Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Isn’t it weird—”

“You get used to it.”

He was looking at Vera’s picture. Her expression didn’t really look all that special to him.

“I like it. It feels cosy and dangerous in equal parts.”

The sand in the foreground of the photo was as fine and white as baking powder. A line of big, crumbly tracks led from Vera’s rock to the camera. In the low sun, they showed as wedge-shaped pools of shadow. Flipper prints. He’d never noticed them there before. My Man Friday , George thought; to Diana Pym he said, “It’s best at night, with the oil lamps on and the stove going—”

“If my cottage had just been tied up to Cornwall with a rope, I guess I’d have undone the knot long ago.”

“Well, that’s the trouble with houses. They don’t float.”

“I always thought that was their point,” she said and started coughing, with the sound of crackling timber coming from deep in her lungs. Excuse me—” Her voice was hoarse and her face was reddened. “It’s this damned rainy winter.”

“It’s the cigarettes you smoke.”

“Yes,” she said with studied fairness, “they do help,” and laughed, and began to cough all over again.

“Can’t you give them up?”

“I don’t want to give them up. I’m a serious smoker. It’s much like being a good Catholic: you’re supposed to suffer for it.”

He peered at her gravely through the fern. Diana Pym was being witty; he remembered the copy of The Noblest Station in her muddy car.

“I’m sorry—” she said. She was laughing at him. Her coughing fit had left tears welling in her eyes. She fished in the pocket of her sheepskin coat and produced a rather dirty polkadot snuff handkerchief with which she mopped at her face, blowing loudly. A roving beam of light caught the powder on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

“Have you always been this lightly attached to things?”

George’s bristles itched. He rubbed at them with his forefinger and thumb. Diana Pym’s remark was laughably off-target: she was talking to a man who’d got through a whole tube of glue in a week. “You think this is lightly?” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Not by my standards.”

“Oh, it is by ours,” she said, gusting smoke. “You can’t have noticed us. We all came here to dig ourselves in and take root. You’re the village heretic. You’re rocking our boat.”

When she went, the tide had lifted Calliope to a level with the quay. George pulled the boat in tight against the wall, and Diana Pym stepped ashore with a gasp and a jump. She turned back to him. “The land feels funny now,” she said. “It — kind of wobbles.”

“Well, there you are.”

She frowned, remembering something. “I know what it was. They who travel much abroad seldom thereby become holy.”

“That’s my epitaph?”

“No — just a thought.”

“Hey,” George called, “who said that?”; but she was too far away to hear.

When Diana Pym said “Do come and see the garden—” George’s first thought was Oh, Christ, must I? He hated gardens; at least he hated the gardens in this country. In Montedor it was different: the Portuguese had taught people to go in for promiscuous tangles of colour, for the idea of the garden as a happy carnival. But the gardens of St Cadix were miserable, browbeaten places, with their rows of cloches, barbered lawns and beds of frowsty little hardy annuals. They were ranged with old seed packets stuck in cleft sticks and strings of silver milk-bottle tops. The bigger they were, the worse they got: when you visited people like the Walpoles and the Collinses, you had to pick your way through the gloomy hulks of their rhododendron bushes, then you faced a defile of tea roses, pruned savagely back like so many sprigs of barbed wire.

Walking on the road round the headland to Diana Pym’s cottage, he put her down for rhododendrons, wisteria, hollyhocks and rustic furniture. He wished she hadn’t asked him. He was in for a rotten afternoon of ah, yes! and how charming! when he could have been bleeding the diesel. Since hardly anything would be out at this time of year anyway, he didn’t, quite frankly, see the point. A civilized person, George thought, would have invited him to dinner and left it at that. But Diana Pym was not a civilized person. Several of her screws seemed to George to be distinctly loose.

By the time he passed the candy-striped beacon on the Head, he was possessed by the idea that he was going to end up being forced to drink glasses of Diana Pym’s elderberry wine. Or worse. Then he remembered that Diana Pym had once been Julie Midnight, and sheepishly retracted each thought one by one.

There was a plain farm gate set in a dry-stone wall, and a metal postbox marked PYM nailed to a hawthorn tree. Beyond the gate, a track led through a dripping spinney and out on to a hillside of gorse, turf and cracked and rumpled rock. High overhead, a ribbed pillar of granite was topped with a single black pine; below it there was a shallow green ravine, and at the bottom of the ravine a cottage stood on a promontory in its own horseshoe bay. He couldn’t see the garden anywhere.

The water was calm and clear, and from this height the bay showed itself as a baited trap of reefs and shoals. Serrated teeth of rock lay just a foot or so below the surface. A stranger coming in from the sea would strike in seconds. Standing on a slippery outcrop, George looked down and tried to work his way through the maze of purple submarine shadows. There was one hook-shaped channel of deep water between the little promontory and the open sea: the fisherman whose cottage this must have been would have needed four separate sets of marks to get in and out. George found two of them — cairns of loose stones piled above the tideline.

“Hello!” Diana Pym was carrying a sickle.

“It’s … perfectly charming,” George said, beginning as he meant to carry on.

“You see — you could have sailed your boat here.” There were burrs on her jeans and the backs of her wrists and hands were dotted and dashed with small thorny welts.

“Yes — and got wrecked first time out,” he said.

“Oh, no; the sea’s nearly always flat calm here in the cove. It’s safe as houses.”

He pointed out the lines of the reefs. “Oh, really?” Diana Pym said, “I always thought that was just seaweed.”

It took several minutes of scrambling over rocks and following Diana Pym down muddy tunnels through the undergrowth in the ravine before George realized that he had been in the garden all along: the thistles and gorse, the boulders, the shale-falls, the egglike clusters of dried rabbit droppings were all part of what she meant when she said “garden”. She probably included the sea too, and the clotted cream sky.

“Look,” she said, “there’s a good dryad’s saddle.”

It was a fungus on the bole of a tree, a set of wizened tortoiseshell plates growing one on top of the other.

“The spoor of that came from a wood in Surrey, of all places. Fungi are brutes to propagate. I love them.”

She touched the mottled reddish stain on a bare shoulder of granite. “Xanthoria,” she said. “Isn’t it a pretty lichen? That’s from Wales — the Black Mountains.” George fingered the stain too. It felt rather unpleasantly soft and furry, like the skin of the dead mouse.

She had found a wild place and made it wilder. The ravine was a sanctuary for the outlaws of other people’s gardens, for ivy, wolfsbane, herb robert, black bryony. She liked plants that were poisonous, or crept along the ground, or wrapped themselves round dead trees. She went ahead of George and hacked at a patch of brown scrub with her sickle. The garden smelled of wet brambles and cigarette smoke.