Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“George here is earless,” announced Polly Walpole. “Diana? Why don’t you drop him off? You know — Thalassa — the cottage on the bend.”

“Really — I can walk,” George said.

“It’s no trouble,” said Diana Pym. “You’re on my way.”

The long drawing room had emptied. Nicola and Sue were totting up the score.

“Thirty-two,” Sue said.

“No, thirty-one,” said Nicola. “You must have counted a Home as an Abroad.”

Diana Pym’s car was, like her shoes, old and muddy. The butts in the ashtray were packed and crusty as a nugget of iron pyrites. As George closed the passenger door and the interior light went out, he recognized a paperback book lying, dogeared and broken-spined, on the shelf under the dashboard. It was only when the car was dark and the book no more than an afterimage that he saw its cover: The Noblest Station by S. V. Grey. He glanced across at Diana Pym, who was having difficulty trying to make the engine fire on more than one uncertain cylinder. Did she know Sheila was his daughter? Did she think she had a famously insensitive patriarch for a passenger?

The car grizzled, whined and started. They rolled slowly across a grass bank and stopped short of where the Stevensons’ Daimler blocked the drive sideways on. Perry Stevenson was driving, but Barbara had the starring role. She stood in the blaze of the headlamps in a tan riding mac and shouted “Come on! Come on! Forward just a smidgeon, now!” She was waving her arms like a policeman. She turned to the audience of waiting cars in the dark garden. “Sorry everyone! We’re almost there!”

“What were you?” said Diana Pym.

“Sorry?”

“Everybody here was something. It’s like reincarnation. What were you?”

“Oh … I ran a sort of gas station cum grocer’s shop.”

“In Africa—”

“Yes,” George said. “In Africa.”

“What part?”

“Montedor. At the bottom of the bulge. One block down from Senegal.”

The Daimler showed a clean pair of red tail lights. Diana Pym followed it out into Fore Street, where it creamed along fatly ahead. The Stevensons made the street glow with their passing. They lit the fishermen’s cottages, repainted now in adobe white and crabshell pink. They lit the rustic timber shingles with the new house names. Topgallants. Spinnakers. Crow’s Nest. Malibu.

When George first visited his parents in St Cadix, Fore Street had been sober — a long and narrow tunnel of dripping slate and granite. Now it was the colour of romperwear, of second infancy. The fishermen had all gone — up to the council houses or out to the bald cemetery at St Austell; and few of the new cottagers were here on winter weekdays. Their windows were dark, their shingles rocked in the wind on the ends of their chains. A fairylit Christmas tree stood in the window of one darkened room; in another a television picture of a golf course disclosed that someone was at home.

Diana Pym drove as if there were landmines in the road, her head anxiously far forward, her hands gripping the wheel tight. Her little, angular wrists made George think of the clean skeletons of very small animals … stoats, voles, wrens. She was wincing at the dazzle of following lights in the rear view mirror. Without thinking, George reached up and twisted the mirror away from her face.

“Oh — thanks,” she said.

“How long have you been here?”

“Just coming up to five years now.” Her voice, gruff with cigarettes, had a touch of American (or was it Australian?) in it. “I suppose that puts me close to graduation.”

“Leaving, you mean?”

“No. Staying. They used to say it took twenty-five years to be accepted. Now they’ve had to cut it down to five. Pressure of circumstances. Everybody was dying long before they qualified.”

George found it difficult to put together the separate bits of Diana Pym: the miniature wrists and ragged gardener’s nails, her panicky driving and her confident, barking style of speech. She seemed to him frail and shaggy all at once.

“Thalassa, Polly said?”

“Yes,” said George.

“What a pretty name—”

“It was my father’s idea. He was very proud of his theological college Greek.”

It was one of his most irksome vanities. George could still hear him intoning complacently over the breakfast table, “ , oldboy-Gnothy see-out-on. Know thyself!” He called his parishioners ; and the defining essence of hoi polloi was that they were barred from knowing the meanings of words like Thalassa. When, in 1960, George’s mother had written to him on the brand new headed notepaper (“We think the name is rather original. Daddy says it certainly has the locals foxed!”) he’d shuddered, and addressed his reply to 48, Upper Marine Walk. It was only when his father died two years later that George grudgingly adopted Thalassa. It still struck him as a perfectly absurd name for a cottage.

“He was the vicar here once, was he?”

“No, they just came here to retire.”

The car laboured in third gear up the hill, past the yacht club and the gothic hotel. Thalassa was at the top, on its own promontory of pine-fringed rock, where it straddled the angle of the bend. George had left the lights on, and the house goggled back at him from its perch. George found it impossible to think of it as his own. Its front of whitewashed lumpy stone always put him in mind of his father’s face; tonight it wore an expression of solemn petulance, as if it had spent a long and lonely evening storing up complaints against his return.

“Can I offer you a drink?” George said. The engine was still running. Diana Pym switched it off.

“Please. The Walpoles’ punch is one of the penalties one has to pay for Christmas here.” He was surprised to find an ally in Diana Pym. She hadn’t struck him as the ally type.

Outside the car, he could hear the sea burbling and sucking at the rocks a hundred feet below. Beyond the single tall chimneypot on the cottage roof, the Atlantic clouds were racing in the sky, but the headland shielded this side of the estuary from the west wind and the air was quiet.

“What a marvellous position,” Diana Pym said.

“Yes. At least, in the mornings. Night seems to start around lunchtime when the sun goes over the top of the hill.”

“You have a garden, too?”

“In theory.” He had not worked out where the garden ended and the common land of gorse, dead bracken and knobby granite outcrops began. At the back of the cottage he’d found some cabbages that had run wild and looked as if they were trying to turn into trees, three broken cloches and a variety of bamboo canes with loops of green twine hanging from them. They must have supported something once.

They walked through a soft and smelly mulch of rotten pine needles. At the door, George ferreted for his keys while Diana Pym looked at the brass dolphin doorknocker.

“That was another of my father’s ideas,” George said.

“It’s rather handsome.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid; I’m still just camping out here. I’m waiting for my stuff to come by ship and the place has been pretty well derelict since my mother died.”

George wished, suddenly, that he had not invited her in. He didn’t want anyone else to see Thalassa. The house shamed him. His parents’ houses always had shamed him; he couldn’t walk through their doors without feeling surly and half-grown, dropping ten, then twenty, now more than forty years, as he faced up to their familiar, doggish clutter.