Foreign Land
Page 21
By throwing herself off the end of Number 8 Dock in her mohair skirt (“You might think she’d at least have had the decency to wear slacks for the occasion”) Miss Lisle had committed an act of cowardly betrayal. For in that leap, Miss Lisle had sneered at the Club, sneered at the Lifeboat and Cancer funds, at the Preservation Committee (which had halted the spread of council houses across the cliff), at the reefer evenings and the black tie dinners. She had sneered at the view from one’s first-floor picture window and at the posted and stiled Smugglers’ Trail, on which one took one’s dogs in the mornings.
George stood on the awkward outskirts of the group at the bar, sipping at a schooner of fino sherry. He rather disliked its thin wormwood and gall taste, but the drink seemed right for the day. He had expected St Cadix to rally round and sympathize with him over the beastly experience of fishing up Connie Lisle’s corpse, but it hadn’t turned out like that. It felt rather as if he’d been spotted coming out of a brothel. Everyone, even Rupert Walpole, seemed to be keeping a measured distance from him. It was Rupert, in fact, who, when George came into the bar, had said, “Oh—hullo, George. Aren’t you off yet?” Some sympathy. The Yacht Club was behaving like the Greeks who shot the messenger.
What the hell had he been expected to do? Prod the body with a boathook and push it out into the tide?
“Nasty thing for George there.” Denis Wright’s meaning was aggressively plain: George had touched pitch and been defiled.
He meant to stand his ground. “Yes. It was awful. I barely knew her, of course, but she seemed a nice woman.” Who else here knew or cared a damn about the drought in the Sahel?
“Poor girl.” Betty Castle was putting herself on George’s side. “I do so wish she’d talked to me. There was so much one could have done. If only one had been allowed.”
Verity Caine said: “I’m afraid she was never really right for Cornwall. Connie’s trouble was that she didn’t have any proper outside interests. She’d have been a great deal happier, I think, if she’d stayed on in Southend.”
“Oh, is that where she came from?” Freddie Corquordale said. “Ah. Southend.” As if that explained everything.
To Verity Caine, George said: “I don’t think that’s quite fair. She worked for Oxfam. She was surprisingly knowledgeable, really, about Africa.”
“Africa!” said Edgar Crosthwait, seizing his chance like a trout arrowing up to a floating fly. “Your patch?”
“Ah … yes, in fact,” George said, embarrassed to find himself singled out by the old booby in the pepper and salt tweeds.
“Funny you should bring up Africa,” Crosthwait roared. “I don’t know whether you had much to do with rhinos in your time out there?”
“That was a bad go.” It was the man from the television shop. Jellaby. He was standing on the quay at high water, holding the remains of a sandwich in one hand. “Must’ve given you a turn.”
“Yes,” George said from the deck of the boat. “It’s sad.” He meant the words to sound final, but Jellaby took them as an invitation. “Mind?” he said, turning his back to George and positioning himself lugubriously on the dock ladder. Jellaby was a very fat young man: the seat of his cavalry twill trousers was worn to a high shine, and the essence of Jellaby seemed to be concentrated in his broad, bland and self-important bum. George resentfully watched the bum descending to eye level. Jellaby eased himself over the rail and steadied his bulk against the shrouds. He was panting slightly.
“Nice one,” he said, looking over Calliope. “Lovely job.”
“Well, I like her,” George said. Needlessly he began to coil a warp of rope on the foredeck.
“Though she must cost you a bit in maintenance,” Jellaby said.
With each coil George twisted the rope away from him with a flick of the wrist to free it of kinks. He didn’t feel inclined to discuss his finances with the man from the TV shop.
“Bad as keeping a wife,” Jellaby said pleasantly, licking a crumb from his fingers. “Or a mistress.”
George went on coiling.
“Ever thought of going into the charter business?”
“No.”
“It’s an idea.” Jellaby parked his most distinguished feature on the edge of the coachroof. “You could defray a few expenses that way.”
George had come to the end of the rope. He searched the boat for something else to do and found nothing.
“Of course,” Jellaby said, “after what’s happened …” He shook his head.
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Well. People might get the wrong idea. There’s a lot of superstition around still. Especially to do with the sea. And a boat that’s had a drowning … some people might think that was on the unlucky side.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, you know better, don’t you? Same as me. No, I reckon your best bet would be with the film companies. They’re always out for locations. It’s money for jam. You’d get … oh, I’d say about a hundred pounds a day. That’s what they call a facility fee.”
“Really.”
“Straight up. You’d provide the fuel, of course. And you’d be the skipper.”
George stared at Jellaby. The bovine appearance of the man was a long way out of kilter with George’s notions of what a drug smuggler might look like. He would never have guessed that Jellaby was one: he looked far too poor and far too stupid. But, come to that, he didn’t look capable of running a TV shop either.
Jellaby saw that George was definitely interested.
“What sort of electrics have you got on here, then?”
“Twelve volts,” George said, lost.
“With an alternator?”
“Yes, in fact.”
