Foreign Land (16 page)

Tom was driving. George was in the passenger seat of the minivan, his narrow knees jammed high against the dashboard, his arms folded on his chest. He was wearing his dark grey topcoat with a rim of black velvet round the collar. Seeing him come down the steps, with that coat flapping in the wind, Tom had been reminded of the moulting Andean Condor in the zoo at Regent’s Park; but when he got in the van he just looked like an elderly teddy boy with his velvet collar and his scraggy grey sideburns.

He seemed to have put on ten years overnight. When he’d first come in through the door with Sheila, he’d looked quite young, considering. When you saw him in the morning, though, you noticed the dark skin under his eyes like burnt paper and the way his tan didn’t look healthy at all, but jaundiced and short of blood. His hair needed cutting. If you had that kind of hair—trained to go back in ripples over the ears and pasted flat across the skull—you probably needed to go to the barber every couple of weeks. Sheila’s dad didn’t look as if he’d been in months. His hair had a glued-together look from the bottle of oily stuff that Tom had observed up in the bathroom. Poor old George. It was weird, him looking so like Sheila. Same eyes, and just the same funny trick of the mouth so that you were never quite sure when he was smiling and when he was being sarcastic.

“Snow,” Tom said. They were driving along the edge of Clapham Common. There wasn’t much snow. It was melting on the roofs of houses and lay in patches on the grass of the Common like dirty rags. It never settled for long in London. That was because every big city created its own climate: it had
its own winds, its own temperature range, its own humidity—everything. Compared with Essex, London was in the tropics. Banana country.

“Where are we?” George said.

“Wandsworth. It’s always a bit tight here, this time in the morning.”

On the far side of the road, he saw Winston in his black Thunderbird, waiting to filter right to Wandsworth Bridge. Tom hooted—a long, a short and a long. Winston turned in his seat, waved, and came back with an electric orchestra playing the first line of “Colonel Bogie”.

“Friend of mine,” Tom said.

“Do you know the Morse code?” George said.

“No. Why?”

“You just did ‘K’ on your horn. It means ‘I want to communicate with you’.”

“Well, I did, didn’t I?”

They climbed West Hill.

Tom had never seen Sheila so tensed-up as she had been last night. When she came to bed, she was rigid and shivery; all gooseflesh, like someone who’s been pulled out of the water after nearly drowning. He’d held her, willing her to sleep, but it was he who slept first. The last thing he remembered was Sheila’s half-audible muttering about how she’d bitched it, and how it was like playing the same crackly record for the hundredth time.

It hadn’t been that bad. A bit dire, maybe; but not very. For an old guy, Sheila’s dad was OK. The trouble was that there didn’t seem to be any proper level to him. First he’d been as uptight as a scared cat, then, after he’d had a bit, he’d gone all round the park. It wasn’t surprising that he was such a funny colour in the morning: he’d been pickling himself. Tom and Sheila had only had a glass each, and they’d started with two bottles. And that wasn’t the end of it, either. Sheila’s dad drank on the sly. Tom had looked in his bag; there was another bottle there. Emergency supplies.

“This part of London’s all new to me,” George said.

“Putney,” Tom said. He pointed left, up Putney Hill. “Algernon Charles Swinburne lived up there. With another guy.” He thought for a moment until the blue plaque came into focus in his head. “Theodore Watts-Dunton,” he said.

George stared. The lights changed. On the Upper Richmond Road, it was bumper to bumper, with the westbound trucks packed solid like blocks of stone.

“Will you go back to Africa again?”

George unfolded his long arms and clasped his knees. If you just glimpsed him in silhouette, it was pure Sheila.

“Well … yes,” George said, “I rather think I may.”

The traffic shuffled forwards for fifty yards and locked again.

“When?”

“Oh … quite soon, I suppose. In the autumn, perhaps.” He was gazing out at the houses as if he wasn’t used to seeing houses at all. Perhaps he was looking for mud huts. In Roehampton. “You see, I’m not exactly retired, yet.”

Poor old bugger. That was just what Tom’s grandad used to say. He was still saying it a week before they cremated him in Gunnersbury. And he was eighty-four.

