Foreign Land (41 page)

“Darling, don’t you think you ought to watch that a bit? I got a lecture from Wilkinson at the station this morning … about how one had to be careful about fratting—”

“Fratting!”
Angela’s voice was piercing and contemptuous. “I’ve never heard anything so sickmakingly stuffy. You can do exactly as you please—you and ‘Wilkinson’, whoever ‘Wilkinson’ may be. But I shall frat and frat and frat and frat with anyone I want, and if little Georgie-Porgie thinks he’s going to stop me, little Georgie-Porgie has another think coming!”

George could hear the leaves in the single acacia tree beyond the verandah. They were chinking like coins in the wind. He said: “Wilkinson’s invited us over to his bungalow for dinner.”

Angela stared at him. She was smiling the way she always did before she burst out crying. “Well you can go, can’t you? I expect I’ll be having dinner with Abdurahman.”

George stood in front of her in the empty room, choked for words. He said “But” twice. He felt for his new pipe in the pocket of his jacket, and realized that he wasn’t wearing a jacket, only a sweat-soaked shirt, the rightful property of Mr Haigh. It was another moment or two before he noticed that it was not Angela who was crying this time, it was him. She was a sort of wobbling blur, and he could feel the cold trickle of tears on his cheeks.

“Oh don’t be such a baby,” Angela said.

“Sorry,” George said. “It’s just … hay fever. Haven’t had it for years.”

But she was placated. By the time that Abdurahman arrived with Angela’s purchases from the souk piled in twin baskets on his camel, she was her sweet self again, carolling with pleasure as she unpacked the bolsters, coloured rugs, squares of dyed silk, copper trays, joss sticks and the rough cotton headdresses that she said would be just perfect for tablecloths.

The transformation of the bungalow was extraordinary. George was dazzled by his wife’s genius. Where the dowdy lounge had been, Angela created what she called her majlis
room, an airy, lamplit cave of cornflower and crimson, where one lolled on cushions on the floor and the walls were hung from floor to ceiling with striped rugs. Day by day, George’s house turned into the most exotic place he’d ever seen.

Mornings and afternoons he sat on an uncomfortable stool under a creaking fan in his prefabricated office at the bunkering station. He swapped ships about between the coal berths and the oiling berths. He wrote out dockets, yarned with Wilkinson and got used to clapping his hands and shouting “Shweyya! Shweyya!” at the Arab longshoremen. When he went home, though, it was to Angela’s Orient, a storybook world over which Angela now presided in a maternity smock and baggy silk pantaloons.

She was wonderful at populating it, too. They had arrived in Aden without introductions to anyone, unless you counted Wilkinson, which Angela certainly didn’t. By Empire Day, they knew everyone. At least Angela did. Often George got home to find a small herd of black Morris 8s tied up outside the bungalow and a cheerful crowd of Residency bachelors, visiting naval lieutenants and sappers with toothbrush moustaches within. They all called her “Angie”—a liberty that George had never taken—and several times George felt that his own entrance into the conversation was a dampener on things.

“Georgie!” Angela called from her cushioned warren of young men. “Kiss?” She tilted her cheek for him, and when he kissed her he saw the young men smile.

Sometimes, between the bridge evenings at the Club, and the blistering Friday beach picnics, and cocktails at the Residency, and bungalow parties up and down the length of Steamer Point, they did have the occasional week night to themselves, and George ached for these times when he and Angela could sprawl alone in the majlis room.

Copies of
Vogue
and the
Tatler
were beginning to arrive for Angela by slow seamail now. While George tried to teach himself to read and write Arabic out of a book, Angela read out snippets of news from home.

“Greta Garbo’s having a thing with Cecil Beaton.”

“Someone’s just opened a new oyster bar in Curzon Street.”

“Oh, look, there’s Lady Throckmorton with the Maharajah of Jaipur.”

The Dunkley pram came, vast and resplendent in a much labelled plywood packing case. He unveiled it for Angela, a surprise; but Angela wept when she saw it. Appalled, George cradled her.

“Oh, Georgie, I don’t want to have this beastly baby—not when I’m having such a lovely time.”

