The Summer Isles (19 page)

Making piston-movements with their elbows, going faster and faster, Cumbernald’s two daughters are pretending the car’s a train as we bowl along the A40 towards Wales and Gloucester. I’m seated between them, in the middle of the back seat so that they can both get most of the fresh air that’s pouring in through the side windows. “They do both tend to get a bit travel-sick,” Eileen Cumbernald warned me when we set out. “Just give me a shout if you see either of them turning green…”

We stop for lunch at one of the big new roadhouse inns. Cumbernald buys us all steak and chips, and the children’s portions come with free ice cream. Christine’s their eldest at eleven; a plump pre-adolescent with dental braces who is designated
clever
and
reads a lot.
Barbara’s seven, thinner, more self-assured and “sporty”. Back in the afternoon heat of the car, we head on amid the lorries and late-August holiday makers. Cumbernald drives a Daimler 25/40, a shining but old-fashioned-looking vehicle that came as a surprise when I saw it until climbed inside and breathed in all the waxed wood, the Axminster and the leather. Much like their tall white house on elm-lined Raglan Street—although there’s also a modern-looking Jowett Jupiter parked in the drive; what Eileen Cumbernald calls “Mummy’s taxi”—it’s a statement about the timelessness of class.

Most of the A40 has been improved to dual-carriageway and looking out across the rolling heat-hazed concrete, the scenery beyond seems distant and arid, framed by white gravel and spindly new trees. Cumbernald clicks on the radio, then he and Eileen argue about whether they want to listen to the Light or the Third Programme. Brief but jumbled snatches of Vera Lynn, static and Tchaikovsky roar out from the loudspeakers—it’s like the avant-garde European music they’d be so quick to condemn—whilst Christine and Barbara grow listless and bored. Studying them carefully for traces of green, I decide to distract them by describing what their lives would have been like at other times in history.

“If you two little girls lived in Roman times, you might have had lots of slaves and servants and central heating.”

“We
do
have central heating.”

“And lots of slaves and servants.”

“They’re just people who come to help Mummy, stupid.”

“Anyway, we’re
not
little girls.”

But they soak it up with surprising interest.

“And what happened to people when they died?” Barbara asks me sweetly. “Did they eat them?”

It’s really quite fun. When we finally turn off at a sign that points north towards Leominster and Hereford onto winding, prettier roads, Barbara leans close to me, dragging my head down with her hot arms to whisper that she likes me because I remind her of her dead Uncle Freddie when she saw him in the coffin.

The place to which the Cumbernalds have invited me lies deep within the Forest of Dean. Deciding to try a new route amid the seemingly few roads, we end up having to reverse for miles to give way to a tree-hauling tractor, and it seems later than it really is in the shade of these pines when we finally arrive at the entrance, which is contradictorily signed, in green and gold, P
ENRHOS
P
ARK—
T
OURERS
W
ELCOME—
B
Y
A
PPOINTMENT
O
NLY
, and sports the crowns and stars of various tourist classifications like campaign medals.

The Daimler whispers past the laurel hedges to a glassed hut where a uniformed man waves us on without bothering to check our passes. Cumbernald raises a gracious hand. In the back, Christine and Barbara stick out their tongues and pull faces.

“
Now
we can relax,” Cumbernald says as he crooks his arm on the open window and starts humming.

The lodge, clad with logs like some fairy tale woodsman’s cottage, is set in a grassy clearing. The evening air smells like nectar even to my dim senses as I claw my limbs out of the Daimler.

“
This
is home, isn’t it?” Cumbernald says, puffing his chest. “Greater Britain! Better than Italy any day…”

My room at the back of the lodge smells of new wood. The bed is undented—has probably never been slept on—and the sliding doors of the fitted wardrobes still have the builder’s instructions stuck on the back. Eileen Cumbernald comes in before I’ve even had time to open my suitcase, changed already from her sleeveless summer dress into shorts and a halter top from which the fatty sides of her breasts look ready to fall out.

“I do hope the girls were alright with you there at the back,” she says as she reaches to open the window. Evening birdsong floods in.

“I quite enjoyed it actually.”

“That’s the spirit…” She smiles, thinking about saying more. I smile back.

“You must love it here.”

