Foreign Land (4 page)

Zapp!
Pause.
Whock!
Longer pause.
Flam!
George was working on Teddy’s backhand down the side wall.

“Scumbag!”

George had always been impressed by Teddy’s command of American vernacular. It seemed a lot to have brought back from two years at the Business School of the University of Wisconsin. Teddy, referring to his alma mater, called it Bizz-Wizz.
George suspected Teddy of having made it up, just as he suspected that many of Teddy’s more colourful American obscenities might have raised blank looks if voiced anywhere within the United States. Did anyone really say—

“Diddly-shitting corn-hole!”?

George found it hard to believe so, and directed the ball at a soggy patch, and missed, and lost the point, but won the game a minute later.

“Teddy—what can I get you?”

Laughing, turbaning his head in a striped towel, the Minister of Communications said: “Me? I’ll sink a Sun Top. Make it two.”

George’s legs felt rubbery. Victory always left him weaker than defeat; and for the last month he’d been on a winning streak. It had started on the day he learned from Vera that she and Teddy had shared a room at the Luanda Mar hotel at the congress in Angola where Vera had been Health and Teddy had been Transport. The two words were altogether too expressive for comfort. That wasn’t the first time, apparently, nor, George assumed sadly, had it been the last. Now, wobbling slightly as he made his way to the bar, George very much hoped that it was a new vein of pugnacity on his part that made him win, and not embarrassment on Teddy’s that obliged him to lose.

The Armenian already had the dusty bottle of Chivas Regal waiting for him. “Is good?” He showed his set of very white and very loose false teeth. They had probably been bought on mail-order.

“Yes,” George said, “that’s the one.” He was used to thinking of the barman as a relic left over from Montedor’s colonial heyday. In fact, only the shrunken jaw of the man was really old; the rest of his face was lightly lined and there was still black in his hair. He and George, two foreigners in a foreign land, were coevals. It was a nasty thought, and he strangled it as soon as it was born, spoiling the Scotch with a long splash of desalinated water.

Teddy, sprawled in a chair, bare legs wide, his face framed in
the towel like a woman’s after a bath, said: “You went to Guia. That’s one helluva drive.”

Vera had had to inspect the new hospital there. George had driven her in the Port Authority landrover. With Vera preoccupied and George depressed, it hadn’t been a successful trip.

“Yes,” said George. “I met some of our new friends.”

“Oh, yeah?” Teddy said carelessly, sucking at his Sun Top.

He had been forced to leave the road to make way for a column of Soviet-built tanks. Montedor’s single American helicopter-gunship dickered in the sky overhead. Then, twenty miles short of Guia, they’d met a roadblock. The soldiers manning it had shouted to each other in Spanish. Though they wore the uniforms of the Republican Army of Montedor, they wore them with a kind of crispness and dash that was quite beyond the reach of the local militia.

“The Hispano-Suiza brigade,” George said. “At a road block.”

Teddy stopped sucking. “Who do you mean, George?”

“Cubans.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I am not.” George was irrelevantly pleased at Teddy’s surprise. He’d supposed that Teddy would have already heard about the Cubans from Vera.

“At a road block? I think that is not possible.”

“Oh, they were Cubans. They weren’t making any secret of it, either.”

“Fucking Peres,” Teddy said. “In this country we have eleven military advisers, Peres says. You do not put eleven military advisers on a fucking road block. I would like to use your name, George. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. I didn’t see anything sinister or undercover in the thing. It was just a Cuban road block.”

“That man is a
terrorist
. We have no need of Cubans to solve the problem.” Over Teddy’s head there sailed, in sepia, the two-masted winner of the Dakar race in 1933.

The problem was that there were two kinds of Montedorians,
as unlike as tigers and ocelots. Teddy was one kind: when you looked at his face you saw an odd crowd of different people there. His hair belonged to an African slave, his nose to a Portuguese slave trader, his mouth to a Syrian shopkeeper, his eyes to a British sailor. Teddy’s skin was a smooth khaki—the mongrel, camouflage, Creole colour. The other kind of Montedorian was as black as basalt. The Wolofs of the interior had their own language. They were nomads, farmers and hunters, where the Creoles were townsmen, fishermen, entrepreneurs. The Wolofs were Muslim, the Creoles Catholic. During the years of drought the gap between the two nations of Montedor, between the coast and the hills, had opened out from a fissure to a canyon. The Creoles suffered from bad nerves and insomnia: the command posts in the mountains, the tanks and road blocks, were supposed to help them sleep more soundly.

“Peres does not want my road,” Teddy said. “He says it is a danger.” At present, the cobbled three-lane highway petered out seven miles beyond Bom Porto. After that, it was just a narrow pathway through the shale. “We have the promise of money from the World Bank. I see the Egyptian again next week. It is not so much the road itself, it is the building of the road. It is a major employment project. I will have Wolofs working on that road. With Creoles. In the same gang.
Communication”
He pronounced the word the Portuguese way.
Comunicão
. The
ão
was a soft and nasal miaow.

“And all Peres sees is an army of hungry Wolofs marching down your road?”

“Peres is a monkey. He loves guns. He hates my Ministry. The guy has a theory … you know? … that bad communications are always the safest.”

George laughed. “Well, there’s something to be said for that. I was thinking rather along the same lines myself, earlier today.” He patted his jacket pockets, searching for his pipe, while Teddy watched him with a sour stare.

“Oh—nothing to do with your road. In quite another context.” There had been a letter from his daughter in the
lunchtime mail. George had been rattled by it. For one diverting moment, he saw Sheila as a Wolof charging down a dusty mountainside with a long banana knife.

“That road is the most important piece of infrastructure in Montedor. We need communication like … like we need water.”

“I suppose we do,” George said, still thinking of his daughter.

