Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“I thought service pensions were quite handsome, nowadays.”

“Wingco owes thousands to the bank. He got involved in stocks and shares, you see … and he put some money into a restaurant that went bust … and then there was this boat …”

It didn’t look to George as if it was the crowning symbol of any man’s megalomania. It was too dumpy and trawlerlike. Its varnish was coming out in blisters; the coach roof was marbled with gullshit. It had the air of an abandoned house — not a grand house, but a windy cottage whose tenants had quit in the night with the rent owing and bills piling up on the mat.

“He was awfully clever, I gather. In the Air Force. Early promotion and all that. But then I suppose when he came out the lack of discipline must have gone to his head. It happens, doesn’t it, with people in the services sometimes? The man’s been going to pieces ever since I’ve known him.”

“Poor blighter,” George said, warming to the Wing Commander because he approved of the Wing Commander’s boat.

“Yes,” Betty Thing said shortly. “Though, frankly, it’s poor Cynthia as far as I’m concerned.”

“Is his stroke recent?”

“Oh, early last summer sometime. But, you see, as strokes go it really wasn’t such a bad one. Robin Rhodes said he ought to make a complete recovery from it. But we know our Wingco. He hasn’t made a blind bit of effort ever since.”

A sudden rush of wind pushed Calliope out from the quay. Her mooring ropes tightened in a spray of bright droplets. The boat shivered in the water and the fine seams between her planks caught the light. For a long teasing moment, George saw himself busy on her deck, casting off and sailing cleanly away into the blue.

“Well,” said Betty Thing with a disagreeable little smile, “I’m afraid that’s grammar schools for you. Isn’t it?”

Wing Commander and Mrs Dunnett lived at Persimmons on a hill overlooking the river to the north of the village. Alders would have been a better name for it, George thought, or Nettles. The garden gate was swollen and wouldn’t close behind him. Rain had washed away most of the steep gravel drive. The rusty frame of a dinghy trailer was sunk in the overgrowth of grass and chickweed. An old Mercedes standing aslew at the top of the drive might have been temporarily parked or permanently junked; it was hard to tell. The house itself was a straggling bungalow with Tudor beams chamfered into the brickwork. Its dark windows reflected the careless turmoil of the garden like over-exposed negatives of film.

It took a long time for Mrs Dunnett to come to the door. When she did open it, she stared, rather vaguely, over George’s shoulder as if she expected to see more of him coming up the drive.

“Oh …” she said. Then: “Oh, yes. You want to see Wingco. You’d better come in.”

The house had a married smell of cooked vegetables and unaired linen. It reminded George uncomfortably of the way that Thalassa used to smell when his father was alive. Mrs Dunnett stood in the hall of the bungalow as if it were she and not George who was a total stranger to it. She stared with bulging eyes at the front door until George closed it. Then she gazed round her as if she couldn’t quite remember in which wing of the palace she had last noticed her husband.

She was tall, with colourless skin and high cheekbones that stood out on her face like the arms of a crucifix. Her floral print dress was too vivid, too baggy and too short for her. One of Betty Whatsit’s castoffs?

“Just wait a minute, will you?” She moved all of six feet into the room nearest to her and said, “Your man’s here, Wingco,” then to George, “Yes, he’s through there …”

George followed her in to the room.

“Oh, hullo — good of you to come,” said the wing commander from his armchair. He was small, pink and swaddled like a baby. The left half of his face was stiff; the right half smiled, showing teeth too white and regular to be real.

“Cold, isn’t it, Mister … I don’t know your name,” Mrs Dunnett said.

“Grey.”

“Grey.” Then she said “grey” again, this time as if it was a description of his character rather than his name. “Do you take sugar with your tea?”

“No thanks, I don’t.”

“Oh, well that’s all right,” she said, and breezed from the room.

“Sorry,” Dunnett said. “I can’t get up. At least I can, but …” He nodded at the open door. “Do … ah … ah …” he waved his right hand limply at a chair. “Old Toms called me. Said you’d looked over the boat.”

“Yes,” George said. “She’s very pretty.”

“No speed in her, of course. Won’t tack. But she’s what I call a gentleman’s yacht. Not like all those Tupperware things …”

“Would you like to sell her?”

“Oh …” Dunnett was watching the door. “Well she’s not up for sale, you know,” he said in a voice designed to carry. “We’re still thinking of upping sticks in her next summer. Going down to the Med. Or the Caribbean. My wife has friends in Florida. If only this—” he jerked his left hand—“would ease up a bit, we could be off.” He said orf , but it sounded unnatural in his mouth, as if he’d been taking elocution lessons from his wife.

“I envy you,” George said, thinking how relieved he was to be himself and not the wing commander. The man must be his own age; he realized that he’d been thinking of him as if he was of the same generation as his father.

“Given a stretch of decent weather … with the trade winds and everything … if the medicos gave one a clean bill of health … assuming one could find a buyer for the house … and put all one’s stuff in storage …” Dunnett was adding unlikelihood to unlikelihood with the air of a child building a house of cards for the sheer pleasure of seeing it collapse. “Do you know Florida?”

“No, I’ve never been there.”

“Nor me. Dreadfully hot in the summer, I gather. Moonrockets and Disneyland and all that.” He made a chirruping sound of disbelief.

“And you’d sail all the way?” George said, plugging his advantage.

“Well … I suppose … if things panned out …”

Mrs Dunnett brought in tea on a tray. The silver pot looked ancestral, the china looked as if it might be Spode; but there was a bottle of milk in place of a jug, and the tray had smears of marmalade on it.

“I’m off to St Austell,” Mrs Dunnett said.

“Oh …” For a moment the wing commander showed the fright of a toddler abandoned in a crowd on a station. Then the stiff side of his face moved slightly. “Yes. Drive carefully, darling, won’t you—”

George, awkwardly on his feet, said: “Goodbye, Mrs Dunnett.”

She stared at him as if he’d said something original. “Goodbye.”

“You’d better be Mother,” Dunnett said to George as she left. Pouring the tea, George heard the Mercedes start outside. Its exhaust must have been broken: the engine was making a snarling noise like a tank. The car roared down the drive. He heard it pause, straining, at the gate, then roar down the hill towards St Cadix.

“Cynthia loves the sea,” Dunnett said, as if this somehow accounted for the sound of the car.

“Milk?” George said.

“Oh … would you? Thank you so much.”

Above his head, George noticed a shelf solid with the faded scarlet spines of a row of Debrett’s and Burke’s . The most recent volume was a Debrett’s for 1934. He supposed that Mrs Dunnett must be listed in it somewhere. She must have been Somebody’s daughter.