Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

In Wapping (or was it Limehouse?), George walked with the sceptical, seamanlike roll of one who knows that the ground is always in danger of sliding away from under one’s feet. He was on good nodding terms with every lighterman. The clubbishly furnished saloon was untidy with books from the London Library. In his airy galley, he was learning to cook — real Elizabeth David sort of cookery. Soufflés, ragouts, things like that. Old Africa hands turned up at the dockside. (Take old George, the lucky bastard. Did just what he wanted. Happy as a clam down there on the river.) Up in the bows, Tom carpentered away with chisel and plane. And there was his grandchild. Pure mustard. It was Tom who said the boy looked just like George. No doubt about it this time: he’d sailed home.

George didn’t hear the shipping forecast. The radio played to an empty house. The complex low was drifting south to central Europe; a high was moving into Shannon. The wind, said the man on the wireless, would be from the north, force four to five. Visibility moderate. Good later.

George slept. The folds of sallow skin around his eye and cheek were drained of blood. His overlong grey hair was a limp tangle on the pillow. Only his beard had life in it. It was growing in the night, the white and ginger curls sprouting and twining like vegetable shoots under glass. A considerate trespasser, seeing that face and failing to hear the feeble gull-cries in the throat and chest, might have reached for the blanket (one corner of which was clenched in the man’s knobbly fist) and pulled it gently all the way up over the head.

By the start of the fifth month, each night had turned for Sheila into a long solitary adventure. She oscillated between sleep and wakefulness. During her minutes of sleep she had vivid and peculiar dreams. Every time she opened her eyes she found herself wanting to get out of bed and pee. The woman at the clinic said that all this was quite normal, and Sheila accepted it with placid curiosity. She had never been very interested in her own body; now she studied herself as if she were a new subject on her curriculum. Each symptom of pregnancy was a discovery to be welcomed, and Sheila warmed even to the varicose veins that were now showing like blue threadworms on her thighs and calves.

The luminous dial of the redundant alarm clock showed that it was 4.30. Tom was asleep under the duvet, exhaling gently like an old steam locomotive in a siding. Sheila slid from the bed and padded to the bathroom. Peeing (gallons!), she fancied that she could feel it move. Poor little squidge.

“Sorry, dear,” she said aloud in Cockney. Then, “Can’t a fellow get a bit of peace even in the bleeding womb?”

Down in the kitchen, she made a pot of weak tea. She liked London at this hour, its orangey glow, the distant, intermittent surf of long-distance lorries out on the A23. She liked waiting for the clatter of the first milk floats on the street and for the rim of violet, pigeon-coloured dawn over the roofs. It was a good time to work. Sitting in her dressing gown at Tom’s table, she opened the feint-lined notebook with the words HACK STUFF biroed on its cover.

Today she had to get a review in to the Observer . Eight hundred words on a new edition of the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle. She’d tried to start it yesterday, but had only got as far as the first sentence. “No wonder that the Carlyle marriage was childless: Thomas was baby enough to last Jane Welsh a lifetime.” It wouldn’t do. Of her last review (about women workers in rural Italy), the Observer’s literary editor had said over the phone: “Fine, fine. But don’t you think it’s a bit … ah … well, rather … slightly … shrill?” Sheila was afraid that the sentence about the Carlyles was definitely rather slightly shrill. She inked it out with a line of black loops and noticed to her surprise that she’d put sugar in the tea. She never took sugar. Was this the start of a pregnant craving?

She drew a flower on a long stalk in the margin and wrote: “Jane Welsh had more to get off her chest than most Victorian women: she was married to Thomas Carlyle.” She crossed that out too, and burped; another symptom. She stared at the paper, wrote Weird Dream and underscored it twice.

Every night lately, she’d been having anxiety dreams about the baby. It kept on cropping up in odder and odder disguises. Last week it had arrived in the shape of a ginger cat caught in the top of a tall tree. The cat had stared down at her, rheumy-eyed, its tail frisking the leaves. She’d tried to climb the tree to save it. The cat had hissed at her. She’d slipped, bloodying her knees and forearms on the bark. The cat had climbed on to a higher bough, where it turned into a bird and sang. That was all in the notebook. Then there was the one about the baby as a ragged old man. A dosser with a cider bottle. He was squatting on the doorstep in a filthy overcoat, hawking and spitting. She’d asked him inside. He’d sat at the table where she was working now, eating chocolate biscuits and sardines. As he ate he grew fatter and fatter and fatter, a roly-poly cuckoo in the nest. When Sheila’s cupboard was bare, the old man began to curse her. She had to stick her fingers in her ears to muffle the stream of obscenities that came gushing out of him— like blood, a flux of arterial blood , as she wrote later. As he cursed, she watched him shrivelling like a balloon with a puncture, and at the end of the dream he was just a sort of wizened rubbery thing, inches big, a scrap of rubbish on the floor. Summing it up, Sheila had written: Fear of inadequate lactation (?).

She’d woken from a funny one this morning. She seemed to have dreamed her way inside her own womb. It was a wild, dark place, with confused waters crashing on what seemed like a rocky beach. Standing there on the edge, she’d been ice cold with panic. She couldn’t see properly, but she could hear cries from a long way away. They came in gusts, with the wind — horrible cries, like pigs squealing, but human. Sheila plunged into the scummy surf, and was immediately out of her depth. She tried to swim towards the cries, but her schoolgirl breaststroke was agonizingly slow, and her mouth was choked with salt and slime. She swam and swam, sick with exhaustion and fright. Somewhere out there, it was drowning and she had to save it. Her legs seemed tangled up with seaweed, her arms were numb. Outlined for a moment against the dark roof of the place, she saw something — a raft or boat, perched on the lip of the enormous wave that was going to smash it to smithereens.

Then, suddenly, she had it in her hand. It was a broken walnut shell, and it had an occupant — a stiff little manikin, quite dead, like a plastic doll in a Christmas cracker. Angry, a child herself now, in a party dress, Sheila threw the tiny, beastly white thing into the fire, where it fizzled briefly and melted into a blob of goo. Sheila wept. Her own cries woke her and her first thought was that she must have scared Tom. But he was deep asleep; huge, reliable, real. She touched him to bring herself properly awake, and felt his drowsy penis stir comfortingly under her fingers.

In her notebook she wrote: Womb. Water. A tempest. Me alone on the beach. Yet the more she thought about her nightmare, the less that stormy place seemed like a womb. She remembered the pitiless wind pinning her dress against her body, the gravelly roar of the breakers at the water’s edge, the little boat on the wave.

That boat. It wasn’t her baby she’d been dreaming of, it was her father. Or perhaps it was her baby and her father both at once. But she felt intruded on — as if her father had come by night like an incubus, to take her by stealth in her sleep.