Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

It was the kind of film that was shown only to captive audiences on aeroplanes. Without the soundtrack, it was perfectly incomprehensible. George couldn’t see a story in it, only a jerky collection of dislocated images. The actors seemed to be engaged in a game of cruel mimicry as they pretended to kiss, pretended to fight, pretended to signal to pretend-taxi-cabs. The camera gloated over them in close-up, suddenly zooming in to give a dentist’s-eye-view of the back teeth of a laughing woman or the staring eyes of a man holding a toy gun.

George tried to concentrate on the backgrounds to these shots, where another world was getting on with its business behind the actors’ backs. There were pretty brownstone houses; an American traffic light flashed “Don’t Walk”; an innocent dog crossed the top left hand corner of the screen; a tug ploughed slowly upstream on a scummy river.

The camera never allowed him to dwell on these small pleasures for more than a second or two. It was continually panning away from them or throwing them out of focus, as if reality was a kind of grit that needed to be forcibly wiped from the eye.

An actor in the film was shouting. His mouth worked like a swinging catflap in a door. The film cut to another actor sitting at an office desk. There was a close-up of a file and the words TOP SECRET.

Bored, George waited for another exterior to show up. He wondered if there was any chance of seeing the river and the tug again, or whether the plot (if there was a plot) had finally disposed of them. The noise of the jets had somehow combined with the pictures: he could hear distant actors’ voices in the engines.

For no apparent reason, a woman in the film began to cry. At least, she made her cheek muscles wobble and contract, and in the next shot her face was wet with dribbles of mascara. The camera stayed on her for a long time. To his horror, George found that he was crying with her. Her shoulder shook; his eyes fogged with tears. She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief, and George’s nose began to run. When the film moved on, to a car chase by night through some attractive streets, George was still crying. First he was crying for shame, then he was crying from the shock of crying. It was mechanical, involuntary, absurd — but he could not stop blubbing. He unbuckled his seatbelt, plunged past his neighbour and threw up in the cramped and overlit lavatory at the back of the aircraft.

At Frankfurt, George changed planes. At Heathrow, he booked himself in to the Post House Hotel for the night. He tried to sleep, and failed. He did not telephone his daughter.

“Oh, haven’t you two met yet?” said Rupert Walpole. “Verity Caine. George Grey. George is just back from Montenegro.”

“Montedor, actually.”

“Sorry, wrong continent. Must be the punch.”

“Oh, heavens, yes,” said Verity Caine. “Now where exactly is that?”

“On the bulge of Africa, one block down from Senegal,” George said, using the formula that had grown increasingly weary over the last fortnight.

“Oh, that side,” said Verity Caine, shifting her gaze to the slice of apple and the maraschino cherry in her punch. In St Cadix, all of West Africa was on the wrong side of the park.

The Walpoles’ Christmas party was a fixture on the county social calendar. “We’re just having a few people round here for drinks,” was how Polly Walpole put it over the telephone, but the few were many, and the cars in the street outside had come from Truro, Fowey, St Austell, Liskeard, Bodmin. Ben Dickinson had driven down from Plymouth, braving floods to make it.

The long drawing room, with its exposed beams and uncurtained picture window, smelled of Rentokil and cut flowers; the snowy carpet looked as if it had been run up from chinchilla skins. The Walpoles were lavish receivers of Christmas cards: there were six strings of them in the window where Italian madonnas hung sideways next to the stamped crests and regimental ribbons. Rupert had been Army himself, once, and people at the yacht club still sometimes called him “Major”, but Rupert had preferred to drop the title when he went into china clay. “In industrial relations,” he liked to say, “there are no officers and men — there are just chaps.”

“It cost buttons when Rupert and Polly bought the house originally,” Verity Caine was saying to George. “It was still a pilchard smokery then. They had to do a vast amount to it. Of course, all that’s dead now. They were catching pilchards here when we came, even; but there hasn’t been a pilchard boat working out of St Cadix for yonks.”

“What finished it?” George wanted to get his pipe out, but the smell of the room and the shampooed locks of that awful carpet had No Smoking signs written all over them, he thought.

“Oh, the Common Market. The ruddy French and their seine nets. The whole of the English Channel’s fished-out now.”

George looked over Verity Caine’s shoulder, to the smears of reflected light on the black estuary beyond the picture window where yawls and ketches were tugging fretfully at their mooring buoys.

Across the room, Barbara Stevenson said “When we were out in Kenya—”, and Nicola Walpole nudged her friend Sue and whispered “Two points”. Nicola and Sue were both in the Upper Fourth at Hatherup Castle. Sue was staying with the Walpoles for Christmas.

“Does that make it four or five?” Sue said.

The people at the party were known as the When-I’s, and the game was to catch them actually saying it. You got two points for an Abroad and one for a Home. Last Christmas, Nicola had scored nineteen. This year the going was slower: Robert Collins had said “When I was with Ferrantis”; Laura Nash had come up with “When we were in Highgate”; and Denis Wright had cheated by saying “In Basra, of course, we always—”.

Barbara Stevenson’s was by far the best effort so far.

Polly Walpole introduced George to old Brigadier Eliot.

“You remember George’s mother — Mary Grey.”

“Oh yes, of course. How is your mother now?”

“She’s dead actually.”

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that.”

Everyone seemed very old to George. The women had either lost their waists long ago, or been shrivelled into bags of fragile sticks bound together in peach chiffon. Two men in a corner wore deaf aids and bellowed into each other’s good ears. Wherever he listened, he heard talk of operations.

“How’s the new hip?”

“Oh, pretty good. Can’t manage stairs with it yet, of course. Thank God for the bungalow is what I say.”

“Margaret’s going in in January.”

“Hip?”

“No. Insides. Woman’s thing.”

“Oh.”

For Nicola and Sue, the pace of the game began to quicken when Philip Slater said “When I was in Cyprus”; it was still two points, even though he was only talking about a holiday in Larnaka.

George noticed, with a spasm of hope, a woman on the far side of the room. She was stubbing out a cigarette in a potted plant. If he couldn’t smoke his pipe, at least he might be able to cadge a cigarette from her. He had already turned to join her when he was grabbed by a small, spiky woman who was going distinctly bald.

“George? Betty Castle. Bet you don’t remember me. We met at your ma’s. Mary was a great chum.”

“Oh, yes, of course I do.” He had no recollection of her at all.

“Now you’re a Navy man!” She said this, too, as if she was laying a pound each way on an outsider.

“No, not really. It was just wartime Navy.”

“D’you sail?”

“Not much lately. I did a bit when I was in Aden, actually. I rather hoped to pick it up again when I came here.”