Foreign Land (10 page)

“Where do you want him io, then?” Clasping the enormous set to his chest, Mr Jellaby was puffed and bandy legged.

Thrown by the man’s grammar, George had stared and said, “Oh … anywhere over there will do—”, pointing at the portrait of the cousin.

Jellaby connected up the equipment. “He’ll do nice here,” he said, as if the TV was a dog or a foster child. “You want the video, too?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t think so. No.”

“You get free membership of the Video Club …”

“The television’s fine—it’s all I want.”

“You’re all on your own here, are you?” Jellaby inspected the unswept room with the expert look of someone whose business is other people’s business, like a parson or a social worker. “In the Video Club we’ve got a very good selection of … adult films.” He didn’t quite wink, but his expression was unpleasantly complicit. “I’ll leave you a form anyway. So you can have a think about it.”

“Oh, please don’t bother—”

That affair had been rum enough; the stuff that George saw on the screen of the thing was rummer. Much of it was incomprehensible because the programmes kept on referring to other television programmes that George had never seen. It was like the Walpoles’ party—knowing none of the famous names, he felt ignorant and excluded. The jokes were unanswerable riddles. He watched, baffled, as a housewife on a quiz show identified six different TV series from a medley of their signature tunes. For this feat of general knowledge, she was rewarded with a twin-tub washing machine and tumble drier. Never before had George seen anyone literally jump for joy, but this woman was skipping up and down on the stage. She threw her arms round the neck of her inquisitor, wept real tears, and kissed him lavishly. George changed channels.

He watched a game of football in which England lost 3-0 to Luxembourg. An hour later, on the news, he saw the aftermath of the game: children fighting with policemen in the streets around the football stadium. The policemen advanced like ancient Greeks, behind an interlocking wall of silver riot shields; the angry children stoned them with bricks and bottles. Forty children had been arrested, eight policemen seriously injured.

He watched advertisements for kitchen units, sheep pellets,
chocolate bars, home computers. He half expected to come across his own daughter’s face as he drifted from station to station. There was a programme in which people were talking about books, but Sheila wasn’t on it.

He sat through the full term (a record, for him) of a comedy show called “An Englishman’s Home”. The characters in it were supposed to be lords and ladies living on their uppers in a mouldy castle. The helicopter shot at the beginning of the programme, with its view of sculpted woods, trim parkland and old, rust coloured brick, suggested Kent. The castle was ruled by a woman called Lady Barbara, who strode round the place in a tweed skirt and padded kapok jacket of camouflage green. Every time she came on, the studio audience clapped. She could barely speak without raising a storm of appreciative laughter. At the climax of the show she blew a derelict barn to bits with dynamite. When the dust and smoke cleared, a wayward baronet was found squatting in the rubble.

“Ah, Peregrine,” said the actress playing Lady Barbara. “There you are. Sitting around on your b.t.m. as usual. Why don’t you do something useful for a change? Oh, Perry, do get on your bike!”

The audience roared. The actress turned on them with her bossy, horsey, Lady Barbara look, and they choked their laughter for just long enough to allow her to deliver her next line.

“And Peregrine!” The baronet was dusting himself down. His clothes were charred, his tie in shreds. “How many times have I told you to stop smoking?”

The audience loved this one. George was mystified. He supposed that the programme must be some sort of allegory. Or satire, perhaps. Whatever it was, it was definitely rum. For a moment he rather wished that he hadn’t thrown away that form of Jellaby’s: if one was going to get the hang of television now, perhaps one had to be a member of the Video Club.

Furry puppets jigged on the screen. George stared at them and searched his head for phrases to send to Vera.

Her letter had come by the second post. It was breathless
and crowded, full of abrupt bursts of news penned out in Vera’s lovely, loopy scrawl. She missed him. Waking in the mornings, she felt lonely, sometimes. She thought of him as a tree. (Was that
arvore
, or some other word? George meant to look at it again.) On Tuesday, twenty millimetres of rain had fallen. She’d met the President of Guinea-Bissau. She hoped to go to the WHO conference in Washington in January. She’d found a scorpion on the balcony; the Wolof janitor from downstairs had murdered it for her with relish. The Egyptian from the World Bank had given the final OK to the building of the new road to Guia. Then she wrote: “All that I speak must sound a little bizarre, for Montedor now is very far away to you, I think.”

That wasn’t true. (A man with a woman’s lacquered hairdo was reading the news.) Africa was so close that George could graze it with his cheek. Africa was where he was whenever he forgot himself: it was the place where he slept, brushed his teeth and where he hummed “Tiger Rag” as he waited for the kettle to come to the boil. It was home. Several times in the last few days he’d noticed a lightning flicker on the extreme periphery of his vision—a house skink, tacking nervously up the wall. He’d turned his head to watch the lizard, and remembered. No skinks in St Cadix.

It was England, not Africa, that was so far away. The country was all round him, dark and mossy, littered with his parents’ ancestral junk. Yet it was like a thin charcoal smear of land on the horizon of an enormous lake. He kept on losing sight of it, and none of it seemed any nearer than the rest.

If only Vera’s apartment was as close as it felt … He longed to talk to her over a bottle of Chivas Regal parked on top of the manual of abdominal surgery, with the guttering electricity supply making candlelight around them. But what could one put in a letter? Not much.

Writing carefully, George filled two sides of lightweight onionskin. The television pictures cast an even, cold blue light on the page. When he next looked up, Lady Barbara was on. She was in jodhpurs tonight, and she was shaking a riding crop at one of the hapless noblemen in her domain.

