At 2.45, and again at 3.00, Mr Haigh stood by the drawing room window gazing irritably across the uncut lawn to the fringe of trees that screened the rectory from the road. At 3.15, a hooded green MG TC arrived, driven by a man in a leather helmet and motoring gloves who said he had got lost trying to get off the Winchester by-pass.
At 4.00, George and Angela, filmed by Mr Haigh, left for Brighton in the green MG. Brighton had been picked for the single night of the honeymoon because it was reasonably convenient for Portsmouth, where George was due to join Hecla at 1600 hours the next day.) Angela drove, miraculously fast.
It was raining in Brighton and the sand-coloured sea came creaming slantwise up the beach in a south-westerly gale.
“Georgie, it’s far too rough for them to make you go tomorrow, it’s absurd!”
George, watching the sea through the net curtains of the hotel room, was inclined to agree: he’d been badly sick on Larkspur and dreaded the lumpy run down-Channel. Hecla was a “Woolworth carrier”—an old merchant ship, decked over to provide a skimpy flight deck for her twenty aircraft. She had a reputation as a bad roller. He said: “No, we’ll be fine, darling. There’s just a bit of a popple on the water.”
Dinner was dreadful. Angela sent hers back and told the waiter that she’d expected to come to a proper hotel and not to a fleabitten seaside boarding house. The waiter said that there was a war on.
Angela opened her eyes wide and said: “Really? Honestly and truly? A war? How utterly ghastly for you. Is it frightfully hush-hush, or can you tell us who it’s between?”
The waiter put on a frigid smile and beat a retreat to the pudding trolley.
Angela said, “Well, that épaté’d him, anyway. Oh, darling, I can’t bear to watch you eat yours, it looks perfectly disgusting … like dog-do!”
So George got very little dinner either.
The war had done for the hotel’s heating system and the room was damply cold. Though the windows were closed, the curtains stirred with the salty wind. The lamp by the bedside refused to work, the water in the bathroom was lukewarm and stained with rust. Angela complained of goose pimples and “blotches”.
“Oh, Georgie—I look such a frump, I hate myself. Hate! Hate! Hate!”
But the double bed with its stiff sheets was a glorious safe harbour. George and Angela lay in its warm shelter, listening to the gale rattling the window frames and to the dyspeptic gurgle of the hotel plumbing. It was, George thought, strangely like being a baby again, to be a married man. Their kisses now were soft and unhurried. Embracing, they were as moist and slippery as eels. George had a little difficulty with the rubber contraceptive. Angela helped.
Her sudden frantic violence always took him by surprise. Though her arms were tight around his neck, it was as if she’d taken leave of him. Pumping and thrashing, she came to her private climax, her voice a hoarse growl. “Georgie! Georgie! Don’t drown! Don’t drown! Don’t drown!”
He slept with his head cuddled to his wife’s breast.
He woke to laughter.
The water was chuckling against the hull—but it wasn’t that. The laugh was fuller, throatier, more like the rumble of a ship’s twin screws close by. But the sea was clear to the horizon. Fumes from the diesel must be getting to him. He stepped out of the wheelhouse into the cockpit. Where his father had been just a moment ago, Teddy was now sprawled in his scarlet University of Wisconsin tracksuit. Head thrown back, white teeth shining in the sun, he was banging a squash racket against his knee. And laughing.
“Oh, holy shit!” said Teddy and straightened himself up. “I’m sorry, fella.” Then he was off again.
“Oh, George, you sweet asshole! You wimp! You old scumbag!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Diana’s muddy car was parked outside Thalassa, its driver’s door open, its tyres sunk in pine needles. Diana had meant to stop only for as long as it took to pick up the mail, but she enjoyed being alone in other people’s houses and the car had already been standing there for more than ten minutes with the open door wagging in the wind.
Once upon a time Diana, on tour in strange cities, had made a habit of calling up estate agents and being shown round people’s homes on the pretence that she was looking for somewhere to live. She was always comforted by these trips, which she kept secret from her manager and the rest of the band. Sometimes there was the sad pleasure of being able to warm yourself for a little while in front of someone else’s family life: their stray Wellington boots, crumbs on tea tables, nappies drying on washing lines, the lingering smell of Vicks vapour rub. At other times there was a happy sense of recoil as you realized that you were glad, at least, that you didn’t live there, not like that.
