Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Sue said to Nicola, “The old bloke over there — the tall one. ‘When I was in Aden’. Two points.”

“That’s eleven,” Nicola said.

“You see,” Betty Castle said to George, “we sort of had you marked down for the Dunnetts’ boat. Has Alec said anything?”

“I don’t know who Alec is,” George said.

“The commodore. I mean he’s really a colonel, but he’s the commodore. Of the yacht club.”

“Oh, yes, we did meet. But he didn’t say anything about the Dunnings.”

“Dunnetts. No, Wingco Dunnett had a stroke in the spring, and poor Cynthia is right down on her uppers. Wingco’s never going to walk again, and that boat really is the last straw. They can’t possibly afford to keep the thing, but Wingco won’t hear of putting her up for sale. So what we need is a fait accompli, if you see what I mean.”

George didn’t, but said that he did in order to save trouble.

“Are you a racing man or a cruising man?” said Betty Castle.

“I don’t think I’m either—”

“It wouldn’t be any use if you were a racing man, of course, but for a cruising man it’s a super little ship. Wingco’s pride and joy. But he’s changed dreadfully since his stroke. People do.”

The picture window filled suddenly with lights. George, distracted, watched other windows sliding past, almost within touching distance. A freighter was moving upriver to the china clay docks. On her floodlit bows and stern, deckhands were busy with winches and hawsers. She was in ballast, her load line showing three feet or so above where the dark water streamed past her hull like braided rope. She was flying a charred Greek ensign. George put her at about eight thousand tons. Her passage past the room was quite soundless. A face at one bright window stared at the party, stared at George; a young Greek sailor watching a foreign country going by at arm’s length. It was George, though, who felt homesick: he measured the space between himself and the ship. It was just three weeks and a little over three thousand miles, and he had to shake himself to remember that it was out of reach, that Raymond Luis was in charge.

“Do go and have a look at her,” Betty Castle said. “Poor Cynthia’s nearly at her wits’ end. She’s such a saint, that woman. And Wingco was never any good with money, I’m afraid.”

But George wasn’t listening. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes … yes … yes.”

The score went up to fourteen when Nicola caught Mrs Downes in the act, with “When we had the cottage in the Dordogne”. With an hour at least still to go, she was confident now of breaking last year’s record.

“Have you seen the bus shelter?” said Connie Lisle to anyone who’d listen. “It’s been balkanized again. It’s all over graffiti, just as bad as last time.”

Balkanized was a code word in St Cadix. It had entered the language in the early autumn, when Hugh Traill had used it as an explanation of what was happening to Britain in the 1980s. Traill had worked for the British Council in Damascus. He was not much liked, though he was asked to all the parties. “Frankly,” said Barbara Stevenson, “I don’t really see his point,” and most people found it difficult to see the point of Traill, who wore rubber overshoes indoors and went about the place in trousers that looked as if he had made them himself. When he said that Britain was becoming balkanized, the phrase was joyfully taken up — mostly in mockery and partly in deference to his notorious cleverness. When outboard motors disappeared from the cluster of moored dinghies that jostled around the steps of the Town Quay, they had been balkanized. When work began on the new council estate at the top of the hill, that was balkanization. Most things on television news now were “pretty balkan”; Sue and Nicola were doing their best to smuggle into the general currency the expressions “Oh balk!” and “Balk off!” Less than usual had been seen of Traill himself this winter; Polly Walpole was the first of several people to say that he had probably balkanized into thin air.

George was in search of the woman with the cigarettes. He found her standing alone studying the Christmas cards on the mantelpiece and flicking ash into the log fire. It was obvious, when you looked at it, that the log fire wasn’t real; it was a sort of gas-powered artwork, and the ash lay in pale splashes on the blazing timber.

“I wonder if you could spare me a cigarette?” George said.

“Of course,” the woman said, and stared abstractedly into the gaping chaos of her handbag. Her white hair was of the kind that had once been platinum blonde.

“I’m sorry,” George said; “I usually smoke a pipe, but I feel shy about doing it here …”

“Yes, everyone gave up when Roger Mann died of cancer. They’re a bit born-again about smoking now.” She shook the contents of her bag: chaos rearranged itself and tossed g packet of Marlboro to the surface.

“Oh, Diana!” It was the Caine woman. “D’you still want that manure?”

“Please—” the woman said. “If you can spare it—”

“It’s ready and waiting. You’d better get on to the Tomses and have them pick it up in the van. So you two’ve met—”

“Not exactly,” George said. “I was just begging a cigarette.”

“Oh — Diana Pym … George Grey. George is just back from Africa. Diana’s a great gardener.”

George noticed that, indeed, the flat-heeled brown shoes of the Pym woman were flaked with dried mud. They did not go well with her black evening dress, which must have cost a lot of money about a quarter of a century ago.

Sue claimed a “When we were stationed in Malaya”, and Nicola came back with a “When I was in New York”. The score was going well enough for them to afford to disqualify “When Gilbert worked at Lazard’s”. Barbara Stevenson had said “When we were out in Kenya” for the second time, but this, too, wasn’t counted since Barbara Stevenson was a separate When-I game in her own right. The girls moved among the guests with trays of canapés, pretending they were working for MI5. Sue said that Patrick Cairns had been trying to peer down the front of her dress, but Nicola said no way; everyone knew that Cairns was only interested in little brown boys. “Unless, of course,” Nicola said, “he was just trying to see if you’d got a penis down there.”

George stood at the window and watched the spooling water. The tide had turned and it was travelling fast downstream in a sweep of simmering tar. The buoys that marked the edge of the channel were half-submerged by it, and the torn tree branches which had piled up against the buoys were waving as if they were drowning. The reflected party lay on the water in broken panes of light.

He was joined by Rupert Walpole.

“Well, how are you settling in?”

“Oh, quite nicely, thanks. Still feels a bit odd to be here, like being jetlagged with a hangover. One gets astonished by the most ordinary things.”

“It’s early days yet,” Rupert said. “I must say I rather envy you — having somewhere to retire to . I’ve only got a couple of years before I come up for the chop myself. What I dread is staying on with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs, with the works a quarter of a mile up the road. That’s going to be the hard bit.”

“Yes,” George said. “I thought of that too. That’s pretty much why I came home.”

“I suppose we just have to learn how to be old folks.” He turned back from the window to face his party. “You know what Truro people call St Cadix now? God’s waiting room.”

At 10.30, the Walpoles’ hall was pungent with the smell of wet coats. In the crush, Brigadier Eliot was being gallant under the mistletoe and Denis Wright was shouting, “Looks as if someone’s balkanized my hat.”