Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

George wasn’t listening; he was remembering something that he’d passed over in the Radio Times . He pulled the magazine off the television set and studied it on his knee. It wasn’t a book programme at all. Feeling shaky, he gazed at the print of the billing:

2.45 BABYTALK

5. (Of 6): The Latecomers.

Having a first baby when you’re over 35 can

bring its own special problems and rewards.

The panel of speakers included “Sheila Grey, feminist and mother-to-be”. Impending motherhood, apparently, had made her drop that aggressive pair of initials and go back to the first name that had been George’s own choice for her; though he did wonder, for a hopeful moment, if there might conceivably be some other Sheila Grey altogether.

George’s next indignant thought was that this wasn’t the sort of thing that anyone wanted to learn from the pages of the Radio Times . He was offended not so much by Sheila as by the magazine itself — its grubby typography and the blotchy photograph of a grinning comedian with tombstone teeth. He replaced it on the television set. Diana was back again.

“I was … wondering where the bathroom was …” George said.

“Oh — just through there, the door at the end.”

“Thanks—”

Gratefully bolting himself in, George took sanctuary. First things first … Steady the Buffs … He peed, aiming his stream fastidiously at the painted blue shield of Thos Wilson & Co St Austell on the cracked porcelain bowl. He washed his hands. He rinsed his eyes in cold water. He squeezed a striped worm of toothpaste on to his forefinger, and rubbed at his front teeth with it.

Why in hell’s name—

He swilled the pepperminty stuff round his mouth and spat.

Who does she think I am?

He combed the swallowtails of grey hair back over the tops of his ears. He tried running the comb through the stubble round his chin, but the bristles weren’t yet long enough to tame.

You’d think … her own father …

He pulled down the saggy skin under his eyes and inspected them in the mirror. The whites were reassuringly white. He bared his teeth at himself.

In the Radio Times , of all places. The bloody Radio Times!

The mirror over the basin was also the door of a small cupboard. He opened it. Diana was evidently no great collector of medicines: it was a disappointing show … two half-empty bottles of cough mixture, some disinfectant, a tin of Elastoplast, scent phials, 2-milligram tablets of Valium, no secrets. He hesitated over the Valium for a moment, and closed the door with a spasm of guilt at having raided such an innocent bower. But the act of trespass had calmed him.

He saw that the framed picture over the lavatory wasn’t in fact a picture at all; it was a presentation record, made of doubtful silver, and awarded to Julie Midnight in December 1961 to mark the sale of 250,000 copies of a song called “Talking in the Dark”. George remembered a line about “walking in the park”, then a chorus:

But this I tell you true,

That best of all with you,

I like talking in the dark.

Talking in the dark …

Talking in the dark …

The silver disc looked antique now. The gothic script on the imitation vellum was convincingly faded.

Julie Midnight

“Talking in the Dark”

Lyrics: D. Pym

Melody & Arr: Ben Gold

With The Carol Benson Singers & The King Pins

So she did write her own words. It was funny to think that pop singers might mean what they sang. Had there been a real person to whom Diana really did like talking in the dark — and was he, perhaps, the same chap who, after all the kissing and laughter, was going to walk out on her next week, next month, or maybe the month after? Had he in fact-walked? And was it because of him that she’d gone off to America? Or was the whole thing just a pose, contrived to tap the market in brittle little ballads of half-requited love? There was something teasing about the way she’d hung the record over the lavatory: you’d have to be male in order to find yourself standing face to face with it. Had she planned that too?

He made a final check in the mirror: there was a speck of lint on his lapel and a splash of toothpaste in the bristles at the corner of his mouth. Shoulders back … chin up … smile, please. He unbolted the door, ducked under the beam and steamed cautiously ahead into the living room, his colours hoisted and his hatches battened down.

When Diana said “You will stay on to have some supper, won’t you? It’s nothing much, just chops and things …”, George realized that he’d been wondering how to avoid going back to Thalassa. It was a relief to stand in Diana’s kitchen, watching the bramble-scarred backs of her hands as she peeled the papery skin from an onion. It was nice to be told where things were and assigned the small symbolic tasks of an acolyte. She showed him where the corkscrew lived. He went out to the woodpile and filled her wicker basket with logs. He could hear the spitting fat in the pan on the kitchen stove and the sound of the tide coming in over the rocks in the dark. There was no wind, the sky was low with cloud, and the water was fitting itself stealthily, invisibly, around the house and drowning the shoreline of the bay.

The knowledge of Sheila’s baby had started as a sudden blow to the gut; it changed to an itch, and each time George remembered it he felt compelled to scratch.

“Odd, really,” he said “ … Sheila going on television like that, so … long before the event.”

“Yes, when is it due?”

He’d hoped that Diana would be able to tell him that. “Oh … not for ages yet. This Moselle’s nice — where does one go for wine round here?”

Diana asked if Sheila was his only child. Yes, said George, but he was thinking of that other baby in his life — a baby curiously more vivid to him in some ways than Sheila had ever been. For Sheila was always Angela’s child— hers in the same way that her frocks and the MG and her torn nursery teddy bear were hers. George had only once seen Sheila being breastfed: that was a part of Angela’s personal toilette, and she would no more have allowed him to be present than she would have let him see her on the lavatory.

But the other baby was different. He still sometimes surfaced in George’s dreams, with his outraged old man’s face and lobster body. George liked to imagine him as a farmer now, with terraces of vines and olive trees … a serious family man with a fat wife and a string of kids of his own.

He said: “When I was in the Navy, there was a tiny scrap of a baby … Greek …”

“You mean, yours?”

“No, not mine. I just pulled him out of the water and looked after him for a few hours—”

It was a week after VJ Day. Hecla , bound for Singapore, was still in the Mediterranean, 300 miles short of the Suez Canal. They spotted the burning refugee ship at midnight — she looked like a mirage city on the horizon. It turned out later that the fire started when a nurse overturned a primus stove; by the time Hecla arrived, the ship was alight from end to end. Half her lifeboats and rafts were gone and she was listing badly; a great floating bonfire that lit the faces of the men on Hecla’s bridge and showed the sea as an amazing ruddy tangle of heads, carley floats, empty lifebelts, fibre suitcases, cardboard boxes and bits of smoking woodwork. The submarine Trouncer was lying off, a mile from the ship, and had launched a little flotilla of rubber dinghies; they bobbed about in the lumpy sea as if they had escaped from a suburban regatta.

The captain asked all strong swimmers in the crew to volunteer. George, naked in his lifejacket, went into the water as soon as the scrambling nets were lowered over the side. It was a curious business. Every time you saw a body, it turned out to be something else. George rescued a very lifelike overcoat, a pair of oilskin trousers, somebody’s sleeping bag and a dead goat before he found his first real survivor — an elderly man in a flat cap, clutching a plucked chicken, who gazed at George with fixed reproach as he was dog-paddled to the ship’s side. He missed the baby twice, swimming straight past it in an attempt to save what turned out to be an upturned wastepaper basket and a coil of heavy rope.