Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

George backed away, but there was no visible escape route except out across the floor through the dancers. A dozen people at least now were looking at him as if he was some kind of lab specimen. They must have mistaken him for someone else.

The fat man said: “Doesn’t it make you utterly ashamed to meet a fighting man? It simply churns the guilt round and round in me whenever I see Johnny. Always so friendly, always so unpatronizing. And I think, but why — oh why? — can’t I fight this beastly war for myself?”

George couldn’t make it out at all. He wasn’t sure whether the fat man was about to burst into tears or if this was some clever, nasty, London game at his expense.

“It’s our friend Johnny here who makes me want to declare a moratorium on Art for the duration. When Johnny brings the smell of the battlefield into the drawing room, he makes the whole idea of Art seem perfectly ridiculous. No, honestly, look at him! Isn’t he quite simply more real than anyone else here? If you want the spirit of the age, my dears, don’t, for heaven’s sake, ask for it from Wystan Auden; ask for it from Johnny.”

A wandering man with a bottle of Scotch peered over the tops of the heads of the group. “Cyril talking balls again?” he inquired, moving on.

The fat man ignored the interruption. “And it’s all very well our letting Johnny fight for a world fit for us to live in; but what are we going to do to make a world fit for Johnny? I can’t bear it. All our rubbishy little poems and rubbishy little paintings. When I see Johnny, I feel worthless and fraudulent. How are we ever going to ask Johnny to forgive us?”

It was awful. George wanted to knock the man down. He was being made to look a bloody fool by this damned pansy drunk. But he felt boiled and wordless. He stood rigidly upright, the blood gone from his face, his hands fiercely clenched at his sides.

“But what will Johnny do and where will Johnny go? Whenever I hear the word ‘Peace’, I’m afraid that all I see is an ugly politicians’ world of barbed wire and passports. The thing that bothers me is that I simply can’t imagine Johnny ever again being able to listen to “The Ring” at Salzburg, or wandering freely from the Cote D’Azur to the Sistine Chapel. After this war, do you see Johnny sipping Calvados in Pamplona or tramping through the ruins of Mycenae? I have to confess I don’t myself. And that seems to me to be one of the questions that ought to be right at the top of our agenda now. Where will Johnny go?”

George saw that the man, smiling now, was reaching out to lay his pudgy hand on George’s shoulder. Ducking angrily away, George said, “Anywhere, so long as it’s a bloody long way away from people like you.”

As soon as he heard himself saying the words, he wished that he’d swallowed them. They sounded priggish and schoolboy. No sooner had he set foot in London than he’d publicly disgraced himself. It was dreadful. He felt ashamed and sick. He wondered if he ought to sneak quietly away into the dark street. The thought that he’d have to find his hostess and thank her first, and that he’d have to go home sometime to the Maitlands’, stopped him.

Then, suddenly, there was a woman, laughing. Laughing? “Well done, you,” she said, “it’s always nice to see someone squashing Cyril.”

“Is he always like that?”

“In his off moments, yes, pretty much so. I think he was rehearsing for an editorial.”

“Who is he?”

“Cyril? He does Horizon . You know.”

George found words in his mouth again. “I know a thing or two about horizons, actually. One has to. As a navigation officer. It’s almost the first thing you learn — how to tell a true one from a false one.”

“Oh, that’s rather good. Yes. Sonia — Michael — did you hear that? Johnny here has got a new name for Cyril’s rag. He calls it False Horizon . He’s in the Navy. He should know.”

“Actually … I’m not Johnny, in fact. Actually … I’m George.”

For some reason, everyone seemed to think that this was funny too. For the next few minutes, almost everything he said was met with peals of appreciative laughter. He’d never known success so easily come by.

It was during a break in the conversation, when George was basking in this sudden celebrity, that he realized. Horizon! It was the magazine that Alex was sent every month. “Even at sea one ought at least to try to keep up,” Alex said, and the two subs passed Horizon between them. Sometimes Alex read poems from it aloud. Only yesterday, George had been reading a long article in it by George Orwell, a writer whom George always kept an eye out for, and only partly because of Orwell’s first name. Why hadn’t someone told him that the fat man was Cyril Connolly? It was mortifying . To come back from London saying that he’d met Cyril Connolly was one thing; to admit what had actually happened was quite another. Going back over the scene in his head, he found himself biting his lip in remorse.

Yet still — he was swamped in the company of smiling girls. He danced. He fetched new glasses of punch for everyone. He was modest about the one, mercifully uneventful, Atlantic convoy on which he’d sailed. The Negro bandleader, stomping and grinning, put down his tenor sax and sang “Get that tiger! Get that tiger! Get that old tiger rag!” and the whole room, led by a party of Americans, did an athletic new dancestep called the Jive, in which girls’ dresses swirled round their waists and showed their rigging of suspender belts and nylon stocking tops.

Where, in that ocean of swimming, friendly faces, was Angela Haigh? Did someone introduce them? Had he cut in on her during a dance? Had she been one of the people around Connolly? All George could see now was an intimate pool of gloom in a corner, and Angela’s face, huge-eyed under bangs of pale and fluffy hair. She was saying, “But don’t you simply dread torpedoes?”

No-one in his life had paid attention to George as Angela did in that corner. Her eyes and mouth were framed in the same rapt, astonished O. When he offered to go off and forage for more drinks for them both, she said, “Oh! Would you? Really?” as if she’d never been extended such an exquisite courtesy before. And when he returned with two glasses of punch, she sipped hers, paused for a moment, and said, “Bliss!” Being with Angela was not quite real, in quite the nicest way. It was a little like being in the pictures … Clark Gable and Merle Oberon. But then, George supposed, that was London for you. Being in London, with these London people, must be like living your whole life in the pictures. Feeling himself beginning to drown in Angela’s lovely gaze, he tried to focus on the tiny spray of blackheads that showed under the powder on her forehead, but found himself enchanted by the blackheads too.

“I had a friend,” Angela said, in a voice midway between a whisper and a sob. “Toby Carraway. He was on convoy duty. Lost at Sea.”

“Rotten luck,” George said.

“Tragic,” Angela said. “I can’t bear to think about it. Toby was such a darling. You’d have loved him.”

George felt an unworthy twinge of relief at the fact that Toby Carraway was dead, and spent the next sixty seconds feeling ashamed of himself for the thought.

“It makes one seem so pointless” Angela said, meaning that it made her seem pointless, but that this only enhanced the general, overwhelming pointfulness of George.

Dancing with Angela, as the floor thinned of couples and the lights went down, he felt her hand move from his right shoulder to the bare skin at the back of his neck. Experimentally he increased the pressure of his palm against the small of her back. They were hardly even pretending to shuffle on the floor now. He could feel Angela breathing against his throat. It was heartstopping — she was so warm and weightless. The thin silk stuff of her dress moved under his hand against her skin. When the number came to an end, they stayed standing there alone together, as serenely entangled as a pair of week-old kittens in a basket.