It was with pride and fascination that George watched the steady swelling of Angela’s pregnancy. Sometimes she allowed him to rub her with Lady Standing’s Rejuvenating Cream For Tired Faces And Hands. Spreading the cream over her belly with his fingers, he marvelled at her stretched skin, blue and shiny and hard as porcelain. During the seventh month, her navel turned inside out. George didn’t like to mention it, but this development intrigued him no end: it stood on top of the great mound of her womb like a sprig of holly on a Christmas cake. Once, he saw the skin quake and shudder as the baby kicked. Full of wonder, he put his lips to Angela’s oiled stomach.

She pulled her nightdress down over herself with an angry tug, hurting George’s cheek with her knuckles.

“Don’t! I’m so bloody ugly I want to die!”

Angela’s pains started in the middle of a dinner at the Residency. Billy Wilshawe drove them to the Naval Hospital, hooting all the way. George held Angela’s hand tightly and watched wild dogs scarpering from the jumpy beams of the headlights. At the hospital, she was taken away from him by a nurse and he was left by himself in a creaky wooden room full of rattan cane chairs and dog-eared magazines. The bare electric bulb was fly-specked, the yellow light came in fits and starts. Under the noise of the crickets outside, he could hear the hum-and-grumble of a generator in the grounds.

The nurse came back.

“It’s going to be a long time yet, Mr Grey. If I were you I’d go home and get some sleep.”

“Would you mind awfully if I kipped down here?”

“No. I’ll get you some blankets if you really want to, but you’d be much more comfortable at home.”

“I’d sooner stay. If that’s alright with you.” At ten, the nurse came back with a pile of hospital blankets and a mug of tea. At eleven, George went out on to the loggia, where he smoked a pipe and stared into the half-lit dusty courtyard. Someone had once planted a tree in the middle, but like most green things in Aden it had died. At midnight, he tried to read a magazine. It was tough going.

He wasn’t sure whether it was supposed to be funny or not.

“Still up and about?” It was the nurse again. “You’re not going to be good for much in the morning, are you? Still, I’ve brought you a drop of brandy. Don’t drink it all at once—we’ve got quite enough on our hands without having to deal with sozzled fathers.”

“She is … all right … isn’t she?”

“She’s tophole. She’s sound asleep at present. Just like you ought to be, my lad.”

George measured out the quarter bottle of brandy at a fingernail an hour. He watched the dawn sky lighten to the colour of Parma violets and saw the kites wheeling high over Crater Town like scraps of burnt paper. At six, he heard singing—a soprano hitting a random selection of top notes—and realized that it was a moan of pain. He couldn’t tell how far away it was, but it didn’t sound at all like Angela. At seven, breakfast came on a tray.

“Sleep well? She’s doing fine. Not long to wait now.”

The morning lasted for days and weeks. People passed by
the loggia, talking, busy, indifferent. George hated them. Angela was Having a Baby, yet the bread man stood by gossipping in Arabic with a ward orderly, a doctor in the uniform of the RAMC walked past whistling “Much Binding in the Marsh” and a dog was lifting its leg against a gatepost. He swallowed the last of the brandy. He wanted to go to the lavatory but didn’t dare, in case they needed him.

A few minutes after noon, George heard Angela scream. It was a scream in which the whole world seemed to curdle—a scream from which it seemed impossible that the screamer could survive. It was ragged, gasping, louder and louder, arching over the hospital into the sky. Clutching his head in his hands, George shuddered with it, as if the scream was inside him. He bit on his sleeve. Then there was silence. A landrover, misfiring on all five cylinders, went by on Hospital Road.

Drenched in sudden sweat, George thought,
she’s dead
. He stood in the corner of the room, hunched, his eyes covered, his head pressed against the hot wood. He felt someone touching him. Then he heard another horrible scream.

“It’s all right, dear. Don’t worry. She’s having nice big contractions now.”

The nurse was laughing at him.

He said: “It’s not … always like this?”

“Oh, yes, dear. It’s perfectly normal. It’s just Nature’s Way.”

“Oh, God,” George said, as Angela screamed again.

“It’s always the fathers who have the worst time of it. The mums just sail through.”

At 12.30, Angela’s bachelors piled out of a Morris 8 into the courtyard. Peter Moffatt. Alan Chalmers. Tony Flower. Bill Nesbit. Justin Quayle.

“Hello, George! Hasn’t she had it yet?”

“Don’t mind us, do you? Just thought we ought to turn out and show the flag.”

“I say, George, you look positively wrecked.”

