Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

He loosened each hinged glass with a dewdrop of sewing machine oil. The engineering of the instrument was lovely — every piece of it firm and snug. He’d have to resilver the mirrors on it, though; but there must be a book that would tell you about that in Clapham Public Library. They’d have books on navigation, too. He could find out how to use it.

It was a collector’s piece, really. Looking at it now, at its fat brass telescope and silver arc, Tom thought: it could be worth three hundred pounds, no, make it four.

There were four empty miniatures of whisky in the netting pouch on the seatback at George’s knee, along with the airline magazine and the card showing smiling people in lifejackets sliding down chutes from emergency exits. George knew exactly why those idiot smiles were stuck on their diagrammatic faces: any way out from a jumbo jet, however unscheduled, was something to be thankful for. He squashed the cellophane tumbler in his fist and dropped it under his seat.

The monotonous raw noise of the engines made his head feel as if it had been stuffed with wire wool. All blinds down, with coloured pictures playing on the bulkhead screen, the plane roared north through the sky, eating up the latitudes. His fellow passengers looked like patients being treated for something, or souls being chastened. Their feet were encased in identical blue airline-issue nylon slippers. Plastic headsets were clamped round their jaws. Their faces were slack. As the aircraft shuddered on a swirl of turbulence, they lolled in their seats, eyes fixed indifferently on the screen.

George was too distracted, too ashamed to watch the movie. He couldn’t read. He felt terrible. Strapped into his seat in the candy-smelling half dark, he winced at himself and ached to be alone.

He lifted the blind at his elbow as high as he dared and looked out. The Sahara was trapped in the angle between the wing and the fuselage, seven miles down, a continent below. The desert was like brick dust — the colour of a shattered city. The wind had blown it into waves and ripples; a red ocean of scorched rubble. Somewhere between George and the desert, the jet stream of another plane was disintegrating in the sky.

He pressed the button with the outline picture of a stewardess in a flared skirt. Oh, God Almighty, he thought; God all bloody mighty! Pain, yes — he had bargained on that, but he hadn’t counted on farce.

“Yes, sir? Can I get you something?” The stewardess’s voice was Afrikaner. It was an accent that George instinctively detested, but it wasn’t a bad accent for someone who worked in the admin department of Purgatory.

“Please. Whisky and water. No ice.”

“Are you quite sure, sir?”

George stared at her, and for a horrible moment he saw what he imagined she saw. “Yes,” he said, “of course I am.”

“Very well, sir. And — sir? Would you mind pulling down your blind, please? It spoils the film for the other passengers.”

When she brought his drink, she said, “Perhaps I can take those other empty bottles from you, sir—”

George obediently fished in the netting and handed them over. From the way the stewardess took possession of them, they might have been used french letters.

“Thank you, sir. We shall be serving coffee and sandwiches after the film.”

If only he’d been warned … But his send-off had been meant as a surprise. George guessed that Teddy must have been behind it; and Vera must have known too. How could she not have told him?

It was Teddy who collected him, and George was afraid something was up when he saw that Teddy was in uniform. They had trailed out to the airport in the official fleet of Humbers and Mercedes, with the presidential Daimler in the middle. Out on the tarmac, the silver band was playing a Brazilian rumba and a platoon of the National Guard presented arms, their rifle barrels pressed against their noses.

The plane had just landed. Bom Porto was a half-hour refuelling stop on the flight from Johannesburg to Frankfurt, and the passengers stayed in their seats. Bland voortrekker faces gazed from the windows of the aircraft as George was led up and down the lines of the guard.

He had carefully chosen his worst suit for the flight. The best he had been able to do with himself was to abandon his pocketed half bottle of Chivas Regal in Teddy’s Humber. He still held Vera’s oilcloth shopping bag, and because his feet swelled at high altitudes he was wearing his plimsolls.

The President made a speech. George didn’t hear much of it: the hot wind carried away most of the words and two yellow dogs decided to join the ceremony by yodelling provocatively at the silent band. Then George and the President kissed. George and Teddy kissed. George and the Minister of Industry kissed. Kissing Teddy, George saw the faces at the windows on the plane. They were laughing.

The band went into the Montedor National Anthem. The dogs howled. Vera’s shopping bag flapped in the wind. Then the tune changed to something slow and sad. A dozen bars in, George recognized it as “God Save the Queen”. Caught in a bad dream, he raised his hand to his forehead to remove his Holsum cap, and found, with a lurch of relief, that he was capless.

Responding to the gesture, the captain of the National Guard obliged with a slightly puzzled salute. So George, bag in hand, had to salute back to save the captain’s face. “God Save the Queen” went on forever. The two men faced each other, in rigid salutation, while George felt trickles of hot sweat running down his chest and spine.

George was the only passenger from Bom Porto, and the wobbly aluminium steps had been trucked out to the 747 especially for him. Climbing them, he felt he was taking his leave of Montedor in a state of bizarre disgrace: he might just as well be wearing a red papier-mâché nose and have his trousers round his ankles.

Nor were things much easier when the steward wound the aircraft door shut behind him and George, stooping, was led down the plane to his seat. People who are seen off by guards of honour are morally obliged to fly First Class: George, not knowing what was planned for him, had booked a ticket in something called the Executive Club, which turned out to be a euphemism, with free drinks, for Tourist. As he moved along the cabin gangway, he was met by stares of condescending disapproval as if he was a brush salesman who’d been caught masquerading as a viscount.

He squeezed past the knees of his neighbour and tried to let himself off lightly. “Bit of a mix-up out there. I seem to have coincided with their band practice day.”

The neighbour didn’t smile. He waited until they were in the air and then he began to punish George for his indecent celebrity. The man offered a rambling resumé of his domestic circumstances, photographs included, followed by a string of tales about peddling cosmetics in the suburbs of Cape Town. By the time he reached the general question of cash flow in the pharmaceutical industry, George was ready to scream. He searched the man for a sign of a switch that would turn him off, but the high cocksure voice flowed inexhaustibly on. It stopped only when the announcement came over the intercom that they were now ready to show the film. In Purgatory one form of torture is always relieved by the commencement of another.

George raised the window-blind with his finger. The plane had not advanced a further inch, it seemed. There was the same reddish sea swell with its quarter moons of shadow, the same jet trail breaking up in puffs and squiggles. Fearful of the patrolling stewardess, he snapped the blind down on the Sahara and tried to look at the pictures on the screen.