Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

Stooping under the low ceiling, he put a pan of water to boil on the calor gas ring and punctured the top of a tin of steak and kidney pudding to stop it from exploding as it warmed. A small lizard was spreadeagled on the whitewashed wall over the sink. As George dropped the steak and kidney pudding into the saucepan, it skeetered up the wall and hid in a crack, its lidless eye a wary needlepoint of light.

George was rattled. He needed time to think. He poured himself a tumblerful of Dão and sank it like beer.

He could recite the words of his daughter’s letter by heart. What was her game? The tone was imperious. It had the clear ring of Admiral’s Orders. Signal your intentions … Report immediately upon arrival … George was evidently supposed to snap his heels and salute. Did the girl think he’d entered on his dotage? The giveaway, of course, was the word we . It had stood out on the page like an atoll in an ocean. So Sheila was in the plural now. George guessed that the house in Clapham must be some sort of commune for women. The bold instructions didn’t come from Sheila; they must issue from the entire sisterhood. When she wrote of “habitable rooms”, George saw a cloister of bare guest chambers, with books of meditation stacked neatly by each narrow single bed, and heard the swish of the sisters’ long gowns as they patrolled the corridor outside. It sounded like bad news to George. Was Sheila happy, living like this? Was it a Sapphic arrangement? He assumed so.

That he had fathered Sheila at all was a profoundly unsettling fact. It was like finding that one was the heir to someone whom one knew only from items of gossip in newspapers, and it raised a similar cloud of guilty whys and wherefores.

It was a thousand years since he had felt himself to be her father, her his child. It had been like that once. He remembered holding a torch to the print of a book in a darkened room. Sheila was ill with measles. He was reading her to sleep. The book was The Wind in the Willows . To Sheila in Aden, the Thames Valley of Ratty, Mole and Mr Toad was as delightfully unreal as Samarkand. George made it up for her: the leaves of the green trees feathering the water like long fingers; the freshly rinsed colours of England after a summer shower; the tumbledown brick cottages under their bonnets of thatch; men and girls in punts; lock keepers’ gardens; mysterious weirpools where big pike swirled.

“Do Mr Toad again, Daddy—”

George, perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean, went toot-tooting his way through Wallingford and Goring as Sheila fell to sleep, a drowsy giggle the last sound from under her thin blue Navy blanket.

A year after the divorce, George came back to London in December. Busy with visits to shipping agents, he’d asked the girl at the hotel desk to buy him two tickets for a matinée of “Puss in Boots” and had gone to Liverpool Street to meet his daughter from the train.

She was a foundling. Sternly buckled into her schoolgirl gaberdine, she stepped from a trailing cloud of thick steam from the engine. Her hair was pulled back from her skull in plaits. She wore spectacles with round gunmetal frames which magnified her puritan, Tribulation Wholesome eyes. When Sheila’s eyes came to rest on George, he felt arraigned in them.

God knew what Angela had told the child; God knew what Sheila herself, this vessel of probity, thought she knew. Whatever it was, she clearly wasn’t telling George. She walked by his side like a wimpled nun. It must have pained her, George felt, to be seen in the company of a man of such desperate reputation. Even before they left the station, he wanted to explain to strangers that his intentions were innocent, this girl really was his daughter.

By the time they were rounding St Paul’s in the taxi, he knew that the tickets to the pantomime in his pocket were an offence. He’d meant them to be a surprise. A stupid idea. He should have known. A panto? How could he have dared to inflict anything so frivolous on this severe stranger?

All through lunch he felt punished. Sheila drank water, and stared at him each time he gulped at his wine, then set him questions about his health. She dismissed the ice cream when it came and said it was bad for her teeth. He asked her, thinking sadly of the panto tickets, if she was at all interested in the theatre.

“We never go in Norwich,” Sheila said. “In any case, Mummy finds it jolly hard to make ends meet.”

So they went instead to a news cinema on Shaftesbury Avenue and saw the huge bald baby face of Eisenhower, triumphant in his re-election. George sneaked sideways glances at his daughter in the stalls: her eyes were fixed on the screen, her hands folded in the lap of her mackintosh. She seemed utterly indifferent to the presence of her father. If only … if only … George thought of “Puss in Boots” just a few doors up the street. They would be into the second act by now. George imagined another father, another daughter, leaning together over a shared box of chocolates in the dark; the Dame shouting “Oh, yes, it is!”, and the auditorium of children roaring back “Oh, no, it isn’t!” Not his child. She was gazing at a sequence of cold black and white pictures of Anthony Eden opening a new civic housing project in Birmingham.

When they left the cinema, Sheila consented to tea at Lyons’ Corner House on Oxford Circus. Regent Street was hung with lights and the pavement swarmed with people in hats and winter coats looting the shops for presents. Sheila and George were carried away from each other by the crowd. He stood, craning, waiting for her outside Hamley’s window, incongruously framed by woolly bears and Hornby train sets like Father Christmas in person. When Sheila caught up with him she paid no attention to the childish window; indeed, the whole season seemed to be beneath her notice.

“Oh — there you are. Is this Lyons’ place much further?” she said, hardly checking her northward stride.

An hour later, George saw her to her train and went back to St James’s Street, where he lay on the bed and cried because he’d lost his child and because it was Christmas. The hotel linen was newly laundered, stiff and comfortless.

What was her game?

He eased the steak and kidney pudding from its tin. It collapsed on the plate and leaked a pool of black gravy. The lizard was back on station, as fixed and still as a double-dagger sign on an otherwise blank chart. George, bearing his unappetising supper to the table, was unsteady on his pins. His calf and thigh muscles hurt like hell. Every time he moved, he tweaked a fresh ligament. He felt his heart in his ribcage like a trapped quail beating its bony wings. In Cornwall, he thought dully, he’d better take up golf and settle for an old man’s nine-hole ramble round the links and a round of gin and tonics with the other crocks at the clubhouse bar.

The oddest thing of all about Sheila was That Book. It had arrived two years ago, in a cushioned bag that spread grey fluff all over the table and floor. When George finally found a means of entry to its contents, it yielded an object almost as astonishing as a bomb. It was the size and weight of a desk encyclopedia. Its jacket reproduced, in good colour, a reclining Titian nude with the words The Noblest Station overprinted across the painting in white rubber-stamp lettering.

He’d known, of course, that Sheila had written a book, and had pictured it clearly as a slim and sensitive novel, about an adolescent growing up in a town much like Norwich, perhaps. He had looked forward to reading it, and to sending his congratulatory letter. (“It reminded me vividly of the young Elizabeth Bowen.”) This he had not expected. Its title came from a couplet that Sheila had used as an ironic epigraph: