Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“St Cadix Police Station. PC Lofts.”

“It’s Connie Lisle,” George said.

At noon on Sunday in the Royal St Cadix Yacht Club, even old Freddie Corquordale was wearing the face that he kept in reserve for Test Match defeats and sudden bereavements. The only member who was out of step was Edgar Crosthwait, a rare visitor from Lostwithiel, who was deaf and hadn’t caught on.

“There’s no way around it as far as I can see,” Denis Wright said. “They’re going to have to call a spade a spade and bring in a straight suicide verdict. If only she hadn’t left that ruddy note.”

“You know where she’s supposed to have gone in?” said Rupert Walpole. “Off the end of Number 8 Dock. One of the girls in the office saw her standing there for about half an hour.”

“What’s the drop there? Fifty feet?” asked Freddie Corquordale.

“Oh no, more like fifteen. She went in at high water.”

Edgar Crosthwait was nodding vigorously and saying “Yes!”, “Yes!” at frequent intervals, his excellent false teeth phrased in an ingratiating grin. When he did manage to get down to the Club he prided himself on being able to rub along pretty easily with the other chaps there; today they all seemed a bit liverish for some reason. Edgar Crosthwait was listening to see if he could find a handy way in for his story about the rhino and the canoe. He’d told that a couple of times at his other club in Newquay, where it had gone down extremely well; he was fairly certain that it would be a new one on the St Cadix chaps. At present though, they seemed stuck firmly in the groove of talking about the launch of some boat or other, and he couldn’t see an opening anywhere.

“She must have been in the river for three days, just going up and down with the tide,” said Denis Wright.

“One just wishes that she’d said something,” said Betty Castle. The spring sunshine revealed how thinly her spiky hair grew on her pink skull. “I’m afraid the trouble with poor Connie was that she was a bottler-up. It never does any good, that. I know.”

“From what I’ve heard, she said a hell of a lot too much. In that note.” Brigadier Eliot glowered at Edgar Crosthwait, who chuckled, nodded and said Yes! three times.

The note which Connie Lisle had left on her dining-room table in a sealed white envelope under a candlestick had been passed by the police to the coroner’s office. It might just as well have been published in the Truro Times . Everyone knew what was in it. It was not, in any usual sense of the term, a note at all; it was a long essay. According to Mrs Downes, it ran to more than fifteen closely-typed pages. Connie Lisle had (in Mrs Downes’s word) “expatiated” on the emptiness of her retirement and her feelings of personal futility since she’d lost her job and moved to Cornwall. This was perfectly acceptable: Connie Lisle simply had never pulled her weight in St Cadix and, as you make the bed you lie on, so she had made herself a very hard and narrow bed. What wasn’t in the least acceptable was the second part of the so-called note, in which Connie Lisle had gone on to vilify (“That really is the only word for it”) St Cadix. Mrs Downes rattled off the phrase “topheavy, snobbish, inward and unreal” with an incredulous, dry smile; but she lowered her voice to an appalled whisper for “Dying can’t be so difficult when you spend every day in the company of the living dead.” It was Laura Nash, though, who put the kibosh on it. She was afraid that, tragically, certain names were named and some very ungrateful and very thoughtless things were said.

By throwing herself off the end of Number 8 Dock in her mohair skirt (“You might think she’d at least have had the decency to wear slacks for the occasion”) Miss Lisle had committed an act of cowardly betrayal. For in that leap, Miss Lisle had sneered at the Club, sneered at the Lifeboat and Cancer funds, at the Preservation Committee (which had halted the spread of council houses across the cliff), at the reefer evenings and the black tie dinners. She had sneered at the view from one’s first-floor picture window and at the posted and stiled Smugglers’ Trail, on which one took one’s dogs in the mornings.

George stood on the awkward outskirts of the group at the bar, sipping at a schooner of fino sherry. He rather disliked its thin wormwood and gall taste, but the drink seemed right for the day. He had expected St Cadix to rally round and sympathize with him over the beastly experience of fishing up Connie Lisle’s corpse, but it hadn’t turned out like that. It felt rather as if he’d been spotted coming out of a brothel. Everyone, even Rupert Walpole, seemed to be keeping a measured distance from him. It was Rupert, in fact, who, when George came into the bar, had said, “Oh — hullo, George. Aren’t you off yet?” Some sympathy. The Yacht Club was behaving like the Greeks who shot the messenger.

What the hell had he been expected to do? Prod the body with a boathook and push it out into the tide?

“Nasty thing for George there.” Denis Wright’s meaning was aggressively plain: George had touched pitch and been defiled.

He meant to stand his ground. “Yes. It was awful. I barely knew her, of course, but she seemed a nice woman.” Who else here knew or cared a damn about the drought in the Sahel?

“Poor girl.” Betty Castle was putting herself on George’s side. “I do so wish she’d talked to me. There was so much one could have done. If only one had been allowed.”

Verity Caine said: “I’m afraid she was never really right for Cornwall. Connie’s trouble was that she didn’t have any proper outside interests. She’d have been a great deal happier, I think, if she’d stayed on in Southend.”

“Oh, is that where she came from?” Freddie Corquordale said. “Ah. Southend.” As if that explained everything.

To Verity Caine, George said: “I don’t think that’s quite fair. She worked for Oxfam. She was surprisingly knowledgeable, really, about Africa.”

“Africa!” said Edgar Crosthwait, seizing his chance like a trout arrowing up to a floating fly. “Your patch?”

“Ah … yes, in fact,” George said, embarrassed to find himself singled out by the old booby in the pepper and salt tweeds.

“Funny you should bring up Africa,” Crosthwait roared. “I don’t know whether you had much to do with rhinos in your time out there?”

“That was a bad go.” It was the man from the television shop. Jellaby. He was standing on the quay at high water, holding the remains of a sandwich in one hand. “Must’ve given you a turn.”

“Yes,” George said from the deck of the boat. “It’s sad.” He meant the words to sound final, but Jellaby took them as an invitation. “Mind?” he said, turning his back to George and positioning himself lugubriously on the dock ladder. Jellaby was a very fat young man: the seat of his cavalry twill trousers was worn to a high shine, and the essence of Jellaby seemed to be concentrated in his broad, bland and self-important bum. George resentfully watched the bum descending to eye level. Jellaby eased himself over the rail and steadied his bulk against the shrouds. He was panting slightly.

“Nice one,” he said, looking over Calliope . “Lovely job.”

“Well, I like her,” George said. Needlessly he began to coil a warp of rope on the foredeck.

“Though she must cost you a bit in maintenance,” Jellaby said.