Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Inside the airport tunnel, George said: “I’m so glad to have met you, Tom … I’ve never seen Sheila looking better.”

Tom very nearly said something then, but remembered just in time.

At the terminal, George’s legs were all tangled up with his carrier bag and he had difficulty getting out. Tom reached into the back of the van, where he’d hidden the sextant under an oily blanket.

“You’ll be needing this,” Tom said.

The odd thing was, he didn’t seem too pleased to see it. He stared at it lying on the seat and started muttering about how no, he couldn’t possibly and that it was an awfully kind thought, but really … He looked old and sort of faffy , standing there making little, awkward pushing-away gestures with his hands, his carrier bag dangling from his wrist.

“Go on, take it,” Tom said. “It’ll be useful for you. On your voyage.”

He crumbled, eventually, though there was still something funny in his eyes as he went into his thanks-awfully bit. Tom did his best to deflect the downpour. After all, it had been Sheila’s idea, not his. He’d been meaning to sell the sextant to Con in Chelsea.

Tom watched as George was absorbed into the terminal. For a few seconds, he could still see George’s topcoat swirling round his knees, his ducklike walk, the carrier bag and the sextant. Then they were lost behind a crowd of kids with skis. It was a pity, really, that Sheila had never got around to telling him about the baby; it might have cheered the poor old bugger up.

At Geneva, George left the sextant in a locker at the airport, took a cab direct to Carouge, and was back in the city in time to lunch, late, on the rue Cherbouliez. The flight on which he was booked to return to London didn’t leave until 8.40 in the evening. At 3.30 he crossed to a hairdressing salon on the opposite side of the street, where he had a shampoo and cut, sandwiched between two tiresome Englishwomen. George spoke to the girl who was cutting his hair in a mutter of bad French: he didn’t want the women to spot him as a compatriot. They were on their way to Gstaad.

“I saw Roddy at Sarah’s on Saturday.”

“How is Roddy these days?”

“Oh, much as usual. Pretty beastly.”

Every few seconds, George’s gaze flipped down to Vera’s bag at his feet. It was strange how so much money could take up so little space. He’d expected to have to buy a suitcase to carry the stuff away in. In the event, it had turned into a brown paper parcel the size of a small book, with the decks of mint fifty-pound and hundred-dollar bills fitting as snugly together as the components of a lock. On the cab ride back to the rue Cherbouliez, George thought he could smell the money in the bag: a thin ammoniac odour, like the whiff of freshly ironed shirts. But perhaps that was just the smell of Switzerland. He had set aside just over a thousand Swiss francs to pay off the Furies, and he could still feel the bulge of them in his wallet under his armpit, like a glandular swelling. Lunch at Au Plat D’Argent had cost 140 francs, his haircut another 30. There were still an awful lot of francs to go.

The woman on his right was saying, “Bingo told him that the only way she was going to talk to him in future was through her solicitor.”

“Isn’t Bingo a dream?” said the woman on his left.

George tipped the girl who’d cut his hair ten francs. He thought, I’ll call Perdita in Vevey, and brightened as the digits of her number obediently presented themselves in his head. He had just time to cast a hopeful glance at the receptionist’s telephone before he came awake again — to the smash on the N37, the boy Fergus in the driver’s seat. Fergus, of course, had got out of it with a cracked rib and a black eye, but he’d killed his mother. If there was any reply on 61-39-28 it would be Fergus with drink in his voice, his lazy, whining hippy talk. An afternoon’s conversation with Fergus Monaghan would just about make George’s day.

He walked east along the river to the lake. The tips of his fingers were numb. Did the lake never freeze over? He’d hoped for snowy Alps, for skaters in long scarves on the ice, but the water was empty, the mountains had been erased by the grey weather, and the few people who were out on the street looked pinched and tired. He ducked out of the wind into a steamy bar-café, where he sat up at the counter and inspected his new haircut in the silver chromework of the espresso machine.

A young woman seated herself on the stool next to George’s. She placed a cigarette in her mouth and glanced across at him. He lit it for her. Looking down at his hand, she said, “English?” The question puzzled him for a second, then he saw that he was flying his flag a bit conspicuously: the box of matches in his hand said England’s Glory .

In French too quick for him to easily follow, the woman said that she knew many Englishmen. There were many in Geneva. For how long was he in the city? A few hours only? That was honteux! George studied her lips as she talked; her face, showing between her white fur hat and tightly-belted white raincoat, was pink with the cold and her nose was running a little. Between sentences she sniffed. She hated the winter, she said.

It was only when they had finished their coffees and she said, “Viens-tu chez moi?” that George realized she was in business and that he was her task in hand for the afternoon. He sneaked a quick glance at his distorted reflection in the machine: was it the haircut that had marked him out as such an obvious punter?

Well, why not? It was like being offered the drink you didn’t need at the end of an evening. There’d be a penalty to pay, for sure, but it wouldn’t be too stiff to bear. It would certainly help with the problem of the Swiss franc surplus. And anyway he was On The Continent now. This was so exactly what an Englishman was supposed to do On The Continent that to say yes was to do no more than bow politely to the force of custom.

Crossing the street, the woman snuggled professionally against George’s coat. She was embarrassingly short. With his crooked arm resting awkwardly on her shoulder, he stared loftily ahead, keeping his eyes in ignorance of whatever was going on down there in the foothills.

She lived, or at least worked, in a building as reassuringly staid as a bank. They took the elevator to the fifth floor, where she rang an illuminated doorbell that said MARQUIS. It was answered by a woman of George’s age who was dressed in a smart managerial suit and who immediately repositioned herself behind a hall table arranged like a desk, with an appointments book, a telephone and a vase of white chrysanthemums.

“Mon cadeau,” the girl said, wriggling against him like a gerbil.

“Cinq-cents francs, m’sieur,” said the woman in the suit.

That was more like it. He counted out the money from his wallet.

The girl said, “Anglais.” The woman looked at George for a moment and he saw a mixture of boredom and derision in her smile as she nodded and said that he must feel at home in this dull Geneva weather. To the girl, she said: “A sept heures — le Japonais. L’éstropié. OK?”

“Fouf — je lui fis le dernier temps. Où est Adèle?”

“A Lausanne. Jusqu’ à demain.”

“Oh, OK.”

She led George to a room which had been cursorily dressed to resemble a real bedroom. A floppy dog with black and white nylon fur and a pink felt tongue sat in a toddler’s basket chair. The low bed, with its covering of a single plastic sheet, looked alarmingly like a trampoline. There was a small fridge by the bedside, two transparent plexiglas chairs and, on the wall, a framed print of Van Gogh’s “Cornfield near Aries”, George noticed sadly. The window looked out on to an airshaft — someone’s washing and a tangle of black drainpipes.