Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

At a zebra crossing, an elderly woman in a caliper hobbled slowly in front of the headlights. “Get a fuckin’ move on, shagbag!” the driver said, and made her jump with a blast of the horn. It was as if his anger supplied the motive power for the taxi: fuelled with expletives, it dodged, braked, slewed, cut in. With every gear change there was another burst of filth from the driver. “Wet fart!” he shouted. “Wanker!” “You tit!” “You fuckin’ toerag!”

George, quailing in the back of the cab, lit his pipe.

“Can’t you fuckin’ read?”

“What?”

“No smoking! I don’t give a shit if you want to kill yourself, mate; you go ahead. Get fuckin’ cancer. But don’t you poison my lungs with your fuckin’ smoke — okay?”

Unable to speak, reddening with rage, George pocketed his pipe. Suddenly he was as angry as everyone else in South Lambeth. He boiled in silence; hating the driver, hating the cab, hating the traffic, hating the tower blocks and the bad air and the slow, ugly endlessness of the city as it repeated itself for mile after mile without a landmark. As the darkness thickened, it seemed part of the geography of the place: south of the river, into the dark. He was sure that he was being driven in wide circles, and twice spotted the same pillar of squashed cars rising over a gaping wall of corrugated iron to prove it.

Crouched low in his seat, he tried to get a view of the sky: if only he could get a fix on a star, he could keep tabs on where he was being taken. But the only lights up there were the windows of the flats. As the taxi lurched on through the traffic, they revolved over his head like constellations.

In Africa, George had tried to keep up with the news from Britain. He read the International Herald Tribune as often as he could find a copy, and subscribed to the Weekly Guardian . It had been with disbelief that he’d read of how suspected IRA men, held in detention in Northern Ireland, had mounted what they called the Dirty Protest. These men had expressed their indignation against the government by turning themselves into giant babies. They didn’t wash. They threw their food on the floor and ate it in their hands. They practised incontinence and daubed the walls of their cells with their own excrement. Sitting, out of the sun, in the Rua Kwame Nkruma, George had followed this story as if he was reading up on the customs of some remote and terrifying tribe. In Britain? Surely not.

Yet this new London looked like a dirty protest. It was wrecked and smeared. The taxi driver, fouling the air with words, was part of it. He was only saying what all the slogans said. I hate it here. I’m innocent. It’s not my fault.

And where on earth did Sheila fit? George had meant only to take her to lunch at Wheeler’s, where he could have been comfortably in command. On the phone, though, it had been Sheila who took control. There was no question of lunch — she was working all day, anyway. But he must stay the night, at least. “Father, really- ” She loaded the word with meanings: it was at once a call to duty, an appeal to common reason, even an exasperated declaration of affection. George had laughed. Holding the receiver to his ear, doodling an embroidered rectangle round the phone number of Swissair in London, he was game. But he hadn’t bargained on this dreadful place. Sheila is at home here?

Labouring in third gear, the taxi climbed a ribbed hillside of low brick terraces. The traffic was thinner now: there were sooty plane trees at the side of the road and lighted grocery stores on the street corners. The tower blocks were sinking fast behind. Soon they were no bigger than obelisks in a neglected graveyard. George looked down over the brow of the escarpment and saw the city rendered suddenly harmless by distance and the dark — a dim, untidy scatter of lights across a valley floor. He thought he could make out the black threadline of the river and the amber glow of floodlights at Westminster, puzzlingly near at hand.

At this altitude, even the driver’s manner softened. “Inker-man Rise? That’s off Acre Lane somewhere, en’t it, mate?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Yeah …” He was working it out. “It’s after Sebastopol and Alma.”

Brick gave way to cheesy stucco, plane trees to chestnuts and beeches. The air began to smell like air again. The houses began to look like real London houses, frowning and beetle browed with their heavy cornices and balustrades.

George cuddled Vera’s old patchwork oilcloth shopping bag on his lap, trying to cushion the wine against the jolting of the taxi and keep it warm. It was a ’71 Leoville-Barton, and George had spent a long time in conference with the wine merchant on St James’s Street before he’d bought it. The bottle had cost him as much as a whole case of ordinary claret. He hoped that Sheila would recognize it as a serious treat. But then Sheila appeared on television now; she was bound to know things like that. George felt that the wine struck just the right note. It was expensive. It was thoughtful. It would be gone in an hour. The trouble with most gifts was that they hung around accusingly long after the moment they’d been designed to celebrate had passed. He’d gone to the shop to buy champagne, but had been seduced by the colour of the old clarets, their sombre dustiness, and had thought how well they seemed to fit, somehow, with the idea of him and Sheila.

The taxi stopped, its motor stuttering loudly in the quiet street. George overpaid the driver, who pocketed the money without thanks and drove off, leaving him alone in the dark with the trees making sea noises overhead. He couldn’t see the numbers on the houses, which were set a little back from the road, their front doors at the tops of fanlike flights of steps. Then he spotted Sheila’s — knowing it by instinct from the light in the tall curtainless window and the bare timber door from which the paint had been freshly stripped. Before climbing the steps, he patted his pocket to make sure his pipe was there, straightened his tie and squared his shoulders. Steady the Buffs, George thought, Steady the Buffs.

He kissed her quickly to cover his surprise. For the woman at the door, his daughter, was already old. Her hair, brushed straight back from her face, was thickly streaked with silver. She looked like a badger disturbed at the entrance to her sett. He felt her arms grip him tight for a moment then spring away. Her hair smelled of apples.

“God, you feel icy,” Sheila said. “Is that all you’ve brought? You are travelling light nowadays, Father.”

She was staring at Vera’s bag. Myopia made her eyes look naked. George mumbled about how one could go a long way on a spare shirt and a clean pair of socks.

“I always remember you with pyramids of matching pigskin cases. I could never imagine what you must have put in them. Old newspapers was what I rather suspected.”

To explain his bag would mean explaining Vera. Instead, George said: “Yes, I used to cart far too much stuff around with me in those days.”

She led him into an airy, pale, high-ceilinged room. Evidently there were builders in the house: it smelled pleasantly of pine shavings and turpentine, and a builder’s man with a spirit level was standing in front of a wall of books. George, keen to make himself agreeable, nodded at the man, who responded with a silent half-moon of a smile, produced from somewhere deep inside his beard.

“Father, this is Tom,” Sheila said. “Father’s living out of a carrier bag—”

Now the man gazed at the bag, with big slow eyes. After a long moment he said, “That’s … economical.” George realized that he wasn’t from the builders. Yet he was hardly more than a boy — an enormous boy, taller and wider than George, built to the proportions of someone designed to stand on a plinth in a civic square.