He stood on the coachroof in the warm red shadow of the mainsail, one arm locked round the mast, the other trying to keep the binoculars aimed at Devon. Mostly all they showed was blinding sky, then the torn lacework of the sea, as Calliope’s bows splashed down after another flying leap. But it was bloody marvellous, though. George had spray in his eyes and up his nose. The chest of his jersey was soaked through. He had to keep on using his binocular-hand to jam down the brim of his Holsum cap and stop it being blown away to France. Eventually he gave up on the binoculars and hung them round his neck. Giving himself to the powerful sweep and plummet of the foredeck, he let the land ahead come to him in its own good time.
Yes. There was a fan-shaped spill of colour in the dark cleft of a hillside over to the north-east, like a mess of dried paint on a palette with its shocking pinks and chlorophyll greens. George warmed to the sight of it. He loved those feckless shanty towns where people lived in cardboard boxes, old banana crates, kerosene drums, palm thatch and chickenwire. They kept starved goats and grew amazing flowers in dried milk tins. Ten minutes more, and one would catch the first whiff of their cooking fires, and see the women at the water’s edge, pinning out the laundry with stones to dry on the sand. Yes. Now he could smell the fires. Definitely. Woodsmoke. Burned palm oil. Dung. Coriander.
Calliope slammed into a breaking wave and George got a bucketful of sea in his face. He wiped his eyes with a sodden sleeve. When he looked up to find his shanty town again, it wasn’t there. Not that it made a damn of difference, really, that the shacks of the detribalized Wolofs were actually just holiday caravans. The basic principle and the colours were exactly the same. But it was funny about the smell. That had been as tangible as the salt water which was still stinging in his eyes.
He clambered back along the wet deck to the wheelhouse, where he reset the compass course on the autopilot. 125° would keep the boat prowling nicely south-eastwards in parallel with the coast. He loosened the sheets in the cockpit. With the wind behind her now, Calliope was freewheeling: she lolloped quietly along with the waves, taking the sea with an easy slouch.
George trained the binoculars on the shore. The sandstone cliffs swam, enlarged and slightly out of focus, in the glass. What he wanted was a church tower, or a gasholder, or a radio mast, or what the Admiralty chart called a Hotel (conspic). But the place was empty of landmarks. There was nothing to get a fix on in the blue shadows of its volcanic pleats and folds, its tufty trees, its wide heathlands of gorse and bracken, its pretty tumble of caravans on the hill. The land slid past at a steady four knots on the stream. George watched intently, trying to second-guess it, like an immigrant at a porthole looking anxiously out at his strange home.
There was a voice at his shoulder.
“There will be Kurds there, won’t there, darling? I’m simply dying to see the Kurds, aren’t you?”
He’d felt a blaze of relief and gratitude to Angela for the sweet way in which she’d said yes to the Aden job. He had expected tears, recriminations, icy silences, had steeled himself to be told that he was utterly insensitive, thoughtless and unkind. The marriage was fifteen months old and Angela was pregnant. George knew that Aden was too much to ask of her, even though the job did pay an amazing £1250 a year. He had put it to her so hesitantly that he was dismissing it from his own mind as he spoke. Yet she said yes. No questions. Just like that. It was a day or two later that he found out that Angela’s consent was based on the fond illusion (and George loved her for it) that Aden was the homeland of the Kurds.
After his demob., it seemed to him that he was the only person around who didn’t have a strong opinion about what George should do in civvy street. Angela had lots. “Georgie can be one of those men who go round the world collecting old carriage clocks for millionaires,” she announced at breakfast at the Haighs’. On successive days, she advised him to go in for theatrical management, estate agency, trick photography and the Bar. Finally she suggested that he might find work as a spy.
“Darling—how on earth do you think one’s supposed to become a spy, for heaven’s sake?”
“Well, you’d have to go and see someone in the Foreign Office, I should think,” she said, smoking a de Reszke cigarette and looking perfectly serious.
