Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  “I do wish you’d stop moping round this house like a sick cat,” his father said.

  “There’s a pain in my back,” George said. “My heart’s giving out warning signals. I’m not a well man.”

  “If you want something to keep you occupied, you can always deliver some parish magazines. Or give your mother a hand, for a change.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” George said, squeezing rudely past his father on the landing.

  He cooked himself a rubbery omelette in his mother’s kitchen, on his mother’s pan, and drank the remains of one of his own bottles of Vinho Verde.

  “That’s not what I’d call a proper meal at all,” his mother said.

  “Wine? On top of whisky?” his father said.

  “Will you leave me alone, for Christ’s sake? I am sixty years old.”

  “The boy’s drunk,” his father said.

  “He’s just going through a phase,” said his mother.

  “There are certain levels of behaviour that I simply will not tolerate in this house,” his father said.

  George rid himself of them by folding The Times back on the crossword and getting out his pen; “Vessel goes astern in some Liverpool sea shanty (5)” was obviously “sloop”, and “Philosopher uses box, in emergency (8)” was “Socrates”. He got “castigate” and “pythons” before he heard his parents’ voices again, coming from behind the closed door of the drawing room.

  “Heaven knows what they’re going to make of that young man in the Navy,” his father said.

  “It’s adolescence, dear,” his mother said.

  At 9.00, George rang Diana. He wanted to invite himself round for a drink. He wanted to invite her to come with him on the boat—only as far as Plymouth, of course. Or Dartmouth. For a day or two, to see how she liked it. But her voice on the phone was surprised and already sleepy. George coughed, and said that he was leaving the key to the house under a brick.

  “I’ll look in when I go past and pick up your mail.”

  “I’d be awfully glad if you would.”

  “It’s no trouble at all. When will you get to London?”

  “Oh—ten days, a fortnight. It depends on the weather.”

  “Ring me up and tell me where you are … when you’re in port.”

  “Will do,” George said.

  “You wouldn’t like a drink … sort of now, would you? Before you go?”

  “Oh …” George said, playing for time, waiting for the invitation to solidify. “It’s a bit on the late side … isn’t it?”

  “I guess so … with your early start.”

  “I really meant—”

  “Take care. Watch out for Arthur. Have a lovely trip. I’ll be thinking of you.”

  “’f you too,” George said, swallowing, and found that Diana had hung up before he’d spoken.

  Putting the phone down, he noticed his face reflected in the dark uncurtained window. It was in ghostly monochrome, like a photographic negative. What was upsetting was that, at first glance, it wasn’t his own face. The hair and beard were his, but not the plummeting cheekbones, the sunken eye sockets, the ridged and bony temples, the fishlike downturn of the lips. They were his father’s. Worse, they were his father’s, not at sixty but on the day that George had last seen him, when the rector was seventy-nine and was already confined to the upstairs bedroom, where he kept a baby’s hours of sleep broken by weeping complaints.

  “Come … to … the … station,” he’d said, in his new voice that sounded like dead leaves blowing across stone.

  “What?” George had bent close. “What is it—Daddy?”

  “Constipation,” the rector whispered. “It’s just this … ruddy … constipation.”

  George, finding himself nearer to his father than he’d ever been before, quickly kissed him. It was only on the forehead and the kiss was no more than a graze of the lips. His father’s skull felt as fragile as a speckled blackbird’s egg. But the rector’s eyes were shocked, helpless, accusing. They followed George as if the kiss had been an indecent assault.

  That was the face—the face he’d kissed—that he saw in the window. Fascinated, appalled, he studied it, turning his head slowly in the bare electric light. The resemblance faded out of the reflection. It was just a trick of the uneven glass and the darkness outside. There was no more real likeness than there was in the pictures of the ancestors on the walls. It was the Grey family cheekbones that he’d seen—no more. Even so, it gave him the jitters. He’d never realized that he would ever look so old, or so much his father’s son.

  At 10.00 George, middling drunk now, locked the dark house and pushed the key under the brick. He would have liked to have left a note, but couldn’t think of anyone to leave a note for. Not even the milkman called at Thalassa. Holsum-hatted (H LS M—M CA’S # B D: “What is that gibberish on the boy’s head,” his father said), carrying Vera’s oilcloth bag of many colours, he padded out through the soggy mulch of pine needles. The house frowned at his back.

