“What’s its construction—this boat of yours?”
“Oak frame. Larch planks. Teak deck, teak sole. The saloon’s fitted out in mahogany.”
“Nice.” On the open fields of Middlesex, the snow lay more thickly, in broad scoops and dripping ridges. Tom said, “How many people can you have on her?”
“Oh, it’s meant to sleep six. That means there’s just about enough room for one person to swing the proverbial cat in.”
So that was that, then.
Inside the airport tunnel, George said: “I’m so glad to have met you, Tom … I’ve never seen Sheila looking better.”
Tom very nearly said something then, but remembered just in time.
At the terminal, George’s legs were all tangled up with his carrier bag and he had difficulty getting out. Tom reached into the back of the van, where he’d hidden the sextant under an oily blanket.
“You’ll be needing this,” Tom said.
The odd thing was, he didn’t seem too pleased to see it. He stared at it lying on the seat and started muttering about how no, he couldn’t possibly and that it was an awfully kind thought, but really … He looked old and sort of faffy, standing there making little, awkward pushing-away gestures with his hands, his carrier bag dangling from his wrist.
“Go on, take it,” Tom said. “It’ll be useful for you. On your voyage.”
He crumbled, eventually, though there was still something funny in his eyes as he went into his thanks-awfully bit. Tom did his best to deflect the downpour. After all, it had been Sheila’s idea, not his. He’d been meaning to sell the sextant to Con in Chelsea.
Tom watched as George was absorbed into the terminal. For a few seconds, he could still see George’s topcoat swirling round his knees, his ducklike walk, the carrier bag and the sextant. Then they were lost behind a crowd of kids with skis. It was a pity, really, that Sheila had never got around to telling him about the baby; it might have cheered the poor old bugger up.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At Geneva, George left the sextant in a locker at the airport, took a cab direct to Carouge, and was back in the city in time to lunch, late, on the rue Cherbouliez. The flight on which he was booked to return to London didn’t leave until 8.40 in the evening. At 3.30 he crossed to a hairdressing salon on the opposite side of the street, where he had a shampoo and cut, sandwiched between two tiresome Englishwomen. George spoke to the girl who was cutting his hair in a mutter of bad French: he didn’t want the women to spot him as a compatriot. They were on their way to Gstaad.
“I saw Roddy at Sarah’s on Saturday.”
“How is Roddy these days?”
“Oh, much as usual. Pretty beastly.”
Every few seconds, George’s gaze flipped down to Vera’s bag at his feet. It was strange how so much money could take up so little space. He’d expected to have to buy a suitcase to carry the stuff away in. In the event, it had turned into a brown paper parcel the size of a small book, with the decks of mint fifty-pound and hundred-dollar bills fitting as snugly together as the components of a lock. On the cab ride back to the rue Cherbouliez, George thought he could smell the money in the bag: a thin ammoniac odour, like the whiff of freshly ironed shirts. But perhaps that was just the smell of Switzerland. He had set aside just over a thousand Swiss francs to pay off the Furies, and he could still feel the bulge of them in his wallet under his armpit, like a glandular swelling. Lunch at Au Plat D’Argent had cost 140 francs, his haircut another 30. There were still an awful lot of francs to go.
The woman on his right was saying, “Bingo told him that the only way she was going to talk to him in future was through her solicitor.”
“Isn’t Bingo a dream?” said the woman on his left.
George tipped the girl who’d cut his hair ten francs. He thought, I’ll call Perdita in Vevey, and brightened as the digits of her number obediently presented themselves in his head. He had just time to cast a hopeful glance at the receptionist’s telephone before he came awake again—to the smash on the N37, the boy Fergus in the driver’s seat. Fergus, of course, had got out of it with a cracked rib and a black eye, but he’d killed his mother. If there was any reply on 61-39-28 it would be Fergus with drink in his voice, his lazy, whining hippy talk. An afternoon’s conversation with Fergus Monaghan would just about make George’s day.
