Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  Yet this new London looked like a dirty protest. It was wrecked and smeared. The taxi driver, fouling the air with words, was part of it. He was only saying what all the slogans said. I hate it here. I’m innocent. It’s not my fault.

  And where on earth did Sheila fit? George had meant only to take her to lunch at Wheeler’s, where he could have been comfortably in command. On the phone, though, it had been Sheila who took control. There was no question of lunch—she was working all day, anyway. But he must stay the night, at least. “Father, really-” She loaded the word with meanings: it was at once a call to duty, an appeal to common reason, even an exasperated declaration of affection. George had laughed. Holding the receiver to his ear, doodling an embroidered rectangle round the phone number of Swissair in London, he was game. But he hadn’t bargained on this dreadful place. Sheila is at home here?

  Labouring in third gear, the taxi climbed a ribbed hillside of low brick terraces. The traffic was thinner now: there were sooty plane trees at the side of the road and lighted grocery stores on the street corners. The tower blocks were sinking fast behind. Soon they were no bigger than obelisks in a neglected graveyard. George looked down over the brow of the escarpment and saw the city rendered suddenly harmless by distance and the dark—a dim, untidy scatter of lights across a valley floor. He thought he could make out the black threadline of the river and the amber glow of floodlights at Westminster, puzzlingly near at hand.

  At this altitude, even the driver’s manner softened. “Inker-man Rise? That’s off Acre Lane somewhere, en’t it, mate?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Yeah …” He was working it out. “It’s after Sebastopol and Alma.”

  Brick gave way to cheesy stucco, plane trees to chestnuts and beeches. The air began to smell like air again. The houses began to look like real London houses, frowning and beetle browed with their heavy cornices and balustrades.

  George cuddled Vera’s old patchwork oilcloth shopping bag on his lap, trying to cushion the wine against the jolting of the taxi and keep it warm. It was a ’71 Leoville-Barton, and George had spent a long time in conference with the wine merchant on St James’s Street before he’d bought it. The bottle had cost him as much as a whole case of ordinary claret. He hoped that Sheila would recognize it as a serious treat. But then Sheila appeared on television now; she was bound to know things like that. George felt that the wine struck just the right note. It was expensive. It was thoughtful. It would be gone in an hour. The trouble with most gifts was that they hung around accusingly long after the moment they’d been designed to celebrate had passed. He’d gone to the shop to buy champagne, but had been seduced by the colour of the old clarets, their sombre dustiness, and had thought how well they seemed to fit, somehow, with the idea of him and Sheila.

  The taxi stopped, its motor stuttering loudly in the quiet street. George overpaid the driver, who pocketed the money without thanks and drove off, leaving him alone in the dark with the trees making sea noises overhead. He couldn’t see the numbers on the houses, which were set a little back from the road, their front doors at the tops of fanlike flights of steps. Then he spotted Sheila’s—knowing it by instinct from the light in the tall curtainless window and the bare timber door from which the paint had been freshly stripped. Before climbing the steps, he patted his pocket to make sure his pipe was there, straightened his tie and squared his shoulders. Steady the Buffs, George thought, Steady the Buffs.

  He kissed her quickly to cover his surprise. For the woman at the door, his daughter, was already old. Her hair, brushed straight back from her face, was thickly streaked with silver. She looked like a badger disturbed at the entrance to her sett. He felt her arms grip him tight for a moment then spring away. Her hair smelled of apples.

  “God, you feel icy,” Sheila said. “Is that all you’ve brought? You are travelling light nowadays, Father.”

  She was staring at Vera’s bag. Myopia made her eyes look naked. George mumbled about how one could go a long way on a spare shirt and a clean pair of socks.

  “I always remember you with pyramids of matching pigskin cases. I could never imagine what you must have put in them. Old newspapers was what I rather suspected.”

  To explain his bag would mean explaining Vera. Instead, George said: “Yes, I used to cart far too much stuff around with me in those days.”

