Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  He’d known, of course, that Sheila had written a book, and had pictured it clearly as a slim and sensitive novel, about an adolescent growing up in a town much like Norwich, perhaps. He had looked forward to reading it, and to sending his congratulatory letter. (“It reminded me vividly of the young Elizabeth Bowen.”) This he had not expected. Its title came from a couplet that Sheila had used as an ironic epigraph:

  Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;

  A woman’s noblest station is retreat.

  From the first page he learned that the book was “a study of female submission” in Western culture, and by page 2 the author had mastered the distinction between submission and subjection. The more George looked into it, the more the thing surprised him. He was bewildered by the kind of statistic with which the author berated him: the fact, for instance, that in 1974, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, 76% of married couples still relied on the sheath as their primary means of contraception. How on earth would anyone know that? That was rum; but what was rummer was the way the author followed it with an exchange between Millamant and Mirabel in Congreve’s “The Way of the World”, where, apparently, the attitude of the women of Tower Hamlets was ingeniously foreshadowed.

  Most of all, George was surprised by the author’s high spirits. She was—well, funny. She dealt with her submissive women with a kind of irritable glee. She lined up real women along with women in literature and women in paintings, and shook the nonsense out of all of them. When George forgot for a moment that this scathing author was his daughter, she made him laugh, and then he remembered.

  For Sheila wasn’t in the least bit funny. There wasn’t a glimmer of amusement in her. Watching her magnified eyes across a restaurant table (her glasses grew noticeably thicker every year), George felt himself scrutinized by a pair of stuffed olives. There was resentfulness there, yes. Humour, no. One might as well expect to share a joke with Little Dorrit, at whose expense the author of The Noblest Station was briskly clever.

  But there was worse to come. The author had mined her pages at intervals with the word “patriarchal”. George felt that this explosive multisyllable had been laid there especially for him to stumble over and be wounded by.

  Harbouring the book in the house at all seemed to George to be like keeping a polecat for a pet. He did his best to tame it, shelving it in its proper place among the G’s, between Goodbye to All That and Diary of a Nobody. It didn’t work. The name S. V. Grey stuck out as importunately as if it was lit in neon. The book itself was so much taller and fatter and newer than George’s orangeback Penguins and foxed Tauchnitz Library editions. Its coloured jacket bulged away from its spine, as if the book had developed a wild and irrepressible life of its own. Nor was this just a function of the way that George felt got-at by the contents: it was the first object in the house that any visitor spotted. Once, people had remarked on the ornate Adeni oak chest in which George kept his papers or on the dwarf snowbell tree that he had grown from seed in a tub in the living room. Now all they saw was the book.

  “This is you, yes, Mr Grey?” they said.

  “No, no—that’s … my daughter, actually,” said George, and always felt that he was telling an obscure lie as he said it. But no-one would understand that the alarming S. V. Grey was—

  There was a throaty tirra-lirra from the phone in the hall. George gratefully detached himself from the remains of his meal.

  The hall was dark and humid, a resort for cockroaches and hairy spiders. When George picked up the phone, all that was there at first was a lot of echo and transcontinental crackle. Concentrating harder, he discovered a tinny replica of a human voice hiding somewhere in the nest of interference. It was saying, “Hello? Hello? Hello? George?”

  “Who is that? … Vera?”

  It was Vera, calling from three streets away. The Montedorian telephone system, like the electricity supply, was still in an experimental stage.

  “What is your name?” Vera asked.

  “What?”

  “How—was—your—game?”

  “Oh. Fine. No, just fine.”

  “Who won?”

  “Mm? Ah … Teddy did.”

  “Always Teddy wins.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid it’s his commando training.”

  “Unkind fruits and bosky boots,” Vera said.

  “What? I can’t hear you!” he shouted.

  “I ask you if you eat your dinner.”

  He was sure that she hadn’t said that.

  “Yes. Vera—I suppose you wouldn’t … like to come over, would you?”

  “Oh, it is so late. In the morning is a conference at the hospital. I must have sleep, George. Not tonight, I think.”

  He guessed she meant that Teddy was there. “Okay,” he said.