George’s father held out altogether gloomier prospects for his future. “I don’t know if you’ve thought of schoolteaching, old boy? You might just manage to get into that. Of course there’d be two years of college first, but I rather think you might be able to get one of those grants that they seem to be giving away to pretty well everybody now, under the Socialists.” He blew noisily through the dottle in his pipe. “The Whitaker boy, now … what’shisname?”
“I can’t remember,” George said, knowing perfectly well.
“Jeremy … Nicholas, something like that. Anyway, he’s doing awfully well for himself, so his father was telling me. Average adjuster. There’s a big future in Insurance, but of course you’d need a good head for figures for that one.”
It was one of his father’s dearly held fictions that George was incapable of adding two and two.
“What’s your view, er, Angela?” his father said.
Angela stared at him for a moment, her big eyes misty with boredom. “Oh, look!” she said. “You’ve got bluebells in your garden. Aren’t they ravishing?”
The job in Aden was Mr Haigh’s idea, of course. He knew a man who knew a man—and it was fixed. He waved away all George’s worries about Angela giving birth in the hot season four thousand miles away from home. “The sun’ll do her a world of good. And they love babies in naval hospitals; it makes a change from what they usually have to do with sailors.” As for the bunkering business, it was “You ought to know a bit about ships now—it’s just like being a sort of maritime petrol pump attendant.”
Angela celebrated the news by going shopping with Tanya Fox and Serena Lake-Williams. There was, she said, nothing-literally nothing—at Harrods, or Fortnum & Mason’s, or Peter Jones. “It’s too Cold Comfort Farm to be true.” Even so, she came back to Bolton Gardens with a white halo beret with a built-in veil (“for the mosquitoes”), a yellow rayon bathing costume, a striped parasol, sunglasses, three broderie anglaise maternity gowns, a patent water purifier, a white dinner jacket for George, turtle oil soap, orange skin food, and a tinned ham. She had placed an order for the early delivery of a Dunkley pram, and showed George a printed photograph of what looked like an open touring car circa 1908.
Mrs Haigh, looking at the things which Angela had bought, said, “You must have used a dreadful amount of coupons.
Where did you manage to find them, dear?”
“Oh …” Angela said vaguely, “you know … Tanny and Serena chipped in, bless them,” and George, watching her, was certain she was lying. When he tried on the dinner jacket for size, he had the uncomfortable sensation that he was handling stolen goods. It fitted perfectly: Angela was brilliant at that kind of thing.
Everyone, Angela said, madly envied their going overseas, and the glamour of Abroad became a fixed feature of herself, like her eyes and her fair hair. She called Aden “The East”; whenever she said the word, she inserted a short pause before it and lowered her voice a little. “Of course, when I’m in … The East …” she would say, and she had the knack of making you see her there; alone in a desert of sculpted dunes, at the head of a crocodile of native bearers carrying trunks on their heads. Hecla had actually stopped at Aden for a day the previous year, and George could remember the place as an untidy heap of hot cinders spilling out into the sea … some makeshift bungalows … and dwarfish men in ragged skirts pestering the sailors for baksheesh. When he heard Angela talk, he realized how much he must have missed. She was right, of course: it was entirely his fault that Aden had looked such a dump. You needed Angela’s imagination if you were going to see through the surface to the far Araby that lay behind. He even began to wonder if she might be right about the Kurds.
Her elation survived the sixteen-day
passage on the RMS Queen Adelaide from Southampton en route to Bombay. The ship had been a luxury liner before the war, but she had been requisitioned as a troop carrier in 1939 and the accommodations were still pretty grim and soldierly. Angela was horribly seasick off Cape Finisterre, but she was jolly brave about it, lying all day in her bunk with a sweet white-faced smile and saying, “Please don’t worry about me, Georgie—you go off and have fun.”
It was George who behaved badly. He hated being a passenger and pined for the view from the bridge. He saw his chance when he found himself alone with the Second Officer at the bar.
“So you’ve found your sealegs?” the Second Officer said, as the floor sank suddenly away to port and the barman moved just in time to catch a flying soda siphon.
