Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Anyone would be scared at the sight of Peres’s handwriting. From a distance, it looked gap-toothed; then you saw that it was a jumble of little letters mixed up with big ones. The e’s and n’s and p’s were sometimes the right way round, sometimes reversed. The Little Sisters of Mercy hadn’t made a very good job of Peres, the scowling thug in the back row of their mission school in São Felipe. Yet Peres, who could barely write at all, loved writing. He had the relentless output of a romantic novelist. From Peres’s office came plans, memoranda, surveys, orders, dreams, fictions. The three male secretaries whom Peres called his sergeant majors did their best with their boss’s peculiar orthography; but even after the documents had been typed and tidied, you could still see Peres’s vandal script in every line. They were full of capitalized words: REGENERATION, PURIFICATION, DISCIPLINE, NECESSITY. For five years, George had grown used to glancing at them, wincing, tearing them up and consigning their pieces to the office bin. Was anyone daring to tear them up now?

For what else was one to make of Vera’s missing letters and the dead connections on the telephone? Listening to Senegal failing to raise Montedor, George heard Peres in the wires, and hated him as a rival. For Bom Porto was his , George’s. It was precious to him as England had never been. It was too little, too delicate, too private, to survive Peres’s handling. George had once seen the man spell liberation as . At the time, it had been a joke. He’d shown it to Teddy at the Club as a rich example of how one of Peres’s damaged words exactly fitted Peres’s damaged notion of its meaning. Give Peres power, though, and the man would mangle the country in just the same way as he mangled the language. One day, you’d ring up and there wouldn’t be a Montedor to get through to . Peres could make it disappear, as letters and words disappeared from shopfronts and signposts, eroded away by vandalism and the weather. The shape of the harbour, the spiky mountains, the leftover Portuguese trellises and balconies — they’d still be there, but they wouldn’t be Montedor. They’d be another country, as alien as Iran or the Philippines. Had it happened already? Was George having no luck with his phone calls because the international operator had been right first time and there was now just a blank space between Monte Cristo and Montego Bay?

Discarding an old lace-fronted dress shirt that laundering had turned to the colour of ivory, he felt helpless, shaky. It was if someone with a rubber was methodically trying to erase the world one lived in: Teddy was almost gone; Vera was going fast; the bunkering station was now little more than a few vestigial pencil lines. George knew who was doing it. Peres. It had to be Peres. That was the only possible explanation as far as he could fathom. Seeing Peres’s khaki, Creole face, smelling his minty breath, George hated him for a persecutor and a thief.

He tried to soothe himself. Thoughts like this were bad for his heart. Remember Vera’s warnings — her alarm at his morning sweatiness, her nagging talk of Dr Ferraz. George thought: but I don’t have Vera to worry for me now; I’m on my own lookout. He rolled up the tie that she’d brought back from the conference in São Paulo (“the closest thing I find for you to a living rainbow”), and bedded it down between his shirts.

There was a blast from a baritone ship’s siren below the window. A coaster was sliding past, lighting up the water as she went. Eight thousand tons, or thereabouts; and she was riding low, a damned sight too close to her Tropical line. The siren sounded again, full of the self-importance of having somewhere to go. Like every ship on its way out of the estuary nowadays, she made George feel left behind.

A hairpin fell out of a pair of boxer shorts as he lifted them from the drawer — his mother’s. This was how things came full circle. Soon everything female in his life would be his mother’s again. It was like being six, to find one’s mother’s scent in one’s clothes, and odd maternal souvenirs lurking in one’s underwear. He half expected to hear himself scolded for crumpling his shirts into balls instead of folding them. His parents — provident as always — had taken care when dying to leave enough of themselves to last George through his own lifetime: hairpins here, pictures there, postcards, hats and papers. In his first week in St Cadix, he’d had to throw out his father’s old pipes because he didn’t want to find himself smoking them by accident. Out of tobacco one Sunday, he had raided an ancient tin of his father’s: the stuff had flared in the bowl and burned like wood shavings, its dusty, rectorish taste taking him back fifty years in a breath.

He opened, and quickly closed, another drawer full of trinket boxes.

“Do you think this brooch goes with my organdie, dear?” His mother was talking to his father, who, as usual, wasn’t listening. “Dear?”

“Very nice, dear,” his father said in the patient voice that he kept specially for talking to women and children.

“What does George think?”

“Oh — tophole,” said George at ten, from deep in the Aeromodellers’ Monthly; and came swooping back like a glider falling out of a thermal to his glass of Chivas Regal and his carrier bag of linen.

His parents were more alive, more real to him now, than he was to himself. They had some sort of knack, a staying power, that George had failed to inherit. Thalassa bulged with them, while he still tiptoed round it like a weekend guest. Their past was intact (how did they manage it?) while George’s felt as if it was crumbling from under him so fast that he couldn’t even count its going. As for the future … George saw that as the period covered by the next shipping forecast. It didn’t look bright, either, the way things were looking now. South, veering southwest, six to gale eight. Visibility moderate, becoming poor later. Rain later. Something of that order. Certainly not a future that anyone could take much comfort from.

On the way downstairs, George found himself being chided by his father.

“I do wish you’d stop moping round this house like a sick cat,” his father said.

“There’s a pain in my back,” George said. “My heart’s giving out warning signals. I’m not a well man.”

“If you want something to keep you occupied, you can always deliver some parish magazines. Or give your mother a hand, for a change.”

“Yes, Daddy,” George said, squeezing rudely past his father on the landing.

He cooked himself a rubbery omelette in his mother’s kitchen, on his mother’s pan, and drank the remains of one of his own bottles of Vinho Verde.

“That’s not what I’d call a proper meal at all,” his mother said.

“Wine? On top of whisky?” his father said.

“Will you leave me alone, for Christ’s sake? I am sixty years old.”

“The boy’s drunk,” his father said.

“He’s just going through a phase,” said his mother.

“There are certain levels of behaviour that I simply will not tolerate in this house,” his father said.

George rid himself of them by folding The Times back on the crossword and getting out his pen; “Vessel goes astern in some Liverpool sea shanty (5)” was obviously “sloop”, and “Philosopher uses box, in emergency (8)” was “Socrates”. He got “castigate” and “pythons” before he heard his parents’ voices again, coming from behind the closed door of the drawing room.

“Heaven knows what they’re going to make of that young man in the Navy,” his father said.