  Then Vera said: “You can come here, if you like to. Today I buy a new bottle of Chivas Regal—”

  “You are a love,” George said. “No. You get your sleep. I’m feeling bushed as hell, too.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow then—”

  “Yes. Tomorrow. That would be nice. We can go to dinner—”

  “Maybe,” Vera said. “Sleep good.”

  “You sleep well, too, old love.”

  “Ciao, George—”

  He hung the phone back on its hook. Returning to the uneasily throbbing light of the living room, he saw S. V. Grey accusing him from the bookshelf. He swigged the last of the Dào. S. V. Grey was still there, the letters of her name glowing in red tipped with silver.

  Let me know your flight number and I will meet you at Heathrow.

  Moving painfully, cautious as a burglar in his own house, George shook his squash kit out of the oilcloth shopping bag and refilled it with an ironed shirt, socks, pants, razor and the old account book in which he was drafting his report to the President.

  Outside, the air was warm and free of furies. A stucco archway divided George’s strip of garden from the street; beneath the arch was a tidy, man-sized parcel of rags. The loose ends of the parcel fluttered slightly in the night wind, and George stepped carefully over its least bulky end.

  A hand came out of the rags.

  “Por favor—” The parcel had a cracked woman’s voice.

  George felt in his pocket, found a handful of escudos and laid the coins on the hand.

  “Muito obrigado,” the parcel said politely.

  “Boa noite,” George said.

  “Obrigado, senhor.”

  There was no traffic in the city. He could hear dogs, exchanging notes from the cardboard box suburbs and, somewhere out in the sky, a light aircraft was on sentry-go. The moon showed the Rua Kwame Nkruma as a picturesque ruin, its fantastic timberwork the colour of old lace.

  “Não a Preguiça!” said the broken facade of Number 12; “Não a Oportunismo!”

  George, taking the message personally, quickened his aching step.

  Habit woke him at dawn. He had dreamed he was an astronaut, hurtling through space in a module full of clocks and gauges. Then he was driving in a golf buggy through a bumpy landscape of red moondust. There was a baby, wrapped in rags, crying under an acacia tree. He picked it up to cuddle it and it turned into something dead and heavy with an elderly stranger’s face. Vera had been in his dream as well. She had gone spacewalking, and when he called to her she was too high in the sky to hear him scream.

  He looked at his watch. It wasn’t six, yet. He had always taken pleasure in the cool early morning walk through the sleepy city to the bunkering station. Today, he’d arranged to see Raymond Luis there at eleven; an age away. He was an eleven o’clock man now, at one with the distinguished visitors and the perspiring sales reps; and he saw the redundant hours laid out ahead of him like a range of steep, uninteresting hills.

  Surreptitiously, he shifted first one leg, then the other. Neither hurt too badly. Vera’s body was curled away from him, lost in sleep. The springy tangle of her hair was lodged on the neighbouring pillow like a thornbush. The thin shared coverlet stir
red against his own body as she breathed. George watched her through one eye, soothed by the simple bulk of her lying beside him. She gave the morning point and weight: it was today, and not just any old day, because here was Vera, her big shoulders hunched and bare, lungs and heart in A-OK order, one pink palm exposed to the encroaching sun as it leaked through the shutters and cast a pale grid of light on the wooden floor.

  Vera was exactly a year older than his daughter; George treasured those twelve months as a special, secret gift. By Bom Porto standards, Vera was no chicken: the girls with whom she’d been in school were all old women now. When he’d first met Vera, he’d been shocked by the schoolfriends—their cracked faces, their shuffling walk, their trails of ragged grandchildren. They seemed older than his own mother. Standing with them, Vera looked absurdly, indecently young; but she was a year older than his daughter—that was the important thing to George.

  He touched her warm haunch and felt the moistening of her nightsweat on his fingers. She shivered as if his hand had entered in disguise into her dream, and the open palm on the pillow travelled slowly, uncertainly to her hidden breast. Dear Vera. It occurred to George that he liked her best when she was asleep. Awake, there was too much of her, somehow, to allow any but qualified and complicated feelings. Asleep, she permitted him to wallow in simple tenderness and simple gratitude. Dear, dear Vera.