George explained that, in fact, he knew this patch of sea rather well. Last time he’d been on it, it had been worse than this. A steady Force 9 for nearly twenty-four hours. They’d come bloody close to losing an aircraft, and a gun-mounting on the starboard quarter had been swept clean away when they’d tried to make a turn for Brest and been caught beam-on.
The Second Officer smiled and turned to the barman. “You know what they say about the three most useless things you can have on a ship? A wheelbarrow, an umbrella and a naval man. What’s in that glass?”
“A pink gin,” George said, duly squashed.
The Captain organized a daily sweepstake in which the passengers bet on the distance run each noon. George took a lot of trouble over his estimates. He worked out the tidal streams as best he could from memory and guesswork. He enjoyed explaining to Angela how to make an independent measurement of the ship’s speed with a Dutchman’s Log. He made Angela stand on the promenade deck up at the bow, while he waited near the stern. When he waved his handkerchief, she dropped a cigarette packet over the side and he counted off the time in seconds, going “a-hundred-and-one, a-hundred-and-two, a-hundred-and-three” until the cigarette packet raced past him in a rush of foam. The foam was the problem. More often than not, he never spotted the cigarette packet. But it did work a couple of times, and George calculated that the Queen Adelaide was making a steady twelve and a half knots.
The odd thing was that, despite this careful science, George and Angela never won the sweepstake. He was always close, but there was always someone who was closer, like the old lady who was going out to see her grandchildren in Hyderabad, or the bald young man who was getting off at Suez to sell agricultural implements to the Egyptians. It occurred to George that the Captain might be cheating him of his prize on the grounds that George was a fellow professional and therefore ineligible for the competition.
At dinner one night he heard Angela saying to her neighbour, “Poor Georgie likes to pretend that he knows everything in the entire world about ships and navigation and things. After being in the Navy and all that. But between you, me and the gatepost, I don’t think he knows anything much at all.”
George grinned, said, “Ah, I was afraid I hadn’t fooled you, darling,” and devoted a great deal of attention to tearing his bread roll in half. The remark hurt, though, and he didn’t ask Angela to help him with the Dutchman’s Log again.
Within sight of the lights of Algiers, George, in pyjamas, went to Angela’s bunk. “Oh, sweetie—no. Think of the Baby.” So he lay alone, watching the lights fade slowly out in the dark sea, listening to the intimate wheeze of the ship’s engines and feeling frightened—of Angela, Aden, the baby, everything. Some mornings he woke up thinking that he had only dreamed his marriage. It was like that now. It was queer and scary to feel that you weren’t really related at all to the person who was sleeping just six feet away from you in the cabin. He could see the dim hump of her shoulder under the blanket. It didn’t look in the least bit wifely, somehow.
“Darling?”
The hump shifted a little as Angela moved more deeply into the bed towards the wall. He was sure she was awake. He would have liked to ask her if she was feeling frightened too.
In the Suez Canal, Angela said, “Oh, Georgie! Look—camels! Isn’t it just bliss?” She snuggled against him as they stood at the rail, watching the camels in silhouette on the levee like a cut-out paper frieze, and George, feeling proud and husbandly now, basked in the brilliance that Angela brought to things just by making herself a part of the picture.
They docked in Aden on May 11th. The temperature was in the high nineties, and they stepped ashore into a hot, wet, gassy wind, like the bad breath of a sperm whale. George was sick with apprehension for Angela as he looked out on ricketty roofs of corrugated iron, dusty boulders, mudbricks and starveling yellow dogs. Yet all she said was, “Do you see that man with his dagger? Sweet!”
The company had allocated them a bungalow on Steamer Point. Its previous tenants, trying to make themselves at home, had given it the character of a seedy boarding house in the English midlands. They had left greasy antimacassars on the chairbacks and some printed tablemats with pictures on them of the Oxford colleges. George noticed what looked like rat droppings on the sinkboard of the kitchen. He waited for the bomb to drop out of the bland blue tropical sky.
He said, “Darling, we only have to stick it out for … well, six months perhaps …” He tried to make six months sound hardly longer than a weekend, but the words came out with the cold ring of a prison sentence.
“Oh, Georgie, don’t be so feeble.”
