Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

“Who is she?”

“Oh, just someone I know.”

Damn him! Damn this man!

Four steps on, George let fall another rabbit-dropping of information. “I sometimes see her in Geneva.”

“Geneva?” How on earth did the bunkering business extend to Geneva?

“I get over there quite often. In the winter.”

They passed a window full of scrolled shotguns, their fingerguards linked with loops of chain. At the pedestrian crossing, her father started covering his tracks again.

“There aren’t many places in the world that you can fly to direct from Bom Porto. Oddly enough, there is a weekly flight to Geneva.”

Furious, Sheila said: “It’s hard, isn’t it, keeping one’s life in watertight compartments?”

“Yes,” said George. “It can be a bit tricky.”

She looked at him to see if he might — just — be smiling. His features were in neutral.

“I don’t know how you feel about Wheeler’s,” George said.

All evening she tried to find the stranger whose single sentence she had overheard. First she needled, then she sulked. George talked evenly throughout: about a play he’d been to see (with the Laura Ashley woman?), about methods of cooking shellfish, about the doctor’s latest report on her grandmother in Cornwall.

“It’d be nice if you could manage to get down there,” he said. “I know she’d like to see more of you.”

And who was he, of all people, to issue her with moral imperatives? She lit a cigarette with an irritable flash of her lighter. It was impossible to be sure, but she hoped that George hated to see her smoking. Later, thinking of that large-boned Anglo-Irish looking woman with the stupid grateful eyes, Sheila found herself seeing her as a rival and a thief.

The open doorway of her study filled, suddenly, with Tom.

“You working, then?”

“No. I haven’t started yet.”

Tom was very slightly out of focus. The hairs of his beard ran into each other, making his face look as if it had been cast in black bronze, like Marx in Highgate Cemetery.

“You’re lucky,” he said. “I nearly bought a dog.”

“A dog? What would we do with a dog?”

“The Chinese eat them.” Tom’s good teeth showed through his whiskers. “It was in that pet shop place, just along from Sainsbury’s. It was mostly sort of Afghan, but it had Dachshund legs. I reckon it had problems.” He leaned his cheek against the frame of the door. “I saw Trev. They’ve been pulling down a place near Crystal Palace. He’s bringing round some wood for me. Mahogany.”

“Is there any room left for it?” Since Tom’s arrival, the bomb shelter in the garden had filled with baulks of timber and hijacked bits out of car engines. Tom specialized in things that other people didn’t want. In that underworld of Trevs and Steves and Dougs that Tom entered every time he left the house alone, he was, apparently, famous as a Schweitzer of abandoned objects. People came to the door now with old folding cameras whose leather bellows leaked light, stopped clocks, hubcaps, broken canework chairs. Tom took everything in. He was as unselective as a council skip. Early on, Sheila had wondered if she herself had a place in Tom’s recycling system: it was a thought that she had felt it safer not to pursue.

“I’ll put it out in the garden for the winter. A bit of frost and rain will do it good.”

She saw a line of words in George’s letter. It was at the bottom of the first side: “It is the rainy season here. As usual, there’s no rain. The last proper wetting was in 1966.”

“D’you want some coffee?”

“No, I’ll come down in a bit.”

“I’ve got to clean the carburettor of the van.” He shifted in the doorway, his hair tangling with the lintel. “Oh. I looked it up. It is a baobab tree.”

Sheila blinked at him through her spectacles, smiling; but there was a space in the doorway where he’d been and the room seemed to lift slightly in the air.

She would invite her father to stay. He could have no excuse now for that impregnable hotel. She’d meet him at the airport. No ifs or buts about it. If Tom finished the basement by then George could even have a separate entrance. Though if George ran true to form, he’d see it only as an exit.

Dear George . She used the writing paper with the stamped letterhead that Tom had made, then crumpled the sheet and dropped it in the basket by her chair. Dear Father , she wrote. There were times when people ought to be made to face up to their responsibilities, and from now on she meant to hold George accountable.

Her pen moved briskly as she set out her terms. He must let her know his flight number …. If there was anything she could arrange for him (by telephone, of course) in Cornwall …. She came to a tricky pronoun, and hesitated. “We’ll be happy to have you here,” she wrote; and the lettering of that phrase seemed to her to stick out as more formal and deliberate than the surrounding scrawl.

She realized, guiltily, that it had crossed her mind to ask Tom to go back to the underworld for the week or ten days of her father’s stay. That would be a mangy compromise. Unfair to Tom, unfair to her, unfair, even, to George — and damn him for having raised the question in her head at all.

There was a raw smell of petrol coming from downstairs. She said sorry to the smell. Yet it was true that few people were good at seeing Tom’s point. He was not a convenient item of dinner furniture. He was unafraid of his own silence and could stay speechless for hours on end: guests usually felt attacked by him. He tended to remind people of things they’d prefer to gloss over, like dole queues and Supplementary Benefits. At the woozy end of the evening, if someone started to boast about paperback advances and promotion campaigns, and use the word “grand” when he meant a thousand pounds, his eyes were likely to come to rest on Tom and his speech, with any luck, would falter badly.

There was also Tom’s age. For everyone else that Sheila knew, their age was part of the interesting genetic accident that defined who they were. Tom’s age was unique, in that it was taken as a moral accusation, and a serious personal shortcoming. He was “too young”. In fact, by comparison with most of her acquaintances, Tom was positively grandfatherly: his tolerance of other people was of a kind that normally went only with cocoa and slippers. Terrible things happened to him. Drunks battened on him, couples warred over his head, girls wept into his knees; Tom took it all. Driving home in the van, after some social fracas that had driven Sheila to the edge of shrieking, the worst Tom ever said was, “I thought that was a bit dire. Didn’t you?”

“We are still trying to get this house sorted out,” Sheila wrote, “but there are plenty of habitable rooms. You’ll have your own bath.”

Below, there was the sound of a distant artillery barrage, a voice, and then the artillery changed to infantry on the march. Sheila looked to the window and waited.

In a minute, they showed, carrying an unhinged door. Tom held the front and a starveling youth in an anorak held the back. He had a parrot’s beak nose and thin straw hair sticking out from a pink skull. Seen from above, Tom’s frizzy bush made him look like an African. They carried the door with clumsy gentleness, padding ankle deep in leaves as they crossed the lawn and rounded the bird bath — a pair of ambulancemen, bearing a critically wounded case. Without a word, they propped the door up against the crumbled wall under the plane tree, then, wordless still, they tracked back through the yellow leaves the way they had come.

She signed her letter: Lots of love, Sheila .