Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

The man — the boy — Tom — said, “You look just like Sheila. When you came in together like that, it knocked me out. Sheila never said.”

George, flushing, said, “Oh — Sheila’s supposed to take after her mother.”

“No,” Tom said, “it’s two peas. Anyone would see it.”

“Rubbish,” said Sheila. “Father, do take off your coat.”

Clumsy under Tom’s gaze, George shrugged his way out of his overcoat. Sheila took it from him. Moving abruptly, in her tweed skirt and brown mohair jumper, she looked all the more badgerlike and wary. George barely dared to stir for fear of startling her.

“What a lovely house,” he said. “It seems all height and space.”

“That’s Tom,” said Sheila. “It was a horrid little warren of partitioned boxes when I bought it. Tom knocked all the walls out.”

“If it was in Italy, they’d probably call it a palazzo.”

“Well, they certainly don’t call it that in Clapham Park,” Sheila said.

The table at the end of the room was laid for three. Two bottles of supermarket Dão stood on it, their corks already pulled to let them breathe. Numbly, George realized that his Leoville-Barton was hopelessly extravagant and pretentious. He couldn’t bring it out now. He’d have to keep it hidden, in the bag. Why was it that with Sheila he always seemed to end up doing the wrong thing?

Tom, George gathered, was doing the cooking. When he left for the kitchen, George felt marooned in the room with his daughter. Sheila sat at the end of a long sofa, her legs tucked up under her; George sat in a basketwork chair that creaked loudly every time he moved.

“Was Christmas hell?” Sheila asked.

The ten-foot space of air between them was brittle, crackly. George was disconcerted by his daughter’s eyes. They didn’t blink.

“No. No, not at all—” He’d watched television, then tried to read Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus . After that he’d got a little drunk on Chivas Regal and thought a lot about Vera.

“So your friends weren’t so bad after all?”

“Oh — we managed to muddle along quite well really.” Two weeks before Christmas, he’d told Sheila on the phone that he was doomed to spend it with some octogenarian friends of his mother’s who could not be disappointed so near to the date. Out of respect for his fiction, he added: “Considering the difference in our ages.”

“I tried ringing you on Christmas Day, and then I remembered.”

That was odd. He’d been in all the time. The phone hadn’t rung. He said to Sheila: “No. I stayed two nights there. Didn’t get back till Boxing Day.” He felt distinctly cheered at catching Sheila out in her lie while keeping his own intact.

“And is it all right in Cornwall? Have you met lots of people now?”

“Oh — lots,” George said. “Yes …” Under interrogation, he twisted his head and gazed at a wall which was blank except for two very small framed watercolours. His daughter’s following stare was so intent that he felt scorched by it. Feeling that he was now obliged to concede something to Sheila, he said, “Of course, it takes a while to get the hang of things.” It felt as if there was an obstruction the size of a golf ball in his larynx.

The trouble was that every time George looked up at Sheila he came face to face with S. V. Grey. Sitting on her sofa in her tall house on the hill, her long neck craned questioningly forward, she looked just like the photo on the back of her book. There was the same startled candour in her eyes, the same doubtful and ironic cast to her mouth. You would take her for someone who’d looked long and hard at the world and hadn’t been able to credit the nonsense that she’d seen there. That was S. V. Grey to a T, with her knuckle-cracking logic and her alarming reputation for being witty — a reputation so powerful that it had spread even among people who watched television in Cornwall.

Now George feared that the wit was being covertly exercised on him. But with Sheila it was so hard to tell when she was being wittyand when she wasn’t. George felt it was the safest course to assume that everything she said was witty until it was proved otherwise. So when Sheila said, “Do you feel at home yet, Father, or does it all still seem an awful wrench?” he looked at her cunningly and tried to read the small print of the question in her face. Finding none there, he blustered lamely about how he’d always kept a foot in both camps anyway, you know, and how one did try to keep up, even in Bom Porto, and on one’s leaves and so forth … He only managed to finish the sentence by lighting his pipe and hiding behind a lot of tricky business with his tamping thumb and his matches.

Sheila said, “But there must be things about England … things we’re blind to because we’ve lived here too long. You’re bringing a fresh eye to the place—”

A maroon flare went off inside George’s head. He thought he detected a pretty obvious sarcasm there.

“It has to be an interesting time for you, now, Father.”

He stared at her. She seemed to be in earnest. His first thought was of the hideous valley below Sheila’s window, and of how high-caste Indians were supposed to be blind to the way their own streets were used as lavatories; but he rejected it as a dangerous line to pursue. Then he thought of that programme on TV—“An Englishman’s Home”. He would have liked talk about that; its air of snobbish self-congratulation, and the way it seemed to him so parochial and so unfunny. But Sheila had been on television, and people who were on it didn’t watch it, he supposed. If he let on that he’d seen practically everything from breakfast time till closedown, and was rapidly learning the names of all the “personalities”, he would expose himself on a very vulnerable flank.

So he said, “Actually I’ve been so busy, I’ve hardly had time to look over my own shoulder so far,” and instantly was sorry for saying it; Sheila’s question deserved more, but the more was something that George simply couldn’t give. Wanting to make it up to her, he shifted in his creaking chair so that he could study the two little watercolours on the wall. They were pictures of people in streets, done in quick dabs and splashes of paint, as if the artist was racing to keep up with the life he was trying to record. George thought they were pretty good. Regretfully he abandoned hope of ditching the ancestors on Sheila: someone who liked these deft and lively paintings would detest those oppressive slabs of Victorian journeywork.

“Gwen John,” Sheila said.

He’d meant to praise the pictures, but the name silenced him. He wasn’t sure who Gwen John was. He thought he’d heard of her, but hadn’t a clue as to whether she was alive or dead.

“Ah,” George said, temporizing warily.

“Sister to the famous Augustus.” Sheila laughed.

George laughed too. He didn’t know why he was laughing, but Sheila’s tone of voice had been ironical — he was certain of that.

Feeling his ground as he went, he said: “In Cornwall I’m lumbered with your grandfather’s hideous taste for dead archdeacons and major generals. There’s an especially awful dead maiden aunt, too.”

“Oh, those —” Sheila said. “That’s odd, I thought you must have rather liked them.”

“Good God, no.” It was like finding oneself accused of interfering with small boys in public parks.

“Granny hated them too.”

“Are you sure?” It struck George as a novel idea: in his experience, his mother had meekly followed his father’s taste in everything from his high churchmanship to his loathing of garlic. They only bickered, late in life, about each other’s illnesses.