For a week, George held his breath. It seemed to him that he was always watching Angela through a blue film of mosquito-mesh as she moved behind it, mysteriously purposeful in her white slacks and cherry-coloured blouse. It took her a day to destroy the hideous sitting-room, and George piled the furniture in the dirt road outside, from where it disappeared within minutes of its exile, seized by invisible hands. Returning at noon from his first full morning at the bunkering station, he found the bungalow swept clean and bare as a shell and Angela gone.
When she returned, her hair was caked with red dust and she was talking nineteen to the dozen. She’d been out with Abdurahman. Abdurahman? Abdurahman—silly!—was the camel driver who brought the water-carrier up the street every morning and evening. He’d taken her home and she’d met his cousins, sweeties, all of them, and their simply darling children. She’d gone into the women’s quarters and been dressed up as an Adeni bride, and she’d gone to the souk in Crater Town and bought tons of things for the house with Abdurahman’s help. Abdurahman would bring them later, with the water—
“Darling, don’t you think you ought to watch that a bit? I got a lecture from Wilkinson at the station this morning … about how one had to be careful about fratting—”
“Fratting!” Angela’s voice was piercing and contemptuous. “I’ve never heard anything so sickmakingly stuffy. You can do exactly as you please—you and ‘Wilkinson’, whoever ‘Wilkinson’ may be. But I shall frat and frat and frat and frat with anyone I want, and if little Georgie-Porgie thinks he’s going to stop me, little Georgie-Porgie has another think coming!”
George could hear the leaves in the single acacia tree beyond the verandah. They were chinking like coins in the wind. He said: “Wilkinson’s invited us over to his bungalow for dinner.”
Angela stared at him. She was smiling the way she always did before she burst out crying. “Well you can go, can’t you? I expect I’ll be having dinner with Abdurahman.”
George stood in front of her in the empty room, choked for words. He said “But” twice. He felt for his new pipe in the pocket of his jacket, and realized that he wasn’t wearing a jacket, only a sweat-soaked shirt, the rightful property of Mr Haigh. It was another moment or two before he noticed that it was not Angela who was crying this time, it was him. She was a sort of wobbling blur, and he could feel the cold trickle of tears on his cheeks.
“Oh don’t be such a baby,” Angela said.
“Sorry,” George said. “It’s just … hay fever. Haven’t had it for years.”
But she was placated. By the time that Abdurahman arrived with Ange
la’s purchases from the souk piled in twin baskets on his camel, she was her sweet self again, carolling with pleasure as she unpacked the bolsters, coloured rugs, squares of dyed silk, copper trays, joss sticks and the rough cotton headdresses that she said would be just perfect for tablecloths.
The transformation of the bungalow was extraordinary. George was dazzled by his wife’s genius. Where the dowdy lounge had been, Angela created what she called her majlis room, an airy, lamplit cave of cornflower and crimson, where one lolled on cushions on the floor and the walls were hung from floor to ceiling with striped rugs. Day by day, George’s house turned into the most exotic place he’d ever seen.
Mornings and afternoons he sat on an uncomfortable stool under a creaking fan in his prefabricated office at the bunkering station. He swapped ships about between the coal berths and the oiling berths. He wrote out dockets, yarned with Wilkinson and got used to clapping his hands and shouting “Shweyya! Shweyya!” at the Arab longshoremen. When he went home, though, it was to Angela’s Orient, a storybook world over which Angela now presided in a maternity smock and baggy silk pantaloons.
She was wonderful at populating it, too. They had arrived in Aden without introductions to anyone, unless you counted Wilkinson, which Angela certainly didn’t. By Empire Day, they knew everyone. At least Angela did. Often George got home to find a small herd of black Morris 8s tied up outside the bungalow and a cheerful crowd of Residency bachelors, visiting naval lieutenants and sappers with toothbrush moustaches within. They all called her “Angie”—a liberty that George had never taken—and several times George felt that his own entrance into the conversation was a dampener on things.
“Georgie!” Angela called from her cushioned warren of young men. “Kiss?” She tilted her cheek for him, and when he kissed her he saw the young men smile.
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