  The night was damp and windless. The sea at the foot of the cliff was inaudible, the branches of the trees overhead quite still. It was the deceptive calm that you expected before a gale came roaring out of the southwest. It deadened the village, making it feel like something preserved in jelly.

  Most of the houses were as dark as his own, still waiting for the summer visitors who rented them furnished by the week. For weeks people had been talking about The Visitors, in the same tone that they would have used to say The Russians or The Chinese. But no Visitors had come yet. At least none that George had seen.

  In a very few windows, the curtains were splashed with blue light from the televisions inside. The only voices on Upper Marine Walk were American ones talking too loudly about love and death with the tinny vowels of speak-your-weight machines.

  At the bottom of the hill there was a noisy pool of pop music from the jukebox in The Falcon’s Nest and the bleep and chatter of wargames in the bar. George kept to the shadows on the far side of the street. He’d always thought of pubs as friendly places in whose foggy undemanding gloom a man could safely talk to himself and nurse his bruises. But you’d have to feel very good about yourself to face The Falcon’s Nest with its wolfish motorbikes on the pavement outside and its angry racket within.

  The man from the TV shop—Jellaby—was there, a baggy, albino figure under a sodium streetlamp. He was propositioning a girl almost as fat as himself in motorcycle leather gear.

  George heard the girl say, “Cash?” and saw Jellaby raise his open palms under the lamp. “Anyway you want it, flower,” Jellaby said. “Or I could cut you in on a percentage.” He spotted George. “Evening, squire! Off on your travels then?” He laughed. George cringed and let out a small hiccup on the salty, hamburger-and-chip-smelling air.

  “Goonight,” George said, trying to cover the hiccup.

  “Don’t forget now, squire!”

  How squalid and graceless it was, this strange village England of the young, where a man like Jellaby was at home and George was in resentful exile. Walking on, grateful for the darkness of the empty street between the padlocked aquarium and the soft Queen Anne brick of the old custom house, George thought of Africa: the statue of Dr Da Silva in the square, spraygunned with Vivas; the silver band under loops of fairylights; the couples dancing beyond a fringe of dry acacia trees. He saw a man, taller than the rest, easing his way through the crowd. Hi, Mister George. He couldn’t believe it-it felt so bloody long ago, as far away as childhood itself.

  He reached the quay wall and leaned for a moment against its black bulk, feeling the granite against his cheek. The silhouettes of the scallop dredgers were rigidly still on their moorings, their masts and derricks forming a complicated cuneiform inscription on the water beyond. For a moment, he saw them as tuna boats, jostling abreast, waiting their turn to discharge at the Frigorifico.

  “Hey, Mister?”

  The voice seemed to come more from inside his head than out of it. He thought, Christ, I’m
drunker than I realized.

  “Mister? Please? Where is the red lights place?”

  George saw, or thought he saw, the Creole face of a boy in his twenties. His thin nylon shirt looked far too skimpy for a March night. His head barely came up to George’s chest.

  “Donde voce?” George said, his voice wobbly with drink.

  “Cabo Verde, o senhor.”

  “Cabo Verde? What are you doing here?” It was like being able to sing, to find words of Portuguese back in his mouth again.

  “I am working on a German ship. I am a deckhand. We came in tonight. My brother also is with me. He stays aboard now, to study.”

  “Your brother is a good boy,” George said. “You should be studying too, not out sniffing after whores.”

  “Make a favour, sir, but I—”

  “Which town in Cabo Verde? Which island?”

  “Mindelo. São Vicente.”

  “Mindelo? But that is marvellous! I know Mindelo.” He put his arm round the boy’s shoulder, hugging him. He felt so bony and frozen in his pitiable shirt that George was afraid for him. Stupid boy. He remembered an old jacket down in one of the hanging lockers in the saloon; the boy could have that—it’d be a bit big, but better than nothing. He thought there was a guernsey somewhere, too. Bloody German shipowners—the boy’s wages would be laughable, and what little money he had would probably be all mailed home to Mindelo.