He walked east along the river to the lake. The tips of his fingers were numb. Did the lake never freeze over? He’d hoped for snowy Alps, for skaters in long scarves on the ice, but the water was empty, the mountains had been erased by the grey weather, and the few people who were out on the street looked pinched and tired. He ducked out of the wind into a steamy bar-café, where he sat up at the counter and inspected his new haircut in the silver chromework of the espresso machine.
A young woman seated herself on the stool next to George’s. She placed a cigarette in her mouth and glanced across at him. He lit it for her. Looking down at his hand, she said, “English?” The question puzzled him for a second, then he saw that he was flying his flag a bit conspicuously: the box of matches in his hand said England’s Glory.
In French too quick for him to easily follow, the woman said that she knew many Englishmen. There were many in Geneva. For how long was he in the city? A few hours only? That was honteux! George studied her lips as she talked; her face, showing between her white fur hat and tightly-belted white raincoat, was pink with the cold and her nose was running a little. Between sentences she sniffed. She hated the winter, she said.
It was only when they had finished their coffees and she said, “Viens-tu chez moi?” that George realized she was in business and that he was her task in hand for the afternoon. He sneaked a quick glance at his distorted reflection in the machine: was it the haircut that had marked him out as such an obvious punter?
Well, why not? It was like being offered the drink you didn’t need at the end of an evening. There’d be a penalty to pay, for sure, but it wouldn’t be too stiff to bear. It would certainly help with the problem of the Swiss franc surplus. And anyway he was On The Continent now. This was so exactly what an Englishman was supposed to do On The Continent that to say yes was to do no more than bow politely to the force of custom.
Crossing the street, the woman snuggled professionally against George’s coat. She was embarrassingly short. With his crooked arm resting awkwardly on her shoulder, he stared loftily ahead, keeping his eyes in ignorance of whatever was going on down there in the foothills.
She lived, or at least worked, in a building as reassuringly staid as a bank. They took the elevator to the fifth floor, where she rang an illuminated doorbell that said MARQUIS. It was answered by a woman of George’s age who was dressed in a smart managerial suit and who immediately repositioned herself behind a hall table arranged like a desk, with an appointments book, a telephone and a vase of white chrysanthemums.
“Mon cadeau,” the girl said, wriggling against him like a gerbil.
“Cinq-cents francs, m’sieur,” said the woman in the suit.
That was more like it. He counted out the money from his wallet.
The girl said, “Anglais.” The woman looked at George for a moment and he saw a mixture of boredom and derision in her smile as she nodded and said that he must feel at home in this dull Geneva weather. To the girl, she said: “A sept heures—le Japonais. L’éstropié. OK?”
“Fouf—je lui fis le dernier temps. Où est Adèle?”
“A Lausanne. Jusqu’ à demain.”
“Oh, OK.”
She led George to a room which had been cursorily dressed to resemble a real bedroom. A floppy dog with black and white nylon fur and a pink felt tongue sat in a toddler’s basket chair. The low bed, with its covering of a single plastic sheet, looked alarmingly like a trampoline. There was a small fridge by the bedside, two transparent plexiglas chairs and, on the wall, a framed print of Van Gogh’s “Cornfield near Aries”, George noticed sadly. The window looked out on to an airshaft—someone’s washing
and a tangle of black drainpipes.
The girl took his coat. He parked Vera’s bag on the side of the bed furthest away from the door. The parcel of money was lodged safely at the bottom, under the Leoville-Barton. George looked questioningly at his hostess to discover the next move. He thought, I don’t know the ropes here at all. The last brothel that he’d visited was in Accra, where they did things quite differently. He wondered just how much time he had in hand before his trousers would have to be removed. At least he’d put on a clean pair of boxer shorts that morning.
The girl came to him. He felt her standing on tiptoe, trying to match her pudendum against his pelvis, and he had to bend his knees rather a lot before they fitted. She gripped his right buttock with one hand and fingered his spine with the other. He sought for likely handholds on her and was surprised to find how fat she was. In her raincoat, she’d looked appealingly skinny; in this loose print dress the flesh around her waist felt like handfuls of pastry dough.
Her tongue was in his mouth. Darting, hard, expert and distinctly unfriendly, the strange tongue was probing George’s gaps and fillings. He pushed it back with his own tongue. It flickered for a moment between his lips, then their two faces parted.