  She led him into an airy, pale, high-ceilinged room. Evidently there were builders in the house: it smelled pleasantly of pine shavings and turpentine, and a builder’s man with a spirit level was standing in front of a wall of books. George, keen to make himself agreeable, nodded at the man, who responded with a silent half-moon of a smile, produced from somewhere deep inside his beard.

  “Father, this is Tom,” Sheila said. “Father’s living out of a carrier bag—”

  Now the man gazed at the bag, with big slow eyes. After a long moment he said, “That’s … economical.” George realized that he wasn’t from the builders. Yet he was hardly more than a boy—an enormous boy, taller and wider than George, built to the proportions of someone designed to stand on a plinth in a civic square.

  The man—the boy—Tom—said, “You look just like Sheila. When you came in together like that, it knocked me out. Sheila never said.”

  George, flushing, said, “Oh—Sheila’s supposed to take after her mother.”

  “No,” Tom said, “it’s two peas. Anyone would see it.”

  “Rubbish,” said Sheila. “Father, do take off your coat.”

  Clumsy under Tom’s gaze, George shrugged his way out of his overcoat. Sheila took it from him. Moving abruptly, in her tweed skirt and brown mohair jumper, she looked all the more badgerlike and wary. George barely dared to stir for fear of startling her.

  “What a lovely house,” he said. “It seems all height and space.”

  “That’s Tom,” said Sheila. “It was a horrid little warren of partitioned boxes when I bought it. Tom knocked all the walls out.”

  “If it was in Italy, they’d probably call it a palazzo.”

  “Well, they certainly don’t call it that in Clapham Park,” Sheila said.

  The table at the end of the room was laid for three. Two bottles of supermarket Dão stood on it, their corks already pulled to let them breathe. Numbly, George realized that his Leoville-Barton was hopelessly extravagant and pretentious. He couldn’t bring it out now. He’d have to keep it hidden, in the bag. Why was it that with Sheila he always seemed to end up doing the wrong thing?

  Tom, George gathered, was doing the cooking. When he left for the kitchen, George felt marooned in the room with his daughter. Sheila sat at the end of a long sofa, her legs tucked up under her; George sat in a basketwork chair that creaked loudly every time he moved.

  “Was Christmas hell?” Sheila asked.

  The ten-foot space of air between them was brittle, crackly. George was disconcerted by his daughter’s eyes. They didn’t blink.

  “No. No, not at all—” He’d watched television, then tried to read Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus. After that he’d got a little drunk on Chivas Regal and thought a lot about Vera.

  “So your friends weren’t so bad after all?”

  “Oh—we managed to muddle along quite well really.” Two weeks before Christmas, he’d told Sheila on the phone that he was doomed to spend it with some octogenarian friends of his mother’s who could not be disappointed so near to the date. Out of respect for his fiction, he added: “Considering the difference in our ages.”

  “I tried ringing you on Christmas Day, and then I remembered.”

  That was odd. He’d been in all the time. The phone hadn’t rung. He said to Sheila: “No. I stayed two nights there. Didn’t get back till Boxing Day.” He felt distinctly cheered at catching Sheila out in her lie while keeping his own intact.

  “And is it all right in Cornwall? Have you met lots of people now?”

  “Oh—lots,” George said. “Yes …” Under interrogation, he twi
sted his head and gazed at a wall which was blank except for two very small framed watercolours. His daughter’s following stare was so intent that he felt scorched by it. Feeling that he was now obliged to concede something to Sheila, he said, “Of course, it takes a while to get the hang of things.” It felt as if there was an obstruction the size of a golf ball in his larynx.

  The trouble was that every time George looked up at Sheila he came face to face with S. V. Grey. Sitting on her sofa in her tall house on the hill, her long neck craned questioningly forward, she looked just like the photo on the back of her book. There was the same startled candour in her eyes, the same doubtful and ironic cast to her mouth. You would take her for someone who’d looked long and hard at the world and hadn’t been able to credit the nonsense that she’d seen there. That was S. V. Grey to a T, with her knuckle-cracking logic and her alarming reputation for being witty—a reputation so powerful that it had spread even among people who watched television in Cornwall.

