Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Yes … that’s why I’m trying to teach myself to watch the television.”

“Oh? Is there a lot to learn?”

Glad of an escape route from her eyes, George told her his theory that all programmes on the television were about other programmes on the television, and that if you came to England from abroad you found yourself trying to decipher an extremely complicated code that everyone else grasped by instinct while you laboured over it as if every comedy show was being transmitted in Morse.

“It used to be our class system that foreigners could never get the hang of. Now it seems to be the television. Do you by any chance know who a man called Russell Harty is?”

When Angela returned from the doctor’s, she was fiercely gay; clattering about the house and shouting to George from distant rooms. “Did Tanya ring? We’re supposed to be going round to Lizzie’s for drinks. Did you see that man of Daddy’s?” George didn’t know why she had gone to Dr Spellman twice in a week, and was shy of asking her. When she finally landed up in the same room as George (where he was filling in an application form for a job as a trainee in a Marine Insurance company), he said, “All in order, darling?” “Yes,” she said; “Fine. Wizard. I’ve got … What do your beastly sailors call it? I’m in the pudding club,” and started to cry.

After nearly forty years the phrase still had the power to make his guts turn over. He hadn’t known what to do, what to say. He had stared at her until she yelled, “I thought you’d be pleased, if no-one else was!”, and ran up the stairs to “her” room where George, the new husband, was tolerated like an awkward guest.

Diana, smiling through her smoke, said, “Well … does it feel like a proper homecoming?”

George felt an unmanly prickling in his eyes. He couldn’t think why — perhaps it was just Diana’s cigarette, or the pine burning in the fireplace. He hoped it didn’t show. He said: “Oh … it’s just like any new posting, I suppose. It takes one a while to … shake down, you know.”

“I found it pretty medium hell when I came back.” Her eyes went on looking at him after she’d spoken as if she was still talking. They were saying, Tell, Confess.

But he couldn’t tell. He sat sprawled in her armchair: he grinned; he hid behind his tumbler of brandy; he searched for pipe and matches in his pockets; he said, “I don’t know. Do you think it’s hell not to know who Russell Harty is?”

“Limbo, at least,” Diana said. “Rather an enviable limbo, at that.”

She was looking into the fire. The long back of her cashmere sweater was stretched tight: he could count her vertebrae and see the mothwing pattern of her shoulderblades beneath the wool. She made him think of the model aeroplanes that he’d built as a boy, with their lovely, intricate frames of balsa struts and spars, their taut and glassy tissue paper skins. They were hald together by pure stress: Diana looked as if she were constructed on the same principle. George discovered that he was watching her with surprised and involuntary desire. He felt a sudden jolt of tenderness for her small bones, the surfline of down on her exposed forearm in the firelight, her sad, gruff, ruined voice. He wanted to—

“But you will stay?” Diana was still looking at the burning logs and, for two sweet seconds, George thought she was flying another signal altogether. “Yes,” he said. “There’s something going on in Montedor at present. Something rather awful, I’m afraid. It’s in the papers. It rather looks as if I shan’t be able to go back.”

It would be so nice, he thought, if he could turn to her. For comfort. For kindliness. For loneliness, too. Temporizing, he inspected his empty glass as if he’d just noticed a gang of microbes swimming in the treacly drop of liquid that remained at the bottom. Well? Did she want him to risk the hazardous crossing of the rug to where she sat by the fire? He felt as jittery about it, as nervously constricted, as he’d been at seventeen. Encouraged by something in the way her hair (and it was still blonde … a very pale, polleny blonde … it wasn’t white at all) grazed her shoulder, he shifted a couple of inches forward in his chair, but found himself finally too stiff to admit his own weakness, to make that bold, vulnerable, candid move.

“Do you want to try to explain it to me?”

George gazed at her, smiling, his head swimming a little with relief. In a tone as gentle as he could manage, he said,

“What?”

“About what’s happening … in Monty … in your African place.”

“Oh.” Disappointed, he made a show of sitting back deep in the chair. “It wouldn’t really make much sense to anyone who hadn’t been there. It’s too messy and internal. No Left or Right to it. The usual boring African story. A weak president in power, and a first-rate shit waiting in the wings to make his move. I’m a president’s man, and I wouldn’t stand a chance if the shit gets into office. That’s about it, really.” With every fresh word he spoke, he felt himself losing her.

“Will it be bloody?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. The shit has been stockpiling weapons for the last two years, and he’s got a lot of the army with him.” He watched Diana. Her face was tilted a little away from him. It seemed to drift out of focus, leaving him staring at a single enlarged eye, the colour of a harebell.

“And your friend — the one in the photograph? What’ll happen to her?”

“Oh … Vera Osorio …” George put a heavy emphasis on Vera’s second name. “She’ll be all right.” To clear himself of any lingering attachment in that direction, he added: “She’s with the Minister of Communications. He’s an old friend too, but he’ll behave like the Vicar of Bray.”

“You’re still there, aren’t you? You’re not really here at all.”

“I thought I was supposed to be in limbo.”

Stubbing out her cigarette, Diana smiled — a quick and funny twist of a smile that might conceivably have held in it the promise of something else, George thought. She said, “You’ll just have to learn now to look forward to things like taking your grandchild sailing on your boat.”

Grandchild? For a moment the word was as inexplicable as chihuahua or concertina . It didn’t seem to apply to him at all. Then George remembered. He supposed, sadly, that if Diana was sending him any signals now, she was flying her P and S flags. Keep your distance. Do not come any closer. In a studiedly offhand voice he said, “Yes. Talking of the boat, actually … I want to try her out at sea while this weather holds. Tomorrow, even … or maybe the day after.” He realized that he was quoting her old song. “If it’d amuse you to come along as a passenger—”

“I’d love to,” she said quickly; then, “So long as you realize that I’ll be no use to you at all.” She scrutinized the bramble weals on the back of her hand. “I mean, I can’t tie knots or anything like that.”

“No, no — the whole point of the boat is that I can manage her entirely on my own.”

And not only the boat , he thought, watching Diana and wishing that things were otherwise. It would have been different a year ago. It would have been different in Africa. But not now, not here. Getting up to go, he had to pause midway out of the chair to deal with a sharp twinge of Cornish lumbago. It struck him that from now on he would always have to go to bed alone. A … singlehander. The word yielded a melancholy obscenity. Upright at last, his hair tangling with a creosoted beam, he said, “Lovely evening. I did like your wild garden. I didn’t expect to at all, in honesty, but I really did.”