Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Diana put her hand on his sleeve for a second. “I’ll look forward to the boat. Ring me. I don’t know whether I really expect to enjoy it or not, but I’ll look forward to it.”

She drove him home. Outside Thalassa, with the car door open, he leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin tasted papery. Letting himself in to the dark house, he remembered exactly which model aeroplane it was that Diana had reminded him of. It was a Keil Kraft Osprey with a 36” wingspan, his most ambitious effort ever. It had taken six weeks of summer holiday labour with broken razorblades, coloured pins and tubes of balsa cement. Its registration letters, GA-GG, were painted on its wings and tailplane. He’d launched it on a chalky down near Oliver’s Battery. Its rubber motor had taken it straight up into a thermal, where it began to glide in a slow circle, higher and higher, its doped skin flashing in the sun. He’d timed its flight: one minute … two … three … four … four minutes forty seconds … a record. Then it lost the thermal and he had to chase it across the downs, smashing through picnickers and people with dogs out for walks. He’d run for a mile at least when the plane, losing altitude rapidly now, had banked and headed with what looked (“Oh — no! Oh, Christmas! Oh, buggeration!”) like a pure and deliberate act of will for the top of the tallest, most unscaleable elm in the whole of Hampshire. He’d been too far away to hear the crash; the white plane had dissolved silently into the branches. By the time he got to the tree, it wasn’t a plane any more; it was a mess of wastepaper, eighty feet up, with one torn wing flapping gently in the wind. At fourteen and a quarter, George had been too old to cry, but his face had felt very stiff indeed on the walk home to the Rectory. The wreckage was still visible in the tree at Christmas; by Easter there was just a small section of crushed fuselage and a triangle of skin with the letters GG on it. In the summer everything had gone. George reckoned that the rooks had probably used it to build nests with.

At high tea, his father, wearing his white alpaca summer jacket, was put into a high good humour by the news of what had happened to the Osprey. “Treasures upon earth, old boy! Moth and rust!” After tea, he’d challenged George to a game of croquet, and beat him hollow in comfortable time to go off to church and say evensong.

Now, pouring himself a modest nightcap of Chivas Regal in his father’s house, half here, half in the summer of … when was it? ’37? ’38? … George thought: you know, I haven’t changed a bloody bit. All I’ve done is fly a lot more Ospreys into a lot more trees.

He was woken by the soft splatter of the post downstairs and, stiff and liverish, was picking the letters up from the mat while the postman was still getting back into his van on the road outside. But there was nothing from Vera; just bills, a card from somebody on holiday in Crete addressed to his mother (a Cretan holiday must be seriously boring if it involved one in sending picture postcards to the dead), and a duplicated brochure for Jellaby’s Video Club. It was nearly two weeks since he’d written to Montedor. Sheila’s letters to him had rarely taken more than six days to arrive. Though that, of course, was from London, which was different. He wondered if it would be worth putting off his sea trials and waiting in for the second post. He looked up Diana’s number in the book and dialled it. Five minutes later, stooping, naked, studying his bare feet on the slate, as he rehearsed his lines, he dialled the number of his daughter. He listened to the London trill of her phone — quite different from the low chirrup-chirrup of the local telephones. It was a long time ringing. He picked up the postcard that had been sent to his mother: the handwriting on it was thin and dithery but quite legible.

Good to see you looking so well in your enchanting house in St C. V pleasant hotel here in Timbakion, though spring weather only fair. Davina and I return on 23rd. Look forward to seeing you for early lunch on 25th. D. sends love, Alice.

Some poor old bat with a badly disturbed memory. Today was the 27th, and there’d been no sign of Alice. Away in London, the phone was lifted from the hook and Sheila’s voice, still thick with sleep at 0915 hours, was saying, “Yes? Hullo?” as George swallowed the knot of anxiety in his throat and began to speak.

It must be the effect of the seasickness pill. The chemist — who’d brought Diana a glass of water from the back of the shop to swig it down with — had said that it might make her feel drowsy. Well, there was drowsy and drowsy. Her vision tended to wobble and there was a definite buzz in the flesh of her arms and legs. The sensation was actually quite nice, but it roused unnerving echoes of things that she’d aged out of long ago, like the little foil-wrapped slugs of Acapulco Gold that she used to keep in the bedroom closet on Ocean Avenue.

She sat up at the front of the boat with the anchors, hands clasped round her knees, watching the sea slide round and under her, as if the boat was a boulder breaking the stream of an enormous river. The sea kept on coming; an unending drift of open water, teased and crimped by a wind as faint and irregular as the breath of a sleeping invalid. On the shadowy side of the hull she could see jellyfish — whole schools of them, sailing past a foot or so beneath the surface, like tasselled art-deco lampshades on the run. Their colours were so immodest … purple, mauve, blue and livid scarlet. As she watched they changed in size, swelling as big as buckets then gathering themselves to the size of a clenched fist. One moment she thought them beautiful; the next they were disgusting, with their wrinkled glassy skins and trailing guts.

She’d been here before, but it was so long ago, when you lay back in the scatter-cushions and found yourself up on a high wire, not knowing which way you were going to fall, into a good trip or into a bad one. If you thought about it, it always turned out bad; you had to go with it, feed it, nurse it along.

She focused on a single small jellyfish, trying to count its mass of radiant filaments; then, as if she was carrying a tray full of water and not spilling a drop, she transferred her attention to the warty, galvanized steel of the anchor at her feet.

From the moment that they’d left the quay, things had started to seem more than a bit odd. First the boat (which had seemed so solid, so cottagey, when it was tied up) had shrunk to a walnut shell as it nosed out into the estuary. Then George Grey had grown. Perhaps it was just that ridiculous cap (H LSUM — AM R CA’S #1 B AD, whatever, in God’s name, that meant), but he seemed to have put on a good eighteen inches overnight. He had been stooping, apologetic, Eeyoreish. Now he was disconcertingly tall. He seemed possessed by some private, and rather irritable, good humour, as he danced round his boat from end to end in baggy jeans and scuffed plimsolls, with the sunlight glinting in his infant silver beard.

They had stolen past the lifeboat, through the line of moored yachts. The river didn’t look like water at all — it had a deep substantial gleam to it, like polished brass. “No flies in this ointment!” George Grey had called to her in a voice too loud for the still morning. As they passed the candy-striped beacon on St Cadix Head, she had gone up front to get out of earshot of the heavy bass chatter of the engine. A moment later, he was dancing again — pulling up sails the colour of red rust. Mostly they hung slack from the masts; every so often a sudden exhalation of wind would make them clatter over her head and shake out their wrinkles, but they seemed to be there only for show, really. George Grey had looked up at them with such obvious pride that she wondered if he’d cut and sewn them all himself.