“There’s another job out there that I could do. They asked me before I left. Adviser on Foreign Trade. It’s not much of a job, really; a lot less grand than it sounds. I’d just be a glorified gopher.”

“Gopher?”

“You know. Go-for this … go-for that …” He did a snickety little laugh, like a cough, and stared out of the window all the way to Hammersmith Bridge, where he looked at the moored boats on the river and said, “Sorry about last night—all that nautical stuff.”

“No, it was interesting,” Tom said. “Really. That’s something I’d like to do—sail round England. You could get a lot of thinking done, I reckon … at sea.” He was wondering what he’d say if Sheila’s dad asked him to go with him. He wouldn’t mind giving it a try, for a few days anyway. He’d like to learn Navigation. But all George said was “Yes,” and smiled one of
his twisty, Sheila-like smiles; then, “Awfully good of you, to drive me all this way,”

On the M4, Tom tucked the van into the slipstream of an airport coach and tried to bring the subject up again.

“What’s its construction—this boat of yours?”

“Oak frame. Larch planks. Teak deck, teak sole. The saloon’s fitted out in mahogany.”

“Nice.” On the open fields of Middlesex, the snow lay more thickly, in broad scoops and dripping ridges. Tom said, “How many people can you have on her?”

“Oh, it’s meant to sleep six. That means there’s just about enough room for one person to swing the proverbial cat in.”

So that was that, then.

Inside the airport tunnel, George said: “I’m so glad to have met you, Tom … I’ve never seen Sheila looking better.”

Tom very nearly said something then, but remembered just in time.

At the terminal, George’s legs were all tangled up with his carrier bag and he had difficulty getting out. Tom reached into the back of the van, where he’d hidden the sextant under an oily blanket.

“You’ll be needing this,” Tom said.

The odd thing was, he didn’t seem too pleased to see it. He stared at it lying on the seat and started muttering about how no, he couldn’t possibly and that it was an awfully kind thought, but really … He looked old and sort of
faffy
, standing there making little, awkward pushing-away gestures with his hands, his carrier bag dangling from his wrist.

“Go on, take it,” Tom said. “It’ll be useful for you. On your voyage.”

He crumbled, eventually, though there was still something funny in his eyes as he went into his thanks-awfully bit. Tom did his best to deflect the downpour. After all, it had been Sheila’s idea, not his. He’d been meaning to sell the sextant to Con in Chelsea.

Tom watched as George was absorbed into the terminal. For a few seconds, he could still see George’s topcoat swirling
round his knees, his ducklike walk, the carrier bag and the sextant. Then they were lost behind a crowd of kids with skis. It was a pity, really, that Sheila had never got around to telling him about the baby; it might have cheered the poor old bugger up.

A
t Geneva, George left the sextant in a locker at the airport, took a cab direct to Carouge, and was back in the city in time to lunch, late, on the rue Cherbouliez. The flight on which he was booked to return to London didn’t leave until 8.40 in the evening. At 3.30 he crossed to a hairdressing salon on the opposite side of the street, where he had a shampoo and cut, sandwiched between two tiresome Englishwomen. George spoke to the girl who was cutting his hair in a mutter of bad French: he didn’t want the women to spot him as a compatriot. They were on their way to Gstaad.

“I saw Roddy at Sarah’s on Saturday.”

“How
is
Roddy these days?”

“Oh, much as usual. Pretty beastly.”

Every few seconds, George’s gaze flipped down to Vera’s bag at his feet. It was strange how so much money could take up so little space. He’d expected to have to buy a suitcase to carry the stuff away in. In the event, it had turned into a brown paper parcel the size of a small book, with the decks of mint fifty-pound and hundred-dollar bills fitting as snugly together as the components of a lock. On the cab ride back to the rue Cherbouliez, George thought he could smell the money in the bag: a thin ammoniac odour, like the whiff of freshly ironed shirts. But perhaps that was just the smell of Switzerland. He had set aside just over a thousand Swiss francs to pay off the Furies, and he could still feel the bulge of them in his wallet under his armpit, like a glandular swelling. Lunch at Au Plat D’Argent had cost 140 francs, his haircut another 30. There were still an awful lot of francs to go.