  Now George feared that the wit was being covertly exercised on him. But with Sheila it was so hard to tell when she was being witty and when she wasn’t. George felt it was the safest course to assume that everything she said was witty until it was proved otherwise. So when Sheila said, “Do you feel at home yet, Father, or does it all still seem an awful wrench?” he looked at her cunningly and tried to read the small print of the question in her face. Finding none there, he blustered lamely about how he’d always kept a foot in both camps anyway, you know, and how one did try to keep up, even in Bom Porto, and on one’s leaves and so forth … He only managed to finish the sentence by lighting his pipe and hiding behind a lot of tricky business with his tamping thumb and his matches.

  Sheila said, “But there must be things about England … things we’re blind to because we’ve lived here too long. You’re bringing a fresh eye to the place—”

  A maroon flare went off inside George’s head. He thought he detected a pretty obvious sarcasm there.

  “It has to be an interesting time for you, now, Father.”

  He stared at her. She seemed to be in earnest. His first thought was of the hideous valley below Sheila’s window, and of how high-caste Indians were supposed to be blind to the way their own streets were used as lavatories; but he rejected it as a dangerous line to pursue. Then he thought of that programme on TV—“An Englishman’s Home”. He would have liked talk about that; its air of snobbish self-congratulation, and the way it seemed to him so parochial and so unfunny. But Sheila had been on television, and people who were on it didn’t watch it, he supposed. If he let on that he’d seen practically everything from breakfast time till closedown, and was rapidly learning the names of all the “personalities”, he would expose himself on a very vulnerable flank.

  So he said, “Actually I’ve been so busy, I’ve hardly had time to look over my own shoulder so far,” and instantly was sorry for saying it; Sheila’s question deserved more, but the more was something that George simply couldn’t give. Wanting to make it up to her, he shifted in his creaking chair so that he could study the two little watercolours on the wall. They were pictures of people in streets, done in quick dabs and splashes of paint, as if the artist was racing to keep up with the life he was trying to record. George thought they were pretty good. Regretfully he abandoned hope of ditching the ancestors on Sheila: someone who liked these deft and lively paintings would detest those oppressive slabs of Victorian journeywork.

  “Gwen John,” Sheila said.

  He’d meant to praise the pictures, but the name silenced him. He wasn’t sure who Gwen John was. He thought he’d heard of her, but hadn’t a clue as to whether she was alive or dead.

  “Ah,” George said, temporizing warily.

  “Sister to the famous Augustus.” Sheila laughed.

  George laughed too. He didn’t know why he was laughing, but Sheila’s tone of voice had been ironical—he was certain of that.

  Feeling his ground as he went, he said: “In Cornwall I’m lumbered with your grandfather’s hideous taste for dead archdeacons and major generals. There’s an especially awful dead maiden aunt, too.”

  “Oh, those—” Sheila said. “That’s odd, I thought you must have rather liked them.”

  “Good God, no.” It was like finding oneself accused of interfering with small boys in public parks.

  “Granny hated them too.”

  “Are you sure?” It struck George as a novel idea: in his experience, his mother had meekly followed his father’s taste in everything from his high churchmanship to his loathing of garlic. They only bickered, late in life, about each other’s illnesses.

  “Yes. When she was alone in the house, after your father died, she used to cover them up. She told me.”

  “Why on earth didn’t she chuck the things out, then?”

  “But she wanted to leave them to you.”

  “Really?”

  “‘They’ll be so important to George when he comes home.’”

  The words hit on a tender spot. He felt not pain but a nasty stab of what a dentist would have called “discomfort”. How badly he’d known his mother; how badly she’d known him.