“Oh, well, you can’t go wrong.” Jellaby brought himself slowly to his feet. It was like watching a marquee go up in a small garden in a high wind. “Mind if I take a decko at the … accommodations?”
“I’m extremely busy at present,” George said, shaking the coiled rope out over the deck and starting in on it from the other end.
“It won’t take a mo.”
“I’d be awfully glad if you didn’t. If you don’t mind.” George felt his cheek muscles go stiff with fury at the man’s impervious bloody crassness.
Jellaby looked suddenly and horribly wise. “Ah.” He grinned, opening his lips to disclose an unappealing collection of gunmetal fillings. He must have been a very greedy little boy. His mouth was like a memorial to the gallons of ice cream and hundredweights of chocolate that had passed that way. “You got company.” He nodded knowingly at the roof of the forecabin under his feet. “Some other time, then.”
“Yes. If you would be so kind. Some other time altogether.”
Jellaby looked at George in much the same way, George thought, as he might stare expectantly at a Black Forest Gateau, his face prematurely lit by the prospect of a big impending pleasure. “Well,” he said, “be seeing you,” and hauled his rude bum up the slippery ladder.
Diana parked her car askew on the quay and visited the boat with a string bag of grapes, oranges, bananas and a pineapple, as if George was ill in hospital. He kissed her on both cheeks. Her skin tasted moister, more substantial than when he’d seen her last. She smelled like a stranger, and he realized that he missed the powerful, baconfatty perfume of her cigarettes.
It was at Diana’s suggestion that he cut the drawstring of the bag and slung it like a hammock from two screweyes set in the overhead beams of the saloon. Scooping up fruit in handfuls from the settee, he settled them in the sagging mesh. He sniffed at the whiskery skin of the pineapple and put it on top like a crown.
“My horn of plenty.”
“Fruit keeps so much better if it’s properly aired,” Diana said.
And not only fruit, he thought. Her voice had changed too: it was lighter and rounder, with a clarinet-like tone that he hadn’t heard before—at least not since long ago, when she’d been a girl on the television. He looked at her, surprised. Her new hea
lthiness was somehow offputting. It put her suddenly out of his reach.
“When are you off?”
“As soon as I see a window in the weather. There’s a low in Finisterre that I’m keeping an eye on. So long as it moves west … tomorrow, touch wood.”
“You don’t have to go to the inquest?”
“The police say not. They’ve got my written statement.”
“Did she have family?”
“There’s a sister, apparently. In Rotherham.”
“People are being absolute shits about her.”
“Yes, aren’t they?”
“Do you think they’re making up that note as they go along? None of it sounds right to me.”
George said: “Why would they want to do that?”
“It’s heavensent, isn’t it? An opportunity for everyone to say all the things they’d never dare to say for themselves. According to Willa Geach, the note says St Cadix was snobbish and exclusive, but Cynthia Dunnett is going round saying that Connie Lisle found us all too vulgar for words. I must say, it’d be pretty hellish if Cynthia Dunnett didn’t find one vulgar. I hope she found you vulgar when you were buying their boat.”
“Yes, she put on rather a good act of taking me for a door-to-door brush salesman.”
“It makes me envious. All this running away to sea.”
“What—me and poor old Connie Lisle?”
“Yes. You and she both.” Diana smiled. There was real wistfulness in her face too; but it was not, George thought a little sadly, a wistfulness for him at all—it was all for the boat as it sashayed gently on the ends of its ropes.
“I’d … love it if you came as well …” he said. The moment he spoke the words, they sounded importunate, too much.
“It’s a sweet idea.” Diana laughed, meaning no.
George thought: I always did lose my biggest fish.
Still nothing from Vera. Twice, George tried to reach Montedor on the phone and got no further than a crackly line to Senegal. He searched the small paragraphs at the bottoms of the Foreign News pages in The Times. There was no mention of Bom Porto. Late in the afternoon, he started to dial the number of the Montedorian consulate in Lisbon (there wasn’t one in London), but gave up halfway through. 010, 351 (but what could he say?); 29, 7 (“Excuse me, but have you had a recent coup?”); 6, 8 … He dropped the receiver back on its cradle. The single forlorn ping of the bell rang in the empty house.
At 5.50, the shipping forecast gave the low in Finisterre as moving slowly east and deepening. You can say that again, George thought, feeling the pressure in the air sinking round him as he listened. Perhaps he should go anyway. Maybe a testing gale was just what he needed. Indeed, as endings went, there were worse ways of going than being lost at sea. He poured himself two thumbs of whisky and watched the estuary below darken from grey to black.
The Cornish night silence was damp and deadly. The whisky made George’s throat burn. He found his mind working too fast and fruitfully for comfort as he gathered socks and shirts from his mother’s rosewood dressing table.
Out in the dark he could see soldiers. They stood on the corner of the Rua Kwame Nkruma, the tips of their cigarettes glowing, submachine guns slung from their shoulders, beery laughter in their wild, boys’ faces. Peres’s divisions. And Peres himself would be at his desk in the Presidium of the People, the chest and armpits of his battledress shirt black with fresh sweat. He was drinking 7-Up straight from the can and writing out his orders on sheets of school graph paper.
