Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

He carried his mug of coffee back up to the wheelhouse and studied the horizon. About two miles off on the bow there were three ships steaming north in line, on course for Plymouth Sound. Warships, from the look of them. George focused his binoculars on them. Yes, that was the Navy: two destroyers and a frigate, out on manoeuvres. The frigate quivered unsteadily in the lenses as George took in its angular sharkishness, its immaculate paintwork of armoured grey. It was his colour — the colour of rain clouds, cinders, schoolboy trousers. As it headed closer, he could pick out its twin radar scanners rotating slowly on their stalks, and its big guns wrapped like parcels in tarpaulins.

He switched on the VHS to see if the warships were talking, and found the radio full of voices that made him start because they sounded so like his own. Younger, of course, and lighter in pitch; but George heard them as his voice. OK, Halifax , roger and out. He found himself repeating the words out loud as he watched the ships pass less than a mile to port. He followed them with the binoculars until they melted into the sky. Well, he’d had his chance to be on that course once. He’d be retired now anyway; and the chances were that he’d never have got beyond Commander; and he’d probably have found one of those girl scout service wives that Mr Haigh meant when he said “adequate”. He put the binoculars down and sipped his bitter instant coffee.

George and Angela were married by his father in his father’s church. The Haighs swept down from London in a Roman triumph, bringing hampers, top hats and tailcoats, cine equipment, two bridesmaids and a best man called Rodney whom Angela had found at a dance. Rodney had failed his Army medical on account of his asthma, and did quite a lot of this sort of thing, he said.

“Pity it’s too late to have a staggers,” he said on the wedding morning. “Had a bloody good staggers last week for a man called Tommy Jarvis.” Rodney had flap ears, tow hair and a spotty complexion which reminded George of a raspberry mousse. George was rather ashamed of him, but Angela called him Roo, out of the Winnie the Pooh books, and said he was a sweetie, really, who just adored making himself useful to people. George didn’t tell her that Rodney had just asked him for five pounds, which was what he called “the usual”.

But Angela was wonderful. She cut through the gloom of the rectory like a blaze of sudden light. She was so wonderful with other people, too. She asked George’s father how on earth he’d managed to find himself such a darling little church, and made the rector blush — a first, in George’s lifetime. To his mother she said she knew she couldn’t possibly hope to take as good care of Georgie as Mrs Grey had done, there was so much she didn’t know, so much to learn, and she just knew that in Mrs Grey she’d found a second mother, and wasn’t that too heavenly? George’s mother put her arms round Angela and cried fit to bust.

Angela neglected nobody. To Uncle Stephen and Aunt Eileen, who had come down from Scotland specially for the wedding and were staying at the rectory for a week, she said, “Oh, Scotland! I adore Scotland! It’s my very favourite! Do you have a simply huge castle?”

Uncle Stephen explained that they had a small house in the centre of Dumfries.

“Fibber!” Angela said. “You’re being modest, aren’t you? I don’t believe a word of it. Georgie? Your Uncle Stephen’s been leading me up the garden path.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, he has. He’s been telling me he’s only got a teeny little house in Scotland. I only have to look at him to see great big turrets and battlements, and acres and acres of wild romantic moorland absolutely swimming with grouse and funny old ghillies and salmon and stags and things. Don’t dare to disillusion me, darling, or I’ll die—”

George winked at his uncle and said, “Actually the King’s always trying to swap Balmoral for Uncle Stephen’s place, but Aunt Eileen won’t allow it because she says Balmoral would be far too poky for them.”

“You see!” Angela gave Uncle Stephen a skittish little push in the chest. “I knew. I’m always right. And I bet you’re a terrible old meanie to all your ghillies and people, too.”

Uncle Stephen and Aunt Eileen loved her. You could see. Though Angela’s wit was a bit above their heads. They weren’t used to the way that people talked in London. George supposed that Uncle Stephen’s managerial job (it had something to do with Scottish reservoirs) had never given him much of an entrée into Society.

The church service was, as Angela said afterwards, divine. George stood at the altar shivering with disbelief in his astounding luck. This was what grace meant, in the real, religious sense — a sort of marvellous, unasked-for providence that just descended on you, like that — from where else but heaven? He tasted the mouldysweet air of the church, felt Angela, veiled in a cloud of lace, standing close beside him, and believed absolutely in the existence of God for the first time since he was thirteen.

The organ music, Angela and Jesus were all mixed up with each other in a holy stew. Exalted, lost in the sheer wonder of the thing, George swam to his bride through a sea of beautiful words. His borrowed dress sword clanked on the stone as he and Angela kneeled together in front of his father, and George realized that if he was kneeling, it must be done already. He was — married.

He heard his father saying something about Isaac and Rebecca and heard his own voice crack on an Amen — the first word he’d ever spoken since becoming a Husband. He sneaked a glance at Angela’s clasped hands. The ring was there. He was aware of Rodney’s knees on an embroidered hassock just behind him, and of the folds of his father’s surplice out in front. Each cautious sensation — the sight of the worn red altar carpet, of the Mothers’ Union banner beyond the pulpit, of the grinning choirboy’s face in the front stall — was registered by George as an amazing novelty. So this was how the changed world looked to a married man.

Outside the church, Mr Haigh had set up his cine camera on a tripod. For several minutes, everyone was made to huddle in the porch, while Mr Haigh panned low over the wet tombstones in the churchyard. He filmed the old women from the village who were waiting by the wall, and a squall of rooks clattering into the sky from the elm trees. Then Angela and George walked arm in arm out of the church and down the gravel drive towards the lych-gate.

“Cut!” Mr Haigh shouted, and made them do it again.

They came out of church seven times. At George’s fifth step (amended to the seventh on Mr Haigh’s fourth take), they stopped, kissed, and Angela let a flower fall from her bouquet on to the gravel. Then they walked on towards the camera, unlinking their arms so that George could squeeze by on one side of Mr Haigh and Angela on the other.

“Do you remember the wedding sequence in von Stroheim’s ‘Greed’?” Mr Haigh asked George.

George’s father was talked into putting on full vestments and got three takes to himself. He strode through the nettles along the side of the church, robed in gold.

By now, the crowd from the village was packed along the churchyard wall. George saw Vivienne Beale there, and nodded at her, a star acknowledging a fan; and when the wedding party left through the gate, it was Vivienne Beale, George noticed, who threw the most confetti.

At the rectory, the Haighs had laid on a three-tiered wedding cake, smoked salmon, turkey breasts and a whole crate of Mumms champagne. Mr Lewis-White, the rector’s warden, said, “I haven’t seen a spread like this since war broke out,” while Uncle Stephen, who had a problem with rich foods, eyed the three trestle tables brought in from the church hall and said that in Scotland, of course, no-one saw much of the Black Market. Rodney’s speech (it was apparently included in the five pounds) went down rather badly. Mr Haigh said first that he wasn’t going to announce that he had lost a daughter and gained a son, then said it all the same. He seemed distracted, and kept on looking at his watch. George was desperate to be alone with Angela. Since becoming man and wife, they’d barely spoken; and at the reception Angela seemed like a glamorous intimidating stranger — the sort of person whom you see across a room but know you’re never going to meet.