Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

“Makes you look a different man, sir,” the barber said. The deference was new and spoken to the beard. George tipped the man five pounds for fixing this lightning promotion.

Bathed, kitted out in his shoregoing suit, flashing the points of his admiral’s beard, he was cock of the walk in the hotel lounge, where he strode through an early package tour of Americans, left his key at Reception and ordered a taxi to Tadfield.

They raced past windblown fields and stands of frantically gesticulating trees. Landspeed was dizzying, too fast for the eye to keep up, after the steady, encroaching motion of a boat on the sea. Searching for a point of focus, some reliable horizon, George settled on a flock of herring gulls, battling against the gale as they followed a plough on a brown hillside.

The journey to Tadfield (he remembered it as a long, slow summer drive through crooked lanes) took less than ten minutes from the Winchester suburbs, and when they reached it George was completely foxed.

“Are you sure?” he said to the driver. He saw a minimarket, a video club and a terrace of breezeblock Costa del Sol-style houses with windy balconies and carports where there should have been a hummocky common of gorse and bracken. He left the car to wait for him on the forecourt of a pub that looked all wrong but had the right name.

Only the church was the same. The same old appeal was going on for the restoration of the roof. A battered cardboard thermometer, roped to a pole and flapping dangerously, showed the fund standing at £2,150. The colours were running from the thumbtacked notice which said something about Bingo. Bingo, indeed. His father wouldn’t have cared for that.

Inside, the smell was as he remembered; a dark, clammy, musty smell of creosote and old bones. His footsteps ringing on the stone, he walked down the aisle to the family pew and knelt there, on a new blue hassock, his hands clasped under his beard. The wind was fussing in the rafters and the Mothers Union banner stirred in the draughts of heavy, ecclesiastical air. Something was missing, though. George sniffed. There wasn’t any incense in it now. He guessed that the bingo-playing rector must be Low.

His father’s voice droned with the wind in the arches and up in the beams. He was still going on about Agape and Eros. The congregation had its thoughts on Sunday dinner. George shut his ears to the sermon and studied the Table of Kindred and Affinity in the prayer-book. He toyed with the notion of marrying his grandmother, his wife’s father’s sister or his brother’s son’s wife. He transferred his gaze from the small print to the tantalizingly exposed ridge of Vivienne Beale’s brassiere-strap under her jumper. He wondered if girls ever farted. He supposed that they must, sometimes; a liberating thought. He tried to imagine Vivienne Beale farting, and couldn’t.

“Eros,” his father said. Distracted for a second, George saw a stone imp with a bow and arrow. Agape sounded vaguely like some sort of tropical fish.

He looked up to find that his father was staring straight at him, singling him out; and in his father’s face there was something that George had never seen there before — a look of troubled, sorrowful fraternity.

He got up stiffly from the pew and walked down the suddenly empty church to the pulpit steps. He climbed into the little wooden crow’s nest, stood in front of the lectern and leaned forward, hands gripping the rails.

“Dearly beloved brethren,” George said in the affectedly resonant voice that his father used for talking in church. The words were echoed by the wind outside. The pulpit felt far higher than it looked from the pews, and lonelier, too. He looked down on the thin scattering of resigned faces, and saw his own, out there in the seventh row, cast in a supercilious schoolboy smile, a trace of pale down on its upper lip. He felt mocked in his eminence. Nobody listened to you, not really, when you talked from the pulpit; you were here to bore people and be misunderstood.

He was glad to get out into the open air. He walked across the churchyard to a row of fresh graves and stood numbly in front of a stone which said:

VIVIENNE JOANNA BEALE

1925–1983

ABSENT IN BODY BUT PRESENT IN SPIRIT

1 Cor. v.3

There were some dead flowers in a jar on the pink quartz chips. So she’d never married. Cancer, presumably, had got her at 58. That was strange as well: George had always thought she was a year older, not a year younger, than himself. She hadn’t even rated an “In Loving Memory”, just that stony quotation from St Paul, poor bitch.

He saw his father marching through the nettles round the side of the church. He was dressed for the wedding, in full regalia, togged out in white and purple and scarlet and gold.

“Daddy—” George said.

“Cut!” shouted Mr Haigh, and a cloud of rooks exploded from the dead elm on boxy wings.

The taxi was waiting. George told the man to drive him back to Winchester, where he gathered his things from the hotel room before returning to the boat.

Now he was ready to go. Calliope was connected to the ground by a single anchor. George sat in the saloon listening to the intestinal slurps and rumbles of the mud around the hull as it yielded the boat, inch by inch, to the rising water.

28th March. 1005. Sea Area Thames. Wind, W 5 locally 6. Visibility good. Bar. 1003mb., rising more slowly .

Tom was doing a steady 65 down the M3 in Trev’s old Commer van. It had taken most of yesterday to find Trev, and then he’d had trouble with the pews. They rattled in the back, half a churchful of them, all solid oak and nicely carved.

He liked driving on the motorway. Once you were in the middle lane with your foot three-quarters down on the pedal, you could let your thoughts wander. Sometimes fifty miles went by without Tom noticing, he was so lost in one of his wrangles. Sometimes he sat alone in the cab arguing with Sheila, sometimes he told stories, sometimes he got hold of an idea and argued it out with himself.

Which was what he was doing today. Trade, he thought, as he drove through the contraflow system round the road works at Sunbury. By Exit 2, he was away, driving on automatic and taking a leisurely stroll round the grand and ornamental garden of his brain.

The thing about Trade was … Everything was in the wrong place. You wanted coffee, it was in Brazil. Or take oil. It was in the Arabian desert, or deep down under the North Sea. Asparagus was in Worcestershire — the wrong place again. What traders did was move things from the wrong place to the right place.

Like the pews. They’d come from a church that was being knocked down in Battersea. As long as they stayed in SW11 they were worth no more than the wood they were made of. But outside of Shaftesbury, there was a bloke turning an old barn into a restaurant. He was crying out for church pews. Shaftesbury, just now, was the right place for pews. With every mile they travelled from London, Tom could feel their value accumulating behind him in the van.

It was just a question of knowing, of getting intelligence about what needed to be moved where. Sometimes it was done on a nod and a wink basis. Sometimes you needed to do divination. Tom had brought his divining pendulum, just in case he needed it to find Sheila’s dad.

Trade. If you squinted at the world right, there was the secret of all that restlessness and motion. Refrigerated lorries full of fish from Grimsby, Russian ships with guns for South America, planeloads of food and blankets for the starving people in Africa, hurtling newspaper vans taking city corners on two wheels … everything was travelling because it was in the wrong place. The fizz and energy of it all was staggering; and it was Traders — like Tom — who kept things spinning, faster and faster, round the spinning globe, moving them into their right places, in vans and ships and trains and planes.