Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

At 2.45, and again at 3.00, Mr Haigh stood by the drawing room window gazing irritably across the uncut lawn to the fringe of trees that screened the rectory from the road. At 3.15, a hooded green MG TC arrived, driven by a man in a leather helmet and motoring gloves who said he had got lost trying to get off the Winchester by-pass.

At 4.00, George and Angela, filmed by Mr Haigh, left for Brighton in the green MG. Brighton had been picked for the single night of the honeymoon because it was reasonably convenient for Portsmouth, where George was due to join Hecla at 1600 hours the next day.) Angela drove, miraculously fast.

It was raining in Brighton and the sand-coloured sea came creaming slantwise up the beach in a south-westerly gale.

“Georgie, it’s far too rough for them to make you go tomorrow, it’s absurd!”

George, watching the sea through the net curtains of the hotel room, was inclined to agree: he’d been badly sick on Larkspur and dreaded the lumpy run down-Channel. Hecla was a “Woolworth carrier”—an old merchant ship, decked over to provide a skimpy flight deck for her twenty aircraft. She had a reputation as a bad roller. He said: “No, we’ll be fine, darling. There’s just a bit of a popple on the water.”

Dinner was dreadful. Angela sent hers back and told the waiter that she’d expected to come to a proper hotel and not to a fleabitten seaside boarding house. The waiter said that there was a war on.

Angela opened her eyes wide and said: “Really? Honestly and truly? A war? How utterly ghastly for you. Is it frightfully hush-hush, or can you tell us who it’s between?”

The waiter put on a frigid smile and beat a retreat to the pudding trolley.

Angela said, “Well, that épaté’d him , anyway. Oh, darling, I can’t bear to watch you eat yours, it looks perfectly disgusting … like dog-do!”

So George got very little dinner either.

The war had done for the hotel’s heating system and the room was damply cold. Though the windows were closed, the curtains stirred with the salty wind. The lamp by the bedside refused to work, the water in the bathroom was lukewarm and stained with rust. Angela complained of goose pimples and “blotches”.

“Oh, Georgie — I look such a frump, I hate myself. Hate! Hate! Hate!”

But the double bed with its stiff sheets was a glorious safe harbour. George and Angela lay in its warm shelter, listening to the gale rattling the window frames and to the dyspeptic gurgle of the hotel plumbing. It was, George thought, strangely like being a baby again, to be a married man. Their kisses now were soft and unhurried. Embracing, they were as moist and slippery as eels. George had a little difficulty with the rubber contraceptive. Angela helped.

Her sudden frantic violence always took him by surprise. Though her arms were tight around his neck, it was as if she’d taken leave of him. Pumping and thrashing, she came to her private climax, her voice a hoarse growl. “Georgie! Georgie! Don’t drown! Don’t drown! Don’t drown!”

He slept with his head cuddled to his wife’s breast.

He woke to laughter.

The water was chuckling against the hull — but it wasn’t that. The laugh was fuller, throatier, more like the rumble of a ship’s twin screws close by. But the sea was clear to the horizon. Fumes from the diesel must be getting to him. He stepped out of the wheelhouse into the cockpit. Where his father had been just a moment ago, Teddy was now sprawled in his scarlet University of Wisconsin tracksuit. Head thrown back, white teeth shining in the sun, he was banging a squash racket against his knee. And laughing.

“Oh, holy shit!” said Teddy and straightened himself up. “I’m sorry, fella.” Then he was off again.

“Oh, George, you sweet asshole! You wimp! You old scumbag!”

Diana’s muddy car was parked outside Thalassa, its driver’s door open, its tyres sunk in pine needles. Diana had meant to stop only for as long as it took to pick up the mail, but she enjoyed being alone in other people’s houses and the car had already been standing there for more than ten minutes with the open door wagging in the wind.

Once upon a time Diana, on tour in strange cities, had made a habit of calling up estate agents and being shown round people’s homes on the pretence that she was looking for somewhere to live. She was always comforted by these trips, which she kept secret from her manager and the rest of the band. Sometimes there was the sad pleasure of being able to warm yourself for a little while in front of someone else’s family life: their stray Wellington boots, crumbs on tea tables, nappies drying on washing lines, the lingering smell of Vicks vapour rub. At other times there was a happy sense of recoil as you realized that you were glad, at least, that you didn’t live there , not like that .

George’s house was perfectly hideous, Diana thought. She felt cheered up no end by its horrible shuttered dustiness. There wasn’t anything of George’s in it at all, so far as she could see, unless one counted the TV set in whose curved screen she saw herself reflected as a jolly fat lady.

Nor was there any mail for him, to speak of. A telephone bill. A seed catalogue for Occupier. A very thin airmail letter. Diana looked at the stamp, which was pretty and extravagantly big. It showed a sword, a boat and a baobab tree. She put it away in her bag.

She lit a cigarette and restored the spent match to the box. She’d taken up smoking again, but it was as if there’d been a rift in an old friendship, and she and cigarettes were now on uneasy terms. The fat lady on the screen puffed smoke at her.

She wouldn’t have minded a drink. She poked about in all the likely places, but all she could find was some low-calorie tonic and the dregs of a bottle of Vinho Verde, so she settled herself in the bulbous and smelly buttonback chair and inspected the room.

A pair of kukris in burst leather scabbards hung on one wall. Withered palm crosses were stuck behind the pictures. As for the pictures themselves … they were freakish. They were portraits of the sort of people who should never have had their portraits painted in the first place.

A slug of white ash splashed on the knee of Diana’s jeans. She let it stay there, and returned the blank stare of His Honour Judge Samuel Wilson Grey Ll.B (Cantab) with a frown, for in the Judge’s face there was a faint — faintly displeasing — trace of George. It was something in the set of the jowls and cheekbones; something puzzling and indefinite like seeing (or did you just imagine it?) a stranger wink at you in a crowded room.

Behind the Judge’s head there was a sketchy landscape of mountains and temples. If you looked closely enough into the paint, you’d find tigers there. Diana felt suddenly irritable and lonely. She stubbed her cigarette out on an ugly brass tray that the Judge had probably brought home from India along with the kukris, and for a second it was like grinding the butt out on George.

What could you do with someone who was as ghostly as this? George was hardly more than a disturbance of the dust in the house. He was an ancestral cheekbone, a family mouth. Diana wanted to wound him back to life — to make him his own man — even her man, maybe. That hadn’t seemed too mad a thing to think a week ago, but the beastly house turned it into a laughable idea.

She pulled open a drawer in the Welsh dresser. It was stuffed to the top with papers. She opened another. The same. They all were. She picked up a sheet from the top of the drawer; it was a carbon copy of a letter to the Church Commissioners about roof repairs, poorly typed with a lot of x’ings-out. She burrowed through a layer of old Christmas cards, hunting for something private, personal, but in all this accumulation of yellowed paper there were just stiff politenesses and yours faithfullies. At the very bottom of the drawer there was a letter dated March 1944 and addressed to The Revd. D. Grey, The Rectory, Pound Lane, Tadfield, Hants. It was from the assistant manager of Lloyds Bank in Winchester and it wished to draw the Reverend’s attention to the fact that, following the presentation of cheque No. etcetera, his account was overdrawn to the tune of £4/5/8d.