Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

She said: “Oh, George — you eating chickenshit again?” Chickenshit was one of Teddy’s words, and George resented it.

“It’s a perfectly good steak and kidney pudding,” he said.

“Steak and kidney chickenshit. You know the cholesterol level of that thing? One of these days, George, I am telling you, you are going to be dead before your time.”

He punctured the tin with a can opener and looked back at Vera on her rock, ample as a dugong.

“The trouble with you, George, is you just love to eat shit.” “Oh, do come off it, old love,” he said feebly, and lowered the tin carefully into a saucepan of hot water. He wasn’t up to much as a cook, but there were a few things that he could do pretty efficiently and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pudding was one of them.

With the trembling flames of the lamps, the glow of the charcoal stove and the twin gas rings burning blue in the galley, the boat was a cave of jumping shadows. He found Diana there, half hidden behind the hanging fern in its basket. She looked younger than when he’d last seen her, even more like the remembered girl on the black and white television screen, the outline of her face softened by the drifting smoke of her cigarette. He blessed her for being there — for being that kindly, floating trick of the air and the light. He brought up a half bottle of Pomerol from his cellar in the bilges, set out knife and fork and placemat on the saloon table, and dined with Diana.

It was the dining alone — more, even, than the cold palpable silence of Sheila’s room with its closed shutters — that George dreaded most. From May to September, Angela escaped to London for the hot season. Ahaza, the wall-eyed Jewish nurse from Ta’izz, was paid off for the duration and George was left to rattle in the empty house, a summer widower.

They’d moved to Crater Town, to an ancient, narrow, five-storey tower of baked mud, once the mansion of a date merchant. There were no European neighbours. Camping out by himself in the gloom and dust, George listened through a broken lattice to the babble of motor horns and shouted Arabic in the street below.

The other summer widowers were a miserable crew. They ate at the Club (toad in the hole, plum duff and warm, bottled Worthington), swapped dog-eared photos of their family houses in England, read their wives’ letters aloud to anyone who’d listen, formed drab huddles round the dartboard, and were treated like lepers by the bachelors. George went to the Club two or three evenings a week and found it lonelier than his forlorn lodgings in Crater Town.

So he stayed at home, with a Tilley lamp hung from a nail in a beam (the house wasn’t rigged for electricity). He set himself the job of working his way through the Tauchnitz Library, bought by the boxful, sight unseen, from Mesloumian’s, the Armenian bookshop on the corner. He wrote letters. At least, he didn’t so much write them as draw them. Finding things to say to Angela was always tricky: the weather was no use as a topic since it stayed the same way for weeks on end, with the temperature in the hundreds and the humidity in the nineties, and gossip from the Club was pretty sparse at that time of year. Jerry Kingdom shot himself in July; but that was like a freak earthquake, and anyway Jerry eventually pulled through, having missed his heart by several inches and causing only a nasty wound in his shoulder.

It was the drawings for Sheila that made the bind of letter-writing worthwhile. George drew Arab ladies, like human bell tents, with drums of water on their heads; sailors in wide trousers; dogs; ships at sea; Mr Al Sabir’s new American motor car. He always drew himself in the right hand margin of these pictures — a grinning beanpole in a hat, smoke billowing from his pipe, pointing at the subject of the drawing with a forefinger as big as a banana.

In the summer, George was sick with the knowledge that it was always like this, really. Sheila and Angela were connected to him by a fraying thread. Each winter, their presence in Aden was more of an accident, and the house on Bab al Qulu felt like an empty house, graced by unreliable and exotic visitors. As Angela’s letter in September ’49 put it, “I shall be coming to stay on the 14th …”; George tortured himself with that phrase.

He knew it was his fault. It wasn’t surprising that Angela was bored by him — he was bored by himself. Other chaps were bright as buttons, with their easy way of dishing out compliments, their knack of turning everything that happened to them into a clever joke. George felt lumpish and tongue-tied beside these men who sped prettily through the world like skaters on a rink. When the dried-up stream of dinner invitations began to flow again in October, he would see Angela at the far end of tables, laughing as she never laughed in the house, her enormous eyes alight with a rapt attention that George could never rouse.

“Yes,” George said to his neighbour at the table, a visiting agricultural boffin from the UN, “we should see a gross tonnage of at least two million by next year.” How could you be clever and funny about things like that?

He did what he could. Each year he dreamed up an adventure for his wife — something that would make her want to come back to Aden, with Sheila. It was George’s idea that she crossed the Empty Quarter with Freddie Blount, driving the second landrover. Everyone said that Freddie Blount was interested only in little brown boys, so George felt safe and Angela, on her return, kept the entire Protectorate spellbound for months with her marvellous stories of the trip. George found a berth for Angela when he heard that Toby Morgan was planning to sail a dhow from Aden to Kuwait. She camped in the mountains in Oman with Alan Pigott-Williams, and flew to Baghdad, from where she drifted down the Tigris to Basra on a raft with Freya Stark.

When Angela was away on her expeditions, George came back early from the bunkering station to the house and played with Sheila. Ahaza sat cross-legged in the corner of the room, her wall-eye roaming. Some mornings, he carried Sheila on his shoulders to his office on the quayside and saw her properly piped aboard the visiting ships.

“And an orange juice, if you have one, for Rear Admiral Grey.”

The captains made a gratifying fuss over her, and Sheila loved the ships — their spooky mazes of ladders and hatchways and secret compartments. Toddling stiffly on wide-apart legs, she made her tour of inspection, collecting treasures at each stop: a rough-cut opal on the bridge, biscuits in the galley, a useful box from the ABs’ quarters.

“Bound for Cape Town?” George said, writing out a docket in the wardroom with Sheila seated on his knee, making crumbs. “Don’t suppose you could find space for the Admiral and her rusty lieutenant, could you?”

It was what he always said to every captain. With Angela away, George cherished a sweet recurrent fantasy in which he and Sheila were afloat, alone and out of reach, on an ocean of blue-shot silk. At bedtime in the house on Bab al Qulu, Sheila demanded, “Pigrin Boat! Pigrin Boat! Pigrin Boat!”

“The owl and the pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful—”

“Pigrin Boat!” shouted Sheila.

“They took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped up in a …”

“Fi Pow Note!”

With Sheila and Ahaza in the house, George was on a gentle pleasure cruise. When Angela was around, it was a bit like getting a radio report that there was a U-boat somewhere in your sector. The sea looked just the same, but you stood your watch numbly waiting for the sudden white porpoise track of the torpedo.