  “I am from Bom Porto. Montedor.”

  The boy stared up at him for a moment, and giggled nervously as if George had cracked an incomprehensible joke.

  “We’re neighbours, you see. Do you know Bom Porto?”

  “Yes, sir, I have visited there.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two, three years ago.”

  “I was there. Your ship refuelled in Bom Porto? I expect you saw me. Remember the bunkering station? That was me. What was the name of the ship?”

  “It is a long time. I do not remember.”

  “I never forget a ship,” George said. “A German ship, was it? Tarmstedt? Nordholz? Katerina?”

  “I do not know.” The boy stared down at his black plastic shoregoing shoes.

  “Never mind,” George said. “It is too cold to remember things. What you need is something warm to put on. You are not in Mindelo now, you know; you are in England. It is a very frigid place. You must have proper clothes.”

  “I am not too cold, sir.”

  “Nonsense. Come down to my boat, and I will find you some English clothes. Then you can go to look for your girl.”

  “I am obliged sir, but it is not necessary.”

  “Idiot! I want you to have them. What is your name?”

  “Paulo Joaquim Pedeira.”

  “Well, Paulo Joaquim, I am George.”

  “Yes, sir.” He slipped George’s grasp with a fluttering wriggle, like a scared bird. Poor bloody kid. Europe must have accustomed him to expecting only kicks from strangers. Now he stood frowning at the water, his waif’s body topped by a fantastical bush of wiry hair; an exotic tropical plant on a dull Cornish quayside.

  “Here—” George said, holding out Vera’s bag. “You take this, and I will go down the ladder first. What do you like to drink? Whisky? A beer?”

  The boy didn’t move. He stared at George, his lips moving soundlessly like an actor rehearsing. Then he said, “Excuse me, sir, for a favour, but I do not like to bum-fuck.”

  “NO! NO! NO! I do not ask you down for that! That is not what I mean at all!”

  “There is a boy on the ship. A German boy. With white skin and white hair. He will do it for some money. I will speak to him, if you wish, sir.”

  “No!” George shouted from a swirl of nausea in his chest.

  “I apologize, sir, but it is late, and I must find a woman.”

  Brokenly, George said, “But you must have a jacket—something for the cold …”

  “Boa noite, o senhor.” And he was walking, at a trot, towards the custom house.

  “Paulo Joaquim!”

  The footsteps on the stone paused for a moment.

  “You make a left turn,” George called. “Go up a little hill. There is a bar there. The Falcon’s Nest. Ask for a man called Mr Jellaby. Jellaby. He will find you a woman.”

  The boy’s voice came thinly back on the still air. “Jay … Lay … Bee? Muito obrigado, o senhor.”

  He lay on his berth in the forecabin of Calliope, under a pile of threadbare naval blankets. They were the same blankets that had once gone to make up Sheila’s infant cot in Aden, and it seemed to George that some faint, sweetish scent of her babyhood still clung to them. He fingered a torn corner just above his left eye, and remembered how she had used to chew on it for comfort. When he’d put the light on in her room, he’d watched her face suddenly convert from tearful panic to a sly and toothy smile. He could have sworn that she was winking at him.

  “All in order, Number One?” George said.

  “Gog,” said Sheila. “Gog. Gog. Gog,” and held out her arms to be lifted from the cot.

  He’d left the transistor radio switched on to catch the shipping forecast at 0015, and the oil lamp over his head was still burning, making the cramped cabin bigger with its shadows. George opened a book. It was an old Bom Porto favourite, James Agate’s Ego II, but the light from the lamp was too erratic and George himself too shaken to follow those funny reviews of dead plays. He had a go at listening to the voices on “Today In Parliament”. They were talking about rate capping, but he didn’t have the faintest idea of what rate capping was. So he lay under the blankets studying the insides of his eyelids and waiting for the people on the wireless to say something that he understood.

  Gale or no gale, he’d go. Whatever the weather. It felt like a bitter lifetime since he’d climbed on to the plane in Bom Porto, yet he still hadn’t managed to actually arrive in England. Going to sea, he might—just might—manage to come home.

