Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

The figures looked so fatuous. She stuffed the letter back inside the heap and pushed the drawer shut. Bits of paper stuck top and bottom. It looked flagrantly burgled, but Diana couldn’t be bothered to cover her tracks: she felt too impatient with these tiresome people — these Greys —who never threw anything away, who hoarded their roof repairs and cruddy little overdrafts and left them behind to their descendants as if they were history. It was unbearably pompous to treat your life like that. Diana liked to think of her own past, when she thought of it at all, as something contingent to herself, like the Foreign News page in the paper; a succession of small earthquakes in Chile. But when you looked at Thalassa, at these obsessively stored leavings, it was like kids making beastly little piles of their own snot and earwax.

A door banged upstairs. George! It banged again: it was only the wind. He must have left a window open. Pleased with this excuse to prowl further, Diana climbed the dark staircase.

A curtain in the bedroom was billowing into the room, its red velvet sopping and blackened with rain. She shut the window. The estuary was chipped and roughened and the sea at the entrance was sending up tall plumes of surf where it broke on the rocks. She thought, I wouldn’t like to be in George’s boat today; I’d be saying every Latin prayer I could remember. And some English ones, too.

The bedroom was a woman’s, not a man’s. A valance of frilly lace skirted the unmade bed. The only picture was a floral print of the kind you could buy at Woolworths. The manufacturers had printed it in relief to give the impression of whorls and ridges of oil paint. After the judges and bishops and lieutenant-colonels, it came as a bright surprise.

The tangle of blankets and cold sheets on the bed looked forlorn and widowed. A plastic bottle of Evian water stood on a sidetable, its top off, a drowned fly afloat on the surface film. At Diana’s feet there was a shirt crumpled into a ball. Without thinking, she picked it up to tidy it away. Her attention was caught by the label inside — she’d never have taken George for a man who had shirts specially hand-made for him. His name was sewn into the collar like a schoolboy’s. G. H. P. Grey. Folding the shirt, Diana saw herself for an idiotic moment as a matron in a prep school, and felt a twinge of irritation at George for having landed her with this part.

It was not for George but for the woman whose room this really was that she began to remake the bed, heaping the heavy blankets on the floor. It had been a very long time since anyone had bothered to plump the pillows: they were damp and flabby, their stuffing congealed into knots. She tossed them to one side and stared with a paralysed grin at the gun which she’d uncovered.

In thrillers, she thought, you’re supposed to recognize guns as celebrities. People are always turning round to face a Colt o38, or a something-Magnum, or a Smith & Wesson automatic. Your last memory is the brand name of the weapon that kills you. There was no putting a name to the gun on George’s bed. It was just a gun — and hardly even that, more like the sort of cap pistol with which G. H. P. Grey might run round making bangs in the garden. But it looked too heavy for its own good. It had left its greasy imprint on the threadbare cotton of the pillowcase. Like the Turin Shroud, Diana thought.

Even in LA she’d never known anyone who slept with a gun under their pillow. Who was George Grey thinking of killing in St Cadix? What kind of a man would you have to be to get any comfort from feeling a gun against your cheek at night through a layer of lumpy goosedown? And why had he left it behind? Had it been deliberately laid for her like a prize at the end of the paperchase?

She was half ashamed, half excited by her find. Her hands dithered as she replaced the pillow over the gun, matching the grease stains to the black metal. She shook out the shirt and crumpled it into a ball again. Taking her time, she rearranged the bed to make it look slept in and abandoned. When she’d finished, the room showed no sign of being disturbed, but the house was changed. It had a new centre of gravity. Everything now converged on the hidden gun — the frilly valance, the floral print, the terrible portraits, the Easter palms, the old letters. Diana had the sense that she was looking at it now through George’s own eyes; the squirm of alarm in her stomach belonged to him, not to her. Standing by the window, lighting a fresh “cigarette, she felt his hankering after the emptiness of the sea like an unexpected cramp or a stab of heartburn.

Diana liked secrets, and on the stairs she was lightheaded in her possession of this one. She would explore what it meant later. For now, there were two questions rolling in tandem in her head: did he have a licence for that thing? And what did the H and the P stand for?

“And hands that do dishes,” George mumbled in a growling bass, “will be soft as your face in mild green Fairy Liquid.” He’d picked up the jingle from the television like a germ and he couldn’t shake it off. It went round and round in his skull like a loop of tape.

Holding on tight to the varnished spokes of the wheel, his pipe clenched upside down between the tar-stained premolars on the port side of his jaw, he was in the swing of things.

Calliope soared, slid sideways, plunged and bucked, with a phosphorescent bulge of surf swelling against her lee side.

“And hands that do dishes …”

The haze had burned off. The stiffening wind was raising a lumpy sea and the sky was cold and empty except for a jet-trail breaking up high to the north.

“Will be soft as your face …”

He was taking the waves one by one, searching for the safest route up each low rockface of piled water. He could see the sun shining through the crests where the sea was as pale as lime juice before it spilled over into ragged white moustaches of foam.

“In mild green Fairy Liquid.”

His bedroom climbed the wave first, followed in short order by his drawing-room, his kitchen and his bathroom. Calliope splashed like a whale, raising a wall of bright spray as she toppled on a big one. Water streamed along the decks and down the wheelhouse windows. Now up, now down, now in the sun, now in the shade, he was being shaken about like a dice in a cup.

“And hands that do dishes will be soft as your face—”

The wheelhouse was snug, though. The air was warm and thick with pipesmoke, sweat, coffee and diesel; it was good companionable air, and George was happy in his den, inhaling his own exhaust fumes and watching the sea buckle and break outside. He was as safe as houses here. The rubberclad handbearing compass, worn round his neck like a medallion, bounced against his breastbone as Calliope rolled. He eased her down into the black trough.

“In mild green Fairy Liquid—”

His own brand of fairy liquid was racing past the hull; sudsy, tumbled, up to all sorts of magical tricks and passes. It reached for the stern of the boat and thrust him high up over the sea, a giant for an instant. Then it dwarfed him with a sudden giddying fall as the wave dissolved under his feet in a tissue of froth. George wasn’t frightened; at least not now, not in the wheelhouse, with the sun out and the waves grinning at him. Shifting the heavy rudder in its girdle of chains, he was in a trance of concentration, lost to himself, playing in tune.

When land showed, it was at first a faint stain, perhaps only a ledge of thin cirrus, between sky and water. George kept on losing it behind the wave tops. It was another half-hour before he trusted it not to disappear altogether, and a half-hour more before he could pick out the grey rhino rump of a headland, standing out a shade more firmly than the rest. Prawle Point? Bolt Head? He wasn’t sure and didn’t think it safe to leave the wheel to check the compass bearing of this doubtful land against the chart.