Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

It really was extraordinary, that business about the hair. Hadn’t he seen topless pin-ups? Perhaps they weren’t around much in ’44. You booby ! George, his pipe alight and drawing nicely now, thought: but it’s all right-it’s not too late — I don’t have to go through with this . It was still early: the sun, just visible now as a fuzzy disc in the thinning haze, was still well to the east, standing at an angle of 035° or 040°. He wasn’t committed yet. Not really. Angela wasn’t pregnant or anything. He could escape. No-one would blame him. Not even Angela’s parents. For an insane, trance-like instant, George saw himself getting away scot-free from the future. You could do it. It’d be just the same as grabbing the wheel and steering Calliope clear of …

… the tanker towering on the starboard beam . It was higher than the sun. Its great riveted plates, like armadillo scales, were scarred with patches of dry rust. The thing was moving at what must be 20 knots at least, bearing down on him. Calliope’s hull was drumming with the vibration of its screws. If to starboard red appear, It is your duty to keep clear! He yanked the wheel free of the autopilot and hauled it round to starboard. The wheelhouse went dark. He was racing past the ship’s side, with a narrow ditch of streaming, swollen water between the two vessels, the rusty plates going by in a blur, and Calliope making a sudden, sickening speed like a truck running out of control on a mountain road. With a rush of light, the tanker was astern and he was tumbling in her wake. He saw the single star and stripes of a threadbare Panamanian flag hanging limp on the jackstaff.

“Bastard!” He was out in the cockpit, stumbling and sliding. His knee banged into the side of a locker. “Bloody thoughtless bastards!” There was nobody in sight on the tanker, no human outline against the windows of the bridge. The buggers were below — playing cards or sniggering over girlie mags. He’d come within four feet of being smashed to bits by Lazy Mike.

“You SHIT!” George yelled from the galvanized steel pulpit on his stern. The tanker trembled, shimmered and turned into

its own ghost.

“Temper temper!” Angela said.

“Oh, Christ—” George said, diving for the wheel to rescue Calliope from the helpless figures of eight that she was making in the tanker’s wash.

“That sort of language may go down very well in your barrackroom, or whatever they call it in the Navy, but it really won’t do here.”

“Sorry, Daddy,” George said, seriously worried for the state of his cardiovascular equipment. It felt as if he had about five gallons more blood than was good for him thrashing around in his veins.

“What age do you think you are, George? Twenty-five years old?”

Not for the first time, George choked back the temptation to point out to Vera that, for someone with the build of a Russian lady discus thrower without the justification of the discus to go with it, she was hardly in a position to nag him about the condition of his heart. He watched the compass card swerving and tilting in its bowl and inched it round to 093°.

Something went wrong with Larkspur’s steering gear and her rudder had to be rehung. George got five days’ shore leave. He spent it in Bolton Gardens — though to put it flatly, like that, “in Bolton Gardens”, was ridiculously inadequate. For five days it seemed to George that he was as close to living in heaven as any man could bear.

Never had he found something he could love in its entirety as he loved the Haighs’ house in Bolton Gardens. It was, of course, consecrated by the fact that Angela lived there; but without Angela the house would still have been an object of wonder. The most ordinary things in it made George marvel. The lavatories, for instance. The Haighs had two, not counting the ones in their three bathrooms. They smelled prettily of potpourri, fresh towels and sweet peas. Each one was supplied with pictures and a rack of books and magazines. When the Haighs condescended to open their bowels, they did even that in style, inhaling the scent of lavender and leafing through Tatler and Vogue . Amazing.

It was as if the only life that George had known before had been scaled-down and fiddly, like a Hornby Double-0 gauge train set. Staying at the Haighs’, he saw for the first time what it meant to be Life Size. He couldn’t get over the sheer bigness of it. When you went into the Haighs’ first-floor drawing-room, it wasn’t so much like entering a room as being admitted to a park with a ha-ha, woody avenues and long vistas. The armchairs and sofas were set at great distances from each other, across lake-like stretches of carpet, of a pale and delicate blue. When people talked in the Haighs’ drawing-room, its scented spaces lent to the conversation a curiously operatic volume and grandeur.

“I saw Cicely Beech in Town today,” called Mrs Haigh from the south-west corner. “She was in Fortnums. With her youngest. Henrietta’s nearly three now. Quite the little madam.”

“Oh — sweet!” Angela said from the far north.

“Anyone for a drop more sherry?” sang Mr Haigh, chiming in from the east in his surprisingly high tenor. “How’s George’s glass?”

For quite the most wonderful thing in the Haighs’ wonderful house was the way in which Angela’s parents were being nice to George. He’d expected fireworks. On the train up, he’d been daydreaming about eloping with Angela to Gretna Green, and had feared that five days didn’t give them sufficient time to qualify for marriage under Scottish law.

But it wasn’t like that at all. When he arrived at Bolton Gardens, Mrs Haigh had even pecked his cheek; and Mr Haigh, on his return from the Minories, shook hands with George and said, “So you’re George,” as if he was actually pleasantly surprised by the gangling sub-lieutenant in his hall.

Beside the Haighs, George felt awkward and grubby. It was as if life at the rectory had condemned him to be always two or three baths behind these astonishingly clean and polished people. His uniform had been put on clean that morning, but he still felt that he gave off a bad smell and that Angela’s parents were being extraordinarily kind in not noticing, or pretending not to notice, it.

Mr Haigh wanted to know all about Larkspur . George told him all about Larkspur —her tonnage, her gunnery, how the Asdic worked. After half an hour in Mr Haigh’s company, he even felt sufficiently at his ease to do his imitation of old Prynne’s lesson in Dead Reckoning. Mr Haigh laughed. Angela, sitting on the arm of George’s chair, said, “Isn’t he just bliss , Daddy?”

On his first evening, they dressed for dinner. George had never been in a house where you dressed for dinner. Someone had laid out one of Mr Haigh’s old dinner suits in his bedroom. It was a bit sloppy round the waist and an inch or two short in the arms and legs, but George, descending the staircase and studying himself in the full-length gilt mirror on the second floor landing, reckoned that he cut quite a dash in it. During the meal, his only twinge of fright came when Mr Haigh said, “So you were still at Pwllheli last August?” and George said “Yes, sir,” and Mr Haigh said, “When you and Angela met up.” George was just about to put Mr Haigh right on this one when Angela said, “Yes, don’t you remember, Daddy, when I went to stay with the Donnisons in Shrewsbury?”

“Oh,” Mr Haigh said, “you’re a friend of the Donnisons,” and George was saved, in the nick of time, by the arrival of the stewed mutton.

Everything was done properly at Bolton Gardens. When dinner was over, the ladies, meaning Angela and her mother, actually withdrew to the drawing-room, and Mr Haigh said to George, “Would you care for some port?”