“Oh, we do! But, ah…” She pushes back her blond hair, the roots of which are darker. “I know it’s a bit late to say this, but I hope you don’t feel you have to come just because Eric’s your boss.”

“It’ll do me good.”

She frowns, pursing her lips. “What I’m trying to say is that you’re free to do what you like. Shall I help you with your case?”

“It’s alright, I—”

She lifts it up onto the bed anyway. “This is heavy. One of those lovely old ones that last forever. Not like the cheap modern things. But what
have
you got in here? Books, I suppose—I know you academics…”

That evening, Cumbernald—or Eric, as I may now have to start thinking of him—prepares the dinner for us out-of-doors using a crude iron device filled with charcoal. It’s an American idea, he tells me as I duck the spiralling smoke. One of their few good ones. There’s white wine from the fridge and salad tossed in a Pyrex bowl and rolls and the new ready-salted Smiths’ Crisps that come without the little blue bag inside the packet.

Christine and Barbara pedal off along the paths between the trees on the bicycles they keep here, half-blackened sausages gripped like cigars between their teeth. Looking over the forest crown, I see the smoke of other cooking fires rising like Indian signals. As it gets darker, Eileen sets a lantern on the outdoor table where we’ve eaten, and we watch the moths flutter into oblivion on its hot glass. Away from Oxford and his suit, Cumbernald looks pleasingly ridiculous in sandals, baggy shorts, a Fred Perry top, a charcoal smudge across his forehead.

The children finally return out of the night, flushed and bright. When I look at my watch, I see that it’s already nearly eleven. After the commotion of their late bath has diminished to a few odd shrieks indoors, I decide it’s time that I also went to bed.

“You look a better man already,” Cumbernald says, wine glass in his lap. “Eileen tells me you’ve brought lots of books—so just do what you like tomorrow. This is some place, though, isn’t it, eh? A real breath of England.”

He gestures around. It’s suddenly night-quiet, with the faint stirring of the pines, the distant hoot of an owl. It wouldn’t take much imagination to hear the growl of a bear, the rooting chuff of a wild boar, the howl of wolves—the return of all the beasts of old to the vast Wood of Albion.

I’m about to say that—or something like it—when I hear a thin shriek. The sound is so strange here, yet so familiar as it grows louder, that it takes me a moment to realise that all I’m hearing is the passing of a train.

“It’s just a goods line,” Cumbernald explains as it goes by unseen, not far behind the lodge. “Never quite worked out where it’s from or to. But I shouldn’t worry, old chap. That’s the latest I’ve ever heard one go by. They won’t disturb your sleep.”

In the morning, the girls career down on their bikes to buy breakfast from the site shop.
Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon
… The sound of sizzling mingles in my head with the clack and roar of the trains that fractured my night as Eileen, back in her traditional role now the cooking’s indoors, prepares our fry-up.

Sitting blinking in the yellow and pine kitchen, I’m complimented on looking better, and it’s obvious from their faces, their voices, from the way they’re swallowing gallons of orange juice and coffee, that the Cumbernalds slept like logs.

“I was thinking we could go down to the Sun Area this morning,” Cumbernald says, flapping out a copy of the
Times.
There’s a photograph above the page-fold of John Arthur shaking hands with Roosevelt. My Modernist books tell me that even lesser dignities are never searched before they come face to face with the great man.

“The Sun Area today. That okay with you, Brook?”

“Oh? Yes. Fine…”

The girls, for some reason, both start to giggle until orange juice dribbles out of their noses.

Penrhos Park is much bigger than I imagined. Not only is there a shop, but a whole central complex where the children can play table tennis and outdoor chess, watch television in a big dark room, slide around on the parquet of the dance hall, or splash and scream at each other within the giant fishbowl of the indoor pool.

The atmosphere is cosmopolitan. I detect a surprising number of American accents. Not long ago, Greater Britain was regarded as unstable, racist, a powder-keg, an international pariah. But these things never last. Now that Soviet Russia has been revealed as the grey and uninspiring place it always was, Britain has become the greatest object of international fascination. What Modernist Britain does today, so the saying goes, the rest of the world will do tomorrow. Look at our cars, our roads, our televisions, our politics—look at places like this! Everybody wants to come so that they can tell their friends back in Philadelphia or Baden-Baden, even if they still feel a little afraid.

