Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Have a nice day,” she said.

It was 2251 by the digital clock at Heathrow; and the airport was a cold outpost of the Third World. Pakistanis with long brooms were pushing single cigarette packets across the terminal floor, closely followed by West Indian women with electric polishing machines. A scanty tribe of robed Arabs had set up camp round one of the booths at Passport Control; behind them, a Ghanaian dressed like the Widow Twankey was standing reading the Financial Times . The roped-off gangway for Citizens of the United Kingdom was empty, and George passed straight through.

He followed the signs for the Green Channel. Nothing to Declare. He felt he had rather a lot to declare, but none of it was listed on the Customs and Excise posters. At least he could confidently acquit himself of any charge of carrying pets, fireworks, trees, reptile goods, uncooked poultry, flick knives or microbugs. On every other count, George was busy pleading guilty.

The thought must have shown on his face, or in his fugitive, stooping walk, since he was called over to the table by a customs man. Was this his only luggage? Where had he been? How long had he been out of the country?

“Would you open that for me, please, sir?”

George unlatched the case of the sextant and showed him. “It’s a sextant,” he said. “I took it out with me.”

“Just for the day, sir? They’ve got radar on the planes, you know.”

George laughed. “I got lost anyway.”

“May I see the bag, please?” The worn serge of the man’s uniform jacket picked up a greasy shine from the overhead striplighting. He seemed a decent sort. Anywhere else in the world, he would have been puffed to bursting point with his powers of stop and search. In England he was shruggingly apologetic; a tired employee of the state dealing with a fellow subject. He looked as if his wife had egged him on into taking a bigger mortgage than he could sensibly afford; and he looked at George as if he’d spotted a chap with exactly the same problem.

He was studying the label on the Leoville-Barton ’71.

“I bought that in London,” George said.

“I make my own, you know,” the customs man said. “A Cabernet. Costs me 20p a litre. You can’t tell the difference.”

He investigated socks, a dirty shirt, a rotting spongebag, today’s Times folded back on the half-done crossword, an old Penguin copy of Heart of Darkness . George had hidden the money deep in the bottom of the bag, among the fluff, spent matches, crumpled shopping lists and Montedorian coppers. It took the man a few moments to unearth it. When he did so, the expression on his face was sorrowful; he looked like a doctor who’d seen a dark shadow on a chest X-ray.

“May I ask what’s in here, sir?”

“Money.” There was a scrap of lined yellow paper on the table. George saw the pencilled words ôvos, pàdeiro, vinho, farmácia in Vera’s loopy, upward-sloping handwriting.

“Money, sir?” The man was fingering the ribbed edges of the notes through their covering of brown paper. “How much money?”

Jornal. Flores. Biblioteca .

“A bit under thirty-four thousand pounds. But a lot of it’s in dollars. That’s … quite legal, isn’t it? To bring it in, I mean?”

“Oh, yes. No problem there, sir.” But the man’s face had changed. Or, rather, George had changed. Until the money, he’d been a shipmate in the same boat; now he was just another one of them … like a Texan or an Arab.

The man stowed the parcel away in the depths of the bag. In the loud, slow voice of someone patiently explaining something obvious to a retarded foreigner, he said, “With money like that, sir, if I were you, I’d keep it in a bank.”

George took a cab to the Post House Hotel. He was dog tired. Sprawled on the back seat, he hugged Vera’s bag. There was a sign saying WELCOME TO BRITAIN, then the yellow lights of the underpass streamed by. He couldn’t work it out at all, but somehow he had got away scot free.

Easter, only six weeks off, was early that year, and people in St Cadix were starting to talk of The Season. The Stevensons had flown to Lanzarote, but Rhoda Bowles was back from the Seychelles and was busy stocktaking at Aquarius Gifts. William Pitchford abandoned the big canvas, “Homage to de Kooning”, on which he’d been working since November, and settled down to doing square-riggers on panes of Cornish slate. He usually managed a dozen before lunch. At the Polgollan Pottery, Mike and Tricia Hawksby spent most of their time fighting. Mike threw strings of lopsided mugs on which he gouged “St Cadix” with a screwdriver; Tricia drowned them in a viscous oatmeal glaze which stuck to the clay in gobbets and dribbles like dried fishglue. When she stacked them on the shelves of the kiln, she thought of them burning there, purified and broken by the flames. “Thank Heaven for small mercies,” said Laura Nash, “at least the Hawksbys don’t have children.”

At the Falcon’s Nest, Ronnie Swinglehurst finally got rid of the builders who’d been putting up rustic beams in the saloon bar, now The Pyrates Snug. At Trade Winds, Kitty Lane-Williams died of breast cancer without bothering to tell anyone, even Betty Castle. At Heatherlea, Robert Collins changed the Porsche for an Audi, which he bought in London on his annual trip to the Boat Show.

At Harmony Cottage, Diana Pym planted a young ginkgo tree. When the southerly gales came, in the wake of an anticyclone centred over Denmark, she stood in front of the sapling and tried to shield it from the wind with her arms. She rigged up an old door to protect it, but the door blew down, narrowly missing the little tree. Finally she drove the car across the bumpy turf, over the lip of a granite outcrop, and parked it beside the ginkgo. She tore the exhaust system out on a rock, but the tree was safe, and Diana Pym spent the rest of the morning indoors, tippling gently and watching the sea explode at the edge of the garden in rocketing bursts of spindrift taller than the house.

At Persimmons, Roy Dunnett sent away for holiday brochures advertised in the colour magazines of the Sunday papers. He sat wrapped in blankets, wheezing a little, surrounded by pictures of people walking in Nepal, pony-trekking in the Andes and hurtling down the Colorado River on rafts.

Angry children from St Austell stormed the village on motorbikes and balkanized the Yacht Club flagpole, the telephone box by the church, the gothic ladies’ lavatory and the noticeboard that said “What’s On In St Cadix.” They regrouped round the steps of the marine aquarium, where Olivia Jerrold swore that she had seen them smoking heroin cigarettes, and roared off up the Mevagissey road.

At Malibu, Connie Lisle counted out her remaining tablets of Tuinal. There were twelve. She laid them in pairs on the bedside table and put them back in the bottle. The Times Educational Supplement arrived by the second post in a wrapper addressed to Miss C. M. J. Lisle, M.A. She took it up to bed with her and read it from cover to cover.

At Thalassa, six tea chests arrived from Africa: a whole life, docketed, scribbled over with hieroglyphs in mauve crayon, and tied up fast with strong Manila cord. George wrenched their tops off with a claw hammer, and the room bloomed with a smell as stirring and sharp as that of a lover. The air tasted of volcanic dust, oily mangoes, hibiscus and carrion. His squashed cap lay on top of one of the chests and he shook it into shape. The stitching of the letters was starting to come adrift; it now said