Foreign Land (30 page)

Anyone would be scared at the sight of Peres’s handwriting. From a distance, it looked gap-toothed; then you saw that it was a jumble of little letters mixed up with big ones. The e’s and n’s and p’s were sometimes the right way round, sometimes reversed. The Little Sisters of Mercy hadn’t made a very good job of Peres, the scowling thug in the back row of their mission school in São Felipe. Yet Peres, who could barely write at all, loved writing. He had the relentless output of a
romantic novelist. From Peres’s office came plans, memoranda, surveys, orders, dreams, fictions. The three male secretaries whom Peres called his sergeant majors did their best with their boss’s peculiar orthography; but even after the documents had been typed and tidied, you could still see Peres’s vandal script in every line. They were full of capitalized words: REGENERATION, PURIFICATION, DISCIPLINE, NECESSITY. For five years, George had grown used to glancing at them, wincing, tearing them up and consigning their pieces to the office bin. Was anyone daring to tear them up now?

For what else was one to make of Vera’s missing letters and the dead connections on the telephone? Listening to Senegal failing to raise Montedor, George heard Peres in the wires, and hated him as a rival. For Bom Porto was
his
, George’s. It was precious to him as England had never been. It was too little, too delicate, too private, to survive Peres’s handling. George had once seen the man spell liberation as
. At the time, it had been a joke. He’d shown it to Teddy at the Club as a rich example of how one of Peres’s damaged words exactly fitted Peres’s damaged notion of its meaning. Give Peres power, though, and the man would mangle the country in just the same way as he mangled the language. One day, you’d ring up and there wouldn’t be a Montedor to get through
to
. Peres could make it disappear, as letters and words disappeared from shopfronts and signposts, eroded away by vandalism and the weather. The shape of the harbour, the spiky mountains, the leftover Portuguese trellises and balconies—they’d still be there, but they wouldn’t be Montedor. They’d be another country, as alien as Iran or the Philippines. Had it happened already? Was George having no luck with his phone calls because the international operator had been right first time and there was now just a blank space between Monte Cristo and Montego Bay?

Discarding an old lace-fronted dress shirt that laundering had turned to the colour of ivory, he felt helpless, shaky. It was if someone with a rubber was methodically trying to erase the
world one lived in: Teddy was almost gone; Vera was going fast; the bunkering station was now little more than a few vestigial pencil lines. George knew who was doing it. Peres. It had to be Peres. That was the only possible explanation as far as he could fathom. Seeing Peres’s khaki, Creole face, smelling his minty breath, George hated him for a persecutor and a thief.

He tried to soothe himself. Thoughts like this were bad for his heart. Remember Vera’s warnings—her alarm at his morning sweatiness, her nagging talk of Dr Ferraz. George thought: but I don’t have Vera to worry for me now; I’m on my own lookout. He rolled up the tie that she’d brought back from the conference in São Paulo (“the closest thing I find for you to a living rainbow”), and bedded it down between his shirts.

There was a blast from a baritone ship’s siren below the window. A coaster was sliding past, lighting up the water as she went. Eight thousand tons, or thereabouts; and she was riding low, a damned sight too close to her Tropical line. The siren sounded again, full of the self-importance of having somewhere to go. Like every ship on its way out of the estuary nowadays, she made George feel left behind.

A hairpin fell out of a pair of boxer shorts as he lifted them from the drawer—his mother’s. This was how things came full circle. Soon everything female in his life would be his mother’s again. It was like being six, to find one’s mother’s scent in one’s clothes, and odd maternal souvenirs lurking in one’s underwear. He half expected to hear himself scolded for crumpling his shirts into balls instead of folding them. His parents—provident as always—had taken care when dying to leave enough of themselves to last George through his own lifetime: hairpins here, pictures there, postcards, hats and papers. In his first week in St Cadix, he’d had to throw out his father’s old pipes because he didn’t want to find himself smoking them by accident. Out of tobacco one Sunday, he had raided an ancient tin of his father’s: the stuff had flared in the bowl and burned like wood shavings, its dusty, rectorish taste taking him back
fifty years in a breath.

He opened, and quickly closed, another drawer full of trinket boxes.

“Do you think this brooch goes with my organdie, dear?” His mother was talking to his father, who, as usual, wasn’t listening. “Dear?”

“Very nice, dear,” his father said in the patient voice that he kept specially for talking to women and children.

“What does George think?”

“Oh—tophole,” said George at ten, from deep in the
Aeromodellers’ Monthly;
and came swooping back like a glider falling out of a thermal to his glass of Chivas Regal and his carrier bag of linen.

His parents were more alive, more real to him now, than he was to himself. They had some sort of knack, a staying power, that George had failed to inherit. Thalassa bulged with them, while he still tiptoed round it like a weekend guest. Their past was intact (how
did
they manage it?) while George’s felt as if it was crumbling from under him so fast that he couldn’t even count its going. As for the future … George saw
that
as the period covered by the next shipping forecast. It didn’t look bright, either, the way things were looking now. South, veering southwest, six to gale eight. Visibility moderate, becoming poor later. Rain later. Something of that order. Certainly not a future that anyone could take much comfort from.

On the way downstairs, George found himself being chided by his father.

“I do wish you’d stop moping round this house like a sick cat,” his father said.

