David Lodge (7 page)

“Hotel des Boobs”
has a similar theme, but both its action and the writing of it belong to the same period, the nineteen-eighties. In June 1985 my wife and I took a short holiday in the south of France, staying at a number of pleasant hotels, each with its elegant swimming pool. Most of the female guests sunbathing on the margins of these pools, would, as a matter of course, remove or roll down the tops of their swimming costumes. A heterosexual Englishman of my generation could not be indifferent to this spectacle, though etiquette demanded that one pretended to be quite oblivious to it. Musing on the paradoxical unspoken code of manners that governs the baring of female breasts in such situations, and imagining the effect it might have on an unsophisticated man to whom it was a novelty, was the origin of the first half of my story; the metafictional twist of the second half was inspired by a strange incident on my own holiday. In the course of it we met Graham Greene, with whom I had corresponded occasionally, at his flat in Antibes, and were treated to lunch by him in a local restaurant. The next day I was writing down my memories of the occasion (with pen and paper in those pre-laptop days) sitting beside the swimming pool of a hotel somewhere in rural Provence, surrounded by the usual display of bare bosoms, when suddenly, without warning, a small whirlwind descended on the place, knocked over chairs, tables and umbrellas, snatched all my manuscript pages high into the air, and carried them away across the countryside. My wife and I jumped into our rented car and pursued the sheets for a kilometre or two until we saw them settle among the trees and bushes on a hill, where, astonishingly, we managed to recover several of them. In the story it was more interesting to make the writer afraid that the other hotel guests might find them.

“A Wedding to Remember”
is the most recent story, and has not been previously published. It is set in the present, in and around Birmingham, where I have lived since 1960 when I was appointed to an assistant lectureship at its oldest (and at that time only) University. It has changed a great deal since then, and like other industrial cities has redeveloped its centre to accommodate service industries, leisure facilities, and various hedonistic pursuits including fine dining (an idea which would have been a bad joke when I first arrived in Birmingham.) Unlike the other two stories this one contains nothing that is derived from my own experience except the setting. The basic idea came from an anecdote told to me by some friends, concerning a family only distantly known to them. A daughter of this family was engaged to be married, and a big, expensive wedding was arranged, and invitations had been issued, when the engagement was broken off for reasons unknown. Instead of cancelling the wedding however, the young woman married someone else at the arranged time and place. My friends, who were not present at the occasion, did not know any more details. I regarded it as a kind of challenge to a fiction writer to imagine how such a marriage might possibly come about, and the result was “A Wedding to Remember”.

Obviously it was the young woman's story, and obviously she had to be a strong-willed character, determined to bend the world to conform to her own wishes. I called her Emma, suggesting a faint resemblance to Jane Austen's heroine, who is rewarded with her Mr Right only after a humbling lesson in self-knowledge. The sexual mores of her age group and class are different from those portrayed in the two earlier stories. Cohabitation is a now a life-style taken for granted by the younger generation, and accepted more or less reluctantly by their elders, but the longer it goes on in any particular case, the more of an issue the possibility of marriage becomes, especially for the woman, and infidelity is as serious a breach of trust as if the couple were already married. Since weddings nowadays are mostly of people who have been sexual partners for some time, they have lost much of their traditional meaning as a rite of passage - hence, perhaps, the increasing amounts of time and trouble and money that are lavished on them to create a theatrical sense of occasion. Emma Dobson, self-appointed producer of her own wedding, is determined that the show in which she has invested so much must go on, even if it requires a last-minute recasting of the groom. She is lucky to get away with it.

David Lodge

A Man of Parts

The Campus Trilogy

Deaf Sentence

Author, Author

Thinks...

Home Truths

Therapy

Paradise News

Nice Work

Small World

How Far Can You Go?

Changing Places

Out of the Shelter

The British Museum Is Falling Down

Ginger, You’re Barmy

The Picturegoers