That was the plan,’ she said. ‘But Heathrow was socked in. After waiting two days for my flight, I gave up. Can I come in? I was invited.’
‘The party’s nearly over,’ I said stupidly, as if I hoped this would make her go away.
‘Who is it, darling?’ said Fred from behind my back.The ‘darling’, I knew, was purely for appearance’s sake, and implied no melting of her resentment. ‘Oh, it’s you, Alex!’ she cried. ‘Let the poor girl in, for goodness’ sake. Come in! Come in! What on earth are you doing here? I thought you were going
home for Christmas.’
