David Lodge Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 scurried 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 consideration. “ 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 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