Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  “Anyway—” her head was turned away from him; she was looking again at the big, bad, dusty portrait of that distant female cousin with her quill pen and unfinished letter on her desk. “Your parents seem to have had the last word. You’ve come home.”

  “Late, as usual.”

  “Better late than never.” Trying to giggle, she began to cough—a deep crackling cough that sounded like a forest on fire.

  “Can I get you some water?”

  “No.” Her voice was a bass croak. “This part of Cornwall’s awful for bronchitis.”

  “You smoke too much,” George said, talking not to Diana Pym but to the girl on the screen in the forlorn hotel room. Diana Pym stared back at him, her blue eyes moist with coughing.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve never gone in for doing things by halves.”

  “Whatever brought you to St Cadix?”

  “Oh, the sea, I guess. I lived in Venice for a while. Venice, California. We were a block away from the ocean. There was a motel and a Burger King between us and it. You could just see a crack of Pacific from the bathroom window—it was about the same size as the toothbrush handle. Then I moved to Brittany, but there was a big hump of cliff and some iron railings and an ice cream kiosk. You couldn’t actually see the sea at all, there. Now it comes right up to my back garden. At spring tides, the cottage feels like a boat on the water.”

  “You had friends here?”

  “No. I saw a picture of it in a magazine. It looked kind of dinky.” She sat hunched intently forward, listening to herself. “It gave me a job. The house was a ruin, the garden was just rocks and turf. In the first year I was out at nights digging, with a Tilley lamp hung in a hawthorn tree. It felt like something I’d been assigned—”

  Her face was alight with the recollection of it, but George saw only the empty labour, the lonely woman with the garden fork, the darkness, the light in the tree. Surely Julie Midnight could have found something better for herself than that?

  “Now it’s just there. I’m like the park attendant: I go around picking up leaves and frightening the birds.” She laughed. “I have a reputation to keep up, too. The kids go past my place on their way back from school. I heard them talking once: one kid was saying to another, ‘Watch out for the old looniewoman!’ I guess that’s one way of being accepted in the village: I’m the local witch around these parts. Any day now I expect people to come round to the door asking me to cure warts and goitres.”

  “Do you have a familiar?”

  “Uh-uh. Cats and gardens don’t go.”

  One whisky later, at a quarter to midnight, Diana Pym left. As George opened the car door for her, she said, “Someone said you were S. V. Grey’s father?”

  “ … yes,” George said, feeling accused of paternal negligence by the question.

  “I’m reading her now. I’ve seen her on television, of course.”

  “Have you?” George had no idea that Sheila had ever been on television. The information struck him as alarming: he hoped she hadn’t been on television very often.

  “Yes. Rather good, I thought. She’s a witty lady.”

  “Yes, isn’t she—” George said with a hearty emphasis he didn’t feel.

  “You must be proud of her.”

  “Oh … very.”

  He watched the tail lights of Diana Pym’s mud spattered car weave through the dark strand of pines and round the granite buttress of the headland. As the sound of the engine was lost behind the rock, it was replaced by the slow, inquisitive suck and slap of the sea below the cottage and the rattle of dry branches overhead. He found his head suddenly full of words. The girl on the screen was singing:

  Tonight we kiss, tonight we talk, tonight is full of laughter;

  But I know that it won’t last, my dear—

  This will all have passed, my dear—

  Next week, next month, or maybe the month after.

  The words tinkled stupidly. They fitted themselves to the noises of the sea, and the gravelly waves turned into a band playing from a long way off. George could hear drums and saxophones in it, and the steep descending scale of a solo clarinet.

  He went back in to the unwelcoming light of the cottage. On the arm of his mother’s sofa, a cigarette was still burning in a saucer. There was something disconcertingly lively about its white worm of ash. George, nursing his drink, watched it smoulder until the worm reached the filter and collapsed into the saucer. It left a thin, sour smell behind, like the exhaust fumes of a vintage car.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  George watched television. He sat over it, legs wide apart, jawbone cupped in his palm, as if he was warming himself before its coloured screen. The sound was turned down low. George aimed the channel changer at the set and stabbed the button with his thumb. He was searching for—he didn’t know what. News. Intelligence.

