Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  “A … medical book?”

  “No.” She cut an irritable slice out of the air with her knife. “A sort of social book. It’s about … women … and how they’ve used nervous diseases as weapons and symbols and devices …”

  “Does it have a title?”

  “Woman’s Complaint” Sheila said, and laughed her dangerous, witty laugh.

  “It sounds fascinating,” George said, anxiety making the words creak in his mouth.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Father. Of course it doesn’t.”

  “No—honestly … But I would have thought … as a leading feminist …”

  “I’m not a feminist!” Sheila almost sang the words, in a shattering soprano. “Feminists these days are very serious ladies. I’m not in that class. I’m a hack.”

  George, on the run now, took the remark and hastily subjected it to all the tests he could think of for irony and wittiness. The results were inconclusive.

  “Oh, I mean it,” Sheila said.

  He was lost. Way south of the river. Poking at the meat on his plate, he said, “This is delicious,” and looked hopefully around him, a contrived smile fixed to his face.

  Tom said, “It’s a carbonade. It’s easy. You cook it in Guinness.”

  They were back in the withdrawing part of the room. Sheila poured coffee. George swigged off the last of the sour Dão in his glass. He’d accounted for one of the two bottles; Sheila and Tom had divided the other equally between them. He mourned the Leoville-Barton in Vera’s bag like a lost friend. He wondered if Sheila kept brandy in the house and decided that she didn’t.

  Sheila said, “Why are you going to Geneva, Father?”

  “Oh … there’s a bit of unfinished business that I have to sort out … I have to see some gnomes.”

  “Tom’ll drive you to Heathrow.”

  “Oh—no need for that. I can perfectly well get a taxi.”

  “No problem,” Tom said. “I’ve got to see a bloke in Hounslow anyway.”

  Why was it that in England George was always on someone’s way to somewhere else? It made his journeys seem unoriginal; it made the country itself seem no bigger than a village street.

  “And when you come back from Switzerland,” Sheila said, “what will you do then?”

  A little loosened by the wine, George said, “Well—I’m buying a boat.”

  “A boat?” Sheila seemed to be holding the word up close to her eyes for inspection, as if it was in Portuguese.

  “A sort of trawler-thing with sails and just enough space to live on at a pinch.”

  “And where will you sail, in your boat?”

  “Oh, here and there. I thought I’d like to drift round England for a while. There are so many places that I haven’t seen at all, or haven’t seen for forty years … Living in Cornwall’s made me feel footloose.”

  “Do you really need a boat to do that?”

  “There’s something very first-hand about going anywhere by sea. If you’ve navigated your own way there, you feel you’ve literally discovered the place. It seems to be a nice idea to be the Columbus of … oh, Hastings and Lyme Regis.”

  “All by yourself? Is that safe, Father?”

  He felt indulged and scolded. In Sheila’s voice he heard his plans sound solemnly childish. He might just as well have confessed that it was his ambition to build a model railway up in the attic.

  “Yes, I think so. Pretty safe. It’ll probably give me about as much in the way of adventure as I can decently stand at my time of life.”

  “I suppose it’s never too late to run away to sea.” Sheila was looking like the photograph on her book again; there was an edge to her smile that held the uncomfortable suggestion that she was writing him.

  He said: “I think I see it more as a way of coming home.”

  “I shall be worried for you,” Sheila said.

  “I was in the Navy, Sheila. One way and another, most of my time’s been spent with ships.”

  “The Navy?” Tom said. He’d been sitting as bulky and still as a sofa.

  “Yes. Briefly. At the end of the war and just after. ’44 to ’46.”

  When Tom left the room without a further word, the whole house seemed to tilt slightly.

  Sheila said: “I remember you sent me Swallows and Amazons once, for Christmas …”

  George remembered too. He’d still been in Aden. That was the Christmas when the decree nisi came through on what would, in England, have been Boxing Day.

  “I suppose it wasn’t really your sort of thing at all—”

  “I did try. But I couldn’t get on with those ineffably jolly children. There was a girl in it called Titty, and just reading her name used to send shivers down my spine. I’m afraid the net result was to make me feel rather superior about staying on dry land in Norwich.”

