Foreign Land (11 page)

“Stop it, Timothy! Silly dog! No! Just kick him if you want to-”

“Hullo,” George said. “Nice to see you.” She must have been following him.

“Well, what do you think? Interested?” Her birdsnest of thin hair looked as if it had been fried. It was impervious to the squalls of wind that raced across the breakwater. Beneath it, Betty Thing was as round and pink as an old-fashioned powder puff.

“Sorry—I’ve no idea which boat you’re talking about.”

“Calliope
. That one there. The ketch.”

He’d taken it for a fishing boat. It was tubby, varnished, high in the bow, with a wheelhouse posted near the stern like a sentry box.

“Oh, yes,” George said. “She’s rather pretty.”

“Jolly good seaboat. Of course Wingco’s hardly used her, but when the Tremletts had her they used to take her down to Spain almost every year—” Betty Thing’s voice was drowned out by two long blasts of a ship’s horn. A coaster—Finnish, George saw—was surging downstream on the ebb tide. She was in cargo and sitting low in the water, several inches below her Winter North Atlantic line. As the ship passed, the moored boats lurched on her wake and the sea slopped over the edge of the quay.

Betty Thing said: “I believe old Mr Toms at the boatyard has the keys, if you’d like to see inside …”

“Well, actually, it really hadn’t crossed my mind to—”

“She’s solid teak and mahogany down below.” Coquettish in flamingo ski suit and poncho top, Betty Thing followed each exclamatory sentence with a little puff of breath like a blown kiss. She twinkled at George, then twinkled at the boat. “Such a waste, don’t you think? She hasn’t moved from the river in two years, poor thing. Oh, do get the keys from Toms and give her the once-over!”

“Are you on a percentage?” George said, smiling carefully to take most of the sting out of the words.

“Oh …” her face went suddenly vague. “I’m sorry. It was just an idea. You seemed such a likely person. I suppose you must think I’m a frightful busybody. I don’t usually go in for this sort of thing—that’s probably why I’m so bloody at it.” The boat drifted into the quay; its fenders sighed as it touched, then it floated out again. Betty Thing watched it as if she was wondering how to send it to the bottom.

“It’s Cynthia we all mind about. She’s had the most awful time. They haven’t got a cent left. Just … that boat. Wingco won’t hear of having her put up for sale, but if only someone came along … like you … you see?”

“What’s his real name?”

“Oh … Roy. But for godsake don’t call him that. He hates it.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s chippy,” she said, as if it explained everything. Her
dog crouched beside her, its eyes glazed with contentment as it delivered itself of a long, khaki, helical stool. George lifted his own eyes, in embarrassment, to the horizon. “My pa was a Navy man. He used to swear that some of the best officers he knew had come up through the ranks. Except that Wingco didn’t, of course, but you know what I mean—”

Through the wheelhouse window, George could see the compass, swaying slightly in its gimbals, a yellowed
Daily Telegraph
, the circles of tarnished brass on the wheel.

“There must be someone who wants it—” Betty Thing said.

“I thought you said the man doesn’t want to sell.”

“He
has
to sell. He knows it, too—it’s just his silly pride that stops him. He’ll never go out in it again. He can’t afford it. He’s ruining Cynthia’s life. We have to give her clothes on the sly, or she’d be walking round in rags.”

“I thought service pensions were quite handsome, nowadays.”

“Wingco owes thousands to the bank. He got involved in stocks and shares, you see … and he put some money into a restaurant that went bust … and then there was this boat …”

It didn’t look to George as if it was the crowning symbol of any man’s megalomania. It was too dumpy and trawlerlike. Its varnish was coming out in blisters; the coach roof was marbled with gullshit. It had the air of an abandoned house—not a grand house, but a windy cottage whose tenants had quit in the night with the rent owing and bills piling up on the mat.

“He was awfully clever, I gather. In the Air Force. Early promotion and all that. But then I suppose when he came out the lack of discipline must have gone to his head. It happens, doesn’t it, with people in the services sometimes? The man’s been going to pieces ever since I’ve known him.”

