Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“It’s adolescence, dear,” his mother said.

At 9.00, George rang Diana. He wanted to invite himself round for a drink. He wanted to invite her to come with him on the boat — only as far as Plymouth, of course. Or Dartmouth. For a day or two, to see how she liked it. But her voice on the phone was surprised and already sleepy. George coughed, and said that he was leaving the key to the house under a brick.

“I’ll look in when I go past and pick up your mail.”

“I’d be awfully glad if you would.”

“It’s no trouble at all. When will you get to London?”

“Oh — ten days, a fortnight. It depends on the weather.”

“Ring me up and tell me where you are … when you’re in port.”

“Will do,” George said.

“You wouldn’t like a drink … sort of now, would you? Before you go?”

“Oh …” George said, playing for time, waiting for the invitation to solidify. “It’s a bit on the late side … isn’t it?”

“I guess so … with your early start.”

“I really meant—”

“Take care. Watch out for Arthur. Have a lovely trip. I’ll be thinking of you.”

“’f you too,” George said, swallowing, and found that Diana had hung up before he’d spoken.

Putting the phone down, he noticed his face reflected in the dark uncurtained window. It was in ghostly monochrome, like a photographic negative. What was upsetting was that, at first glance, it wasn’t his own face. The hair and beard were his, but not the plummeting cheekbones, the sunken eye sockets, the ridged and bony temples, the fishlike downturn of the lips. They were his father’s. Worse, they were his father’s, not at sixty but on the day that George had last seen him, when the rector was seventy-nine and was already confined to the upstairs bedroom, where he kept a baby’s hours of sleep broken by weeping complaints.

“Come … to … the … station,” he’d said, in his new voice that sounded like dead leaves blowing across stone.

“What?” George had bent close. “What is it — Daddy?”

“Constipation,” the rector whispered. “It’s just this … ruddy … constipation.”

George, finding himself nearer to his father than he’d ever been before, quickly kissed him. It was only on the forehead and the kiss was no more than a graze of the lips. His father’s skull felt as fragile as a speckled blackbird’s egg. But the rector’s eyes were shocked, helpless, accusing. They followed George as if the kiss had been an indecent assault.

That was the face — the face he’d kissed — that he saw in the window. Fascinated, appalled, he studied it, turning his head slowly in the bare electric light. The resemblance faded out of the reflection. It was just a trick of the uneven glass and the darkness outside. There was no more real likeness than there was in the pictures of the ancestors on the walls. It was the Grey family cheekbones that he’d seen — no more. Even so, it gave him the jitters. He’d never realized that he would ever look so old, or so much his father’s son.

At 10.00 George, middling drunk now, locked the dark house and pushed the key under the brick. He would have liked to have left a note, but couldn’t think of anyone to leave a note for. Not even the milkman called at Thalassa. Holsum-hatted (H LS M — M CA’S # B D: “What is that gibberish on the boy’s head,” his father said), carrying Vera’s oilcloth bag of many colours, he padded out through the soggy mulch of pine needles. The house frowned at his back.

The night was damp and windless. The sea at the foot of the cliff was inaudible, the branches of the trees overhead quite still. It was the deceptive calm that you expected before a gale came roaring out of the southwest. It deadened the village, making it feel like something preserved in jelly.

Most of the houses were as dark as his own, still waiting for the summer visitors who rented them furnished by the week. For weeks people had been talking about The Visitors, in the same tone that they would have used to say The Russians or The Chinese. But no Visitors had come yet. At least none that George had seen.

In a very few windows, the curtains were splashed with blue light from the televisions inside. The only voices on Upper Marine Walk were American ones talking too loudly about love and death with the tinny vowels of speak-your-weight machines.

At the bottom of the hill there was a noisy pool of pop music from the jukebox in The Falcon’s Nest and the bleep and chatter of wargames in the bar. George kept to the shadows on the far side of the street. He’d always thought of pubs as friendly places in whose foggy undemanding gloom a man could safely talk to himself and nurse his bruises. But you’d have to feel very good about yourself to face The Falcon’s Nest with its wolfish motorbikes on the pavement outside and its angry racket within.

The man from the TV shop — Jellaby — was there, a baggy, albino figure under a sodium streetlamp. He was propositioning a girl almost as fat as himself in motorcycle leather gear.

George heard the girl say, “Cash?” and saw Jellaby raise his open palms under the lamp. “Anyway you want it, flower,” Jellaby said. “Or I could cut you in on a percentage.” He spotted George. “Evening, squire! Off on your travels then?” He laughed. George cringed and let out a small hiccup on the salty, hamburger-and-chip-smelling air.

“Goonight,” George said, trying to cover the hiccup.

“Don’t forget now, squire!”

How squalid and graceless it was, this strange village England of the young, where a man like Jellaby was at home and George was in resentful exile. Walking on, grateful for the darkness of the empty street between the padlocked aquarium and the soft Queen Anne brick of the old custom house, George thought of Africa: the statue of Dr Da Silva in the square, spraygunned with Vivas; the silver band under loops of fairylights; the couples dancing beyond a fringe of dry acacia trees. He saw a man, taller than the rest, easing his way through the crowd. Hi, Mister George. He couldn’t believe it-it felt so bloody long ago, as far away as childhood itself.

He reached the quay wall and leaned for a moment against its black bulk, feeling the granite against his cheek. The silhouettes of the scallop dredgers were rigidly still on their moorings, their masts and derricks forming a complicated cuneiform inscription on the water beyond. For a moment, he saw them as tuna boats, jostling abreast, waiting their turn to discharge at the Frigorifico.

“Hey, Mister?”

The voice seemed to come more from inside his head than out of it. He thought, Christ, I’m drunker than I realized.

“Mister? Please? Where is the red lights place?”

George saw, or thought he saw, the Creole face of a boy in his twenties. His thin nylon shirt looked far too skimpy for a March night. His head barely came up to George’s chest.

“Donde voce?” George said, his voice wobbly with drink.

“Cabo Verde, o senhor.”

“Cabo Verde? What are you doing here?” It was like being able to sing, to find words of Portuguese back in his mouth again.

“I am working on a German ship. I am a deckhand. We came in tonight. My brother also is with me. He stays aboard now, to study.”

“Your brother is a good boy,” George said. “You should be studying too, not out sniffing after whores.”

“Make a favour, sir, but I—”

“Which town in Cabo Verde? Which island?”

“Mindelo. São Vicente.”

“Mindelo? But that is marvellous! I know Mindelo.” He put his arm round the boy’s shoulder, hugging him. He felt so bony and frozen in his pitiable shirt that George was afraid for him. Stupid boy. He remembered an old jacket down in one of the hanging lockers in the saloon; the boy could have that — it’d be a bit big, but better than nothing. He thought there was a guernsey somewhere, too. Bloody German shipowners — the boy’s wages would be laughable, and what little money he had would probably be all mailed home to Mindelo.