  This, George thought, is the conversation I was trying to have with Sheila in 1955—we’re nearly thirty years too late. So he said, “It was the only thing I could find in Mesloumian’s Bookshop. You could never get anything you really wanted there.”

  Tom came back. He was holding a small wooden chest which he put on the floor beside George’s chair. He smiled at Sheila, smiled at George, as if he was going to produce strings of white doves and knotted handkerchiefs. “Sextant,” he said, and opened the chest.

  It looked like a museum piece. A seaman would have disapproved of the way the sextant shone, its overpolished brass and inlaid silver snatching at the light in the room. The nap of the green baize in which it nested had been brushed up against the grain, giving it the texture of a freshly mown and watered lawn.

  “You know how to work it, then?” Tom said.

  “I used to. A long time ago.”

  George lifted it from its case, taking pleasure in the way the instrument had so much more weight to it than its airy, fretwork structure seemed to allow. He folded the smoked horizon glasses back from the mirror, screwed the telescope into its socket, and focused the lens on the edge of the dining table. The sextant smelled of old age and machine oil. Lodging it against his eye, his right arm braced against his chest, he began to remember in a happy rush—the classroom in the requisitioned holiday camp at Pwllheli, noon sights on the Hecla, the bleached blue spines of the Admiralty Tables in their shelf on the bridge.

  He stroked the knurled screw on the end of the index arm between his thumb and forefinger, and gently mated the reflected image of the table with the table he could see through the telescope. Then he peered at the engraved scale, squinting up close to the swivelling magnifier on the index arm. The scrolled arrow was pointing exactly to zero.

  “Seems in very fair shape,” George said.

  “How do you find out where you are?” Tom said.

  George showed him. Watching the table edge through the telescope, he hunted with the mirror for the reflection of the light bulb overhead, then lowered the image of the bulb until it just grazed the tabletop.

  “12 degrees. 35 minutes.” He snapped the figures out as if a bridge rating was standing at his elbow to record them.

  Tom, sitting nearer to the table, tried it, and got fifteen degrees.

  “The light bulb’s the sun; the table’s your horizon,” George said; but he was thinking of the enormous sky over the Indian Ocean, its lacework of flaring stars … standing watch, steaming slowly through Capricorn. He’d been a bloody good navigator. He loved the old-fashioned fussiness of the subject and the instruments that went with it. He treasured his own sextant, and was made miserable by its theft, years later, on a cargo boat somewhere between Mombasa and Cape Town. It was like losing a way of looking at the world, and George had felt himself narrow a little with its going.

  Tom had turned in his chair and was busy bringing the ceiling down to touch the skirting board. Without looking away from the eyepiece, he said: “It must feel quite good to do this to the sun and the stars. The closer you get to the Equator, the bigger the angle between you and the sun, right?”

  “Yes�
��so long as the sun is over the Equator at the time.”

  “Like at the equinox,” said Tom from behind his sextant, his great hand bunched awkwardly round the little vernier screw.

  “Forget Copernicus,” George said. “That’s the first lesson in celestial navigation. Forget Copernicus. The earth doesn’t go round the sun; the sun goes round the earth, and the stars go round us too …”

  At Pwllheli, the nav instructor had been an elderly two-and-a-halfer who’d been recalled for the duration from his retirement to a nearby prep school. Commander Prynne. A sweet man. He had treated his pupils as if they were all aged ten. He told stories and twinkled and handed out tiny schoolboy prizes to the cadet officers of George’s intake. “Navigation,” he began, “may not be the queen of the sciences, but it is, of all the sciences, certainly the kindliest to man. For only navigation puts the earth slap bang in the middle of the universe.” Prynne’s snuffling tenor was superbly imitable. Everyone had a shot at it: Prynne on the care of the sextant, Prynne on what he called “naughty old Polaris”, Prynne’s helpless pronunciation of the word “azimuth”, which always came out as “wodjimoo”.