Anyone would be scared at the sight of Peres’s handwriting. From a distance, it looked gap-toothed; then you saw that it was a jumble of little letters mixed up with big ones. The e’s and n’s and p’s were sometimes the right way round, sometimes reversed. The Little Sisters of Mercy hadn’t made a very good job of Peres, the scowling thug in the back row of their mission school in São Felipe. Yet Peres, who could barely write at all, loved writing. He had the relentless output of a romantic novelist. From Peres’s office came plans, memoranda, surveys, orders, dreams, fictions. The three male secretaries whom Peres called his sergeant majors did their best with their boss’s peculiar orthography; but even after the documents had been typed and tidied, you could still see Peres’s vandal script in every line. They were full of capitalized words: REGENERATION, PURIFICATION, DISCIPLINE, NECESSITY. For five years, George had grown used to glancing at them, wincing, tearing them up and consigning their pieces to the office bin. Was anyone daring to tear them up now?
For what else was one to make of Vera’s missing letters and the dead connections on the telephone? Listening to Senegal failing to raise Montedor, George heard Peres in the wires, and hated him as a rival. For Bom Porto was his, George’s. It was precious to him as England had never been. It was too little, too delicate, too private, to survive Peres’s handling. George had once seen the man spell liberation as . At the time, it had been a joke. He’d shown it to Teddy at the Club as a rich example of how one of Peres’s damaged words exactly fitted Peres’s damaged notion of its meaning. Give Peres power, though, and the man would mangle the country in just the same way as he mangled the language. One day, you’d ring up and there wouldn’t be a Montedor to get through to. Peres could make it disappear, as letters and words disappeared from shopfronts and signposts, eroded away by vandalism and the weather. The shape of the harbour, the spiky mountains, the leftover Portuguese trellises and balconies—they’d still be there, but they wouldn’t be Montedor. They’d be another country, as alien as Iran or the Philippines. Had it happened already? Was George having no luck with his phone calls because the international operator had been right first time and there was now just a blank space between Monte Cristo and Montego Bay?
Discarding an old lace-fronted dress shirt that laundering had turned to the colour of ivory, he felt helpless, shaky. It was if someone with a rubber was methodically trying to erase the world one lived in: Teddy was almost gone; Vera was going fast; the bunkering station was now little more than a few vestigial pencil lines. George knew who was doing it. Peres. It had to be Peres. That was the only possible explanation as far as he could fathom. Seeing Peres’s khaki, Creole face, smelling his minty breath, George hated him for a persecutor and a thief.
He tried to soothe himself. Thoughts like this were bad for his heart. Remember Vera’s warnings—her alarm at his morning sweatiness, her nagging talk of Dr Ferraz. George thought: but I don’t have Vera to worry for me now; I’m on my own lookout. He rolled up the tie that she’d brought back from the conference in São Paulo (“the closest thing I find for you to a living rainbow”), and bedded it down between his shirts.
There was a blast from a baritone ship’s siren below the window. A coaster was sliding past, lighting up the water as she went. Eight thousand tons, or thereabouts; and she was riding low, a damned sight too close to her Tropical line. The siren sounded again, full of the self-importance of having somewhere to go. Like every ship on its way out of the estuary nowadays, she made George feel left behind.
A hairpin fell out of a pair of boxer shorts as he lifted them from the drawer—his mother’s. This was how things came full circle. Soon everything female in his life would be his mother’s again. It was like being six, to find one’s mother’s scent in one’s clothes, and odd maternal souvenirs lurking in one’s underwear. He half expected to hear himself scolded for crumpling his shirts into balls instead of folding them. His parents—provident as always—had taken care when dying to leave enough of themselves to last George through his own lifetime: hairpins here, pictures there, postcards, hats and papers. In his first week in St Cadix, he’d had to throw out his father’s old pipes because he didn’t want to find himself smoking them by accident. Out of tobacco one Sunday, he had raided an ancient tin of his father’s: the stuff had flared in the bowl and burned like wood shavings, its dusty, rectorish taste taking him back fifty years in a breath.
He opened, and quickly closed, another drawer full of trinket boxes.
“Very nice, dear,” his father said in the patient voice that he kept specially for talking to women and children.
“What does George think?”
“Oh—tophole,” said George at ten, from deep in the Aeromodellers’ Monthly; and came swooping back like a glider falling out of a thermal to his glass of Chivas Regal and his carrier bag of linen.
His parents were more alive, more real to him now, than he was to himself. They had some sort of knack, a staying power, that George had failed to inherit. Thalassa bulged with them, while he still tiptoed round it like a weekend guest. Their past was intact (how did they manage it?) while George’s felt as if it was crumbling from under him so fast that he couldn’t even count its going. As for the future … George saw that as the period covered by the next shipping forecast. It didn’t look bright, either, the way things were looking now. South, veering southwest, six to gale eight. Visibility moderate, becoming poor later. Rain later. Something of that order. Certainly not a future that anyone could take much comfort from.
On the way downstairs, George found himself being chided by his father.