George’s house was perfectly hideous, Diana thought. She felt cheered up no end by its horrible shuttered dustiness. There wasn’t anything of George’s in it at all, so far as she could see, unless one counted the TV set in whose curved screen she saw herself reflected as a jolly fat lady.
Nor was there any mail for him, to speak of. A telephone bill. A seed catalogue for Occupier. A very thin airmail letter. Diana looked at the stamp, which was pretty and extravagantly big. It showed a sword, a boat and a baobab tree. She put it away in her bag.
She lit a cigarette and restored the spent match to the box. She’d taken up smoking again, but it was as if there’d been a rift in an old friendship, and she and cigarettes were now on uneasy terms. The fat lady on the screen puffed smoke at her.
She wouldn’t have minded a drink. She poked about in all the likely places, but all she could find was some low-calorie tonic and the dregs of a bottle of Vinho Verde, so she settled herself in the bulbous and smelly buttonback chair and inspected the room.
A pair of kukris in burst leather scabbards hung on one wall. Withered palm crosses were stuck behind the pictures. As for the pictures themselves … they were freakish. They were portraits of the sort of people who should never have had their portraits painted in the first place.
A slug of white ash splashed on the knee of Diana’s jeans. She let it stay there, and returned the blank stare of His Honour Judge Samuel Wilson Grey Ll.B (Cantab) with a frown, for in the Judge’s face there was a faint—faintly displeasing—trace of George. It was something in the set of the jowls and cheekbones; something puzzling and indefinite like seeing (or did you just imagine it?) a stranger wink at you in a crowded room.
Behind the Judge’s head there was a sketchy landscape of mountains and temples. If you looked closely enough into the paint, you’d find tigers there. Diana felt suddenly irritable and lonely. She stubbed her cigarette out on an ugly brass tray that the Judge had probably brought home from India along with the kukris, and for a second it was like grinding the butt out on George.
What could you do with someone who was as ghostly as this? George was hardly more than a disturbance of the dust in the house. He was an ancestral cheekbone, a family mouth. Diana wanted to wound him back to life—to make him his own man—even her man, maybe. That hadn’t seemed too mad a thing to think a week ago, but the beastly house turned it into a laughable idea.
She pulled open a drawer in the Welsh dresser. It was stuffed to the top with papers. She opened another. The same. They all were. She picked up a sheet from the top of the drawer; it was a carbon copy of a letter to the Church Commissioners about roof repairs, poorly typed with a lot of x’ings-out. She burrowed through a layer of old Christmas cards, hunting for something private, personal, but in all this accumulation of yellowed paper there were just stiff politenesses and yours faithfullies. At the very bottom of the drawer there was a letter dated March 1944 and addressed to The Revd. D. Grey, The Rectory, Pound Lane, Tadfield, Hants. It was from the assistant manager of Lloyds Bank in Winchester and it wished to draw the Reverend’s attention to the fact that, following the presentation of cheque No. etcetera, his account was overdrawn to the tune of £4/5/8d.
The figures looked so fatuous. She stuffed the letter back inside the heap and pu
shed the drawer shut. Bits of paper stuck top and bottom. It looked flagrantly burgled, but Diana couldn’t be bothered to cover her tracks: she felt too impatient with these tiresome people—these Greys—who never threw anything away, who hoarded their roof repairs and cruddy little overdrafts and left them behind to their descendants as if they were history. It was unbearably pompous to treat your life like that. Diana liked to think of her own past, when she thought of it at all, as something contingent to herself, like the Foreign News page in the paper; a succession of small earthquakes in Chile. But when you looked at Thalassa, at these obsessively stored leavings, it was like kids making beastly little piles of their own snot and earwax.
A door banged upstairs. George! It banged again: it was only the wind. He must have left a window open. Pleased with this excuse to prowl further, Diana climbed the dark staircase.