  He wanted to find out … about St Cadix … about his daughter … about his parents … about Diana Pym and the Walpoles’ Christmas party. He wanted to find England. He riffled through the pictures, each one as bright and flat as the last. There was no depth to their colour: they looked as disconnected from real life as a series of holiday postcards.

  Sitting in his father’s chair, George found himself using one of his father’s favourite words to describe what he saw. It was rum. Everything to do with the TV was rum.

  Even its arrival had been rum. In this country (he gathered), where people were trained to stand in line and wait for things and be grateful when they eventually turned up weeks and months late, the TV had veen delivered almost before George had properly begun to think of it. His casual call to the shop in the village had been treated as if it was a medical emergency. The van (“T. Jellaby—Every TV & Video Want Promptly Supplied”) had come, like an ambulance, in minutes.

  “Where do you want him io, then?” Clasping the enormous set to his chest, Mr Jellaby was puffed and bandy legged.

  Thrown by the man’s grammar, George had stared and said, “Oh … anywhere over there will do—”, pointing at the portrait of the cousin.

  Jellaby connected up the equipment. “He’ll do nice here,” he said, as if the TV was a dog or a foster child. “You want the video, too?”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think so. No.”

  “You get free membership of the Video Club …”

  “The television’s fine—it’s all I want.”

  “You’re all on your own here, are you?” Jellaby inspected the unswept room with the expert look of someone whose business is other people’s business, like a parson or a social worker. “In the Video Club we’ve got a very good selection of … adult films.” He didn’t quite wink, but his expression was unpleasantly complicit. “I’ll leave you a form anyway. So you can have a think about it.”

  “Oh, please don’t bother—”

  That affair had been rum enough; the stuff that George saw on the screen of the thing was rummer. Much of it was incomprehensible because the programmes kept on referring to other television programmes that George had never seen. It was like the Walpoles’ party—knowing none of the famous names, he felt ignorant and excluded. The jokes were unanswerable riddles. He watched, baffled, as a housewife on a quiz show identified six different TV series from a medley of their signature tunes. For this feat of general knowledge, she was rewarded with a twin-tub washing machine and tumble drier. Never before had George seen anyone literally jump for joy, but this woman was skipping up and down on the stage. She threw her arms round the neck of her inquisitor, wept real tears, and kissed him lavishly. George changed channels.

  He watched a game of football in which England lost 3-0 to Luxembourg. An hour later, on the news, he saw the aftermath of the game: children fighting with policemen in the streets around the football stadium. The policemen advanced like ancient Greeks, behind an interlocking wall of silver riot shields; the angry children stoned them with bricks and bottles. Forty children had been arrested, eight policemen seriously injured.

  He watched
advertisements for kitchen units, sheep pellets, chocolate bars, home computers. He half expected to come across his own daughter’s face as he drifted from station to station. There was a programme in which people were talking about books, but Sheila wasn’t on it.

  He sat through the full term (a record, for him) of a comedy show called “An Englishman’s Home”. The characters in it were supposed to be lords and ladies living on their uppers in a mouldy castle. The helicopter shot at the beginning of the programme, with its view of sculpted woods, trim parkland and old, rust coloured brick, suggested Kent. The castle was ruled by a woman called Lady Barbara, who strode round the place in a tweed skirt and padded kapok jacket of camouflage green. Every time she came on, the studio audience clapped. She could barely speak without raising a storm of appreciative laughter. At the climax of the show she blew a derelict barn to bits with dynamite. When the dust and smoke cleared, a wayward baronet was found squatting in the rubble.

  “Ah, Peregrine,” said the actress playing Lady Barbara. “There you are. Sitting around on your b.t.m. as usual. Why don’t you do something useful for a change? Oh, Perry, do get on your bike!”

