Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Seek to be good, but aim not to be great;

A woman’s noblest station is retreat.

From the first page he learned that the book was “a study of female submission” in Western culture, and by page 2 the author had mastered the distinction between submission and subjection. The more George looked into it, the more the thing surprised him. He was bewildered by the kind of statistic with which the author berated him: the fact, for instance, that in 1974, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, 76 % of married couples still relied on the sheath as their primary means of contraception. How on earth would anyone know that? That was rum; but what was rummer was the way the author followed it with an exchange between Millamant and Mirabel in Congreve’s “The Way of the World”, where, apparently, the attitude of the women of Tower Hamlets was ingeniously foreshadowed.

Most of all, George was surprised by the author’s high spirits. She was — well, funny . She dealt with her submissive women with a kind of irritable glee. She lined up real women along with women in literature and women in paintings, and shook the nonsense out of all of them. When George forgot for a moment that this scathing author was his daughter, she made him laugh, and then he remembered.

For Sheila wasn’t in the least bit funny. There wasn’t a glimmer of amusement in her. Watching her magnified eyes across a restaurant table (her glasses grew noticeably thicker every year), George felt himself scrutinized by a pair of stuffed olives. There was resentfulness there, yes. Humour, no. One might as well expect to share a joke with Little Dorrit, at whose expense the author of The Noblest Station was briskly clever.

But there was worse to come. The author had mined her pages at intervals with the word “patriarchal”. George felt that this explosive multisyllable had been laid there especially for him to stumble over and be wounded by.

Harbouring the book in the house at all seemed to George to be like keeping a polecat for a pet. He did his best to tame it, shelving it in its proper place among the G’s, between Goodbye to All That and Diary of a Nobody . It didn’t work. The name S. V. Grey stuck out as importunately as if it was lit in neon. The book itself was so much taller and fatter and newer than George’s orangeback Penguins and foxed Tauchnitz Library editions. Its coloured jacket bulged away from its spine, as if the book had developed a wild and irrepressible life of its own. Nor was this just a function of the way that George felt got-at by the contents: it was the first object in the house that any visitor spotted. Once, people had remarked on the ornate Adeni oak chest in which George kept his papers or on the dwarf snowbell tree that he had grown from seed in a tub in the living room. Now all they saw was the book.

“This is you, yes, Mr Grey?” they said.

“No, no — that’s … my daughter, actually,” said George, and always felt that he was telling an obscure lie as he said it. But no-one would understand that the alarming S. V. Grey was—

There was a throaty tirra-lirra from the phone in the hall. George gratefully detached himself from the remains of his meal.

The hall was dark and humid, a resort for cockroaches and hairy spiders. When George picked up the phone, all that was there at first was a lot of echo and transcontinental crackle. Concentrating harder, he discovered a tinny replica of a human voice hiding somewhere in the nest of interference. It was saying, “Hello? Hello? Hello? George?”

“Who is that? … Vera?”

It was Vera, calling from three streets away. The Montedorian telephone system, like the electricity supply, was still in an experimental stage.

“What is your name?” Vera asked.

“What?”

“How — was — your — game?”

“Oh. Fine. No, just fine.”

“Who won?”

“Mm? Ah … Teddy did.”

“Always Teddy wins.”

“Yes. I’m afraid it’s his commando training.”

“Unkind fruits and bosky boots,” Vera said.

“What? I can’t hear you!” he shouted.

“I ask you if you eat your dinner.”

He was sure that she hadn’t said that .

“Yes. Vera — I suppose you wouldn’t … like to come over, would you?”

“Oh, it is so late. In the morning is a conference at the hospital. I must have sleep, George. Not tonight, I think.”

He guessed she meant that Teddy was there. “Okay,” he said.

Then Vera said: “You can come here, if you like to. Today I buy a new bottle of Chivas Regal—”

“You are a love,” George said. “No. You get your sleep. I’m feeling bushed as hell, too.”

“Perhaps tomorrow then—”

“Yes. Tomorrow. That would be nice. We can go to dinner—”

“Maybe,” Vera said. “Sleep good.”

“You sleep well, too, old love.”

“Ciao, George—”

He hung the phone back on its hook. Returning to the uneasily throbbing light of the living room, he saw S. V. Grey accusing him from the bookshelf. He swigged the last of the Dào. S. V. Grey was still there, the letters of her name glowing in red tipped with silver.

Let me know your flight number and I will meet you at Heathrow .

Moving painfully, cautious as a burglar in his own house, George shook his squash kit out of the oilcloth shopping bag and refilled it with an ironed shirt, socks, pants, razor and the old account book in which he was drafting his report to the President.

Outside, the air was warm and free of furies. A stucco archway divided George’s strip of garden from the street; beneath the arch was a tidy, man-sized parcel of rags. The loose ends of the parcel fluttered slightly in the night wind, and George stepped carefully over its least bulky end.

A hand came out of the rags.

“Por favor—” The parcel had a cracked woman’s voice.

George felt in his pocket, found a handful of escudos and laid the coins on the hand.

“Muito obrigado,” the parcel said politely.

“Boa noite,” George said.

“Obrigado, senhor.”

There was no traffic in the city. He could hear dogs, exchanging notes from the cardboard box suburbs and, somewhere out in the sky, a light aircraft was on sentry-go. The moon showed the Rua Kwame Nkruma as a picturesque ruin, its fantastic timberwork the colour of old lace.

“Não a Preguiça!” said the broken facade of Number 12; “Não a Oportunismo!”

George, taking the message personally, quickened his aching step.

Habit woke him at dawn. He had dreamed he was an astronaut, hurtling through space in a module full of clocks and gauges. Then he was driving in a golf buggy through a bumpy landscape of red moondust. There was a baby, wrapped in rags, crying under an acacia tree. He picked it up to cuddle it and it turned into something dead and heavy with an elderly stranger’s face. Vera had been in his dream as well. She had gone spacewalking, and when he called to her she was too high in the sky to hear him scream.

He looked at his watch. It wasn’t six, yet. He had always taken pleasure in the cool early morning walk through the sleepy city to the bunkering station. Today, he’d arranged to see Raymond Luis there at eleven; an age away. He was an eleven o’clock man now, at one with the distinguished visitors and the perspiring sales reps; and he saw the redundant hours laid out ahead of him like a range of steep, uninteresting hills.

Surreptitiously, he shifted first one leg, then the other. Neither hurt too badly. Vera’s body was curled away from him, lost in sleep. The springy tangle of her hair was lodged on the neighbouring pillow like a thornbush. The thin shared coverlet stirred against his own body as she breathed. George watched her through one eye, soothed by the simple bulk of her lying beside him. She gave the morning point and weight: it was today, and not just any old day, because here was Vera, her big shoulders hunched and bare, lungs and heart in A-OK order, one pink palm exposed to the encroaching sun as it leaked through the shutters and cast a pale grid of light on the wooden floor.