Where the Climate's Sultry
L ong, long ago, in August 1955, before the Pill or the Permissive Society had been invented, four young people from England struggled inexpertly with their sexual appetites on the island of Ibiza, which, as a place of popular British resort, also had yet to be invented. Ibiza was still an exotic destination in those days, one the departing holiday-maker might let drop without self-deprecation - with, indeed, a certain air of adventurousness. It was certainly an adventure for Desmond, Joanna, Robin and Sally.
Des, Jo, Rob and Sal - thus were they known to each other, the less essential syllables of their names having worn away under continual use - had first met and paired off at a Freshers' Hop in their second week at a redbrick provincial university. Elective affinities drew them together in that milling throng of anxious and excitable youth. Each of them, unnerved by the sexual competitiveness of their new environment, was looking, half-consciously, for an agreeable, presentable companion of the opposite sex who would settle, once and for all, the question of who to “go around with”. They chose well. Over the next three years, while their contemporaries changed partners with fickle frequency, or remained forever starved and solitary on the edge of the dance, while all around them jilted boys took to drink, and forsaken girls wept into their tutors' handkerchiefs, while rash engagements were painfully dissolved, and nervous breakdowns spread like flu, the twin relationships of Desmond and Joanna, Robin and Sally, remained serene and stable: a fixed, four-starred constellation in an expanding and fissile universe.
Both girls were doing a general Arts degree, and the boys were doing Chemistry. Outside lectures, they formed an inseparable quartet. In their second year, as University regulations permitted, the girls rented a bed-sitting room, and here all four ate and studied together in the evenings. At ten o'clock they made a final cup of coffee and dimmed the lights. Then for half an hour or so, until it was time for the boys to return to their digs, they reclined on twin divans for a cuddle. Nothing more than a cuddle was possible in the circumstances, but this arrangement suited them well. Joanna and Sally were nice girls, and Desmond and Robin were considerate young men. Both couples vaguely assumed that eventually they would get married, but this possibility seemed at once too remote and too real to be anticipated. If three was a crowd, four was company in this situation. Indeed, while fondling each other on their respective divan beds, the two couples would often maintain a lively four-pointed conversation across the space between them.
All worked hard as Finals approached. They planned to reward themselves, and round off their undergraduate careers, with what Desmond described as “a slap-up Continental holiday, somewhere off the beaten track,” to be financed by a month's work in a frozen food factory. It was a measure of what sensible, responsible young people they were that not one of the eight parents concerned raised any objection to this plan. They perhaps reckoned without the effect of a Mediterranean atmosphere upon placid English temperaments. As Joanna, who had prepared a question on Byron for Finals, liked to quote, with almost obsessive frequency, in Ibiza:
What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
There was no airport in Ibiza in those days. A student charter flight in a shuddering old Dakota took them to Barcelona, where they embarked the same evening on a boat bound for the Balearic Islands. Desmond and Robin sat up on deck, where the girls joined them at dawn to watch, with suitable exclamations, the white, steeply raked façade of the town of Ibiza rise slowly out of the turquoise Mediterranean. They breakfasted on rolls and coffee outside a quayside café, feeling the sun already burning between their
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