Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Yes, sir. Please, sir.” George’s knowledge of the form was a bit shaky here. Were you supposed to pass it from right to left or from left to right? And did it count if there were only two of you?

Mr Haigh put a decanter and a glass in front of him. “I’ve never been a port man, myself,” he said. “I’m down to my last three bottles of Drambuie, and I’m counting on you to win this war for me before I run out altogether.”

“Yes, sir,” George said, “I’ll mention it to the Admiralty.”

Mr Haigh laughed and sipped at his liqueur. “You’re not … planning to stay on in the Navy after the war’s over, are you?”

This was exactly what George had hoped to do. If there ever was a Peace (and people were beginning to talk now as if they really thought that the war could be over by as soon as the end of this summer), George didn’t want to lose the view from the bridge. By 1948—even earlier — he could be a lieutenant-commander, RN. After that — well, George (at least before he met Angela) had secretly toyed with the names of Captain Grey, and even Admiral Grey, and thought they sounded distinctly plausible. But it took less than a second in the Haighs’ dining-room to ditch his entire career in the regular Navy. He said: “Oh, no, sir. No, of course not.”

“That takes a load off my mind, anyway. I’m afraid that Angela wouldn’t make a very satisfactory service wife.”

Satisfactory? Surely that wasn’t the right sort of word to use of Angela?

“But London isn’t at all good for her either, you know.”

“No, sir.” So Angela was … ill … in some way that George didn’t know about. Or perhaps she was just delicate. Suppose she had — TB, or even cancer? It would be all right. George would nurse her. She wouldn’t have to lift a finger — he’d look after her.

“I’ve got a contact or two in the ship business in Newcastle-on-Tyne,” Mr Haigh said. “They might come in useful. Don’t know whether you’ve ever been up in that part of the world? It’s on the grim side, of course, but then, with Angela, that’s rather what one’s looking for, isn’t it? Something to bring her down to earth.”

George was lost. He poured himself a second glass of Mr Haigh’s port, said, “Sort of. Yes. I suppose so, sir,” and laughed nervously, man to man.

“Well. We’d better cross that bridge when we come to it. When you win the war for us, yes?” His face was turned fully towards George. His smile was tired. His head, almost completely bald except for a rim of black fuzz high around his temples, gleamed in the candlelight.

Returning his gaze from the distance of Calliope’s wheel-house, George saw a mixture of pity and embarrassment there. No, it was worse than that. It was shame. Mr Haigh was looking at him as if he’d just allowed George to be swindled out of his Post Office savings.

Returning his gaze across the dining table, though, George saw only kindliness there. Angela’s father was a Pretty Decent Type. A grown-up whom you could really talk to. He said, “Well, sir, I give it to September,” which was what Alex Maitland had said a day or two before he and George had ceased to be on speaking terms.

“I’ll act on that,” Mr Haigh said. “I take it as a considered professional opinion. By the way, I gather from Angela that you share my enthusiasm for the Cinema?”

That was odd. So far as George could remember, he’d never said anything about the pictures to Angela. “Well … I suppose I do go quite a bit. You know. When I haven’t got anything else on.”

“Do you like pubs?” Mr Haigh said, with a sudden vigour in his voice.

“I … don’t drink much, sir.” George was conscious of the port in front of him. He wondered if the second glass that he’d poured for himself had been a solecism — or whether the correct thing to do was to finish the whole decanter.

“Pabst,” Mr Haigh said disappointedly. “You know. ‘Pandora’s Box’? ‘Joyless Street’?”

“Not exactly, sir, no. I mean, I don’t think so. The last one I saw was ‘We Dive At Dawn’. In fact.”

“Yes, that’s Puffin Asquith, isn’t it? Yes, he’s quite good, I think, but don’t you find him a bit stagy? Of all those people, I’m afraid the only one I really like is Humphrey Jennings.” He stared at George for a moment and said, “‘London Can Take It’.”

“Yes sir,” George said, rather too reverently, before he realized that it was just another film title. They joined the ladies.

Later, Mr Haigh rigged up a screen at the far end of the drawing-room and showed some of the pictures that he’d taken with his own cine camera. George thought they were pretty good. They looked amateur only in their short length and the way they ran in silence broken by the whir and click of the projector. All of Mr Haigh’s early work featured Angela as its star. Angela aged three toddled diagonally down the screen through a meadow filled with buttercups and daisies. She held a flower in her fist and offered it to the camera. The picture froze.

“That was Provence in ’28,” Mr Haigh said.

In another filmlet, Angela cantered on a pony along a cliff in a stormy dawn. Her ride was intercut with studies of other kinds of motion: a motor car speeding along a new arterial road, a biplane taking off from an airstrip, a yacht heeling to the wind on a beam reach. It was titled “Motion Picture”. There was Angela exploring the streets of foreign cities, Angela eating a peach at a picnic, Angela tiptoeing through the gloomy recesses of the cathedral at Chartres, emerging into a pool of puddled light cast by a great stained glass window.

Then, suddenly, there was no more Angela. Her last appearance was when she was fourteen. After that Mr Haigh’s films went abstract. There were pictures of racing clouds, of rippling cornfields, of machines in factories, but not one of Angela.

“This one might appeal to George here,” Mr Haigh said. It was a rather long study, in slow motion, of waves breaking on a rocky beach. As far as George was concerned, it suffered from a single crippling defect: it didn’t star Angela.

“Awfully good,” George said. “I like the way you’ve used the light, sir.”

“It’s just time and patience,” Mr Haigh said. “I suppose everyone has a missed vocation. The cinema is mine. I’d give my eyeteeth to have made one proper movie.”

After the screen had been rolled up and put away and Mr and Mrs Haigh had gone upstairs, George said to Angela: “Darling, why did you tell your father that I was dead keen on the cinema?”

Angela gazed at him with huge and virtuous eyes. “But I wanted to make him love you,” she said. Then, rising to a challenge, “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s just that I don’t know anything about the cinema. Not that sort of cinema. Not … Pabst and stuff.”

“You’re accusing me!”

“No, darling! No!”

“Yes, you are, Georgie. I can see it in your eyes. You’re blaming me. Everything I do is wrong. I can’t bear it. And I love you so much—”

“Darling!” And he was holding her and saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, darling—” and feeling truly guilty, too, without knowing what it was that he was guilty of. But in a moment it was all right again: Angela was forgiving him. She even permitted him, after a brief period of prohibition, to slip his tongue between her lips. He could feel her cold tears on his own cheek, and promised before God, if there was a God, that he’d never be so thoughtlessly hurtful as he’d been (how could he have done such a thing?) a minute before.

In the morning, he dressed in the crumpled civvies that he’d brought with him in his kitbag. Angela laughed when she saw him. “Georgie!” Don’t you have a proper shirt? If I didn’t know you, darling, I would have taken you for the man who comes to read the gas. It’s too sweet. Mummie, just look at poor Georgie’s shirt!”