The marine aquarium was padlocked for the winter; the three gift shops were sealed off behind rusty metal grilles. At the Lively Lobster restaurant, last season’s menu had curled in its glass frame and the handwriting on it was gone to an illegible sepia. Fore Street was frigid and unsociable. George felt marooned.

The sun was up, but it was too weak to equip him with a shadow. His footsteps, trapped between the tall, wet granite walls, sounded like axe blows.

He spotted Jellaby, out in his van making house calls. Maybe that’s what everyone was up to behind their closed doors … fighting computer wargames and watching old movies on video machines. Hardly anyone was about. The few women who had braved the street had the furtive look of trespassers with their coat lapels pulled up high round their faces as they hid from the wind.

It was the herring gulls who went about as if they owned the village: they loafed in noisy rows on gable ends, scuffled between the chimney pots and stood four square, cackling and spitting, in the middle of the road. As George passed they watched him with bloody button eyes. They knew a newcomer when they saw one: and the gulls had prehistory on their side.

George posted his letter to Vera. Listening to it slither and fall in the empty pillarbox, he wanted to recall it. The words he’d written weren’t strong enough to survive the journey. By the time they reached Vera, they’d mean something else.

The wind stung. His coat was too thin for the weather. Swinging his arms, throwing the hem of his long coat up with his knees, he began to march through the village like a stormtrooper, scattering the gulls ahead of him. Then he remembered that sea air was supposed to be a sexual stimulant. Too bad. He’d walk just the same.

He reached the quay and marched out along the breakwater, past the moored boats to the striped pepperpot lighthouse at the end, where he tried and failed to get his pipe alight. The wind was shredding the tops of the little pointed waves on the estuary. At the harbour entrance, half a mile away, big breakers were rolling in from the open Atlantic: as they hit the rocks they exploded into plumes of white powder. On the far bank the leafless trees looked rimed with hoar frost: dust from the china clay works upriver had brought a snowbound winteriness to the landscape, smearing the trees, the grass, the roads, the dark slate roofs, and blowing in twisty clouds down the long funnel of the valley. Rupert Walpole had said he was fighting “a rearguard action” against “the conservationists”; but George thought Walpole was, if anything, improving on nature. The white dust, mixed with the white spume, gave Cornwall the arresting oddity of a moonscape.

The tide was high and the end of the breakwater felt as if it was afloat. George leaned on the rail to steady himself as the sea moved all round him, lapping at his feet, busy, noisy, comforting. He liked the taste of salt spray on his lips and the dizzying sensation of being back aboard ship, feeling the bows lift to the waves and sink suddenly back.

On watch again, he studied the water. There was something very English about it, this thin, light-starved water which fizzed and splashed so much more quickly and nervously than the slower seas he had grown used to. In Bom Porto, the Atlantic was milky green, thick as soup. At this time of year it swarmed with plankton, and in certain lights you seemed to see the sea wriggle with life. It was easy to imagine the first things crawling out of it and starting in on their colonial adventure. This northern sea was different, more coldly
sophisticated. If you thought about the things that came out of it, they weren’t innocent. Celtic saints with prophecies … shipwrecked sailors … wartime mines. The tidewrack that nudged and bumped against the harbour wall was full of broken fish crates, shapeless chunks of polystyrene, limp condoms like giant white tulip flowers. Well, in that respect the sea was like most things. You got out of it pretty well exactly what you put in: it returned Montedor to Montedor, England to England, as automatically as any mirror. George, watching its flecked and ruffled surface, saw too much confusion there for comfort, and turned his back on it.

Halfway along the breakwater, he stopped to look at the boats. Their mooring lines were slack in the water and they’d floated out from the quay, their hulls knocking gently together, fender to fender. They were very lightly attached to the land. The half dozen yachts were just big plastic toys; it was the fishing boats that interested him, with their scabbed paint and tangles of gear. They had good names—
Excelsior, Harmony, Mystic, Faithful, Harvest Home
. There was an open-hearted frankness in these names. Each one was a confession. When you were at sea you really did think about abstract, religious things—things that you never admitted to ashore. You dreamed a lot. You found yourself believing in fate, or God or a girl.

The naval ratings on
Hecla
, for instance. In Portsmouth, Cape Town, Mombasa, they stormed each port like Apaches. It had been a terrifying task to round them up, sodden and cursing, from the bars and brothels that they always discovered, by some instinctive radar system, within hours of docking. George, a sub-lieutenant fresh out of the Sixth Form, felt like an infant beside these hardened libertines of nineteen and twenty. Yet on night watches, ploughing up the Indian Ocean, it was the ratings who were childlike. He was touched and astonished by the questions they set him when he made the rounds of the ship.

“Do you reckon Jesus was real, sir?”

“My mum’s in Pinner. They won’t bomb Pinner, will they,
sir?”

“Billington saw a ghost once, sir. Have you ever seen a ghost, sir?”

They wore St Christopher charms round their necks. Whenever the papers came on board, they raced to look up their fortunes in the stars. They spent many of their off duty hours staring at the sea with wonder in their faces, counting flying fish and looking out for monsters.

The names of the boats struck the same wondering note. George found the village itself oppressively safe and dull, but the fishing boats held out the teasing promise of another world, just around the corner from St Cadix—a realm of solitude, of meditation, of danger. He watched them crowding at their moorings:
Excelsior
brushed lightly past
Harvest Home;
the tide caught at the stern of
Harmony
and it sashayed across the water, its ropes lifting clear, its bow going on a private abortive quest for open sea.

“Oh, hullo there! So you’ve found Wingco’s boat!”

It was the woman from the Walpoles’ party—the one who’d known his mother. Betty-something, he thought, but wasn’t sure. Her miniature dog was squeaking and snuffling round his trouser ends.