“Poor blighter,” George said, warming to the Wing Commander because he approved of the Wing Commander’s boat.

“Yes,” Betty Thing said shortly. “Though, frankly, it’s poor Cynthia as far as I’m concerned.”

“Is his stroke recent?”

“Oh, early last summer sometime. But, you see, as strokes go it really wasn’t such a bad one. Robin Rhodes said he ought to make a complete recovery from it. But we know our Wingco. He hasn’t made a blind bit of effort ever since.”

A sudden rush of wind pushed
Calliope
out from the quay. Her mooring ropes tightened in a spray of bright droplets. The boat shivered in the water and the fine seams between her planks caught the light. For a long teasing moment, George saw himself busy on her deck, casting off and sailing cleanly away into the blue.

“Well,” said Betty Thing with a disagreeable little smile, “I’m afraid that’s grammar schools for you. Isn’t it?”

Wing Commander and Mrs Dunnett lived at Persimmons on a hill overlooking the river to the north of the village. Alders would have been a better name for it, George thought, or Nettles. The garden gate was swollen and wouldn’t close behind him. Rain had washed away most of the steep gravel drive. The rusty frame of a dinghy trailer was sunk in the overgrowth of grass and chickweed. An old Mercedes standing aslew at the top of the drive might have been temporarily parked or permanently junked; it was hard to tell. The house itself was a straggling bungalow with Tudor beams chamfered into the brickwork. Its dark windows reflected the careless turmoil of the garden like over-exposed negatives of film.

It took a long time for Mrs Dunnett to come to the door. When she did open it, she stared, rather vaguely, over George’s shoulder as if she expected to see more of him coming up the drive.

“Oh …” she said. Then: “Oh, yes. You want to see Wingco. You’d better come in.”

The house had a married smell of cooked vegetables and unaired linen. It reminded George uncomfortably of the way that Thalassa used to smell when his father was alive. Mrs Dunnett stood in the hall of the bungalow as if it were she and
not George who was a total stranger to it. She stared with bulging eyes at the front door until George closed it. Then she gazed round her as if she couldn’t quite remember in which wing of the palace she had last noticed her husband.

She was tall, with colourless skin and high cheekbones that stood out on her face like the arms of a crucifix. Her floral print dress was too vivid, too baggy and too short for her. One of Betty Whatsit’s castoffs?

“Just wait a minute, will you?” She moved all of six feet into the room nearest to her and said, “Your man’s here, Wingco,” then to George, “Yes, he’s through there …”

George followed her in to the room.

“Oh, hullo—good of you to come,” said the wing commander from his armchair. He was small, pink and swaddled like a baby. The left half of his face was stiff; the right half smiled, showing teeth too white and regular to be real.

“Cold, isn’t it, Mister … I don’t know your name,” Mrs Dunnett said.

“Grey.”

“Grey.” Then she said “grey” again, this time as if it was a description of his character rather than his name. “Do you take sugar with your tea?”

“No thanks, I don’t.”

“Oh, well that’s all right,” she said, and breezed from the room.

“Sorry,” Dunnett said. “I can’t get up. At least I can, but …” He nodded at the open door. “Do … ah … ah …” he waved his right hand limply at a chair. “Old Toms called me. Said you’d looked over the boat.”

“Yes,” George said. “She’s very pretty.”

“No speed in her, of course. Won’t tack. But she’s what I call a gentleman’s yacht. Not like all those Tupperware things …”

“Would you like to sell her?”

“Oh …” Dunnett was watching the door. “Well she’s not up for sale, you know,” he said in a voice designed to carry. “We’re still thinking of upping sticks in her next summer.
Going down to the Med. Or the Caribbean. My wife has friends in Florida. If only this—” he jerked his left hand—“would ease up a bit, we could be off.” He said
orf
, but it sounded unnatural in his mouth, as if he’d been taking elocution lessons from his wife.

“I envy you,” George said, thinking how relieved he was to be himself and not the wing commander. The man must be his own age; he realized that he’d been thinking of him as if he was of the same generation as his father.

