Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

He watched a game of football in which England lost 3–0 to Luxembourg. An hour later, on the news, he saw the aftermath of the game: children fighting with policemen in the streets around the football stadium. The policemen advanced like ancient Greeks, behind an interlocking wall of silver riot shields; the angry children stoned them with bricks and bottles. Forty children had been arrested, eight policemen seriously injured.

He watched advertisements for kitchen units, sheep pellets, chocolate bars, home computers. He half expected to come across his own daughter’s face as he drifted from station to station. There was a programme in which people were talking about books, but Sheila wasn’t on it.

He sat through the full term (a record, for him) of a comedy show called “An Englishman’s Home”. The characters in it were supposed to be lords and ladies living on their uppers in a mouldy castle. The helicopter shot at the beginning of the programme, with its view of sculpted woods, trim parkland and old, rust coloured brick, suggested Kent. The castle was ruled by a woman called Lady Barbara, who strode round the place in a tweed skirt and padded kapok jacket of camouflage green. Every time she came on, the studio audience clapped. She could barely speak without raising a storm of appreciative laughter. At the climax of the show she blew a derelict barn to bits with dynamite. When the dust and smoke cleared, a wayward baronet was found squatting in the rubble.

“Ah, Peregrine,” said the actress playing Lady Barbara. “There you are. Sitting around on your b.t.m. as usual. Why don’t you do something useful for a change? Oh, Perry, do get on your bike!”

The audience roared. The actress turned on them with her bossy, horsey, Lady Barbara look, and they choked their laughter for just long enough to allow her to deliver her next line.

“And Peregrine!” The baronet was dusting himself down. His clothes were charred, his tie in shreds. “How many times have I told you to stop smoking?”

The audience loved this one. George was mystified. He supposed that the programme must be some sort of allegory. Or satire, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was definitely rum. For a moment he rather wished that he hadn’t thrown away that form of Jellaby’s: if one was going to get the hang of television now, perhaps one had to be a member of the Video Club.

Furry puppets jigged on the screen. George stared at them and searched his head for phrases to send to Vera.

Her letter had come by the second post. It was breathless and crowded, full of abrupt bursts of news penned out in Vera’s lovely, loopy scrawl. She missed him. Waking in the mornings, she felt lonely, sometimes. She thought of him as a tree. (Was that arvore , or some other word? George meant to look at it again.) On Tuesday, twenty millimetres of rain had fallen. She’d met the President of Guinea-Bissau. She hoped to go to the WHO conference in Washington in January. She’d found a scorpion on the balcony; the Wolof janitor from downstairs had murdered it for her with relish. The Egyptian from the World Bank had given the final OK to the building of the new road to Guia. Then she wrote: “All that I speak must sound a little bizarre, for Montedor now is very far away to you, I think.”

That wasn’t true. (A man with a woman’s lacquered hairdo was reading the news.) Africa was so close that George could graze it with his cheek. Africa was where he was whenever he forgot himself: it was the place where he slept, brushed his teeth and where he hummed “Tiger Rag” as he waited for the kettle to come to the boil. It was home. Several times in the last few days he’d noticed a lightning flicker on the extreme periphery of his vision — a house skink, tacking nervously up the wall. He’d turned his head to watch the lizard, and remembered. No skinks in St Cadix.

It was England, not Africa, that was so far away. The country was all round him, dark and mossy, littered with his parents’ ancestral junk. Yet it was like a thin charcoal smear of land on the horizon of an enormous lake. He kept on losing sight of it, and none of it seemed any nearer than the rest.

If only Vera’s apartment was as close as it felt … He longed to talk to her over a bottle of Chivas Regal parked on top of the manual of abdominal surgery, with the guttering electricity supply making candlelight around them. But what could one put in a letter? Not much.

Vera, love ,

I miss you too and often forget that you aren’t here, or I’m not there. That hurts more than I had expected, but otherwise I am finding my feet and beginning to settle in-

Writing carefully, George filled two sides of lightweight onionskin. The television pictures cast an even, cold blue light on the page. When he next looked up, Lady Barbara was on. She was in jodhpurs tonight, and she was shaking a riding crop at one of the hapless noblemen in her domain.

The marine aquarium was padlocked for the winter; the three gift shops were sealed off behind rusty metal grilles. At the Lively Lobster restaurant, last season’s menu had curled in its glass frame and the handwriting on it was gone to an illegible sepia. Fore Street was frigid and unsociable. George felt marooned.

The sun was up, but it was too weak to equip him with a shadow. His footsteps, trapped between the tall, wet granite walls, sounded like axe blows.

He spotted Jellaby, out in his van making house calls. Maybe that’s what everyone was up to behind their closed doors … fighting computer wargames and watching old movies on video machines. Hardly anyone was about. The few women who had braved the street had the furtive look of trespassers with their coat lapels pulled up high round their faces as they hid from the wind.

It was the herring gulls who went about as if they owned the village: they loafed in noisy rows on gable ends, scuffled between the chimney pots and stood four square, cackling and spitting, in the middle of the road. As George passed they watched him with bloody button eyes. They knew a newcomer when they saw one: and the gulls had prehistory on their side.

George posted his letter to Vera. Listening to it slither and fall in the empty pillarbox, he wanted to recall it. The words he’d written weren’t strong enough to survive the journey. By the time they reached Vera, they’d mean something else.

The wind stung. His coat was too thin for the weather. Swinging his arms, throwing the hem of his long coat up with his knees, he began to march through the village like a stormtrooper, scattering the gulls ahead of him. Then he remembered that sea air was supposed to be a sexual stimulant. Too bad. He’d walk just the same.

He reached the quay and marched out along the breakwater, past the moored boats to the striped pepperpot lighthouse at the end, where he tried and failed to get his pipe alight. The wind was shredding the tops of the little pointed waves on the estuary. At the harbour entrance, half a mile away, big breakers were rolling in from the open Atlantic: as they hit the rocks they exploded into plumes of white powder. On the far bank the leafless trees looked rimed with hoar frost: dust from the china clay works upriver had brought a snowbound winteriness to the landscape, smearing the trees, the grass, the roads, the dark slate roofs, and blowing in twisty clouds down the long funnel of the valley. Rupert Walpole had said he was fighting “a rearguard action” against “the conservationists”; but George thought Walpole was, if anything, improving on nature. The white dust, mixed with the white spume, gave Cornwall the arresting oddity of a moonscape.