  So, now, George treated Tom and his daughter to Prynne and Pwllheli. For the first time in the evening, he was enjoying himself. Emboldened by his imitation of Prynne, he went on to do Lieutenant Carver, an RNVR man who had a family undertaker’s business in Leeds. Carver’s dreadful gravity on the subject of the Siderial Hour Angle had been another party piece in the cadets’ mess, and George made an excellent job of Carver’s strained and lugubrious vowels. He talked happily of laying position lines and finding intercepts. He told of how it was to crouch wedged against the gun emplacement on the afterdeck, drenched in spray, trying to shoot the sun in a cloudy sky on a heavy beam sea.

  “There’s not much that beats it, you know,” George said. “When you’re out in the open ocean with an empty chart, and you can put your finger on a pencilled cross and know that you’re exactly there. Well, give or take a mile or two.”

  Sheila was nodding, her badger head dipping forward as regularly as a pump. Tom, his eyes hidden from George, was nursing the sextant in his lap, turning it slowly over and over.

  George was appalled. “So sorry,” he said. “There’s no bore worse than a war bore.”

  “Heavens, no—it’s not boring at all,” Sheila said.

  But it was. He could see. Worse, he could hear his own voice. It was the voice of a bore—the very voice that George himself had learned to dodge whenever he heard it approaching in a club, or bar, or hotel foyer. It was the sort of voice that went with deaf aids, liver spots and gravy stains on ties. It was ripe with the menacing vanity of old age. Until this moment, George had despised bores—had found them guilty of a basic moral deformity. Now he wondered if boringness was not perhaps a disease that picked its victims as indifferently as renal failure. One day you simply woke up and found that you’d caught it. You couldn’t take pills for it. You couldn’t have an operation. You lugged your symptoms round with you and bored in exactly the same way as other men limped or coughed or got the shakes. The only difference was that they were pitied for their afflictions, but you were hated for yours.

  There was no laughing off this first attack. He was anxious to find out just how bad it had been. Was there a chance that it had been merely a warning, like a passing giddy spell? Or was it more like a case of severe internal bleeding, a sign that something irreversible had happened?

  “How perfectly ghastly of me,” he said. “I blame it all on that sextant of Tom’s. I picked it up and—was away.”

  Sheila laughed; a long, swooping, skating laugh which steered cautiously clear of George’s invitation.

  “I’ll put some more coffee on,” she said. As she passed Tom on her way out she paused and let her hand dawdle for a moment in the tangled black bush of his hair. The gesture looked quite unconscious and much more intimate, somehow, than any kiss could be.

  George, watching his daughter, hastily dropped his gaze to the rug on the floor. He felt forlorn at what he’d seen—suddenly widowed by a touch. Then he found himself listening to his own voice in his head. It was pretending to be Commander Prynne; and when George, in panic, tried to switch it off, it only increased in volume. It was rabbitting on about how to calculate the Wodjimoo of Betelgeuse. He was trapped. The voice, seizing on him as its only audience, was confident, amused, and deadly boring. All the stories that it knew were about people who were dead and times that had long ago ceased to matter.

  Tom was driving. George was in the passenger seat of the minivan, his narrow knees jammed high against the dashboard, his arms folded on his chest. He was wearing his dark grey topcoat with a rim of black velvet round the collar. Seeing him come down the steps, with that coat flapping in the wind, Tom had been reminded of the moulting Andean Condor in the zoo at Regent’s Park; but when he got in the van he just looked like an elderly teddy boy with his velvet collar and his scraggy grey sideburns.

  He seemed to have put on ten years overnight. When he’d first come in through the door with Sheila, he’d looked quite young, considering. When you saw him in the morning, though, you noticed the dark skin under his eyes like burnt paper and the way his tan didn’t look healthy at all, but jaundiced and short of blood. His hair needed cutting. If you had that kind of hair—trained to go back in ripples over the ears and pasted flat across the skull—you probably needed to go to the barber every couple of weeks. Sheila’s dad didn’t look as if he’d been in months. His hair had a glued-together look from the bottle of oily stuff that Tom had observed up in the bathroom. Poor old George. It was weird, him looking so like Sheila. Same eyes, and just the same funny trick of the mouth so that you were never quite sure when he was smiling and when he was being sarcastic.

