Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“This is pretty much the centre of things—”

It was a grotto, with a waterfall pouring as smoothly as syrup from a ledge of overhanging rock, an inky pool, a willow tree, early primroses and beds of moss like plumped cushions.

“There’s nothing much here now, but the frogs come in the spring, and the frogs bring the grass snakes … and the badgers sometimes come at night …”

“You’ve got badgers?”

“The sett is off my land. But they use a track that comes through here.”

Behind the waterfall there was a chipped alabaster head, half hidden by a spray of hart’s tongue ferns. It stood on a granite shelf. It had no nose. “Who’s that?”

“Oh … the man in Bath who sold it me claimed it was Artemis. But one goddess looks much like another.”

At the tail of the pool, the water divided round a boulder of rosy quartz and trickled noisily off into a green thicket.

“I call it the stream, but it’s only a ditch, really. It went bone dry last summer. I found a heron fishing here once, but he wasn’t having any luck. It used to run down that slope there … beyond the osiers.”

“You made the waterfall?”

“Oh, yes, it’s all just engineering, really. There’s a concrete dam under all that ivy … and then I brought the stream out here through an old sewer pipe. I had to dynamite the pool.”

“Really?” George looked up at the pine on its stalk of rock, fifty yards up the ravine. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“I held my breath when it went off. It rained loose stones for a bit.”

“Is it legal to blow up things with dynamite?”

“I never asked.”

“Extraordinary. Where did you get the stuff from anyway?”

“Oh … I found an accomplice … I know a man who simply loves big bangs. He set it up, and I pushed the button. He used to be a drummer.”

“Have you done this everywhere you’ve been?”

“Good God, no. I never got beyond window boxes, and they all went dead on me. When I started this, I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know how it would turn out — I thought … oh, I’ll have chrysanths, and snapdragons, and hollyhocks and things. Like everybody does.” She hacked off a trailing branch of alder. “Then I discovered I had a talent for weeds.”

They climbed down the narrow zig-zag path to the shore. From behind him, Diana Pym said, “I saw your … Sheila on TV yesterday.”

“Oh?” He’d spoken to Sheila over the phone on Tuesday: she hadn’t said anything about being on television. “Ah — yes, of course.”

“She was good.”

“Wasn’t she—” He sidestepped a jagged chunk of rock. Sheila might have mentioned it. He’d been looking out for one of her programmes for weeks now.

“She made everyone else look wooden, I thought. She gives the impression of being completely herself in the studio — that’s so difficult to do, much harder than it looks.”

“Yes …” George said, trying to guess his way out. “She seems almost more natural in front of the cameras than she does at home. Funny, really. Every time she goes on, she has frightful fits of nerves beforehand, you know … shakes like a leaf …” He was glad that Diana Pym couldn’t see his face; but he seemed to have carried it off all right because the next thing she said was, “Your wife — she … died?”

“No — she’s in Norfolk.” He scrambled down the last few feet of shale.

The cottage was too lumpish to be pretty: there was something toadlike in the way it squatted on its promontory, a low building of stone and slate with deepset windows that looked too small for it. The tide had gone right out, leaving it stranded in a waste of ribbed rock and drying bladderwrack. Hooded crows were scavenging in the seaweed; beyond them, George saw another of the fisherman’s marks — a splash of old white paint on a boulder.

“It looks so bald when the sea’s out, I’m afraid,” Diana Pym said.

“No, it’s — charming. Quite charming.” There were two battered blue gas cylinders outside the door. A shrivelled strip of pork rind hung from a bird table, and the stony turf was scattered with crumbs. It was a rum place for anyone to beach at: Diana Pym must have made it by just as complicated a route as the fisherman who used to sail his boat in here. George wondered where her marks had been. “What were you doing in Los Angeles? Singing?” he said, once they were inside.

The cottage smelled of damp and woodsmoke. She was clearing the friendly litter of books, ashtrays and last Sunday’s papers from the tiny living room.

“No, not then. That was after I stopped singing. Do you hate mess? Your boat’s so neat. I haven’t any whisky; only gin or wine. Or is it too early for you?”

“No — gin will do fine.”

She moved through the cottage scattering announcements over her shoulder as she went. “Let’s have a fire!” she said; then “Aren’t these dark afternoons just hell!”; then “I’m out of ice!”; then “I only got the electricity put in last year!”; then “No; don’t you move!” Still in her gumboots, she shuttled between kitchen and living room, all bone and nerve like a trapped bird against a windowpane.

A copy of the Radio Times was on top of the television; it was open at yesterday’s programmes, and George scanned their titles to find out which one Sheila had been on. None of them seemed to be about books: she must have been on another channel.

Diana Pym raked out the ash in the open fireplace. “I was saying about LA … When I went there first, I tried to get into acting. Not proper acting — just TV and radio ads. I was renting out my British accent. Then I bought a slice of a press agency, and spent two years having lunch. Then I went into personal management — singers, you won’t have heard of them. Then I did some work for Joan Baez. Then I sold up and got the house in Brittanny.”

She said this flatly, not looking at him. It didn’t sound like a life at all. He couldn’t imagine her doing any of those unreal jobs in that unreal city. A firelighter flared blue in the grate. Diana Pym said, “Have you been in Southern California?”

“No; I’ve been to New York, but never to the West Coast.”

“It’s a lot like Cornwall. More sunshine … more golf buggies; it’s got the same sea and the same little hills. But they’ve got Spanish names.”

Beside the fireplace there was a dusty glass-fronted bookcase, its doors wedged shut with folded cigarette packets. The books inside looked dull. There were a lot of newish ones on horticulture; the older ones all seemed to be about religion. He saw The Cloud of Unknowing , something by Teilhard de Chardin, The Courage to Be, The Way to Perfection .

He said: “But you’re here to stay?”

The logs were beginning to burn. Diana Pym, crouched in the firelight, had accomplished another of her unsettling reversions: her face had lost twenty years. She said, “I guess so, yes. But I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“You should meet Sheila,” he said, “I was going to ask her down.”

“How old is she?” Diana was half-way to the kitchen.

“Oh …” He had to think back to answer that one. He went through the decades on his fingers. “Thirty … seven … I think.”

“Oh, that’s not so old—”

“For what?”

“For having a baby,” she said.

He stared at her. Was she quite bats? He held his fire. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose it is.”

“Does she want a boy or a girl?”

“I … don’t think … she has any … particular preference.”

“Oh.” She went on into the kitchen. “Of course,” she called, “with the scans they have now, people seem to know the sex of their babies almost as soon as they’re conceived.”