  As quietly as he could, he slid out from Vera’s bed and tiptoed from the room, trousers in hand. Quietly, he filled her blackened kettle and quietly submerged the coffee-grinder in the bitter-smelling sack of mountain beans. A line from a schoolboy hymn stuck in his head: “Who sweeps a room as for His name makes that and the action fine”. George liked these passages of early morning housewifery. Doing things for Vera. The gas popped loudly as he put a match to it. George listened: no, she was still asleep.

  Vera had two rooms—palatial space in this city where most people lived in spicy huddles like litters of kittens. Though Vera herself put one instinctively in mind of clutter, knick-knacks, overflowing laundry baskets, cornucopias, her rooms were barely colonized at all. She had accumulated a lot in the way of flesh, experience, self, but there was precious little of her when it came to things. Her clothes were kept in a single narrow closet. No skeletons there—it was less than half-full. The room at the front had a single picture on the wall, a rather nasty reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Cornfield near Aries”. There was a gaudy woollen rug on the floor, woven by Wolofs. A manual of abdominal surgery lay on top of a guide to the art treasures of Lisbon. George loved this room for its airiness: it was so hospitably empty that a single remark, a shaft of buttery sunlight or a cut flower from an embassy garden could take it over in its entirety. It was a room perfectly designed for living in the present.

  Now he was grinding their breakfast coffee there, filling the room with the smell; bare feet on bare boards, winding the brass handle with a knobbly, clenched left hand, and listening to the satisfying scrunch-scrunch sound of the beans inside the mill.

  He opened the mosquito door on to the loggia, and let the morning in. The jagged hills to the northwest of the city were coloured orange by the sun. The army had painted them with letters big enough to be seen by passing spacemen in their satellites: LONG LIVE AGRARIAN REFORM! LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL DEMOCRACY! LONG LIVE AMILCAR CABRAL! Below the loggia, a yellow Toyota pickup truck with a stoved-in side went past in a caul of dust. It was followed by a black solitary, shit-stained pig, out for a morning constitutional. Then came a woman, a five gallon kerosene drum almost full of water balanced on her head. The drum didn’t shift, but her eyes did: they swivelled upwards, gazing roundly at the balcony, where George felt his gaping flies.

  “Bom dia,” George said.

  “Bom dia,” she said, and giggled.

  He watched her go on down the street, wearing the can on her head as stylishly as if it was an Ascot hat. Her disappearance round a sandy corner left the street suddenly blank; and in that emptiness, George felt a stab of panic. The present was crowding him out. For the last five minutes, he had been printing images in his head as if they were in the past. Everything—the woman, the pig, the truck, the slogans, even Vera still asleep next door, even the smell of the coffee he was still grinding—already had the sharpness of a memory. Viva! Viva! said the slogans on the hills; but this was a life he was looking back to. Framed half-naked in the mosquito door, George felt posthumous.

  “George! Hey, honey, are you there?”

  “Yes,” he called back, “I’m here. I’m making coffee. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The table was spread with sheets from yesterday’s Times. Tom lifted the heavy instrument from its baize-lined wooden chest. The brass frame was blackened; the silvering on the mirrors was speckled round the edges; the smoked glass lenses were encrusted with old dust. Tom held the telescope-bit to his eye. His out of focus view of the mantelpiece was obstructed by a rectangle of white fuzz.

  Viv had said it was a theodolite, like surveyors use—but Viv was ignorant. It was obvious what it was. It was a sextant. Sea captains had them. You looked at the sun through it and it told you where you were.

  There was no sun to look at today. Tendrils of cloud the colour of bonfire smoke grazed the housetops and dampened the winter trees. Visibility stopped beyond the grey shale bank of the Richmond to Waterloo railway line. On the lawn, two wet starlings hopped listlessly between the timber piles. Tom licked the corner of a duster and began gently to wipe the lenses clean.