“What’s the latest from the quacks?”

Angela screamed.

“Christ,” said Tony Flower.

Justin Quayle produced a packet of Players.

George shook his head wordlessly at the sight of the cigarettes. The bachelors lit up in silence, looking suddenly pale under their yellow tans.

“Makes you think, doesn’t it?” Bill Nesbit said.

When Angela next screamed, Peter Moffatt put his arm round George’s shoulder and held him. George’s eyes were squashed shut. He was pressing into them with his fists.

“Bear up, George,” Peter Moffatt said. “They know what they’re doing. Pretty bloody, though, isn’t it? I had no idea. Tony—what about a spot of whisky for the wounded man?”

George sucked gratefully at the bottle. “Thanks so much. I suppose I’m being a b.f., really. The nurse seems to think so, anyway.”

“How long have you been on sentry-go?”

“Since 10 last night.”

“You should have roused out the chaps. We’d have sat it out with you. Bit bloody much having to face it all out on your own-i-o.”

“What are you going to call it, George?”

Angela screamed. The bachelors stood awkwardly at attention. When the sound died, George said, “Ah … Crispin … if it’s a … boy … or … ah, Sheila, you know …”

“Good-oh,” Tony Flower said. “I’ve got a brother called Crispin. The one who’s out in Sarawak, poor old bugger.”

“Well, there’ll be a lot of sloshing being done over at the Club tonight,” Alan Chalmers said. “Bags-I the job of making sure that George gets pissed out of his mind.”

“I suppose they’ll keep her in for a few days, for observation.”

“Bound to,” Justin Quayle said. “My sister had a baby last year, in Godalming. They kept her in for a fortnight, I think it was.”

“Boy or girl?” said Tony Flower.

“Boy. Pretty squalid little nipper, actually.”

The screams were coming at closer and closer intervals. The
bachelors, battle-hardened now, sat around on the cane chairs, smoking and tugging at the knees of their trousers in embarrassment when they heard Angela cry out each new time. Bill Nesbit remembered that there was a pack of cards in the glove compartment of the car, so they played poker. Since no-one had any cash on them, they played for imaginary stakes. They bet their next year’s salaries and their parents’ houses in England. Peter Moffatt bet his sister’s virginity on a pair of tens, and lost it to George, who had a full house.

“To him that hath …” Justin Quayle said.

“The painting by Joshua Reynolds in the drawing-room. Six Chippendale chairs. And the Chinese vase thing on the hall table,” Bill Nesbit said.

“Pass,” said George, even though he’d been dealt a straight flush in diamonds.

At 4.00 in the afternoon if was Peter Moffatt who noticed the silence. “I wonder if that’s … it?” he said. Ten minutes later, a different nurse came out on to the loggia.

“It’s a girl.”

The bachelors whooped. “Sheila!” Peter Moffatt said, his arms round George. “Well done!”

“Well, which of you boys is the Daddy, then?”

The nurse looked surprised when George shambled forward, grinning helplessly. He followed her along the walkway, under a painted sign saying “X-Ray Unit” in War Department lettering.

“Just through here—”

The whitewashed room was cool and smelled of medicine. A flappy punkah fan was turning overhead, and Angela was lying back on the pillows, her face as colourless as putty. Pain had given her a sort of isolating celebrity, and George felt shy of touching her. He said, “Oh Christ, my darling.” The baby was in her arms, wrapped closely in a shawl. George gazed unbelievingly at his daughter. She was like an enormous wrinkled purple grub, not really human at all. He said: “She’s … wonderful.”

Angela said, in a strange, croaky voice, “Everyone was quite
sweet.”

“Oh Christ,” George said, shaking his head to try and bring the world back in focus. “Was it terrible? Were you awfully frightened, darling?”

Angela smiled. She looked as if she found it difficult to make her lips move properly. And suddenly the room was full of bachelors. Tony Flower was the first to kiss her, and the bachelors were doing and saying all the things to Angela that George couldn’t do or say for love of her.

“Angie—you clever girl!”

“Isn’t she stunning!”

“She’s got Angie’s eyes!”

“I never knew you had it in you,” Justin Quayle said, staring lugubriously at the baby, and everyone, even Angela laughed. Suddenly bright, she said: “Oh, Bill—you shouldn’t have. Look—
shampoo!”