Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Then Alex was there, looking oddly out of sorts.

“Well — see you back at the house, then? You know the way? Hullo, Angela.”

“Oh-hullo, Alex.”

“Better keep an eye on that man,” Alex said and laughed, an awkward titter. It sounded as if he’d been hitting the punch pretty hard.

When he was gone, and George and Angela were walking back to their drinks, Angela said, “Poor Alex.”

“Why ‘poor’?” George asked. The word seemed wrong for Alex on every count he could think of.

“Oh. You know. Alex is such a silly darling.”

A little later they were in the almost-dark of a room smelling of piled winter coats. A man in a collapsed bow-tie put his head round the door and said, “Any sign of Hattie? Anyone seen Hattie? Oh — sorry.”

Angela, snuggling in George’s arms, said, “You’re going to die. I know you’re going to die. You’re going to go away to sea and be killed!”

It was thrilling, the way Angela said it. The air in the room was thick with the excitement of the idea. George, torn between wanting to comfort and wanting to worship this wonderful girl, this lovely, generous innocent, kissed her. Angela’s mouth was open — as open as it had been when she gazed at him as he talked in the ballroom — and their tongues touched. He tasted her saliva, its toxic feminine secretions of attar and mint with (as he now seemed to remember) a trace of dry gin.

She drew her face away from his for a moment and said, “All I can think of is horrible things. Mines. Torpedoes. Those depth things—”

George, always at his most reliable on technical matters, said, “You only have to worry about depth charges if you’re in a submarine.”

“Don’t laugh at me. Ever.” And suddenly he was wrapped in her arms and she was kissing, kissing, kissing, as if each kiss would ward off another of her dreaded torpedoes.

He could feel the firmness of her stomach pressed against his own. How could anyone be so candid and so kind? She made every girl he’d ever met seem sly and commonplace. Mouth to mouth with Angela in the dark cloakroom, George felt ashamed of ever having given a second thought to the Vivienne Beales and Judith Pughs of the world.

It was inconceivable that she should know what she was doing — she had begun on a tender, sleepy-slow encircling of him with her stomach and thighs. For George, there was an unbearably sweet comfort in the movement. A gentleman — a real London person — would have somehow eased himself gently away from that lovely sway and ripple of her. But George couldn’t. He clung to Angela, adoring her, half choking on her kisses; he was airborne. Her tongue was reaching deep in his mouth, quivering against his palate. He—

Oh, Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ!

He had lost everything. It was unspeakable. Beastly . For the first time in his life, he’d met a girl whom he could love — who might even, once, have loved him back. And he’d disgraced himself. Worse than that. He’d polluted her , Angela, the purest creature alive. He couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear himself. He’d behaved like a bloody animal.

Yet she was still holding him. She was so guileless. She wasn’t aware of what had happened. Perhaps there was still just a ghost of a chance left to him, if only—

She said: “Was that nice for you, darling?”

“Uh … what?” He didn’t quite understand. He realized that he must be a bit plastered with the punch.

“Was it … ever so specially nice?”

Oh, Angela! Oh, the utter forgivingness of True Woman!

Her mouth was close to his ear. She said, “I can feel your wetness on me.”

What happened next was extraordinary and rather frightening. For she began to pummel him with her body in what seemed like a fit of sudden rage. He felt punished as she ground herself against him, wordlessly, panting a little, her head turned away to one side.

“Angela?” he said. “Angela!”

He stumbled backwards under her weight, into a soft wall of overcoats on pegs. He heard a silk lining tear somewhere behind his head. Angela’s assault on him abruptly stopped.

“Angela?” He didn’t know what to expect. He feared that she might be about to slap his face or, worse, shout to the world that he was a disgusting brute. “Er … Angela … are you … all right?”

“Bliss!” Angela said in a polite voice. George planted a succession of bewildered kisses in her hair.

He hung on tight, not to Angela now but to the grabrail of braided rope on the wheelhouse ceiling. He was hyperventilating (one of Vera’s medical words) and shaky on his pins. He was so stiffly tumescent that it hurt.

And he was hearing voices.

“Tillerman. Tillerman. Tillerman . This is Crystal Jewel. Crystal Jewel.”

Sitala was calling for Prudence, Vigilance for Rattray Head , Par Pilots for British Aviator . Crazy. George reached over his head to switch the captains off: dark patches of sweat showed on his shirtfront; his fingers, searching for the buttons on the VHF, felt sluggish and unwieldy as if a fuse had blown somewhere high up in his central nervous system. He tried to focus on the glittering haze ahead of the boat, but there was nothing there on which he could get a bearing — no distance, no shape or detail, no shade or gradation in the light. The needle of the log pointed unwaveringly at 5.5 knots, but he might as well have been free falling at a thousand miles a minute out in space.

“Bliss,” said Angela, and he felt the reminiscent pressure of her groin, coquettishly nuzzling his unruly member.

But she wasn’t a memory. He wasn’t idly dreaming Angela. She was a stowaway. Somehow she must have sneaked on board in port when he wasn’t looking. She hadn’t paid a penny for her passage, and George was stuck with her. Her sandalwood perfume and the green-apple fragrance of her hair blotted out the smell of timber, salt and burned diesel. It wasn’t what George had planned for himself at all. He was out at sea, in fog, with Angela and her old genius for choosing her moment to boot him in the guts.

“God Almighty,” George said, hanging from his strap, as passive as a carcass on a butcher’s hook. Breathing in, he felt a miniature bolt of forked lightning in his chest.

“Sweetie,” Angela said. The cloakroom was now lit by a bare 40 watt bulb. She picked up a white woollen coat which was lying in a scrambled heap on the floor, and handed it to him. He noticed the expensive label inside the collar: it had been made by someone in Paris.

“You can walk me home.”

The band was still playing in the ballroom. “Shouldn’t one say thank you to … er … Mrs Whatsit?” George said.

“Why?” She looked orphaned inside her big, untidy coat. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, her tongue parting his lips with a quick little wriggle. “You can thank me instead, silly.”

It took them an hour to walk the half-mile to the Haighs’ house in Bolton Gardens. They stopped to embrace under the gaunt planes in Onslow Square, and stopped again in Sumner Place, Cranley Gardens and Thistle Grove. The blistering stucco streets were as quiet as catacombs, every house shuttered and dead.

“Hold me!” Angela said; and George, exalted, in a high fever of pride and love, hugged her in the folds of his naval greatcoat with its silver buttons and saw South Kensington through a delirious fog of tears.

On the Old Brompton Road, Angela said: “Darling, what was it that you said to Cyril Connolly?”

George said: “Oh … nothing, really. You know.”

“People said you were awfully clever. Olga said you totally épaté’d him.”

“I didn’t realize who he was, actually.”