Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

She scored some near misses. One afternoon George came back to the house to find her looking appallingly ill, her left cheek swollen out as big and round as a tennis ball, her eyes glazed, her pupils distended. She seemed to be staring straight through him, with her mouth wobbling rhythmically from side to side.

“Darling! — Ahaza!”

When she opened her mouth, he saw that her teeth were flecked with bright green. Then he noticed the pile of privetlike sprigs on the floor beside her. She was chewing qat like an Arab.

The bubble of anxiety broke. She looked absurd. Pathetic . He said: “Honestly, Angela, for Christ’s sake — you want Ahaza to see you like that? Where’s Sheila?”

Angela looked through him, showing her Martian teeth. She said, “Fuck you,” in a voice so flatly factual and so serious, that George felt the words rankle inside him, doing permanent damage to something vital. He’d always known that he was too dim for Angela, but he’d never realized that he was her enemy before.

She said, “You’ve ruined my life,” and spat the qat out on the floor — a gobbet of green stuff, like the turd of a sick animal.

That evening, at the Kerrs’, with Peter Moffatt and Toby Morgan, Angela starred. Describing her qat -chewing, she said, “I think I’m going to become an absolute slave to it — it opens so many doors, you know.” Pipe in mouth, George smiled twistedly and nodded, leading the applause; but he was wondering which particular door it was that she was talking about, and when it would finally slam shut on him.

She bought a Leica and announced that she was going to publish a book of photographs called The Harem . She took off for the hills and came back with a mountain of snapshots, most of them wrongly exposed. George gave her a light meter, and Angela played with it a few times, then said that f-stops and shutter speeds were really much better if you left them to instinct and feel. She did her own developing down in the cellar and her hands nowadays were stained with hypo. Without telling her, George picked a dozen of her best pictures and mailed them to a publisher in London; he saw Angela’s photography as his last lifeline to Sheila. The publisher replied, writing direct to Angela. The subject was interesting, he said, but neither the quality of the prints nor the composition of her work allowed him to hold out much hope for The Harem . He suggested, however, that with fewer photographs and a really original text, she might approach the Cresset Press.

Angela accused George of treachery and betrayal. He had gone behind her back, spying on her. He had deliberately chosen all her worst pictures. He was trying to sabotage her career because he was jealous of her talent.

“All I wanted—” George said.

“You’re trying to destroy me, that’s what you want,” Angela said. “But you won’t destroy me, Georgie, and you won’t destroy my baby, because I won’t let you do that. See?”

He didn’t see. He didn’t see anything at all, he was so blinded by the shocking injustice of what Angela was saying.

That February, Freya Stark was staying at Sana’a, three hundred miles of rutted tracks away, up on the plateau. Angela was determined to visit her, and to take pictures of the city.

“It’s supposed to be like something straight out of the middle ages!” she said at the bungalow which Justin Quayle shared with Tony Flowers.

Alan Pigott-Williams lent her a landrover, which she loaded with aluminium boxes of photographic equipment, water in jerry cans and a suitcase of London summer dresses. Late in the morning, George looked up at the hills from his office in the bunkering station and saw a puff of red dust climbing the ribbed face of the range. He assumed that the dust was his wife.

For a week George was happy, with Sheila his constant companion. They read books together.

“Look-Jan-et-look! See-the-dog! Look-John-look! See-the-ball!”

They spent a morning on HMS Alert . They played draughts. On Friday, they went swimming at Fisherman’s Bay: hand in hand with his daughter in the tingling surf, George was in a panic of love.

On Saturday, he woke in the dark to a noise from downstairs. He listened and heard it again — the surreptitious scrape of footsteps on stone. There had been a lot of talk lately of qarsana , of thieves from Eritrea who landed by night from the sea. Bungalows on Steamer Point had been broken into and an Adeni watchman stabbed to death. George felt for the torch on the bedside table and for his old naval revolver which he had taken to keeping under the pillows of the bed that he no longer shared with Angela.

He tiptoed down the narrow flight of tall steps, barefoot, holding his breath in the clammy darkness. He heard the whispered word bugah . It meant tyrant, oppressor. So it was political, this vile, stealthy shuffling in the hallway. He was suddenly very frightened. He clicked the torch on and shone it at the noise.

Angela was there, with Bill Nesbit. They both looked filthy, as if they’d been wallowing in a dusthole, and George could smell their intimate sweatiness. They were bent together over a Tilley lamp, trying to get it going.

He said: “I thought you were supposed to be in Sana’a.”

“We were,” Angela said in her brightest party voice. “Such fun!”

The flame of the lamp shot up. Nesbit said “Bugger,” and turned it down.

“Oh, do look!” Angela said. “Georgie’s got his little gun.”

George realized that he was pointing it straight at Nesbit, and for a moment it looked as if Nesbit was going to stretch his hands above his head. George said: “I thought—”

“Do you think he’s going to use it? Oh, Georgie, go on, do! It’d brighten things up no end round here. I’m quite prepared to die for something on the lines of Crazed Bunkerman Slays Wife &: Lover — aren’t you?” She put her hands on Nesbit’s bare forearm. The skin of his face was pale under the dust, and he was putting on a bloody awful show of pretending to laugh, going haw! haw! haw! haw! far too loudly, and exposing his gums like a frightened chimpanzee.

George badly wanted to be rid of the revolver, but there was nowhere to put it — no pockets in his striped pyjamas, no table within reach.

Nesbit said, “I was just seeing Angie … safely … home, you know,” and hawed again.

“Oh, do put that silly thing away, George, you look too ludicrous for words.”

Nesbit looked to Angela for a cue, failed to get one, and said: “I suppose I ought really to be making tracks, sir.”

It was the “sir” that hurt most: George was only two years older than Nesbit — if that. He gave a miserable half-shrug and pointed at the door with the barrel of the gun.

“Well. Sorry. Awkward silence, haw, haw! Goodnight.” Nesbit backed out, the grin on his dirty face looking like a bad flesh wound.

There was the whirr and clank of Nesbit’s starter motor in the street outside, then a rumble as the engine fired.

“Good Christ,” George said.

“Man Stands Girl Up: Husband Blamed,” Angela said.

How could she be so fearless?

Exhausted, beyond tears, beyond surprise now, George said: “Why bring him back here, to this house?”

Angela stared at him, her face as void of liking or interest as a brick. She licked a smudge of dust from her upper lip. She said: “I do so hate fucking in the backs of cars, particularly in landrovers, don’t you?”

It was, as he explained to Diana in the flickering saloon, Angela’s last, and ultimately successful, attempt to rig a final scene with enough drama in it to finish the play. George hit her. For the first time, he began to shout at his wife. He howled at her — the words coming out half-formed and grammarless. It was a minute or two before he heard his own voice joined by the appalled screams of Sheila in her room at the top of the house.