“Chéri,” the girl said politely, and made a little simulated moan of pleasure that came out as an unaffected note of impatience. Her fingers on his backbone seemed to be trying to play him like a flute, in a series of rapid and mildly uncomfortable arpeggios.
Then she said, “Je connais. Que t’aime—”
“Quoi?”
“Moment—” She opened the door of what George had taken for a closet but which revealed itself as a bathroom. He could see a wall of stained tiles and a bleached strip of floral shower curtain. She called, “ … des boissons dans la glacière.”
He opened the fridge. There was a saucer of green olives long past their prime; a shrivelled and nutty half lemon; six red-and-yellow packs of Kodachrome; and several dozen airline miniatures, ranked on the shelves like toy soldiers. He couldn’t find a Chivas Regal and settled for a Johnny Walker Black Label.
“Qu’est ce que vous voulez boire?” He couldn’t tutoyer her.
“Pour moi? Rien.”
He heard water running. He hoped she wouldn’t be long. With every moment that the girl was out of the room, George felt self-consciousness thicken in him like a muddy sediment in his veins and arteries. Soon he’d be gorged by it. Sipping the whisky, he found the smell of her toilet water on his fingers. Petrol and roses.
The girl who came back was a perfect stranger. She’d tied her hair in a short ponytail with a black velvet ribbon. She’d swapped the print dress for a plain white blouse and brown gymslip.
“English—” she said, touching the skirt of the gymslip. “You like?”
“Very good,” George said.
“All the English like this very much. An English gives me this. From Londres. En Angleterre, toutes les jeunes filles sont habillées comme ci.” She sounded serious and sociological.
In costume she was quite different. She’d changed from a tough little stormtrooper on duty in the action zone into an actress proud of her art. She pouted at George and ran the tip of her thumb slowly round the rim of her wet upper lip. Shrugging, she turned her back to him, then regarded him through half closed eyes. He saw immediately why she kept films in her refrigerator. It was obvious that her clients usually came with cameras. After each movement, she froze for the shutter and the flashgun, then relaxed between takes to wipe her nose with the back of her hand.
He was enjoying the show. “Vous êtes une bonne danseuse,” he said as she stood, feet wide apart on stilletto heels, arching her back and reaching behind herself to undo the zip on her gymslip.
“Ssh—” she said. She came towards him, her arms held high over her head. George held the shoulders of her gymslip while she wriggled down and out of it like a quick trout from a bank of waterweed. Her blouse had ridden up over her breasts; she tugged it down and, pouting, froze again for the camera. Absorbed in her own performance, she sucked her thumb, her eyes on George not for himself but for his act, as her audience. His father used to do exactly the same trick in his sermons. His eyes would sometimes lock on George’s face. Whether he was scourging a folly or promising salvation, he always bellowed his best lines straight at George, and George would know that his father wasn’t actually seeing him at all. He was just the aisle seat, left, seven pews from the front—and he was chosen simply because he was the least important person in the whole congregation.
Watching the same unseeing stare in the girl’s eyes, George was rapt and excited. She made him feel deliciously invisible, a keyhole-man. In secret, he felt himself begin to rise to the occasion. He’d been fearing disgrace in that quarter; no need to worry now.
Looking over the top of his head, she undid the top button on her blouse. Imitating a little girl’s dragging, bedtime footsteps, she shuffled across the floor and allowed George to undo the rest, blowing mockingly on his face as he bent forward, all fingers and thumbs, to snap the buttons free. Then she stepped back, holding the ends of her blouse close across her chest. There was another long photo-call. George sat easy, waiting for more.
She exposed first one breast, then the other, peek-a-boo style. She sulked, her arms limp at her sides. She looped a thumb into the elastic top of her pants and tweaked it down, exposing a sliver of shaven skin that looked as if it had been sprinkled with pepper. With an irritable squirm, she shucked off her blouse. Even her fattiness now seemed part of her act: it made George think of jellies and cream cakes. She was so much in character that when she sat on his lap, her arm crooked childishly around his neck, and planted a sloppy kiss on his jowl, her stale cigaretty breath came as a shock. She was very heavy. George feared for the circulation in his leg.