A curtain in the bedroom was billowing into the room, its red velvet sopping and blackened with rain. She shut the window. The estuary was chipped and roughened and the sea at the entrance was sending up tall plumes of surf where it broke on the rocks. She thought, I wouldn’t like to be in George’s boat today; I’d be saying every Latin prayer I could remember. And some English ones, too.
The bedroom was a woman’s, not a man’s. A valance of frilly lace skirted the unmade bed. The only picture was a floral print of the kind you could buy at Woolworths. The manufacturers had printed it in relief to give the impression of whorls and ridges of oil paint. After the judges and bishops and lieutenant-colonels, it came as a bright surprise.
The tangle of blankets and cold sheets on the bed looked forlorn and widowed. A plastic bottle of Evian water stood on a sidetable, its top off, a drowned fly afloat on the surface film. At Diana’s feet there was a shirt crumpled into a ball. Without thinking, she picked it up to tidy it away. Her attention was caught by the label inside—she’d never have taken George for a man who had shirts specially hand-made for him. His name was sewn into the collar like a schoolboy’s. G. H. P. Grey. Folding the shirt, Diana saw herself for an idiotic moment as a matron in a prep school, and felt a twinge of irritation at George for having landed her with this part.
It was not for George but for the woman whose room this really was that she began to remake the bed, heaping the heavy blankets on the floor. It had been a very long time since anyone had bothered to plump the pillows: they were damp and flabby, their stuffing congealed into knots. She tossed them to one side and stared with a paralysed grin at the gun which she’d uncovered.
In thrillers, she thought, you’re supposed to recognize guns as celebrities. People are always turning round to face a Colt o38, or a something-Magnum, or a Smith & Wesson automatic. Your last memory is the brand name of the weapon that kills you. There was no putting a name to the gun on George’s bed. It was just a gun—and hardly even that, more like the sort of cap pistol with which G. H. P. Grey might run round making bangs in the garden. But it looked too heavy for its own good. It had left its greasy imprint on the threadbare cotton of the pillowcase. Like the Turin Shroud, Diana thought.
Even in LA she’d never known anyone who slept with a gun under their pillow. Who was George Grey thinking of killing in St Cadix? What kind of a man would you have to be to get any comfort from feeling a gun against your cheek at night through a layer of lumpy goosedown? And why had he left it behind? Had it been deliberately laid for her like a prize at the end of the paperchase?
She was half ashamed, half excited by her find. Her hands dithered as she replaced the pillow over the gun, matching the grease stains to the black metal. She shook out the shirt and crumpled it into a ball again. Taking her time, she rearranged the bed to make it look slept in and abandoned. When she’d finished, the room showed no sign of being disturbed, but the house was changed. It had a new centre of gravity. Everything now converged on the hidden gun—the frilly valance, the floral print, the terrible portraits, the Easter palms, the old letters. Diana had the sense that she was looking at it now through George’s own eyes; the squirm of alarm in her stomach belonged to him, not to her. Standing by the window, lighting a fresh “cigarette, she felt his hankering after the emptiness of the sea like an unexpected cramp or a stab of heartburn.
Diana liked secrets, and on the stairs she was lightheaded in her possession of this one. She would explore what it meant later. For now, there were two questions rolling in tandem in her head: did he have a licence for that thing? And what did the H and the P stand for?
“And hands that do dishes,” George mumbled in a growling bass, “will be soft as your face in mild green Fairy Liquid.” He’d picked up the jingle from the television like a germ and he couldn’t shake it off. It went round and round in his skull like a loop of tape.
Holding on tight to the varnished spokes of the wheel, his pipe clenched upside down between the tar-stained premolars on the port side of his jaw, he was in the swing of things.
Calliope soared, slid sideways, plunged and bucked, with a phosphorescent bulge of surf swelling against her lee side.
“And hands that do dishes …”
The haze had burned off. The stiffening wind was raising a lumpy sea and the sky was cold and empty except for a jet-trail breaking up high to the north.
“Will be soft as your face …”
He was taking the waves one by one, searching for the safest route up each low rockface of piled water. He could see the sun shining through the crests where the sea was as pale as lime juice before it spilled over into ragged white moustaches of foam.
“In mild green Fairy Liquid.”
