Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

He had the unfair advantage of someone who stays in hotels. On his English leaves, when not in Cornwall he put up at a gilt and chocolate affair which was hidden around the back of St James’s Street. This offended Sheila. Fathers, in her experience, didn’t stay at hotels — at least they did so only in the country, and only then in overgrown pubs with names like The Railway or The Crown and Anchor. All fathers needed was a place to sleep: a “spare room” was royal luxury, and they were happy to bunk down on sofas among empty glasses under a canopy of smoke. Not her father. Shielded by switchboard girls, by “He’s not in his room” and “Can I take a message?”, he was as invulnerable in London as he was in Africa.

She’d never seen him in the early morning, never seen him drunk, never caught him taking dentures out of a tumbler or buttoning a shirt over a vest: she barely knew him. They met at times of the day when love was out of the question: appointments were for 12.45 or 6.30, as if they had a contract to argue over. When her father appeared, he came on the dot, looking as crisp as if the hotel kept him in a hatbox. There was nothing to say about his grey tweed suit — it was a grey tweed suit, and that was that. He smelled of the sort of soap that boring people gave each other for Christmas.

His kisses lent no weight to his presence. There wasn’t any sense of particular proximity about them. He kissed her on meeting exactly as she supposed he greeted the planters’ wives in Bom Porto — if they had planters in Bom Porto, which was something else she wasn’t clear about.

Heaven knows, she’d tried to find out what she could. His job, for instance. Her father was in the bunkering business. The word sounded grubby. It didn’t fit in at all with the smell of soap and that immaculate hotel. “My father is a bunker in Bom Porto …” It was the first line of an awful rhyme.

“But what do you actually do?”

She was seventeen. It was lunchtime on a summer Saturday in the dawning age of the Beatles. George — he was still “Daddy” then — snapped an Italian breadstick in half on the opposite side of the restaurant table.

“Oh … fuelling, provisioning. The general idea is to keep ships fed and watered and stoked up. Dull stuff, really.” He had a dry, open air voice. Sheila thought of it as “Navy”, though George’s Navy days had ended in 1946.

“What about History?” he said, patting his mouth with his napkin. “What period are you doing for A-level now?”

“Tudors and Stuarts,” she said, feeling crushed. She heard George saying something about the Rump Parliament and shut her ears to it: was he really so bored with his own life, or was he just shy of boring her?

After lunch, George said he had to “pick up a few shirts”. They walked to Jermyn Street. Sheila’s head ached and swam from the wine. The shirt shop smelled of George: it had a disinfected, herbal odour, and the man behind the counter was more like a parson than a shop assistant. He greeted George by name and George, more surprisingly, knew his name too. A gangling deacon brought coffee. Shirts were summoned and yet another apologetic minister, a curate perhaps, brought them up from the crypt. They were unwrapped from veils of tissue paper and laid out along the counter. Considering the fuss that was being made over these shirts, Sheila thought they were a serious disappointment. The six shirts were identical — made of limp cotton in a faded, denimy sort of blue. They had been specially made for George, and they came to fifty-four guineas. Sheila watched as he made out the cheque. She had never seen anything so extravagant in her entire life.

“Now for your turn,” George said as they left the shop. He steered her through the crowd, his hand at her bent elbow. Looking at the faces through her afternoon hangover, she saw a race of people; everyone seemed to be obscurely related to her father; no-one was related to her at all.

What Sheila wanted then was some thirty-shilling piece of nonsense from Carnaby Street. It would have been so easy for George to rescue the day for her, if he’d bothered to think about what it might mean to be seventeen and a bit. Instead they rode by taxi in the wrong direction, to another of George’s shops that weren’t proper shops, staffed this time by women who talked as if they were at a garden party. There was more coffee, served on a silver tray with a family crest, and more pleasantries of the “Haven’t seen you for simply ages , Mr Grey!” kind. And I should think not , thought Sheila, who was feeling sweaty and was trying to hide the spot on the left side of her chin.

The dress was bought; a swirl of green silk with a hemline so low that it reached right down into the 1950s. The bunker (or was it bunkerer?) made out another gruesome cheque. At Liverpool Street Station, Sheila was violently sick in the Ladies. George waited for her on Platform 11, and said “ … next year, then …” and touched her cheek with three cold fingers. All Sheila hoped was that he wouldn’t smell the sick on her.

She’d worn the dress just once. When she came downstairs in it, her mother said, “Oh, that is bliss. Yes.” but had looked at the green silk exactly as one might recognize an acquaintance from the past whom one had never much liked. That night Sheila put it away in her wardrobe, where it dripped from its hanger like an alpine waterfall. When she happened on it subsequently, it just looked indecent, like money.

In her twenties, Sheila thought she had got George sorted out. It should have been obvious all along. His boarding school and then the Navy had crippled him emotionally. He couldn’t express his feelings, even to himself. At forty-eight, he was stuck with the emotional apparatus of someone of what? Eleven? Twelve? Thirteen? His only fluency (and Sheila savoured the double meanings of the word) lay in paying, as his hand raced across the velvety surface of that depthless chequebook. Paying was at once an act of atonement and a bid for superiority. And, on the question of fluency, wasn’t it significant that George always used a fountain pen (black ink) and never a biro?

To anyone who questioned her about her father, Sheila said, “He’s a sad figure, really. Hopelessly bottled.” As nutshells went, it would do.

Then George stole even her nutshell from her.

It was one of their 6.30 meetings. Sheila was temping in Holborn. The walk across the West End to St James’s Street brought her to the hotel half an hour early. She asked for her father at the desk.

“He’s not in his room. His keys aren’t here either. You could try the bar.”

The bar had been got up to look like the morning room of a men’s club, with books in glass cases, green leather armchairs and newspapers and magazines spread out along a central table. She couldn’t see George. The only visible occupant of the room was a woman with large bones clad in something Laura Ashleyish.

Then she heard her father’s voice. Or rather, it both was and wasn’t his.

“—yes, yes. But there’s nothing intentional about the way Fergus hurts you; he does it out of fright. And guilt, too — don’t you see?”

He had never spoken like that in her hearing before. The woman looked up at Sheila. George, in tune, looked with her.

“Sheila! Hello!”

What took place next happened rather too fast to follow. George was on his feet. The woman was no longer looking at Sheila. George said “Tomorrow, then?”; the woman said “If you can manage it. Thank you so much, George”; and somehow Sheila and her father were back at the hotel desk and her father was handing his keys to a uniformed porter.

“No introductions, then,” Sheila said.

“No. Sorry about that. I didn’t think she was quite up to it.”