He heard the zip on his fly go, and felt her hand, cold and dry, fasten round him. He was lost in the girl’s game. Clumsy, gasping slightly, he reached his hand inside the back of her pants. Her mouth was against his ear now; he could feel its wetness and the sudden, sweet, deafening pressure of her tongue.
“Papa—” she was saying. “Papa … Papa … Je t’aime, Papa—”
“No—” he disentangled himself from her, feeling wretched and foolish.
“Papa!” It was a schoolgirl squeal.
“Excusez-moi. Pardonnez moi. Je ne suis pas …” He was flailing in the language now. “Je ne suis pas bien portant. Merci bien.” It was like the oral part of the School Certificate exam; he’d failed that too. “Il y a toute ma faute. Excusez-moi.”
She was in a dressing gown. He’d been mistaken all along: she wasn’t a girl, she was a dumpy woman of thirty with a tired face and a cigarette pouched in her mouth in place of an expression. She didn’t say anything but blew a long, contemptuous jet of smoke at the ceiling.
His fly was open, and a triangle of shirt-tail showed at his groin. His white flag. He tugged at the zip too quickly, and it stuck halfway. The woman watched him.
“Vous voyez …” he began, but couldn’t find any more words, in French or English, to keep the sentence on its feet.
“Oui, chéri, je vois.” She was looking at her watch.
“I rather think I had a … bag,” George said, rescuing it from beside the bed. He clambered into his coat. “I’m terribly sorry … my fault entirely … nothing to do with you at all …”
Standing by the window, she looked at him for a moment, too bored even to shrug.
In the hall, the managerial woman put down her newspaper and let him out of the front door.
“Have a nice day,” she said.
It was 2251 by the digital clock at Heathrow; and the airport was a cold outpost of the Third World. Pakistanis with long brooms were pushing single cigarette packets across the terminal floor, closely followed by West Indian women with electric polishing machines. A scanty tribe of robed Arabs had set up camp round one of the booths at Passport Control; behind them, a Ghanaian dressed like the Widow T
wankey was standing reading the Financial Times. The roped-off gangway for Citizens of the United Kingdom was empty, and George passed straight through.
He followed the signs for the Green Channel. Nothing to Declare. He felt he had rather a lot to declare, but none of it was listed on the Customs and Excise posters. At least he could confidently acquit himself of any charge of carrying pets, fireworks, trees, reptile goods, uncooked poultry, flick knives or microbugs. On every other count, George was busy pleading guilty.
The thought must have shown on his face, or in his fugitive, stooping walk, since he was called over to the table by a customs man. Was this his only luggage? Where had he been? How long had he been out of the country?
“Would you open that for me, please, sir?”
George unlatched the case of the sextant and showed him. “It’s a sextant,” he said. “I took it out with me.”
“Just for the day, sir? They’ve got radar on the planes, you know.”
George laughed. “I got lost anyway.”
“May I see the bag, please?” The worn serge of the man’s uniform jacket picked up a greasy shine from the overhead striplighting. He seemed a decent sort. Anywhere else in the world, he would have been puffed to bursting point with his powers of stop and search. In England he was shruggingly apologetic; a tired employee of the state dealing with a fellow subject. He looked as if his wife had egged him on into taking a bigger mortgage than he could sensibly afford; and he looked at George as if he’d spotted a chap with exactly the same problem.
He was studying the label on the Leoville-Barton ’71.
“I bought that in London,” George said.
“I make my own, you know,” the customs man said. “A Cabernet. Costs me 20p a litre. You can’t tell the difference.”
He investigated socks, a dirty shirt, a rotting spongebag, today’s Times folded back on the half-done crossword, an old Penguin copy of Heart of Darkness. George had hidden the money deep in the bottom of the bag, among the fluff, spent matches, crumpled shopping lists and Montedorian coppers. It took the man a few moments to unearth it. When he did so, the expression on his face was sorrowful; he looked like a doctor who’d seen a dark shadow on a chest X-ray.
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