  The audience roared. The actress turned on them with her bossy, horsey, Lady Barbara look, and they choked their laughter for just long enough to allow her to deliver her next line.

  “And Peregrine!” The baronet was dusting himself down. His clothes were charred, his tie in shreds. “How many times have I told you to stop smoking?”

  The audience loved this one. George was mystified. He supposed that the programme must be some sort of allegory. Or satire, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was definitely rum. For a moment he rather wished that he hadn’t thrown away that form of Jellaby’s: if one was going to get the hang of television now, perhaps one had to be a member of the Video Club.

  Furry puppets jigged on the screen. George stared at them and searched his head for phrases to send to Vera.

  Her letter had come by the second post. It was breathless and crowded, full of abrupt bursts of news penned out in Vera’s lovely, loopy scrawl. She missed him. Waking in the mornings, she felt lonely, sometimes. She thought of him as a tree. (Was that arvore, or some other word? George meant to look at it again.) On Tuesday, twenty millimetres of rain had fallen. She’d met the President of Guinea-Bissau. She hoped to go to the WHO conference in Washington in January. She’d found a scorpion on the balcony; the Wolof janitor from downstairs had murdered it for her with relish. The Egyptian from the World Bank had given the final OK to the building of the new road to Guia. Then she wrote: “All that I speak must sound a little bizarre, for Montedor now is very far away to you, I think.”

  That wasn’t true. (A man with a woman’s lacquered hairdo was reading the news.) Africa was so close that George could graze it with his cheek. Africa was where he was whenever he forgot himself: it was the place where he slept, brushed his teeth and where he hummed “Tiger Rag” as he waited for the kettle to come to the boil. It was home. Several times in the last few days he’d noticed a lightning flicker on the extreme periphery of his vision—a house skink, tacking nervously up the wall. He’d turned his head to watch the lizard, and remembered. No skinks in St Cadix.

  It was England, not Africa, that was so far away. The country was all round him, dark and mossy, littered with his parents’ ancestral junk. Yet it was like a thin charcoal smear of land on the horizon of an enormous lake. He kept on losing sight of it, and none of it seemed any nearer than the rest.

  If only Vera’s apartment was as close as it felt … He longed to talk to her over a bottle of Chivas Regal parked on top of the manual of abdominal surgery, with the guttering electricity supply making candlelight around them. But what could one put in a letter? Not much.

  Vera, love,

  I miss you too and often forget that you aren’t here, or I’m not there. That hurts more than I had expected, but otherwise I am finding my feet and beginning to settle in-

  Writing carefully, George filled two sides of lightweight onionskin. The television pictures cast an even, cold blue light on the page. When he next looked up, Lady Barbara was on. She was in jodhpurs tonight, and she was shaking a riding crop at one of the hapless noblemen in her domain.

  The marine aquarium was padlocked for the winter; the three gift shops were sealed off behind rusty metal grilles. At the Lively Lobster restaurant, last season’s menu had curled in its glass frame and the handwriting on it was gone to an illegible sepia. Fore Street was frigid and unsociable. George felt marooned.

  The sun was up, but it was too weak to equip him with a shadow. His footsteps, trapped between the tall, wet granite walls, sounded like axe blows.

  He spotted Jellaby, out in his van making house calls. Maybe that’s what everyone was up to behind their closed doors … fighting computer wargames and watching old movies on video machines. Hardly anyone was about. The few women who had braved the street had the furtive look of trespassers with their coat lapels pulled up high round their faces as they hid from the wind.

  It was the herring gulls who went about as if they owned the village: they loafed in noisy rows on gable ends, scuffled between the chimney pots and stood four square, cackling and spitting, in the middle of the road. As George passed they watched him with bloody button eyes. They knew a newcomer when they saw one: and the gulls had prehistory on their side.

  George posted his letter to Vera. Listening to it slither and fall in the empty pillarbox, he wanted to recall it. The words he’d written weren’t strong enough to survive the journey. By the time they reached Vera, they’d mean something else.