“Given a stretch of decent weather … with the trade winds and everything … if the medicos gave one a clean bill of health … assuming one could find a buyer for the house … and put all one’s stuff in storage …” Dunnett was adding unlikelihood to unlikelihood with the air of a child building a house of cards for the sheer pleasure of seeing it collapse. “Do you know Florida?”

“No, I’ve never been there.”

“Nor me. Dreadfully hot in the summer, I gather. Moonrockets and Disneyland and all that.” He made a chirruping sound of disbelief.

“And you’d sail all the way?” George said, plugging his advantage.

“Well … I suppose … if things panned out …”

Mrs Dunnett brought in tea on a tray. The silver pot looked ancestral, the china looked as if it might be Spode; but there was a bottle of milk in place of a jug, and the tray had smears of marmalade on it.

“I’m off to St Austell,” Mrs Dunnett said.

“Oh …” For a moment the wing commander showed the fright of a toddler abandoned in a crowd on a station. Then the stiff side of his face moved slightly. “Yes. Drive carefully, darling, won’t you—”

George, awkwardly on his feet, said: “Goodbye, Mrs Dunnett.”

She stared at him as if he’d said something original. “Goodbye.”

“You’d better be Mother,” Dunnett said to George as she
left. Pouring the tea, George heard the Mercedes start outside. Its exhaust must have been broken: the engine was making a snarling noise like a tank. The car roared down the drive. He heard it pause, straining, at the gate, then roar down the hill towards St Cadix.

“Cynthia loves the sea,” Dunnett said, as if this somehow accounted for the sound of the car.

“Milk?” George said.

“Oh … would you? Thank you so much.”

Above his head, George noticed a shelf solid with the faded scarlet spines of a row of
Debrett’s
and
Burke’s
. The most recent volume was a
Debrett’s
for 1934. He supposed that Mrs Dunnett must be listed in it somewhere. She must have been Somebody’s daughter.

“I’m afraid I’ve always been too much of an airman to like the sea very much. Didn’t even like flying over it. I get mal de mer very easily. Tried all the pills. None of them seems to work. I always manage to end up with my head stuck over the lee side …”

“Yes,” George said, “it’s flying that does that to me.”

“Same with Cynthia. She hates the air. I suppose it’s not really given to most of us to be at home in more than one element. I’m air; Cynthia’s sea. Ironic really, when you think about it.”

George said: “I was in the Navy for a bit—and since then I’ve always had to do with ships.”

“Betty Castle said something about that, yes. You know her, of course. She’s been an absolute brick to us, you know. Heart of gold.”

“Yes,” George said, and thought, poor sod.

“She’s been awfully good with Cynthia …” The wing commander looked across at George, fishing for some sort of knowing response.

“Has she—?”

“Oh, marvellous. Marvellous. Cynthia’s in so much better shape than she was. Without Betty, I can’t think what we’d have done. She’s been a pillar to both of us.” He carried his
teacup carefully to his mouth. It wobbled badly, and tea splashed the travelling rug in which the wing commander had been wrapped.

“I’m going to have to watch my step, you know,” he said. “When I do sell the boat. It was bought for Cynthia, really. Only I turned out to be such a ruddy awful sailor.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t sell it,” George said.

“No choice. Look at me … And then there’s the simple matter of the L.s.d. involved: it’s rotten for Cynthia, all this—she’s not used to having to count pennies.”

“I don’t want to make things more difficult for you.”

“Frankly, old boy, you’ll be taking a millstone from round our necks. I sometimes think that if only I’d had a bit more bottle in me, I should have scuttled the thing for the insurance money long ago …” The good side of Dunnett’s face contracted into a small, unhappy smile. “I knew a chap who did that once. Got clean away with it. Nobody said a word.”

“We had quite a bit of it where I was in Africa. It was supertankers there, usually. There’s a spot just off Liberia where the continental shelf is only five miles out. You can leave the ship in seven hundred fathoms of water and have a pleasant row ashore. Lots of people do it. It’s a profitable way of spending an afternoon.”