Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

They docked in Aden on May 11th. The temperature was in the high nineties, and they stepped ashore into a hot, wet, gassy wind, like the bad breath of a sperm whale. George was sick with apprehension for Angela as he looked out on ricketty roofs of corrugated iron, dusty boulders, mudbricks and starveling yellow dogs. Yet all she said was, “Do you see that man with his dagger? Sweet!”

The company had allocated them a bungalow on Steamer Point. Its previous tenants, trying to make themselves at home, had given it the character of a seedy boarding house in the English midlands. They had left greasy antimacassars on the chairbacks and some printed tablemats with pictures on them of the Oxford colleges. George noticed what looked like rat droppings on the sinkboard of the kitchen. He waited for the bomb to drop out of the bland blue tropical sky.

He said, “Darling, we only have to stick it out for … well, six months perhaps …” He tried to make six months sound hardly longer than a weekend, but the words came out with the cold ring of a prison sentence.

“Oh, Georgie, don’t be so feeble.”

For a week, George held his breath. It seemed to him that he was always watching Angela through a blue film of mosquito-mesh as she moved behind it, mysteriously purposeful in her white slacks and cherry-coloured blouse. It took her a day to destroy the hideous sitting-room, and George piled the furniture in the dirt road outside, from where it disappeared within minutes of its exile, seized by invisible hands. Returning at noon from his first full morning at the bunkering station, he found the bungalow swept clean and bare as a shell and Angela gone.

When she returned, her hair was caked with red dust and she was talking nineteen to the dozen. She’d been out with Abdurahman. Abdurahman? Abdurahman — silly! — was the camel driver who brought the water-carrier up the street every morning and evening. He’d taken her home and she’d met his cousins, sweeties, all of them, and their simply darling children. She’d gone into the women’s quarters and been dressed up as an Adeni bride, and she’d gone to the souk in Crater Town and bought tons of things for the house with Abdurahman’s help. Abdurahman would bring them later, with the water—

“Darling, don’t you think you ought to watch that a bit? I got a lecture from Wilkinson at the station this morning … about how one had to be careful about fratting—”

“Fratting!” Angela’s voice was piercing and contemptuous. “I’ve never heard anything so sickmakingly stuffy. You can do exactly as you please — you and ‘Wilkinson’, whoever ‘Wilkinson’ may be. But I shall frat and frat and frat and frat with anyone I want, and if little Georgie-Porgie thinks he’s going to stop me, little Georgie-Porgie has another think coming!”

George could hear the leaves in the single acacia tree beyond the verandah. They were chinking like coins in the wind. He said: “Wilkinson’s invited us over to his bungalow for dinner.”

Angela stared at him. She was smiling the way she always did before she burst out crying. “Well you can go, can’t you? I expect I’ll be having dinner with Abdurahman.”

George stood in front of her in the empty room, choked for words. He said “But” twice. He felt for his new pipe in the pocket of his jacket, and realized that he wasn’t wearing a jacket, only a sweat-soaked shirt, the rightful property of Mr Haigh. It was another moment or two before he noticed that it was not Angela who was crying this time, it was him. She was a sort of wobbling blur, and he could feel the cold trickle of tears on his cheeks.

“Oh don’t be such a baby,” Angela said.

“Sorry,” George said. “It’s just … hay fever. Haven’t had it for years.”

But she was placated. By the time that Abdurahman arrived with Angela’s purchases from the souk piled in twin baskets on his camel, she was her sweet self again, carolling with pleasure as she unpacked the bolsters, coloured rugs, squares of dyed silk, copper trays, joss sticks and the rough cotton headdresses that she said would be just perfect for tablecloths.

The transformation of the bungalow was extraordinary. George was dazzled by his wife’s genius. Where the dowdy lounge had been, Angela created what she called her majlis room, an airy, lamplit cave of cornflower and crimson, where one lolled on cushions on the floor and the walls were hung from floor to ceiling with striped rugs. Day by day, George’s house turned into the most exotic place he’d ever seen.

Mornings and afternoons he sat on an uncomfortable stool under a creaking fan in his prefabricated office at the bunkering station. He swapped ships about between the coal berths and the oiling berths. He wrote out dockets, yarned with Wilkinson and got used to clapping his hands and shouting “Shweyya! Shweyya!” at the Arab longshoremen. When he went home, though, it was to Angela’s Orient, a storybook world over which Angela now presided in a maternity smock and baggy silk pantaloons.

She was wonderful at populating it, too. They had arrived in Aden without introductions to anyone, unless you counted Wilkinson, which Angela certainly didn’t. By Empire Day, they knew everyone. At least Angela did. Often George got home to find a small herd of black Morris 8s tied up outside the bungalow and a cheerful crowd of Residency bachelors, visiting naval lieutenants and sappers with toothbrush moustaches within. They all called her “Angie”—a liberty that George had never taken — and several times George felt that his own entrance into the conversation was a dampener on things.

“Georgie!” Angela called from her cushioned warren of young men. “Kiss?” She tilted her cheek for him, and when he kissed her he saw the young men smile.

Sometimes, between the bridge evenings at the Club, and the blistering Friday beach picnics, and cocktails at the Residency, and bungalow parties up and down the length of Steamer Point, they did have the occasional week night to themselves, and George ached for these times when he and Angela could sprawl alone in the majlis room.

Copies of Vogue and the Tatler were beginning to arrive for Angela by slow seamail now. While George tried to teach himself to read and write Arabic out of a book, Angela read out snippets of news from home.

“Greta Garbo’s having a thing with Cecil Beaton.”

“Someone’s just opened a new oyster bar in Curzon Street.”

“Oh, look, there’s Lady Throckmorton with the Maharajah of Jaipur.”

The Dunkley pram came, vast and resplendent in a much labelled plywood packing case. He unveiled it for Angela, a surprise; but Angela wept when she saw it. Appalled, George cradled her.

“Oh, Georgie, I don’t want to have this beastly baby — not when I’m having such a lovely time.”

It was with pride and fascination that George watched the steady swelling of Angela’s pregnancy. Sometimes she allowed him to rub her with Lady Standing’s Rejuvenating Cream For Tired Faces And Hands. Spreading the cream over her belly with his fingers, he marvelled at her stretched skin, blue and shiny and hard as porcelain. During the seventh month, her navel turned inside out. George didn’t like to mention it, but this development intrigued him no end: it stood on top of the great mound of her womb like a sprig of holly on a Christmas cake. Once, he saw the skin quake and shudder as the baby kicked. Full of wonder, he put his lips to Angela’s oiled stomach.

She pulled her nightdress down over herself with an angry tug, hurting George’s cheek with her knuckles.

“Don’t! I’m so bloody ugly I want to die!”

Angela’s pains started in the middle of a dinner at the Residency. Billy Wilshawe drove them to the Naval Hospital, hooting all the way. George held Angela’s hand tightly and watched wild dogs scarpering from the jumpy beams of the headlights. At the hospital, she was taken away from him by a nurse and he was left by himself in a creaky wooden room full of rattan cane chairs and dog-eared magazines. The bare electric bulb was fly-specked, the yellow light came in fits and starts. Under the noise of the crickets outside, he could hear the hum-and-grumble of a generator in the grounds.