Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Oh, Georgiekins! You are clever. You’re the cleverest man in London. Aren’t you?”

Kissing her (at the corner of Gledhow Gardens), George basked in her praise, as sleek as a seal on a rock. But he wasn’t basking now. Heard in the wheelhouse, Angela’s remark didn’t sound like a compliment at all. It was a perfectly clear and straightforward question. After four hours in George’s exclusive company, she was beginning to harbour some serious doubts on the matter of his famous intelligence. And no wonder. For the first time ever, George and Angela were understanding each other very well. They were even in agreement about something. The sheer novelty of the occasion made George feel a bit better: he lowered himself from the strap to the seat by the chart table and began to update his dead reckoning — until he saw that his last DR position had been pencilled in only seven minutes before.

Next morning, feeling ill with hope and apprehension, he rang her at 10.30 from the Maitlands’. A maid answered, and it was a scary age before Angela came to the telephone. “George? Georgie! I thought you’d sailed away on your horrid ship and I’d never see you ever again.”

They lunched at Rules. They took in a show at the Vaudeville. They dined at the Connaught Grill where Angela (the angel) paid. All day George had the feeling that they were being tracked by a ghostly film camera. There were misty long shots of them in the streets; and as Angela leaned forward over a grizzled lamb chop and shook a bang of fluffy hair away from her eyes, the camera zoomed in close to dwell lovingly (as George dwelt lovingly) on the tiny, jewellike droplets of perspiration in the sweet cleft above her lip.

When George returned to Earls Court, the Maitlands were curiously stuffy. They didn’t seem to recognize the extraordinary personage whom George had become in the last twenty-four hours. He felt that his love deserved to be admired and wondered over by the sub-lunar world, and that the Maitland household was being pretty bloody stingy when it came to coughing up its dues of admiration and wonder.

Alex, of course, must be rotten with envy. He’d expected that. But he was hardly inside the house before Mrs Maitland gave him a cool glance from her chair in the little chintz-filled drawing-room and said, “Well: I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m for Bedfordshire.”

He remembered Angela on the Maitlands—“Sweet, of course, but rather too middle class, don’t you think, darling?” George thought Mrs Maitland’s remark was tiresomely middle class: her “Bedfordshire” made him wince. After she’d gone upstairs Alex made cocoa with dried milk, which was pretty middle class too.

George, in as careless a voice as he could manage, said: “Took Angela to the Connaught. They manage to do quite a decent meal there still.”

Alex said: “You’re not serious about Angela, are you?” His cigarette holder dangled from his fingers at an effete angle. He was blowing a smoke ring.

George smiled a superior, sophisticated, still waters run deep, my lips are sealed sort of smile; a smile that William Powell might have been glad to copy.

Alex said, “Since you seem to know about these things, what with going to dinner at the Connaught and everything … I’d have thought that Angela was obviously quite a tasty hors d’oeuvre, but I can’t really see her as anyone’s idea of a proper entrée, frankly.” He made a finicky show of tapping his ash off the end of his cigarette into the fireplace.

George couldn’t believe what he’d heard. For a moment he grinned, as if Alex had said something clever and amusing in the wardroom. Then he said, “Stand up.”

“Oh, come on, George!”

“Bloody stand up!” His eyes were prickling.

Alex shrugged. The funny abstracted look on his face was like a doctor’s, hearing out a maundering patient.

“Stand up!”

Alex was only half-way out of his chair when George hit him. He went down like a detonated chimney stack: nothing much happened at first, then suddenly a lot did. Separate bits of Alex seemed to topple, one after another. A spindly side table crashed under one of his knees and lay wrecked on the floor beside him. His lip was bleeding. He picked his burning cigarette out of the carpet and fitted it with difficulty back into its holder.

George looked up nervously overhead: he was afraid of Mrs Maitland’s intervention. But the house seemed asleep. He said, “I’m sorry about the table,” and took an awkward pace forward. He wasn’t sure about how things should go from here. When a chap knocked down another chap for insulting a lady, ought he to offer to give the other chap a hand up afterwards? He said, “I’ll pay for it of course.”

Alex stared at him. The man was smiling. He said, “Bugger the stupid table. And — George?”

“What?” He held out his hand to Alex who was still on all fours. The hand wasn’t taken.

“Bugger you.”

By noon the next day, with only eight hours of leave still left to him, George was engaged to Angela. Well, not quite engaged. But as good as. There was no ring, no terrifying interview with Mr Haigh, who was away at his office in The Minories and not expected back till six; he hadn’t even — exactly — asked the Question. But somehow, miraculously, Angela was going to marry him. She talked in a dramatic whisper of a Special Licence.

“My own sweetie!” she said. “We’ll épater everybody!”

The whisper was partly practical, for they were in Angela’s bedroom, having stolen there on tiptoe past the elderly crook-backed maid whom Angela called The Gorgon. In broad daylight, without even pulling the curtains, Angela reached behind her back and undid the straps of her brassière.

“Kiss?” she said.

George had never seen a woman’s bare nipples before. Angela’s nipple was encircled by a little palisade of quite long pale hairs. He loved each single hair. Weak with gratitude and wonder, he kissed, and felt her nipple swell and stiffen between his lips.

“Oh, Georgie!” Angela said in a strange little girl voice, as she cradled his head in her hands, “I’m so frightened you’re going to be killed”.

Paddington Station was full of men in uniform saying goodbye to girls. George too. At last he was part of the great, grown-up London world. It was a triumph to be George as he stood there with the other men, Angela (she was crying, the sweet darling) clasped in his arms. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Alex Maitland with his mother at the far end of the platform. Poor old Alex. George pitied him, rather, for his innocence.

They avoided each other when the train stopped at Plymouth. It was Alex who arranged to bunk with Webb, while George got Peter Neave. For the two weeks before Alex’s transfer to a destroyer came through, things were definitely gruesome: in that time, Alex said only one thing to George in private. “Grey?” he said. “Don’t you think that you really owe my mother a letter?”

But George was far too busy writing letters to Angela to bother with bread-and-butter notes to stuffy, middle class Mrs Maitland. It was lucky that Larkspur was refitting, for the amount of paper passing by almost every post between Plymouth and Bolton Gardens would have been a serious embarrassment to the creaky mailship service. George wrote more often, but Angela’s letters were much more beautiful. Each one began with a detailed list of shops visited and people seen. This sometimes ran to as many as four pages. Then she’d come to the bit that George hungered after: she dreaded for him; he was always in her thoughts; she had been having nightmares in which George’s ship was on fire, sinking, lost, or caught in a wild typhoon. Reading these letters, George thought what a humbling thing it was to be loved by a girl who cared for you more than she cared for anyone alive. He kept her letters under his pillow and spent quite a lot of time at night thinking with agonized pleasure of Angela’s nipples and their enchanting circlets of bright hair.