“You
are
going to stay on, then?”

“No … I wish I could. I can’t, Teddy.”

“Sometimes I think you are a meatball.”

“Oh, so do I, old love. So do I.”

“You rapped with Varbosa?”

“Yes. It didn’t change things.”

“Special Adviser to the President on Foreign Trade … Sounds good.”

“You’ve got too many advisers already.”

“Not that kind, George.”

“I’d just be a one-man quango.”

“Say again?”

“Quango? Oh, it’s something that’s all the rage in England now, or so they say. A quasi-autonomous government organization. It’s a sort of bureaucratic racket. Designed to keep old troopers in gravy.”

“I think we have some quaggas here already.” Teddy flipped the top of a cigarette pack and began to write the word inside it.

“En, gee, oh,” George said.

“We will miss you here, George,” said Teddy. His voice had lost its usual overlay of cab driver Milwaukee.

“I’ll miss you too.” George picked up his glass of Chivas Regal and shielded his eyes with it.

“Perhaps you will not be happy there, I think. You will come back. Aristide will leave the door open on that job, I know—”

“It’d be nice to think so.”

“When I am President, you can be Minister of Defence. Peres I will post as ambassador to Youkay. The cold weather is
good for that man, I think; maybe his nuts freeze off.”

Outside the club, the night was warm and palpable as steam. At the opening of the courtyard on to the street, the two men embraced for a moment. Teddy smelled strongly of Sun Top and more faintly of—
Vera?

“I’ve got the Humber. You want a ride?”

“No,” George said, “I’ll walk, thanks.”

“Ciao, George. Next time, I knock you for a loop, okay?”

“If you say so. Goodnight, Teddy—”

The minister crossed the street to the waterfront where his car was parked on the cinders under a lone acacia.

“Hey-George?”

“Yes?”

“Come back and be a quango!”

The Rua Kwame Nkruma was homesick for Lisbon. Portuguese merchants had built it as the Rua Alcantara, a pretty daydream of steep terraced houses with front yards full of flowers, displaced by twenty-eight degrees of latitude. Gardens had burned dry, pastel stucco fronts were cracking up like icing on a mouldy cake, orange pantiles had tumbled into the street and wooden balconies were peeling away from their parent walls.

A few of the houses had been recolonized as government offices. Others had been used by the army as convenient hoardings on which to paint Party messages. In letters that were six feet high, the front of Number 12 said:

At night the street was dark and empty, the moonlit slogan as lonely as a film playing on the screen of a deserted cinema.

One jumpy electric light showed on the street, from behind
the first-floor shutters of Number 28. The house was in rather better shape than its neighbours. The grizzled banana palm in the front garden was as tall as the house itself, whose bleached wooden columns held up a flirtatious structure of narrow balconies, carved trellises and fretwork screens. It looked like a place designed to keep secrets in. All the house now contained was George.

Stooping under the low ceiling, he put a pan of water to boil on the calor gas ring and punctured the top of a tin of steak and kidney pudding to stop it from exploding as it warmed. A small lizard was spreadeagled on the whitewashed wall over the sink. As George dropped the steak and kidney pudding into the saucepan, it skeetered up the wall and hid in a crack, its lidless eye a wary needlepoint of light.

George was rattled. He needed time to think. He poured himself a tumblerful of Dão and sank it like beer.

He could recite the words of his daughter’s letter by heart. What
was
her game? The tone was imperious. It had the clear ring of Admiral’s Orders.
Signal your intentions
…
Report immediately upon arrival
… George was evidently supposed to snap his heels and salute. Did the girl think he’d entered on his dotage? The giveaway, of course, was the word
we
. It had stood out on the page like an atoll in an ocean. So Sheila was in the plural now. George guessed that the house in Clapham must be some sort of commune for women. The bold instructions didn’t come from Sheila; they must issue from the entire sisterhood. When she wrote of “habitable rooms”, George saw a cloister of bare guest chambers, with books of meditation stacked neatly by each narrow single bed, and heard the swish of the sisters’ long gowns as they patrolled the corridor outside. It sounded like bad news to George. Was Sheila happy, living like this? Was it a Sapphic arrangement? He assumed so.

That he had fathered Sheila at all was a profoundly unsettling fact. It was like finding that one was the heir to someone whom one knew only from items of gossip in newspapers, and it raised a similar cloud of guilty whys and wherefores.

It was a thousand years since he had felt himself to be her father, her his child. It had been like that once. He remembered holding a torch to the print of a book in a darkened room. Sheila was ill with measles. He was reading her to sleep. The book was
The Wind in the Willows
. To Sheila in Aden, the Thames Valley of Ratty, Mole and Mr Toad was as delightfully unreal as Samarkand. George made it up for her: the leaves of the green trees feathering the water like long fingers; the freshly rinsed colours of England after a summer shower; the tumbledown brick cottages under their bonnets of thatch; men and girls in punts; lock keepers’ gardens; mysterious weirpools where big pike swirled.

“Do Mr Toad again, Daddy—”

George, perched on the edge of the Indian Ocean, went toot-tooting his way through Wallingford and Goring as Sheila fell to sleep, a drowsy giggle the last sound from under her thin blue Navy blanket.

A year after the divorce, George came back to London in December. Busy with visits to shipping agents, he’d asked the girl at the hotel desk to buy him two tickets for a matinée of “Puss in Boots” and had gone to Liverpool Street to meet his daughter from the train.

She was a foundling. Sternly buckled into her schoolgirl gaberdine, she stepped from a trailing cloud of thick steam from the engine. Her hair was pulled back from her skull in plaits. She wore spectacles with round gunmetal frames which magnified her puritan, Tribulation Wholesome eyes. When Sheila’s eyes came to rest on George, he felt arraigned in them.