  “Snow,” Tom said. They were driving along the edge of Clapham Common. There wasn’t much snow. It was melting on the roofs of houses and lay in patches on the grass of the Common like dirty rags. It never settled for long in London. That was because every big city created its own climate: it had its own winds, its own temperature range, its own humidity—everything. Compared with Essex, London was in the tropics. Banana country.

  “Where are we?” George said.

  “Wandsworth. It’s always a bit tight here, this time in the morning.”

  On the far side of the road, he saw Winston in his black Thunderbird, waiting to filter right to Wandsworth Bridge. Tom hooted—a long, a short and a long. Winston turned in his seat, waved, and came back with an electric orchestra playing the first line of “Colonel Bogie”.

  “Friend of mine,” Tom said.

  “Do you know the Morse code?” George said.

  “No. Why?”

  “You just did ‘K’ on your horn. It means ‘I want to communicate with you’.”

  “Well, I did, didn’t I?”

  They climbed West Hill.

  Tom had never seen Sheila so tensed-up as she had been last night. When she came to bed, she was rigid and shivery; all gooseflesh, like someone who’s been pulled out of the water after nearly drowning. He’d held her, willing her to sleep, but it was he who slept first. The last thing he remembered was Sheila’s half-audible muttering about how she’d bitched it, and how it was like playing the same crackly record for the hundredth time.

  It hadn’t been that bad. A bit dire, maybe; but not very. For an old guy, Sheila’s dad was OK. The trouble was that there didn’t seem to be any proper level to him. First he’d been as uptight as a scared cat, then, after he’d had a bit, he’d gone all round the park. It wasn’t surprising that he was such a funny colour in the morning: he’d been pickling himself. Tom and Sheila had only had a glass each, and they’d started with two bottles. And that wasn’t the end of it, either. Sheila’s dad drank on the sly. Tom had looked in his bag; there was another bottle there. Emergency supplies.

  “This part of London’s all new to me,” George said.

  “Putney,” Tom said. He pointed le
ft, up Putney Hill. “Algernon Charles Swinburne lived up there. With another guy.” He thought for a moment until the blue plaque came into focus in his head. “Theodore Watts-Dunton,” he said.

  George stared. The lights changed. On the Upper Richmond Road, it was bumper to bumper, with the westbound trucks packed solid like blocks of stone.

  “Will you go back to Africa again?”

  George unfolded his long arms and clasped his knees. If you just glimpsed him in silhouette, it was pure Sheila.

  “Well … yes,” George said, “I rather think I may.”

  The traffic shuffled forwards for fifty yards and locked again.

  “When?”

  “Oh … quite soon, I suppose. In the autumn, perhaps.” He was gazing out at the houses as if he wasn’t used to seeing houses at all. Perhaps he was looking for mud huts. In Roehampton. “You see, I’m not exactly retired, yet.”

  Poor old bugger. That was just what Tom’s grandad used to say. He was still saying it a week before they cremated him in Gunnersbury. And he was eighty-four.

  “There’s another job out there that I could do. They asked me before I left. Adviser on Foreign Trade. It’s not much of a job, really; a lot less grand than it sounds. I’d just be a glorified gopher.”

  “Gopher?”

  “You know. Go-for this … go-for that …” He did a snickety little laugh, like a cough, and stared out of the window all the way to Hammersmith Bridge, where he looked at the moored boats on the river and said, “Sorry about last night—all that nautical stuff.”

  “No, it was interesting,” Tom said. “Really. That’s something I’d like to do—sail round England. You could get a lot of thinking done, I reckon … at sea.” He was wondering what he’d say if Sheila’s dad asked him to go with him. He wouldn’t mind giving it a try, for a few days anyway. He’d like to learn Navigation. But all George said was “Yes,” and smiled one of his twisty, Sheila-like smiles; then, “Awfully good of you, to drive me all this way,”

  On the M4, Tom tucked the van into the slipstream of an airport coach and tried to bring the subject up again.