Thirty years ago my parents gave us the money for a much needed holiday. The other half had been hard at work staring down a microscope, wrestling with a major disease and his mother was very ill. When not teaching, I tried to look after his parents every other weekend. Life was being very challenging for a pair of twenty somethings, so, given the chance of our first holiday abroad, we rushed to a sunny island, thinking things were looking up and this would now be our lot. Sadly it would be two decades before our next holiday but we weren’t to know that at the time.
Nevertheless, innocent of the weight of the future, we explored the island, enjoyed the unexcavated, unremarked remains of antiquity that littered the largely deserted beaches, and, as it was November, were thrown back on other hotel residents for company. There were some young, unattached men, very few families and a sprinkling of retired couples from all over Europe. The hotel had a number of programmes with a rather efficient German flavour for the entertainment of guests. We avoided the early morning calisthenics in the pool and on the grass; they were mainly enjoyed by the retirees. I embraced the activities in the atelier and made a batik picture of the cook’s cat from my photograph. We made friends with a couple of young men whom we hung around with at the bar and a lady of indeterminate age, veering in the direction of late forties – very, very late forties and counting backwards, from Leamington Spa, who I’ll call Sarah. She was holidaying alone and seemed keen to capture the attention of a young unattached man. Any young unattached man. I found myself sounding like the Queen and saying ‘my husband and I’ at all possible opportunities. Fortunately her attention was mainly directed to the other two lads in our group, who were younger than us and mostly treated her with the amused tolerance you would save for an elderly maiden aunt. We visited the pool, the beach, the town, separately and together. There were other possibilities that we didn’t investigate but the one activity guaranteed to draw a full complement of guests was the late morning sunbathing parade.
This daily ritual was not to be found on the bulletin boards, or the pamphlets left in the bedroom. Knowledge of it spread subliminally. Each morning at eleven a procession of guests would appear clutching towels, sun tan lotion and reading material and arrange itself on the sun loungers round the pool. By a quarter past eleven the windows of the dining room, which faced the pool, were filled from end to end by men, all quite suddenly needing to look out of those particular windows at that time. As the sun loungers filled up, the tension in the dining room was palpable. Exactly at quarter past eleven she appeared.
She was known as the Swiss Miss. Whether or not she was actually Swiss is debateable, as far as I’m aware none of the men was ever able to summon the courage to speak to her. She was tall, she was slim, she was fair of skin, she had large blue-green eyes, she had long heavy yellow hair and she had a perfectly hemispherical breast like a stuck-on pudding bowl just there and another one, matching, just there.
She appeared round the corner, which was not difficult to do. The hotel bedrooms were in small ground-level clusters interspersed with winding paths. She rarely appeared from the same path twice, which, of course, only served to enhance the trick. Coolly she sauntered her long legged saunter round the pool. Slowly she bent her long legs and sat on the lounger. Calmly she raised her feet from the ground and stretched out. Luxuriously she rolled on to her front and, as the men in the dining room, craning to check out the weather, let escape a group sigh, with a flash of one slim golden hand she released the catch of her bikini bra, scooped up her book and began reading.
For the next three quarters of an hour she remained, unmoving save to turn the page of the book. She never dropped the book, applied sun tan lotion or minutely escaped the confines of the bikini top in any way whatsoever. The guests at the window gradually ebbed away. They went to their bedrooms to fetch things. They had a cup of coffee. They sat at the bar and had a drink. They wandered into the grounds and played bowls or took photographs of the wildlife.
At twelve they were back. They lined the windows in such close order parade formation you couldn’t have slid a piece of tissue paper between them. At this time the cooks and waiters joined in, having found this a most convenient time to clear the dining room tables of any possible remnants of the self service breakfast, finished three hours previously.
At twelve the Swiss Miss turned over.
She took the bikini top off, folded it, put it under the sun lounger cushion and lay back down again.
She stayed that way for exactly half an hour then sat up, redressed and disappeared until the following day.
In the kicking-heel freedom of the afternoon guests met in dispersing and reforming groups to assess the events of the morning. I have no idea how long the Swiss Miss had been staying, or how long she stayed after we left but there is little doubt that her appearances were creating a little dent in the fabric of reality. Elderly ladies began tootling round the hotel in much less clothing than was good for them. Swimming costumes were altered. Bathing trunks got rolled down and legs of shorts got rolled up. There was an outbreak of facial rash caused by shaving three times a day. The gift shop sold out of toothbrushes. The entire hotel began to revolve in an unhealthy, black-hole-forming sort of way round midday.
Sarah was not happy. She never mentioned the breasts of the Swiss Miss as such but began to make oblique comments about sunburn and associated dangers whenever possible, whilst simultaneously shedding layers of clothing herself. This didn’t do her any favours at all. Her skin was of a pallid yellowish hue. An absence of any muscle tone combined with a tendency to leanness had cruelly left her with a flap of skin hanging under her chin like the wattle of an elderly tortoise. Her arms hung in soft yellow folds like rolls of old crepe paper left over from a long ago fete. Her skinny legs, at first respectably covered with a variety of mid calf tie-dye holiday skirts, gradually made their way into the sunshine as the rolled skirts crept relentlessly up, past the varicose veins, past the bony knees to land at last mid thigh. To compensate for the lack of leg covering, to her usual string-coloured shapeless blouses she began to add short cut-off cardigans in beige. One particularly awful one was beige and blue with an assortment of random holes; no one was surprised when she assured us she had crocheted it herself. To nerve herself up to wear her daring new wardrobe, Sarah began to visit the bar frequently. We took to avoiding her. Meeting in a group by the pool, planning the afternoon, the merest glimpse of the dreadful beige cardigan weaving unsteadily toward us was enough to scatter us at speed on the paths round the hotel. Sarah redoubled her efforts to join in at almost the same rate as we worked to evade her.
On the last day of our holiday with a fortnight of sun, sea and the Swiss Miss to cheer us through the work ahead, we reconvened by the pool mid morning to swap addresses; the Swiss Miss, adjacent, in the face down phase, we would never again see turn over, as we had to vacate our rooms before midday. Spotting us, Sarah came steaming out from the bar, crying ‘Stop! Don’t go! I have something to show you!’
We waited. A mistake, I feel, in hindsight.
Sarah drew level with the group and with no further word grasped the edges of the awful crocheted beige and blue cardigan and parted them with considerably more of a flourish than Moses parting the Red Sea but, sadly, much less audience appreciation. Looking back, it would have been nice if one of the lads could have feigned a gasp, or even said ‘Oh’, however quietly. Underneath the cardi, she had, of course, unadorned in any way, shape or form, a pair of yellow, wrinkled breasts, worn flat to the rib cage at the top and, further south, trickling in a relaxed manner over the top of the rolled skirt waistband to finish pointing to the ground, as a reminder of gravity, in case we had forgotten it. For a good minute we stared silently into the future, sliding over the event horizon of our own group black hole, propelled by the Swiss Miss who lay quietly behind us bending space and time for her own unfathomable ends. Then Sarah scooped up the goods, closed the cardigan and we all went home, quite quickly.
We never contacted the others in the group and they never contacted us. Each went his way with a head full of awful knowledge.
Interestingly, Sarah’s daring but limited revelation was clearly intended to be a parting gift of unprecedented generosity, she may even have thought of herself as bountiful, in a hand crocheted sort of way, whereas the Swiss Miss, power-crazed and self-absorbed was giving nothing, not even a smile.
Yet, despite the black hole, the universe was in perfect balance.
