Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Well, everybody feels that, don’t they?” She lit a new cigarette from the butt of her last one. In the gauzy smoke, Midnight went out of focus and came back as Pym. The jaggedly cut ends of her white hair were coloured with nicotine and there was something creased and tortoiselike about her face. Too much weather, too little blood. Suppose she had been, say, thirty in 1960 … That would still put her only in her early fifties … Her alarming age made George feel shaky on his own account.

“Anyway—” her head was turned away from him; she was looking again at the big, bad, dusty portrait of that distant female cousin with her quill pen and unfinished letter on her desk. “Your parents seem to have had the last word. You’ve come home.”

“Late, as usual.”

“Better late than never.” Trying to giggle, she began to cough — a deep crackling cough that sounded like a forest on fire.

“Can I get you some water?”

“No.” Her voice was a bass croak. “This part of Cornwall’s awful for bronchitis.”

“You smoke too much,” George said, talking not to Diana Pym but to the girl on the screen in the forlorn hotel room. Diana Pym stared back at him, her blue eyes moist with coughing.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve never gone in for doing things by halves.”

“Whatever brought you to St Cadix?”

“Oh, the sea, I guess. I lived in Venice for a while. Venice, California. We were a block away from the ocean. There was a motel and a Burger King between us and it. You could just see a crack of Pacific from the bathroom window — it was about the same size as the toothbrush handle. Then I moved to Brittany, but there was a big hump of cliff and some iron railings and an ice cream kiosk. You couldn’t actually see the sea at all, there. Now it comes right up to my back garden. At spring tides, the cottage feels like a boat on the water.”

“You had friends here?”

“No. I saw a picture of it in a magazine. It looked kind of dinky.” She sat hunched intently forward, listening to herself. “It gave me a job. The house was a ruin, the garden was just rocks and turf. In the first year I was out at nights digging, with a Tilley lamp hung in a hawthorn tree. It felt like something I’d been assigned—”

Her face was alight with the recollection of it, but George saw only the empty labour, the lonely woman with the garden fork, the darkness, the light in the tree. Surely Julie Midnight could have found something better for herself than that?

“Now it’s just there. I’m like the park attendant: I go around picking up leaves and frightening the birds.” She laughed. “I have a reputation to keep up, too. The kids go past my place on their way back from school. I heard them talking once: one kid was saying to another, ‘Watch out for the old looniewoman!’ I guess that’s one way of being accepted in the village: I’m the local witch around these parts. Any day now I expect people to come round to the door asking me to cure warts and goitres.”

“Do you have a familiar?”

“Uh-uh. Cats and gardens don’t go.”

One whisky later, at a quarter to midnight, Diana Pym left. As George opened the car door for her, she said, “Someone said you were S. V. Grey’s father?”

“ … yes,” George said, feeling accused of paternal negligence by the question.

“I’m reading her now. I’ve seen her on television, of course.”

“Have you?” George had no idea that Sheila had ever been on television. The information struck him as alarming: he hoped she hadn’t been on television very often.

“Yes. Rather good, I thought. She’s a witty lady.”

“Yes, isn’t she—” George said with a hearty emphasis he didn’t feel.

“You must be proud of her.”

“Oh … very.”

He watched the tail lights of Diana Pym’s mud spattered car weave through the dark strand of pines and round the granite buttress of the headland. As the sound of the engine was lost behind the rock, it was replaced by the slow, inquisitive suck and slap of the sea below the cottage and the rattle of dry branches overhead. He found his head suddenly full of words. The girl on the screen was singing:

Tonight we kiss, tonight we talk, tonight is full of laughter;

But I know that it won’t last, my dear—

This will all have passed, my dear—

Next week, next month, or maybe the month after.

The words tinkled stupidly. They fitted themselves to the noises of the sea, and the gravelly waves turned into a band playing from a long way off. George could hear drums and saxophones in it, and the steep descending scale of a solo clarinet.

He went back in to the unwelcoming light of the cottage. On the arm of his mother’s sofa, a cigarette was still burning in a saucer. There was something disconcertingly lively about its white worm of ash. George, nursing his drink, watched it smoulder until the worm reached the filter and collapsed into the saucer. It left a thin, sour smell behind, like the exhaust fumes of a vintage car.

George watched television. He sat over it, legs wide apart, jawbone cupped in his palm, as if he was warming himself before its coloured screen. The sound was turned down low. George aimed the channel changer at the set and stabbed the button with his thumb. He was searching for — he didn’t know what. News. Intelligence.

He wanted to find out … about St Cadix … about his daughter … about his parents … about Diana Pym and the Walpoles’ Christmas party. He wanted to find England . He riffled through the pictures, each one as bright and flat as the last. There was no depth to their colour: they looked as disconnected from real life as a series of holiday postcards.

Sitting in his father’s chair, George found himself using one of his father’s favourite words to describe what he saw. It was rum. Everything to do with the TV was rum.

Even its arrival had been rum. In this country (he gathered), where people were trained to stand in line and wait for things and be grateful when they eventually turned up weeks and months late, the TV had veen delivered almost before George had properly begun to think of it. His casual call to the shop in the village had been treated as if it was a medical emergency. The van (“T. Jellaby — Every TV & Video Want Promptly Supplied”) had come, like an ambulance, in minutes.

“Where do you want him io, then?” Clasping the enormous set to his chest, Mr Jellaby was puffed and bandy legged.

Thrown by the man’s grammar, George had stared and said, “Oh … anywhere over there will do—”, pointing at the portrait of the cousin.

Jellaby connected up the equipment. “He’ll do nice here,” he said, as if the TV was a dog or a foster child. “You want the video, too?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. No.”

“You get free membership of the Video Club …”

“The television’s fine — it’s all I want.”

“You’re all on your own here, are you?” Jellaby inspected the unswept room with the expert look of someone whose business is other people’s business, like a parson or a social worker. “In the Video Club we’ve got a very good selection of … adult films.” He didn’t quite wink, but his expression was unpleasantly complicit. “I’ll leave you a form anyway. So you can have a think about it.”

“Oh, please don’t bother—”

That affair had been rum enough; the stuff that George saw on the screen of the thing was rummer. Much of it was incomprehensible because the programmes kept on referring to other television programmes that George had never seen. It was like the Walpoles’ party — knowing none of the famous names, he felt ignorant and excluded. The jokes were unanswerable riddles. He watched, baffled, as a housewife on a quiz show identified six different TV series from a medley of their signature tunes. For this feat of general knowledge, she was rewarded with a twin-tub washing machine and tumble drier. Never before had George seen anyone literally jump for joy, but this woman was skipping up and down on the stage. She threw her arms round the neck of her inquisitor, wept real tears, and kissed him lavishly. George changed channels.