  Under the blankets, George set sail up-Channel. The wind was a brisk northwester, a wind to blow the cobwebs out of any man’s soul. England slid smoothly by on the beam, a rim of violet coast no thicker than a pencil line. It grew as he closed with it—turned into sculpted woodland, castles, church towers, cliffs of chalk … a warm and welcoming water-colour England, its seagoing counties laid out in a bright patchwork. Under engine now, he motored deep up creeks and dropped his hook in the rivery shade of village elms, where he lay in secret, watching the lights in the water and listening to the voices on the shore. Off Portland Bill, he weathered a small, convenient gale. George was brave and elated as the boat tumbled in the waves, its deck streaming with green water, its timbers slamming. She could take it. She’d look after him. Then, becalmed, he lay to anchor in the Downs, where the sea was trapped like a pond behind the Goodwin Sands.

  The lamp overhead flickered. The light changed to a greasy, streaky sort of dawn, with Dover an elongated smudge on the port quarter, and the tide running fast under the boat, spilling it out into the North Sea. George, his pipe drawing nicely, swung on the wheel, bringing the wind hard on his sails, and steered for London. The sea was now broken and littered with traffic. At first, George saw tea clippers, Thames barges and trading schooners under full sail: on closer inspection they resolved into container carriers, lumpy coasters, oil tankers and roll-on roll-off ferries as big as apartment blocks, with Calliope bouncing about in their wakes like a discarded bottle.

  Blue water turned to brown and the flatlands of Kent and Essex came suddenly in close, with marshes, cooling towers and the icy glint of passing cars on wide and windy roads. George went out on deck, lowered his sails and took up position in the long upriver cavalcade. Gravesend. Tilbury. Greenhithe. Dartford. Ships, wharves and warehouses crowded around the boat. The air was meaty with the smells of coal dust, tar and cinnamon. Shirt-sleeved longshoremen unloaded cotton bales from an open hold and watching faces stared from high windows.

  The packed city slowly opened to include him. Things fell into place
as his twin masts fitted themselves among London’s myriad of masts, cranes, spars and funnels. He was enfolded at last by a world he understood—a world which in its turn comprehended George.

  Somewhere up there round a bend in the river past Greenwich Reach, there was a dripping lock-gate waiting to receive him. There were figures on the dockside; his clever daughter, her pregnancy as rounded and firm as an apple, and Tom beside her. They were waving. George too.

  Yes. There was somewhere one could live. There must be a vacant patch of dock wall, crumbling, grassy, with a pair of rusty mooring rings to tie one’s life to. Snugged down with the barges and the lighters, he’d be a free and easy man in thermal underwear and old trousers. Maybe Calliope was a bit small to set up house in—well, he’d buy a Thames barge. But the thing to do was to keep floating. On land, it was too bloody easy to find oneself awash and sinking.

  In Wapping (or was it Limehouse?), George walked with the sceptical, seamanlike roll of one who knows that the ground is always in danger of sliding away from under one’s feet. He was on good nodding terms with every lighterman. The clubbishly furnished saloon was untidy with books from the London Library. In his airy galley, he was learning to cook—real Elizabeth David sort of cookery. Soufflés, ragouts, things like that. Old Africa hands turned up at the dockside. (Take old George, the lucky bastard. Did just what he wanted. Happy as a clam down there on the river.) Up in the bows, Tom carpentered away with chisel and plane. And there was his grandchild. Pure mustard. It was Tom who said the boy looked just like George. No doubt about it this time: he’d sailed home.

  George didn’t hear the shipping forecast. The radio played to an empty house. The complex low was drifting south to central Europe; a high was moving into Shannon. The wind, said the man on the wireless, would be from the north, force four to five. Visibility moderate. Good later.

  George slept. The folds of sallow skin around his eye and cheek were drained of blood. His overlong grey hair was a limp tangle on the pillow. Only his beard had life in it. It was growing in the night, the white and ginger curls sprouting and twining like vegetable shoots under glass. A considerate trespasser, seeing that face and failing to hear the feeble gull-cries in the throat and chest, might have reached for the blanket (one corner of which was clenched in the man’s knobbly fist) and pulled it gently all the way up over the head.