“There’s a pain in my back,” George said. “My heart’s giving out warning signals. I’m not a well man.”

“If you want something to keep you occupied, you can always deliver some parish magazines. Or give your mother a hand, for a change.”

“Yes, Daddy,” George said, squeezing rudely past his father on the landing.

He cooked himself a rubbery omelette in his mother’s kitchen, on his mother’s pan, and drank the remains of one of his own bottles of Vinho Verde.

“That’s not what I’d call a proper meal at all,” his mother said.

“Wine?
On
top
of whisky?” his father said.

“Will you leave me alone, for Christ’s sake? I am sixty years old.”

“The boy’s drunk,” his father said.

“He’s just going through a phase,” said his mother.

“There are certain levels of behaviour that I simply will not tolerate in this house,” his father said.

George rid himself of them by folding
The Times
back on the crossword and getting out his pen; “Vessel goes astern in some Liverpool sea shanty (5)” was obviously “sloop”, and “Philosopher uses box, in emergency (8)” was “Socrates”. He got “castigate” and “pythons” before he heard his parents’ voices again, coming from behind the closed door of the drawing room.

“Heaven knows what they’re going to make of
that
young man in the Navy,” his father said.

“It’s adolescence, dear,” his mother said.

At 9.00, George rang Diana. He wanted to invite himself round for a drink. He wanted to invite her to come with him on the boat—only as far as Plymouth, of course. Or Dartmouth. For a day or two, to see how she liked it. But her voice on the phone was surprised and already sleepy. George coughed, and said that he was leaving the key to the house under a brick.

“I’ll look in when I go past and pick up your mail.”

“I’d be awfully glad if you would.”

“It’s no trouble at all. When will you get to London?”

“Oh—ten days, a fortnight. It depends on the weather.”

“Ring me up and tell me where you are … when you’re in port.”

“Will do,” George said.

“You wouldn’t like a drink … sort of now, would you? Before you go?”

“Oh …” George said, playing for time, waiting for the invitation to solidify. “It’s a bit on the late side … isn’t it?”

“I guess so … with your early start.”

“I really meant—”

“Take care. Watch out for Arthur. Have a lovely trip. I’ll be thinking of you.”

“’f you too,” George said, swallowing, and found that Diana had hung up before he’d spoken.

Putting the phone down, he noticed his face reflected in the dark uncurtained window. It was in ghostly monochrome, like a photographic negative. What was upsetting was that, at first glance, it wasn’t his own face. The hair and beard were his, but not the plummeting cheekbones, the sunken eye sockets, the ridged and bony temples, the fishlike downturn of the lips. They were his father’s. Worse, they were his father’s, not at sixty but on the day that George had last seen him, when the rector was seventy-nine and was already confined to the upstairs bedroom, where he kept a baby’s hours of sleep broken by weeping complaints.

“Come … to … the … station,” he’d said, in his new voice that sounded like dead leaves blowing across stone.

“What?” George had bent close. “What is it—Daddy?”

“Constipation,” the rector whispered. “It’s just this … ruddy … constipation.”

George, finding himself nearer to his father than he’d ever been before, quickly kissed him. It was only on the forehead and the kiss was no more than a graze of the lips. His father’s skull felt as fragile as a speckled blackbird’s egg. But the rector’s eyes were shocked, helpless, accusing. They followed George as if the kiss had been an indecent assault.

That was the face—the face he’d kissed—that he saw in the window. Fascinated, appalled, he studied it, turning his head slowly in the bare electric light. The resemblance faded out of the reflection. It was just a trick of the uneven glass and the darkness outside. There was no more real likeness than there was in the pictures of the ancestors on the walls. It was the
Grey family cheekbones that he’d seen—no more. Even so, it gave him the jitters. He’d never realized that he would ever look so old, or so much his father’s son.

At 10.00 George, middling drunk now, locked the dark house and pushed the key under the brick. He would have liked to have left a note, but couldn’t think of anyone to leave a note for. Not even the milkman called at Thalassa. Holsum-hatted (H LS M—M CA’S # B D: “What
is
that gibberish on the boy’s head,” his father said), carrying Vera’s oilcloth bag of many colours, he padded out through the soggy mulch of pine needles. The house frowned at his back.

The night was damp and windless. The sea at the foot of the cliff was inaudible, the branches of the trees overhead quite still. It was the deceptive calm that you expected before a gale came roaring out of the southwest. It deadened the village, making it feel like something preserved in jelly.

Most of the houses were as dark as his own, still waiting for the summer visitors who rented them furnished by the week. For weeks people had been talking about The Visitors, in the same tone that they would have used to say The Russians or The Chinese. But no Visitors had come yet. At least none that George had seen.

In a very few windows, the curtains were splashed with blue light from the televisions inside. The only voices on Upper Marine Walk were American ones talking too loudly about love and death with the tinny vowels of speak-your-weight machines.

At the bottom of the hill there was a noisy pool of pop music from the jukebox in The Falcon’s Nest and the bleep and chatter of wargames in the bar. George kept to the shadows on the far side of the street. He’d always thought of pubs as friendly places in whose foggy undemanding gloom a man could safely talk to himself and nurse his bruises. But you’d have to feel very good about yourself to face The Falcon’s Nest
with its wolfish motorbikes on the pavement outside and its angry racket within.