  “Now you’re going to find it really difficult to give them to Oxfam,” Sheila said.

  “Yes—damn right I will.”

  Troubled, he gazed at his daughter’s room; its coloured rugs spread on bare wooden boards, its books, its almost empty walls. Sheila’s house had the air of a place where there was nothing that wasn’t wanted and intended. It was the exact opposite of Thalassa.

  “So what will you do with them, do you think?”

  George looked enviously at the acreage of white plaster around the two small watercolours.

  “Oh … leave them to you, I expect.”

  For the first time, Sheila smiled; a frank and easy smile without a trace of wit in its corners. In an instant that lasted no longer than the blink of a camera shutter, George thought: it’s true—we’re related.

  From the kitchen, Tom called that he was almost ready.

  “He seems awfully nice—Tom,” George said.

  Immediately, the wit was back in Sheila’s smile. “Yes?” she said. It seemed to George an oddly dangerous affirmative.

  “Is he … a writer too?” Deep water. He couldn’t touch bottom with his feet.

  “Tom? No—” Sheila laughed loudly enough for George to fear that Tom himself would hear his name being talked of.

  “What does he do?”

  “Things.” The word was definite, and final.

  “Things …” George said, feeling stupid.

  “He makes things. He trades in things. He doesn’t go in for abstractions.”

  “Soufflé—” Tom said, standing in the kitchen door. He was holding it in a pair of thick floral oven gloves. The soufflé had risen from its brown earthenware dish like a thatched cottage with eaves and gables. George, on his way to the table, passed the two watercolours on the wall. “Gwen John,” he said, and nodded twice, checking his bearings.

  When Sheila stood up to clear away the soufflé dishes, Tom said, “What kind of wood grows where you come from, in Africa?”

  George had been watching Tom as he ate. He studied the way Tom’s loaded fork negotiated a clear passage through the straits of his beard. He studied the way Tom’s eyes lifted, every minute or so, to Sheila’s face. He studied Tom’s enormous left hand as it rested on the tabletop. The fingers were spread like roots, but their nails had been pared back to expose four slender crescents of innocent and unprotected-looking skin.

  Tom was a very rare bird indeed. Never before had George met anyone whom Sheila loved. Watching Tom, he searched for Sheila—and lost her again in every movement that Tom made. The more he watched, the stranger his daughter grew to him. He couldn’t figure it out at all.

  “Iroko?” Tom said. “Mahogany?”

  “No, we don’t have enough rainfall. There’s a lot of mahogany in Senegal, but I don’t think there’s any in Montedor. I do
n’t know about iroko, but I rather doubt it.”

  “There’s the baobab, of course,” Tom said.

  “Yes. And a lot of acacia. Then there’s the wa-wa tree.”

  “Wa-wa?”

  “Wa-wa,” George said in his Wolof voice. “Wa-wa. West Africa Wins. It’s a very light, soft, white wood. Like balsa, but more stringy and fibrous. People make dug out canoes from it, things like that.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Tom said. “Wa-wa.”

  Something crashed in the kitchen.

  “You do … wood carving?” George said, looking at Tom’s hands.

  “No. Just shelves and doors and stuff. I did try to carve an angel once. It didn’t work out. I had the wrong wood. Mahogany. You needed lime for that; mahogany was far too hard. It made my hands bleed. I never got beyond the face.”

  Sheila came in carrying a casserole. She served out portions of some sort of stew.

  George said, “You said you were working, Sheila. What’s on the stocks? New book?” He saw Tom gazing at him, then at Sheila, like a spectator following a ball in a tennis match.

  “Yes,” Sheila said. “A book. It goes in stops and starts. Mostly stops, lately.”

  “Can one … ask what it’s about?”

  “Oh—depression, melancholia, slipped discs and the vapours.” Her colour was high, her stare challenging. She blinked furiously as if she was trying to get grit out of her eyes. Tom was looking at her now as if she’d just solved a puzzle for him.