Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Hecla was in chaos. The flight deck had been turned into a shanty town of tarpaulins rigged over lines of blankets and palliasses. No-one wanted George’s baby. The refugees were in shock. They stared as he tried to show them his wet little bundle, saying “Yes? Yes? You like? You know Mama?” He walked up and down the lines, robed in a towel, trying to find a medical orderly to take the baby off his hands. No go. George carried it to his cabin, where he cut its raggy clothes off with a pair of scissors, patted it dry and wrapped it in his pyjamas.

The baby was eerily silent. It lay on George’s bunk, as pale and waxy as if it had been carved in cream cheese. Then it slowly reddened, and as its colour came back it started to bawl; a high thin shriek that started like the sound of tearing silk, then grew in volume until the whole cabin seemed to be contained inside the baby’s cry.

George pulled faces at it. He rocked it in his arms. He warmed some milk over the wardroom stove and tried to drip it into the baby’s mouth from the end of a teaspoon. Now the shriek was like a drill grinding on a raw nerve in a back tooth.

“Hush,” he said. “Hush. Please hush—” The baby drew breath, stared in a wobbly cross-eyed way at a point somewhere just in front of its nose, and let out a chainsaw scream. George crooked his little finger, dipped it in the milk, and offered his wet knuckle to the small, purple knot of anger that was the baby’s face.

“I’m sorry,” George said. The baby howled. George saw it dying on him. How often did babies need to be fed? Could they die of apoplexy? He felt uselessly male. The baby was yelling Breast! Breast! Breast! and flat-chested George was no bloody good to it at all. Justice, felt George, was all on the baby’s side.

Breast! Breast! Breast!

On setting out for the Far East, everyone on the Hecla had been issued with three French letters, Captain’s Orders. (“On my ship,” the captain had announced over the tannoy system on the first Sunday out, “anyone who comes back with a dose of the clap goes on a charge.”) In the ratings’ quarters, they were being widely used as balloons. George’s were kept hidden in a drawer under a pile of socks.

Breast! screamed the baby on the bunk.

George unrolled a condom on his thumb and punctured its limp nipple with the point of a safety pin. Then he filled the thing with the warm milk, cradled the baby in one arm, and dangled the pallid, greasy sheath over the baby’s nose.

“Come on, baby. Come on, my love. Tit—”

The baby was fooled. It fastened its lips round the end of the French letter and sucked. Milk dribbled down its cheeks and chin. Its eyes slowly closed. George cuddled it in triumph. He took it up to the bridge, where he demonstrated his invention to Farley who was on the dawn watch. The baby’s mouth moved in a vague parabola to form what George was certain was a smile, and it farted, quite noisily, three times.

“Listen to that,” George said. “Little bugger’s in complete working order.”

“What’s its name?”

“Aristotle. Harry for short.”

“What the fuck are you proposing to do with it?”

“I don’t know. Put him down for Harrow, do you think? Angela will know what to do.” Sitting by the Asdic, George joggled the baby on his lap. Aristotle gaped at him with a devoted, owl-like stare. George held the swollen condom to the baby’s mouth; Aristotle sucked and waved his wrinkled fists.

He could still smell the baby after thirty — no, more like forty — years. To Diana, he said, “His mother had been on Trouncer all along. We located her later on in the morning. She got him back when we docked at Port Said.”

“Did you meet her?”

“No. The M.O. took charge of all that. I didn’t even learn her name. Pity, really. I have a recurrent fantasy that at least I ought to be able to send that kid a Christmas card every once in a while.”

“Were many people lost?”

“Oh …” The burning ship seemed so much further away than the baby. “There were thirty or so missing at the end of the day. We picked up about two hundred survivors; and Trouncer picked up another ninety.”

“It’s a lovely story.”

That was just what George had expected Angela to say, when he told her in the drawing room of her parents’ house in Markham Street. Instead she’d made a face and said “How perfectly disgusting!” Then, a moment later, “But you must have been frightfully brave, darling, jumping into the sea like that; do you think they’ll give you a gong?” To celebrate George’s homecoming, they had booked in for two nights at the Dorchester, where they lay between the stiff hotel sheets and George said, “Darling … do we need to go on bothering with these things?” and felt Angela shaking her head vigorously in the dark.

At the time, George was sure that Angela’s silent, sweet, impatient negative meant that she wanted a baby. He had astonished himself with his own excitement at the thought, and it was wonderful to find that Angela shared it without them having spoken a word. That was all part of being married; you just found yourself knowing and wanting the same things because you were we , and you weren’t alone any more, even in the most private rooms in your head.

When Angela came, she gripped his neck so tightly that it hurt, and she made a shocked gargling noise as if she had been injured in some awful accident. He could feel the tears on her cheeks. She said, “My God. George. George!” His name was an appalled shout on the air as he, loving his wife, came too.

Next morning they went shopping together. In the Burlington Arcade she was bright and tinny, like someone he’d just met at a cocktail party. “Oh, darling—” she kept on saying; “Oh, darling!” But there was no special intimacy in the word; it was pronounced exactly as she used to carol it over the telephone to old school chums from Hatherup Castle, like Tanya Fox and Serena Lake-Williams.

At Fortnum’s for coffee, George found a horrible idea taking hold of him like an infection. When Angela had shaken her head so violently the night before — had he got hold of the wrong end of the stick altogether? In the café, with its sobering smell of chicory and wet umbrellas, it seemed to George that Angela might have meant something quite different. Had he just reminded her of Aristotle sucking on the teat of the French letter? And was her headshake just a spasm of reminiscent disgust at the image?

Surely not. It was a giddying and shameful thought. George did his best to kill it on the cab ride to Rules, where they lunched. Seven weeks later Angela came back from the doctor’s; she was pregnant.

“Do you drink brandy?” A log cracked and whistled in the grate. Diana was putting a record on the stereo system.

“Yes, please. Is that … one of yours?”

“Oh God, no—” There was a loud bass crackle as the needle touched the rim of the disc; then, four bars in, George recognized the piece as Mozart’s clarinet quintet. He said: “I used to have this myself, on a pile of 78s, when I had a wind-up gramophone in Mombasa. My version went with a bit more of a swing than yours — it had Benny Goodman.”

“Oh, yes” she said, with her definite, actressy trick of emphasis. “Yes. That’s a neat recording.” She stood with her narrow back to him, busy with bottles on a tray. The clarinet notes were marching down the scale in pairs. Tu-whit, tu-woo. Tu-whit, tu-woo. “This is so nice.” She turned round. “Cornish evenings can seem to last for ever if one’s by oneself, don’t you think? Yes?” Her mouth was framed in a polite English teaparty smile, but her refugee eyes went on staring at him until he felt his own gaze slide away from them to the fire.