His bedroom climbed the wave first, followed in short order by his drawing-room, his kitchen and his bathroom. Calliope splashed like a whale, raising a wall of bright spray as she toppled on a big one. Water streamed along the decks and down the wheelhouse windows. Now up, now down, now in the sun, now in the shade, he was being shaken about like a dice in a cup.
“And hands that do dishes will be soft as your face—”
The wheelhouse was snug, though. The air was warm and thick with pipesmoke, sweat, coffee and diesel; it was good companionable air, and George was happy in his den, inhaling his own exhaust fumes and watching the sea buckle and break outside. He was as safe as houses here. The rubberclad handbearing compass, worn round his neck like a medallion, bounced against his breastbone as Calliope rolled. He eased her down into the black trough.
“In mild green Fairy Liquid—”
His own brand of fairy liquid was racing past the hull; sudsy, tumbled, up to all sorts of magical tricks and passes. It reached for the stern of the boat and thrust him high up over the sea, a giant for an instant. Then it dwarfed him with a sudden giddying fall as the wave dissolved under his feet in a tissue of froth. George wasn’t frightened; at least not now, not in the wheelhouse, with the sun out and the waves grinning at him. Shifting the heavy rudder in its girdle of chains, he was in a trance of concentration, lost to himself, playing in tune.
When land showed, it was at first a faint stain, perhaps only a ledge of thin cirrus, between sky and water. George kept on losing it behind the wave tops. It was another half-hour before he trusted it not to disappear altogether, and a half-hour more before he could pick out the grey rhino rump of a headland, standing out a shade more firmly than the rest. Prawle Point? Bolt Head? He wasn’t sure and didn’t think it safe to leave the wheel to check the compass bearing of this doubtful land against the chart.
Making landfall, any landfall, had always been something to marvel over. George had half forgotten that peculiar twist of pleasure which went with seeing a new country come up from under the horizon. Everywhere looked so possible from out at sea. You could feel the whole ship quickening at the first sight of it: the little gangs of ratings out on the flight deck in the cold, the bridge filling, the funny hush as everyone strained to pick out a fresh detail invisible to his neighbour. Landfall was like a child’s Christmas—you woke up in the dark for it, alert after only an hour or two of sleep
, and its slowly sharpening silhouette held out exactly the same kind of promise as the tantalizing bulges in the stocking at the end of the bed. Never mind for now that all the most exciting protuberances would turn out, in daylight, to be potatoes.
Hours before you were due to dock, before land was more than a hypothetical smudge, everyone was busy, borrowing sharp ties, fancy cufflinks, ten bob notes and names of bars where you could meet girls. Even the captain, arriving on the bridge rather too early to take over the wheel, failed to mask the foolish landfall smile that suddenly knocked ten years off his age.
George had first seen Montedor like this, in ’45, twenty years before he’d taken over from old Miller at the bunkering station. There was the smell of the African wind in the muggy dawn, and Hecla’s corkscrew motion as she waddled through a steep beam sea. The dusty cone of Mount Bobia was what you saw first—a lonely island, its top lost in cloud. Then the sky thickened behind it and turned into the sawtooth outline of the Sierra de la Canjombe.
Farley was standing beside him, elbows splayed on the rail, his face sunk in his hands. They watched together as the coast inched towards them and you could see the rim of surf breaking against an impossibly bright yellow beach. Farley passed George the binoculars, and eventually came out with what was on his miserable mind.
“All those nigger tarts … I suppose they’ve all got clap?”
“And syph,” George said. He was staring at the lighthouse on the end of Cabo Sao Giorgio. It didn’t look like a lighthouse at all: with its crucifix and slender spire it looked like a whitewashed Mediterranean Catholic church.
Devon now was just as foreign-looking as Montedor then: a bald, brown, humpbacked land, like a single lichenous rock in the middle of the sea. There were no signs of life out there, no evidence of natives, friendly or otherwise; just a rolling vegetable bareness, on which you might find yourself cast away like Robinson Crusoe. The waves were tamer here now that the boat was in the lee of the coast: six miles offshore, George was able to hand the wheel over to Lazy Mike and go out on deck to take a closer look at the country he’d discovered.
Foreign Land Page 28