  The wind stung. His coat was too thin for the weather. Swinging his arms, throwing the hem of his long coat up with his knees, he began to march through the village like a stormtrooper, scattering the gulls ahead of him. Then he remembered that sea air was supposed to be a sexual stimulant. Too bad. He’d walk just the same.

  He reached the quay and marched out along the breakwater, past the moored boats to the striped pepperpot lighthouse at the end, where he tried and failed to get his pipe alight. The wind was shredding the tops of the little pointed waves on the estuary. At the harbour entrance, half a mile away, big breakers were rolling in from the open Atlantic: as they hit the rocks they exploded into plumes of white powder. On the far bank the leafless trees looked rimed with hoar frost: dust from the china clay works upriver had brought a snowbound winteriness to the landscape, smearing the trees, the grass, the roads, the dark slate roofs, and blowing in twisty clouds down the long funnel of the valley. Rupert Walpole had said he was fighting “a rearguard action” against “the conservationists”; but George thought Walpole was, if anything, improving on nature. The white dust, mixed with the white spume, gave Cornwall the arresting oddity of a moonscape.

  The tide was high and the end of the breakwater felt as if it was afloat. George leaned on the rail to steady himself as the sea moved all round him, lapping at his feet, busy, noisy, comforting. He liked the taste of salt spray on his lips and the dizzying sensation of being back aboard ship, feeling the bows lift to the waves and sink suddenly back.

  On watch again, he studied the water. There was something very English about it, this thin, light-starved water which fizzed and splashed so much more quickly and nervously than the slower seas he had grown used to. In Bom Porto, the Atlantic was milky green, thick as soup. At this time of year it swarmed with plankton, and in certain lights you seemed to see the sea wriggle with life. It was easy to imagine the first things crawling out of it and starting in on their colonial adventure. This northern sea was different, more coldly sophisticated. If you thought about the things that came out of it, they weren’t innocent. Celtic saints with prophecies … shipwrecked sailors … wartime mines. The tidewrack that nudged and bumped against the harbour wall was full of broken fish crates, shapeless chunks of polystyrene, limp condoms like giant white tulip flowers. Well, in that respect the sea was like most things. You got out of it pretty well exactly what
you put in: it returned Montedor to Montedor, England to England, as automatically as any mirror. George, watching its flecked and ruffled surface, saw too much confusion there for comfort, and turned his back on it.

  Halfway along the breakwater, he stopped to look at the boats. Their mooring lines were slack in the water and they’d floated out from the quay, their hulls knocking gently together, fender to fender. They were very lightly attached to the land. The half dozen yachts were just big plastic toys; it was the fishing boats that interested him, with their scabbed paint and tangles of gear. They had good names—Excelsior, Harmony, Mystic, Faithful, Harvest Home. There was an open-hearted frankness in these names. Each one was a confession. When you were at sea you really did think about abstract, religious things—things that you never admitted to ashore. You dreamed a lot. You found yourself believing in fate, or God or a girl.

  The naval ratings on Hecla, for instance. In Portsmouth, Cape Town, Mombasa, they stormed each port like Apaches. It had been a terrifying task to round them up, sodden and cursing, from the bars and brothels that they always discovered, by some instinctive radar system, within hours of docking. George, a sub-lieutenant fresh out of the Sixth Form, felt like an infant beside these hardened libertines of nineteen and twenty. Yet on night watches, ploughing up the Indian Ocean, it was the ratings who were childlike. He was touched and astonished by the questions they set him when he made the rounds of the ship.

  “Do you reckon Jesus was real, sir?”

  “My mum’s in Pinner. They won’t bomb Pinner, will they, sir?”

  “Billington saw a ghost once, sir. Have you ever seen a ghost, sir?”

  They wore St Christopher charms round their necks. Whenever the papers came on board, they raced to look up their fortunes in the stars. They spent many of their off duty hours staring at the sea with wonder in their faces, counting flying fish and looking out for monsters.