Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“What can I get you? Basically, I’ve just got vodka, Scotch or gin—”

“Scotch will be fine. With a little water, please.”

The bottles were still in the cardboard box in which they’d been delivered by the off-licence. George allowed Diana Pym a measure which he thought she should be able to finish in ten minutes at the outside. For himself he poured a tall anaesthetic slug, and topped Diana Pym’s glass up with water until it was on the same level as his own.

“Who is this? A relation?” She was standing in front of a portrait of a woman sitting at a writing desk. The paint of the woods in the background had oxidised badly. The heavy gilt frame was chipped. The picture was far too big for the room.

“Oh, some remote cousin on my father’s side. My father used to call it ‘the Gainsborough’. It’s not, of course. I doubt if it’s even eighteenth century.”

He felt trapped by the Pym-woman. Glass in hand, she was touring the room as if it was a museum. Trust him to let in the village quidnunc. She peered in turn at each of the eight portrait miniatures in one large frame.

“All Greys?”

“I imagine so. My father was always getting left things by his great aunts. Being the clergyman of the family, he was a sort of natural receptacle for ancestral junk. They never left him any money.”

She had moved on to a rough-cut pane of Cornish slate on which had been painted a galleon cruising ahead under full sail. It was attached to a pin on the wall by a leather thong. An old Easter palm was propped behind it.

“That’s not an heirloom,” George said. He took a long swallow of Scotch to curb his temper; the whisky burned his throat.

“It’s odd, isn’t it — inheriting things? They never seem to fit.” She was now making a short-sighted study of a Victorian sampler. It had once hung in his bedroom when he was a child, and George knew it by heart. Decorated with a random assortment of faded dogs, trees, flowers and boats, it made two attempts at an embroidery alphabet, then launched into verse: “A Damsel of Philistine race/ In Samson’s Heart soon found a Place/ But Ah when She became his Bride/ She prov’d a Thorn to Pierce his Side”. It was signed “Eliz. Catherine Grey — Aged 12 years — February 18th 1837”, like a tombstone.

“Sweet,” said Diana Pym. “Who was Eliz.?”

“I’ve no idea,” said George. He stared irritably at the straggling ends of white hair which were distributed around the back of the neck of the black dress. “Some ancestor or other.” He realized that he had completely forgotten her face — if he’d ever noticed it in the first place. When she did eventually turn round, it would hardly have surprised him if she had revealed herself to be wearing a monkey mask. In the event, her face was smudgy; its firmest feature was the web of fine lines round her eyes and mouth. No wonder he’d forgotten it. He saw that her glass was already empty. Was the woman an alcoholic?

“Do sit down,” George said, putting a testy emphasis on the do . He pointed helpfully at his mother’s black vinyl sofa. The plastic had been grained to look like leather; it succeeded only in having the appearance of ferns petrified in coal. The quidnunc seated herself among the fossils. The sofa sounded as if it was discreetly passing wind.

Diana Pym smiled and held out her glass for more. “Thanks,” she gruffed. As he padded across the slate floor to the kitchen she called: “Watch your head!” Then, a moment later, “Oh — there’s your coat of arms. What does the motto mean?”

George, unscrewing the cap from the whisky in the kitchen, grunted. He couldn’t remember the motto. He thought — I brought this on myself.

He returned to the sitting room, handed her the refilled glass, and sank his length in the one bearable chair in the house, his father’s woodwormy chintz buttonback. “So,” he said, smiling as blandly as he dared, “what were you?”

A nimbus of cigarette smoke hid her face. She dashed it away with her hand. Her Wedgwood blue eyes were suddenly wary and reproachful. She looked as if he’d threatened to slap her. Oh, damn these people for whom the liberties they take so gaily for themselves are treated as infringements and offences if found in anyone else’s hands! Damn the woman’s impertinent questions! Damn her nettled looks!

“I was Julie Midnight,” said Diana Pym, “I thought you knew.” She blew smoke like a gusty cherub in a corner of an old map.

The name was a puzzle of letters. Then they sorted themselves out. It was impossible — surely?

It wasn’t long ago. A few years, at most. He remembered Julie Midnight. Sitting alone, bored, in his hotel room in St James’s Street, he was watching television. He was half dressed for dinner. The black and white picture was swept by snow flurries of interference. Julie Midnight was singing.

That was not quite true. She didn’t sing so much as talk, in a sad, flat little voice, over a moody backing of guitar and orchestra. Something-something-laughter … something-something-the day after . It was the appearance of the girl under the television lights that had stuck in his head: her helmet of pale hair; her severe black polo-necked jersey; her face, as white and fine boned as the face of a Donatello saint in marble; the way her eyes appealed to the camera. She was irresistibly vulnerable. You wanted to reach out and save her from the brazen glare of the studio. For three or four minutes, watching the shaky image at the end of the bed, George loved Julie Midnight with a heartstopping purity that he’d never be able to summon for a real woman.

“I’m so sorry—” George said. He was incredulous. “Of course — I should have recognized you—”

“Oh, no-one does now, thank God,” Diana Pym said. “It’s just that the village knows, like villages do.”

“Do you — still sing?” he said, feeling stupid as the question escaped him, unbidden.

“No. I garden.”

“It was … just recently, though … surely?”

“No — my last concert was in ’63. They always used to make me up to look dead; I was really dead by the time the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came in.”

“I thought I saw you singing … just a year or two ago …”

“No way-”

Diana Pym and Julie Midnight … They sat together on his mother’s sofa like twin pictures in a stereoscope, and he could not make them coalesce into a single image. Blink, and he saw one; blink, and the other had taken her place. It was true — Diana Pym had the wrists and eyes of Julie Midnight, the same slender boniness, the same stunned look. In any line of refugees, shuffling away from the scene of a catastrophe, the camera would instinctively single out that face. You would only have to see it for a moment before making out a cheque to the disaster fund. Yet Julie Midnight was Diana Pym: the kind of disaster she suggested was nothing more heart-stirring than an attack of greenfly.

She — or they, rather, were saying: “I adore your slate floor. There’s one in my cottage, but it’s been covered over with a layer of concrete about a foot thick. One would need a pneumatic drill to get at it—”

George, affronted by the thought of Julie Midnight with a pneumatic drill, said: “Yes. My father dug it out when my parents first moved here. He broke his hip on it a week later. After that he pointedly referred to it as ‘your floor’ to my mother. It was rather a bone of contention.”

“You don’t seem to have liked your parents very much,” said Diana Pym.

George found this remark unsettling. Its presumption was pure Pym, but the intimacy of the eyes that went with it was Midnight. The eyes won.

“We just never knew each other terribly well,” he said. “I was in the Middle East, then Africa. They were in Hampshire, then here. We didn’t have a lot in common. I suppose we were all a bit baffled by each other when we met. I used to think we might have done better if we’d hired an interpreter.”