Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“I can’t remember,” George said, knowing perfectly well.

“Jeremy … Nicholas, something like that. Anyway, he’s doing awfully well for himself, so his father was telling me. Average adjuster. There’s a big future in Insurance, but of course you’d need a good head for figures for that one.”

It was one of his father’s dearly held fictions that George was incapable of adding two and two.

“What’s your view, er, Angela?” his father said.

Angela stared at him for a moment, her big eyes misty with boredom. “Oh, look!” she said. “You’ve got bluebells in your garden. Aren’t they ravishing?”

The job in Aden was Mr Haigh’s idea, of course. He knew a man who knew a man — and it was fixed. He waved away all George’s worries about Angela giving birth in the hot season four thousand miles away from home. “The sun’ll do her a world of good. And they love babies in naval hospitals; it makes a change from what they usually have to do with sailors.” As for the bunkering business, it was “You ought to know a bit about ships now — it’s just like being a sort of maritime petrol pump attendant.”

Angela celebrated the news by going shopping with Tanya Fox and Serena Lake-Williams. There was, she said, nothing-literally nothing — at Harrods, or Fortnum & Mason’s, or Peter Jones. “It’s too Cold Comfort Farm to be true.” Even so, she came back to Bolton Gardens with a white halo beret with a built-in veil (“for the mosquitoes”), a yellow rayon bathing costume, a striped parasol, sunglasses, three broderie anglaise maternity gowns, a patent water purifier, a white dinner jacket for George, turtle oil soap, orange skin food, and a tinned ham. She had placed an order for the early delivery of a Dunkley pram, and showed George a printed photograph of what looked like an open touring car circa 1908.

Mrs Haigh, looking at the things which Angela had bought, said, “You must have used a dreadful amount of coupons.

Where did you manage to find them, dear?”

“Oh …” Angela said vaguely, “you know … Tanny and Serena chipped in, bless them,” and George, watching her, was certain she was lying. When he tried on the dinner jacket for size, he had the uncomfortable sensation that he was handling stolen goods. It fitted perfectly: Angela was brilliant at that kind of thing.

Everyone, Angela said, madly envied their going overseas, and the glamour of Abroad became a fixed feature of herself, like her eyes and her fair hair. She called Aden “The East”; whenever she said the word, she inserted a short pause before it and lowered her voice a little. “Of course, when I’m in … The East …” she would say, and she had the knack of making you see her there; alone in a desert of sculpted dunes, at the head of a crocodile of native bearers carrying trunks on their heads. Hecla had actually stopped at Aden for a day the previous year, and George could remember the place as an untidy heap of hot cinders spilling out into the sea … some makeshift bungalows … and dwarfish men in ragged skirts pestering the sailors for baksheesh. When he heard Angela talk, he realized how much he must have missed. She was right, of course: it was entirely his fault that Aden had looked such a dump. You needed Angela’s imagination if you were going to see through the surface to the far Araby that lay behind. He even began to wonder if she might be right about the Kurds.

Her elation survived the sixteen-day passage on the RMS Queen Adelaide from Southampton en route to Bombay. The ship had been a luxury liner before the war, but she had been requisitioned as a troop carrier in 1939 and the accommodations were still pretty grim and soldierly. Angela was horribly seasick off Cape Finisterre, but she was jolly brave about it, lying all day in her bunk with a sweet white-faced smile and saying, “Please don’t worry about me, Georgie — you go off and have fun.”

It was George who behaved badly. He hated being a passenger and pined for the view from the bridge. He saw his chance when he found himself alone with the Second Officer at the bar.

“So you’ve found your sealegs?” the Second Officer said, as the floor sank suddenly away to port and the barman moved just in time to catch a flying soda siphon.

George explained that, in fact, he knew this patch of sea rather well. Last time he’d been on it, it had been worse than this. A steady Force 9 for nearly twenty-four hours. They’d come bloody close to losing an aircraft, and a gun-mounting on the starboard quarter had been swept clean away when they’d tried to make a turn for Brest and been caught beam-on.

The Second Officer smiled and turned to the barman. “You know what they say about the three most useless things you can have on a ship? A wheelbarrow, an umbrella and a naval man. What’s in that glass?”

“A pink gin,” George said, duly squashed.

The Captain organized a daily sweepstake in which the passengers bet on the distance run each noon. George took a lot of trouble over his estimates. He worked out the tidal streams as best he could from memory and guesswork. He enjoyed explaining to Angela how to make an independent measurement of the ship’s speed with a Dutchman’s Log. He made Angela stand on the promenade deck up at the bow, while he waited near the stern. When he waved his handkerchief, she dropped a cigarette packet over the side and he counted off the time in seconds, going “a- hun dred-and-one, a- hun dred-and-two, a- hun dred-and-three” until the cigarette packet raced past him in a rush of foam. The foam was the problem. More often than not, he never spotted the cigarette packet. But it did work a couple of times, and George calculated that the Queen Adelaide was making a steady twelve and a half knots.

The odd thing was that, despite this careful science, George and Angela never won the sweepstake. He was always close, but there was always someone who was closer, like the old lady who was going out to see her grandchildren in Hyderabad, or the bald young man who was getting off at Suez to sell agricultural implements to the Egyptians. It occurred to George that the Captain might be cheating him of his prize on the grounds that George was a fellow professional and therefore ineligible for the competition.

At dinner one night he heard Angela saying to her neighbour, “Poor Georgie likes to pretend that he knows everything in the entire world about ships and navigation and things. After being in the Navy and all that. But between you, me and the gatepost, I don’t think he knows anything much at all.”

George grinned, said, “Ah, I was afraid I hadn’t fooled you, darling,” and devoted a great deal of attention to tearing his bread roll in half. The remark hurt, though, and he didn’t ask Angela to help him with the Dutchman’s Log again.

Within sight of the lights of Algiers, George, in pyjamas, went to Angela’s bunk. “Oh, sweetie — no. Think of the Baby.” So he lay alone, watching the lights fade slowly out in the dark sea, listening to the intimate wheeze of the ship’s engines and feeling frightened — of Angela, Aden, the baby, everything. Some mornings he woke up thinking that he had only dreamed his marriage. It was like that now. It was queer and scary to feel that you weren’t really related at all to the person who was sleeping just six feet away from you in the cabin. He could see the dim hump of her shoulder under the blanket. It didn’t look in the least bit wifely, somehow.

“Darling?”

The hump shifted a little as Angela moved more deeply into the bed towards the wall. He was sure she was awake. He would have liked to ask her if she was feeling frightened too.

In the Suez Canal, Angela said, “Oh, Georgie! Look — camels! Isn’t it just bliss?” She snuggled against him as they stood at the rail, watching the camels in silhouette on the levee like a cut-out paper frieze, and George, feeling proud and husbandly now, basked in the brilliance that Angela brought to things just by making herself a part of the picture.