The woman on his right was saying, “Bingo told him that the only way she was going to talk to him in future was through her solicitor.”

“Isn’t Bingo a dream?” said the woman on his left.

George tipped the girl who’d cut his hair ten francs. He thought, I’ll call Perdita in Vevey, and brightened as the digits of her number obediently presented themselves in his head. He had just time to cast a hopeful glance at the receptionist’s telephone before he came awake again—to the smash on the N37, the boy Fergus in the driver’s seat. Fergus, of course, had got out of it with a cracked rib and a black eye, but he’d killed his mother. If there was any reply on 61-39-28 it would be Fergus with drink in his voice, his lazy, whining hippy talk. An afternoon’s conversation with Fergus Monaghan would just about make George’s day.

He walked east along the river to the lake. The tips of his fingers were numb. Did the lake never freeze over? He’d hoped for snowy Alps, for skaters in long scarves on the ice, but the water was empty, the mountains had been erased by the grey weather, and the few people who were out on the street looked pinched and tired. He ducked out of the wind into a steamy bar-café, where he sat up at the counter and inspected his new haircut in the silver chromework of the espresso machine.

A young woman seated herself on the stool next to George’s. She placed a cigarette in her mouth and glanced across at him. He lit it for her. Looking down at his hand, she said, “English?” The question puzzled him for a second, then he saw that he was flying his flag a bit conspicuously: the box of matches in his hand said
England’s Glory
.

In French too quick for him to easily follow, the woman said that she knew many Englishmen. There were many in Geneva. For how long was he in the city? A few hours only? That was
honteux!
George studied her lips as she talked; her face, showing between her white fur hat and tightly-belted white raincoat, was pink with the cold and her nose was running a little. Between sentences she sniffed. She hated the winter, she said.

It was only when they had finished their coffees and she said, “Viens-tu chez moi?” that George realized she was in business and that he was her task in hand for the afternoon. He sneaked a quick glance at his distorted reflection in the machine: was it the haircut that had marked him out as such an obvious punter?

Well, why not? It was like being offered the drink you didn’t need at the end of an evening. There’d be a penalty to pay, for sure, but it wouldn’t be too stiff to bear. It would certainly help with the problem of the Swiss franc surplus. And anyway he was On The Continent now. This was so exactly what an Englishman was supposed to do On The Continent that to say yes was to do no more than bow politely to the force of custom.

Crossing the street, the woman snuggled professionally against George’s coat. She was embarrassingly short. With his crooked arm resting awkwardly on her shoulder, he stared loftily ahead, keeping his eyes in ignorance of whatever was going on down there in the foothills.

She lived, or at least worked, in a building as reassuringly staid as a bank. They took the elevator to the fifth floor, where she rang an illuminated doorbell that said MARQUIS. It was answered by a woman of George’s age who was dressed in a smart managerial suit and who immediately repositioned herself behind a hall table arranged like a desk, with an appointments book, a telephone and a vase of white chrysanthemums.

“Mon cadeau,” the girl said, wriggling against him like a gerbil.

“Cinq-cents francs, m’sieur,” said the woman in the suit.

That was more like it. He counted out the money from his wallet.

The girl said, “Anglais.” The woman looked at George for a moment and he saw a mixture of boredom and derision in her smile as she nodded and said that he must feel at home in this dull Geneva weather. To the girl, she said: “A sept heures—le Japonais. L’éstropié. OK?”

“Fouf—je lui fis le dernier temps. Où est Adèle?”

“A Lausanne. Jusqu’ à demain.”

“Oh, OK.”

She led George to a room which had been cursorily dressed to resemble a real bedroom. A floppy dog with black and white nylon fur and a pink felt tongue sat in a toddler’s basket chair. The low bed, with its covering of a single plastic sheet, looked alarmingly like a trampoline. There was a small fridge by the bedside, two transparent plexiglas chairs and, on the wall, a framed print of Van Gogh’s “Cornfield near Aries”, George noticed sadly. The window looked out on to an airshaft—someone’s washing and a tangle of black drainpipes.