  He’d paid a fair bit for it—a coat rack from a derelict restaurant in Shooter’s Hill and a filing cabinet and swivel chair from a travel agents’ in Camberwell. But he’d lusted after it as soon as Viv opened its brassbound case and revealed it nesting there in the dusty baize with its set of little accessory telescopes each slotted into a compartment of its own. Tom was fond of instruments, their fiddly precision, their serious weight. This one was a beauty.

  Tom wound the duster round his forefinger and wetted it with a dab of Brasso. He rubbed at a strut on the frame. In a moment there was a wink of pale metal showing from under the mottling of olive-black carbon. It lengthened slowly into a smear. Tom went on rubbing until the whole piece gleamed misty gold.

  He could hear the electric clatter of Sheila’s typewriter up at the top of the house. The words were coming in crowds this morning. One of Sheila’s good days. More often they assembled in ones and twos like at a Salvation Army meeting. Today they were pouring out. It sounded like the Arsenal on a Saturday afternoon up there. Surely she must have enough words to fill her book now. For months she had been in a state of perpetual beginning, filling her wastebasket with half-typed pages. Every week the dustmen carted away Sheila’s extravagant droppings. When the wind got up, paper blew around the garden and lodged in the trees. Tom rescued her rejected pages, shaking them free of coffee grounds, bits of eggshell and tomato skins, smoothing them flat and reading them as messages to himself, as if they’d arrived in bottles. Usually they didn’t make much sense; but sometimes they made a weird and sparky connection with what Tom was thinking. His favourite was headed “27”: the solitary, uncompleted line of type read, “freedom, in daily things, is what”. He kept that piece of paper, and others, in a box in the bomb shelter. That was how he best liked to read Sheila’s work—secretly, in fragments. It was like kissing someone in their sleep, and them kissing back, not knowing it was you.

  He started to tackle the long curved strip at the bottom of the sextant. The tarnish wiped off more easily here and exposed a silver inlay in the brass. The silver was engraved with figures and divisions so tiny and so finely done that one needed the swivelling magnifier on the arm of the instrument to make them out at all. Tom thought: a little soot, rubbed well into the silver, would help them stand out better. He rubbed at the brass around the inlay and uncovered some lettering with fancy curlicues: J. H. STEWARD, 457 WEST STRAND, LONDON. There was also the name of the owner, inscribed in a
less florid style. J. H. C. Minter R.N.

  He loosened each hinged glass with a dewdrop of sewing machine oil. The engineering of the instrument was lovely—every piece of it firm and snug. He’d have to resilver the mirrors on it, though; but there must be a book that would tell you about that in Clapham Public Library. They’d have books on navigation, too. He could find out how to use it.

  It was a collector’s piece, really. Looking at it now, at its fat brass telescope and silver arc, Tom thought: it could be worth three hundred pounds, no, make it four.

  There were four empty miniatures of whisky in the netting pouch on the seatback at George’s knee, along with the airline magazine and the card showing smiling people in lifejackets sliding down chutes from emergency exits. George knew exactly why those idiot smiles were stuck on their diagrammatic faces: any way out from a jumbo jet, however unscheduled, was something to be thankful for. He squashed the cellophane tumbler in his fist and dropped it under his seat.

  The monotonous raw noise of the engines made his head feel as if it had been stuffed with wire wool. All blinds down, with coloured pictures playing on the bulkhead screen, the plane roared north through the sky, eating up the latitudes. His fellow passengers looked like patients being treated for something, or souls being chastened. Their feet were encased in identical blue airline-issue nylon slippers. Plastic headsets were clamped round their jaws. Their faces were slack. As the aircraft shuddered on a swirl of turbulence, they lolled in their seats, eyes fixed indifferently on the screen.

  George was too distracted, too ashamed to watch the movie. He couldn’t read. He felt terrible. Strapped into his seat in the candy-smelling half dark, he winced at himself and ached to be alone.

  He lifted the blind at his elbow as high as he dared and looked out. The Sahara was trapped in the angle between the wing and the fuselage, seven miles down, a continent below. The desert was like brick dust—the colour of a shattered city. The wind had blown it into waves and ripples; a red ocean of scorched rubble. Somewhere between George and the desert, the jet stream of another plane was disintegrating in the sky.