Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Yes. When she was alone in the house, after your father died, she used to cover them up. She told me.”

“Why on earth didn’t she chuck the things out, then?”

“But she wanted to leave them to you.”

“Really?”

“‘They’ll be so important to George when he comes home.’”

The words hit on a tender spot. He felt not pain but a nasty stab of what a dentist would have called “discomfort”. How badly he’d known his mother; how badly she’d known him.

“Now you’re going to find it really difficult to give them to Oxfam,” Sheila said.

“Yes — damn right I will.”

Troubled, he gazed at his daughter’s room; its coloured rugs spread on bare wooden boards, its books, its almost empty walls. Sheila’s house had the air of a place where there was nothing that wasn’t wanted and intended. It was the exact opposite of Thalassa.

“So what will you do with them, do you think?”

George looked enviously at the acreage of white plaster around the two small watercolours.

“Oh … leave them to you, I expect.”

For the first time, Sheila smiled; a frank and easy smile without a trace of wit in its corners. In an instant that lasted no longer than the blink of a camera shutter, George thought: it’s true — we’re related .

From the kitchen, Tom called that he was almost ready.

“He seems awfully nice — Tom,” George said.

Immediately, the wit was back in Sheila’s smile. “Yes?” she said. It seemed to George an oddly dangerous affirmative.

“Is he … a writer too?” Deep water. He couldn’t touch bottom with his feet.

“Tom? No—” Sheila laughed loudly enough for George to fear that Tom himself would hear his name being talked of.

“What does he do?”

“Things.” The word was definite, and final.

“Things …” George said, feeling stupid.

“He makes things. He trades in things. He doesn’t go in for abstractions.”

“Soufflé—” Tom said, standing in the kitchen door. He was holding it in a pair of thick floral oven gloves. The soufflé had risen from its brown earthenware dish like a thatched cottage with eaves and gables. George, on his way to the table, passed the two watercolours on the wall. “Gwen John,” he said, and nodded twice, checking his bearings.

When Sheila stood up to clear away the soufflé dishes, Tom said, “What kind of wood grows where you come from, in Africa?”

George had been watching Tom as he ate. He studied the way Tom’s loaded fork negotiated a clear passage through the straits of his beard. He studied the way Tom’s eyes lifted, every minute or so, to Sheila’s face. He studied Tom’s enormous left hand as it rested on the tabletop. The fingers were spread like roots, but their nails had been pared back to expose four slender crescents of innocent and unprotected-looking skin.

Tom was a very rare bird indeed. Never before had George met anyone whom Sheila loved. Watching Tom, he searched for Sheila — and lost her again in every movement that Tom made. The more he watched, the stranger his daughter grew to him. He couldn’t figure it out at all.

“Iroko?” Tom said. “Mahogany?”

“No, we don’t have enough rainfall. There’s a lot of mahogany in Senegal, but I don’t think there’s any in Montedor. I don’t know about iroko, but I rather doubt it.”

“There’s the baobab, of course,” Tom said.

“Yes. And a lot of acacia. Then there’s the wa-wa tree.”

“Wa-wa?”

“Wa-wa,” George said in his Wolof voice. “Wa-wa. West Africa Wins. It’s a very light, soft, white wood. Like balsa, but more stringy and fibrous. People make dug out canoes from it, things like that.”

“I’d like to see that,” Tom said. “Wa-wa.”

Something crashed in the kitchen.

“You do … wood carving?” George said, looking at Tom’s hands.

“No. Just shelves and doors and stuff. I did try to carve an angel once. It didn’t work out. I had the wrong wood. Mahogany. You needed lime for that; mahogany was far too hard. It made my hands bleed. I never got beyond the face.”

Sheila came in carrying a casserole. She served out portions of some sort of stew.

George said, “You said you were working, Sheila. What’s on the stocks? New book?” He saw Tom gazing at him, then at Sheila, like a spectator following a ball in a tennis match.

“Yes,” Sheila said. “A book. It goes in stops and starts. Mostly stops, lately.”

“Can one … ask what it’s about?”

“Oh — depression, melancholia, slipped discs and the vapours.” Her colour was high, her stare challenging. She blinked furiously as if she was trying to get grit out of her eyes. Tom was looking at her now as if she’d just solved a puzzle for him.

“A … medical book?”

“No.” She cut an irritable slice out of the air with her knife. “A sort of social book. It’s about … women … and how they’ve used nervous diseases as weapons and symbols and devices …”

“Does it have a title?”

“Woman’s Complaint” Sheila said, and laughed her dangerous, witty laugh.

“It sounds fascinating,” George said, anxiety making the words creak in his mouth.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Father. Of course it doesn’t.”

“No — honestly … But I would have thought … as a leading feminist …”

“I’m not a feminist!” Sheila almost sang the words, in a shattering soprano. “Feminists these days are very serious ladies. I’m not in that class. I’m a hack.”

George, on the run now, took the remark and hastily subjected it to all the tests he could think of for irony and wittiness. The results were inconclusive.

“Oh, I mean it,” Sheila said.

He was lost. Way south of the river. Poking at the meat on his plate, he said, “This is delicious,” and looked hopefully around him, a contrived smile fixed to his face.

Tom said, “It’s a carbonade. It’s easy. You cook it in Guinness.”

They were back in the withdrawing part of the room. Sheila poured coffee. George swigged off the last of the sour Dão in his glass. He’d accounted for one of the two bottles; Sheila and Tom had divided the other equally between them. He mourned the Leoville-Barton in Vera’s bag like a lost friend. He wondered if Sheila kept brandy in the house and decided that she didn’t.

Sheila said, “Why are you going to Geneva, Father?”

“Oh … there’s a bit of unfinished business that I have to sort out … I have to see some gnomes.”

“Tom’ll drive you to Heathrow.”

“Oh — no need for that. I can perfectly well get a taxi.”

“No problem,” Tom said. “I’ve got to see a bloke in Hounslow anyway.”

Why was it that in England George was always on someone’s way to somewhere else? It made his journeys seem unoriginal; it made the country itself seem no bigger than a village street.

“And when you come back from Switzerland,” Sheila said, “what will you do then?”

A little loosened by the wine, George said, “Well — I’m buying a boat.”

“A boat?” Sheila seemed to be holding the word up close to her eyes for inspection, as if it was in Portuguese.

“A sort of trawler-thing with sails and just enough space to live on at a pinch.”

“And where will you sail, in your boat?”

“Oh, here and there. I thought I’d like to drift round England for a while. There are so many places that I haven’t seen at all, or haven’t seen for forty years … Living in Cornwall’s made me feel footloose.”