Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

There was no laughing off this first attack. He was anxious to find out just how bad it had been. Was there a chance that it had been merely a warning, like a passing giddy spell? Or was it more like a case of severe internal bleeding, a sign that something irreversible had happened?

“How perfectly ghastly of me,” he said. “I blame it all on that sextant of Tom’s. I picked it up and — was away.”

Sheila laughed; a long, swooping, skating laugh which steered cautiously clear of George’s invitation.

“I’ll put some more coffee on,” she said. As she passed Tom on her way out she paused and let her hand dawdle for a moment in the tangled black bush of his hair. The gesture looked quite unconscious and much more intimate, somehow, than any kiss could be.

George, watching his daughter, hastily dropped his gaze to the rug on the floor. He felt forlorn at what he’d seen — suddenly widowed by a touch. Then he found himself listening to his own voice in his head. It was pretending to be Commander Prynne; and when George, in panic, tried to switch it off, it only increased in volume. It was rabbitting on about how to calculate the Wodjimoo of Betelgeuse. He was trapped. The voice, seizing on him as its only audience, was confident, amused, and deadly boring. All the stories that it knew were about people who were dead and times that had long ago ceased to matter.

Tom was driving. George was in the passenger seat of the minivan, his narrow knees jammed high against the dashboard, his arms folded on his chest. He was wearing his dark grey topcoat with a rim of black velvet round the collar. Seeing him come down the steps, with that coat flapping in the wind, Tom had been reminded of the moulting Andean Condor in the zoo at Regent’s Park; but when he got in the van he just looked like an elderly teddy boy with his velvet collar and his scraggy grey sideburns.

He seemed to have put on ten years overnight. When he’d first come in through the door with Sheila, he’d looked quite young, considering. When you saw him in the morning, though, you noticed the dark skin under his eyes like burnt paper and the way his tan didn’t look healthy at all, but jaundiced and short of blood. His hair needed cutting. If you had that kind of hair — trained to go back in ripples over the ears and pasted flat across the skull — you probably needed to go to the barber every couple of weeks. Sheila’s dad didn’t look as if he’d been in months. His hair had a glued-together look from the bottle of oily stuff that Tom had observed up in the bathroom. Poor old George. It was weird, him looking so like Sheila. Same eyes, and just the same funny trick of the mouth so that you were never quite sure when he was smiling and when he was being sarcastic.

“Snow,” Tom said. They were driving along the edge of Clapham Common. There wasn’t much snow. It was melting on the roofs of houses and lay in patches on the grass of the Common like dirty rags. It never settled for long in London. That was because every big city created its own climate: it had its own winds, its own temperature range, its own humidity — everything. Compared with Essex, London was in the tropics. Banana country.

“Where are we?” George said.

“Wandsworth. It’s always a bit tight here, this time in the morning.”

On the far side of the road, he saw Winston in his black Thunderbird, waiting to filter right to Wandsworth Bridge. Tom hooted — a long, a short and a long. Winston turned in his seat, waved, and came back with an electric orchestra playing the first line of “Colonel Bogie”.

“Friend of mine,” Tom said.

“Do you know the Morse code?” George said.

“No. Why?”

“You just did ‘K’ on your horn. It means ‘I want to communicate with you’.”

“Well, I did, didn’t I?”

They climbed West Hill.

Tom had never seen Sheila so tensed-up as she had been last night. When she came to bed, she was rigid and shivery; all gooseflesh, like someone who’s been pulled out of the water after nearly drowning. He’d held her, willing her to sleep, but it was he who slept first. The last thing he remembered was Sheila’s half-audible muttering about how she’d bitched it, and how it was like playing the same crackly record for the hundredth time.

It hadn’t been that bad. A bit dire, maybe; but not very. For an old guy, Sheila’s dad was OK. The trouble was that there didn’t seem to be any proper level to him. First he’d been as uptight as a scared cat, then, after he’d had a bit, he’d gone all round the park. It wasn’t surprising that he was such a funny colour in the morning: he’d been pickling himself. Tom and Sheila had only had a glass each, and they’d started with two bottles. And that wasn’t the end of it, either. Sheila’s dad drank on the sly. Tom had looked in his bag; there was another bottle there. Emergency supplies.

“This part of London’s all new to me,” George said.

“Putney,” Tom said. He pointed left, up Putney Hill. “Algernon Charles Swinburne lived up there. With another guy.” He thought for a moment until the blue plaque came into focus in his head. “Theodore Watts-Dunton,” he said.

George stared. The lights changed. On the Upper Richmond Road, it was bumper to bumper, with the westbound trucks packed solid like blocks of stone.

“Will you go back to Africa again?”

George unfolded his long arms and clasped his knees. If you just glimpsed him in silhouette, it was pure Sheila.

“Well … yes,” George said, “I rather think I may.”

The traffic shuffled forwards for fifty yards and locked again.

“When?”

“Oh … quite soon, I suppose. In the autumn, perhaps.” He was gazing out at the houses as if he wasn’t used to seeing houses at all. Perhaps he was looking for mud huts. In Roehampton. “You see, I’m not exactly retired, yet.”

Poor old bugger. That was just what Tom’s grandad used to say. He was still saying it a week before they cremated him in Gunnersbury. And he was eighty-four.

“There’s another job out there that I could do. They asked me before I left. Adviser on Foreign Trade. It’s not much of a job, really; a lot less grand than it sounds. I’d just be a glorified gopher.”

“Gopher?”

“You know. Go-for this … go-for that …” He did a snickety little laugh, like a cough, and stared out of the window all the way to Hammersmith Bridge, where he looked at the moored boats on the river and said, “Sorry about last night — all that nautical stuff.”

“No, it was interesting,” Tom said. “Really. That’s something I’d like to do — sail round England. You could get a lot of thinking done, I reckon … at sea.” He was wondering what he’d say if Sheila’s dad asked him to go with him. He wouldn’t mind giving it a try, for a few days anyway. He’d like to learn Navigation. But all George said was “Yes,” and smiled one of his twisty, Sheila-like smiles; then, “Awfully good of you, to drive me all this way,”

On the M4, Tom tucked the van into the slipstream of an airport coach and tried to bring the subject up again.

“What’s its construction — this boat of yours?”

“Oak frame. Larch planks. Teak deck, teak sole. The saloon’s fitted out in mahogany.”

“Nice.” On the open fields of Middlesex, the snow lay more thickly, in broad scoops and dripping ridges. Tom said, “How many people can you have on her?”

“Oh, it’s meant to sleep six. That means there’s just about enough room for one person to swing the proverbial cat in.”

So that was that, then.