Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

Vera was exactly a year older than his daughter; George treasured those twelve months as a special, secret gift. By Bom Porto standards, Vera was no chicken: the girls with whom she’d been in school were all old women now. When he’d first met Vera, he’d been shocked by the schoolfriends — their cracked faces, their shuffling walk, their trails of ragged grandchildren. They seemed older than his own mother. Standing with them, Vera looked absurdly, indecently young; but she was a year older than his daughter — that was the important thing to George.

He touched her warm haunch and felt the moistening of her nightsweat on his fingers. She shivered as if his hand had entered in disguise into her dream, and the open palm on the pillow travelled slowly, uncertainly to her hidden breast. Dear Vera. It occurred to George that he liked her best when she was asleep. Awake, there was too much of her, somehow, to allow any but qualified and complicated feelings. Asleep, she permitted him to wallow in simple tenderness and simple gratitude. Dear, dear Vera.

As quietly as he could, he slid out from Vera’s bed and tiptoed from the room, trousers in hand. Quietly, he filled her blackened kettle and quietly submerged the coffee-grinder in the bitter-smelling sack of mountain beans. A line from a schoolboy hymn stuck in his head: “Who sweeps a room as for His name makes that and the action fine”. George liked these passages of early morning housewifery. Doing things for Vera. The gas popped loudly as he put a match to it. George listened: no, she was still asleep.

Vera had two rooms — palatial space in this city where most people lived in spicy huddles like litters of kittens. Though Vera herself put one instinctively in mind of clutter, knick-knacks, overflowing laundry baskets, cornucopias, her rooms were barely colonized at all. She had accumulated a lot in the way of flesh, experience, self, but there was precious little of her when it came to things. Her clothes were kept in a single narrow closet. No skeletons there — it was less than half-full. The room at the front had a single picture on the wall, a rather nasty reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Cornfield near Aries”. There was a gaudy woollen rug on the floor, woven by Wolofs. A manual of abdominal surgery lay on top of a guide to the art treasures of Lisbon. George loved this room for its airiness: it was so hospitably empty that a single remark, a shaft of buttery sunlight or a cut flower from an embassy garden could take it over in its entirety. It was a room perfectly designed for living in the present.

Now he was grinding their breakfast coffee there, filling the room with the smell; bare feet on bare boards, winding the brass handle with a knobbly, clenched left hand, and listening to the satisfying scrunch-scrunch sound of the beans inside the mill.

He opened the mosquito door on to the loggia, and let the morning in. The jagged hills to the northwest of the city were coloured orange by the sun. The army had painted them with letters big enough to be seen by passing spacemen in their satellites: LONG LIVE AGRARIAN REFORM! LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL DEMOCRACY! LONG LIVE AMILCAR CABRAL! Below the loggia, a yellow Toyota pickup truck with a stoved-in side went past in a caul of dust. It was followed by a black solitary, shit-stained pig, out for a morning constitutional. Then came a woman, a five gallon kerosene drum almost full of water balanced on her head. The drum didn’t shift, but her eyes did: they swivelled upwards, gazing roundly at the balcony, where George felt his gaping flies.

“Bom dia,” George said.

“Bom dia,” she said, and giggled.

He watched her go on down the street, wearing the can on her head as stylishly as if it was an Ascot hat. Her disappearance round a sandy corner left the street suddenly blank; and in that emptiness, George felt a stab of panic. The present was crowding him out. For the last five minutes, he had been printing images in his head as if they were in the past. Everything — the woman, the pig, the truck, the slogans, even Vera still asleep next door, even the smell of the coffee he was still grinding — already had the sharpness of a memory. Viva! Viva! said the slogans on the hills; but this was a life he was looking back to. Framed half-naked in the mosquito door, George felt posthumous.

“George! Hey, honey, are you there?”

“Yes,” he called back, “I’m here. I’m making coffee. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

The table was spread with sheets from yesterday’s Times . Tom lifted the heavy instrument from its baize-lined wooden chest. The brass frame was blackened; the silvering on the mirrors was speckled round the edges; the smoked glass lenses were encrusted with old dust. Tom held the telescope-bit to his eye. His out of focus view of the mantelpiece was obstructed by a rectangle of white fuzz.

Viv had said it was a theodolite, like surveyors use — but Viv was ignorant. It was obvious what it was. It was a sextant. Sea captains had them. You looked at the sun through it and it told you where you were.

There was no sun to look at today. Tendrils of cloud the colour of bonfire smoke grazed the housetops and dampened the winter trees. Visibility stopped beyond the grey shale bank of the Richmond to Waterloo railway line. On the lawn, two wet starlings hopped listlessly between the timber piles. Tom licked the corner of a duster and began gently to wipe the lenses clean.

He’d paid a fair bit for it — a coat rack from a derelict restaurant in Shooter’s Hill and a filing cabinet and swivel chair from a travel agents’ in Camberwell. But he’d lusted after it as soon as Viv opened its brassbound case and revealed it nesting there in the dusty baize with its set of little accessory telescopes each slotted into a compartment of its own. Tom was fond of instruments, their fiddly precision, their serious weight. This one was a beauty.

Tom wound the duster round his forefinger and wetted it with a dab of Brasso. He rubbed at a strut on the frame. In a moment there was a wink of pale metal showing from under the mottling of olive-black carbon. It lengthened slowly into a smear. Tom went on rubbing until the whole piece gleamed misty gold.

He could hear the electric clatter of Sheila’s typewriter up at the top of the house. The words were coming in crowds this morning. One of Sheila’s good days. More often they assembled in ones and twos like at a Salvation Army meeting. Today they were pouring out. It sounded like the Arsenal on a Saturday afternoon up there. Surely she must have enough words to fill her book now. For months she had been in a state of perpetual beginning, filling her wastebasket with half-typed pages. Every week the dustmen carted away Sheila’s extravagant droppings. When the wind got up, paper blew around the garden and lodged in the trees. Tom rescued her rejected pages, shaking them free of coffee grounds, bits of eggshell and tomato skins, smoothing them flat and reading them as messages to himself, as if they’d arrived in bottles. Usually they didn’t make much sense; but sometimes they made a weird and sparky connection with what Tom was thinking. His favourite was headed “27”: the solitary, uncompleted line of type read, “freedom, in daily things, is what”. He kept that piece of paper, and others, in a box in the bomb shelter. That was how he best liked to read Sheila’s work — secretly, in fragments. It was like kissing someone in their sleep, and them kissing back, not knowing it was you.

He started to tackle the long curved strip at the bottom of the sextant. The tarnish wiped off more easily here and exposed a silver inlay in the brass. The silver was engraved with figures and divisions so tiny and so finely done that one needed the swivelling magnifier on the arm of the instrument to make them out at all. Tom thought: a little soot, rubbed well into the silver, would help them stand out better. He rubbed at the brass around the inlay and uncovered some lettering with fancy curlicues: J. H. STEWARD, 457 WEST STRAND, LONDON. There was also the name of the owner, inscribed in a less florid style. J. H. C. Minter R.N.