The Sun Area is lavishly signposted, yet still requires a long trek down through the tents and the trees. Eileen Cumbernald struggles with a canvas bag whilst the girls skip ahead and husband Eric manfully carries his
Times.
I limp behind on my walking stick in an open-neck shirt and hot woollen trousers.

“Don’t mind the sun, do you, ah, Geoffrey?” he asks me from beneath his Panama. “You’re not sensitive?”

“No… Not at all…”

The Sun Area is shielded by high hedges and long walls which we must walk around, then queue at a turnstile. The swing doors beyond lead to a hot wooden tunnel lined with benches: some kind of changing area. Eileen Cumbernald removes the same halter top she wore yesterday evening and hangs it on a numbered peg. She isn’t wearing a bra. Cumbernald, contrarily, removes his shorts and his baggy y-fonts before taking off his sandals. The children, by some instantaneous process, are already naked. They scamper off down the smooth wooden floor towards the bright square of light at the far end, fading into thin outlines, then skeletons, then nothing at all. It’s as if they’ve been swallowed by the sun.

Cumbernald really
is
brown. He must do this sort of thing all the time. Eileen is too; although I can see now that she’s not as blond as she pretends to be.

“You okay, Brook? You can take your walking stick with you if you like. Or just leave it behind. Nothing ever gets stolen.”

I undo a few token buttons of my shirt, wondering how easy it would be to wake up if I pinched myself.
The most amazing dream. I was with the college principal and his wife. They took all their clothes off, then asked me to do the same…

“I’ll get you a sun-vest,” Eileen says, and strides off into the sunlight herself, dimpled buttocks jiggling.

“Can’t beat this for an experience,” Cumbernald says, slapping bits of himself. “They say John Arthur does it. Of course, Jim Toller—
fascinating
article by him in last month’s
H&E
…”

I nod. I’d slump down on the bench, but for the unfortunate level that it would bring my gaze to. Cumbernald’s saggy in the way that all middle-aged men are, although in good enough shape. No surplus fat. I think of Bracken’s blue pigs.
Blam, blam.
People are such big beasts. The light from the frosted window shines on the sloughs of skin beneath his ribs.

“There we are,” says Eileen, returning with an off-white ball of cotton scrunched up in her hands. She’s still wearing her earrings, I notice. And her wedding ring. The puckered scar from some abdominal operation smiles lopsidedly back at me. “A sun vest. On a hot day like this, it’ll help to stop you burning. Come on, Eric—don’t need our help, do you, Geoffrey? No. We’ll just be outside at the cafe. Shall I get you an ice cream…?”

A truly hot day at the honeyed edge of August, here on this Summer Isle. The people stroll about, shining with oil. They play sports and eat simple food and dispose considerately of their litter. Different ages and shapes, lumpy or skinny, effortlessly young and effortlessly beautiful, breathtakingly ugly, shrivelled and brown, or white, stooped and cadaverous like me—amputees, even—they all talk, walk, smile, shade their eyes to look up at the hot bright dot of the sun as they wonder once again at the goodness of this feeling, the goodness of this weather, the goodness of this place where we happen to find ourselves.

Having promised to keep an eye on the children, I sit by the lake with a copy of something called
Future Past
whilst Cumbernald and Eileen go off to rustle up a team for the volleyball. No one seems to mind my wearing a sun vest, and I’m as naked as the rest of them underneath. The white sand along this lakeside looks natural, but must have been carted in by the lorry-load. The water is impossibly dark, impossibly bright. Bodies crash in and out, sleek as otters. A woman breastfeeds her child on the towel next-door to mine, engaging me in snatches of conversation. Out in the distance, white sails are turning.

Occasionally, I glimpse Christine and Barbara. There’s a lido that juts into the lake beside the trees. At this moment, Barbara is hanging onto the bottom of the low diving board there whilst Christine jumps up and down on top of it. A young Adonis strides by at the water’s edge. There’s barely any hair on his body. Amid all this display, his genitals are disappointing—a small afterthought, but then sex seems a remote abstraction here. It really is true what they say; people in the nude are impossibly decent. We should all go around like this. It would probably be the answer to all this world’s troubles. I can see it now—
Naturism
—
A New Theory Of World History
… The only trouble is, I have a feeling that it was one of the titles I drew the line at when I was stocking up for my researches in Blackwells.