Foreign Land (19 page)

“The other papers don’t seem to have picked it up,” he said, going back to the bar, where Freddie Corquordale was reading out something about women priests.

“Bad as that, is it?” said Rupert Walpole. “Lucky you got out when the going was good.”

“I was in Iraq when they bumped off young Feisal,” Denis Wright said.

“He is a ninny, that man,” said Freddie Corquordale; “our current A.B. of C.”

So Peres had got his bloodbath. It was just as Teddy had feared. Two years ago, he’d tried to block Peres’s appointment as Minister of National Defence; but President Varbosa had fallen for Peres like a schoolgirl with a crush. In the Club Nautico, Teddy had said, “What can you do, George? To Varbosa, Peres’s shit smells like roses.”

It was true, too. The president couldn’t contain Peres. Before Independence, Varbosa had been fine, as a man of words. His poems had been published in Brazilian magazines. He coined the slogans and wrote all the pamphlets for PAIM. He spoke, sometimes brilliantly, in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau. His handsome face looked good in photographs, in which he cradled a machine gun like a Madonna with a child. The gun was always lent to Varbosa for the occasion: he was too short-sighted to handle firearms for real.

After Independence, Varbosa turned peacock. He adored
Pan-African conferences and flights to New York in the antique presidential Boeing. He looked across to Zaire and hankered after Mobutu’s trappings of office. Varbosa too wanted gold bathtaps and huge motorcades; he loved to see his own name painted on the mountainsides, and it was Peres’s men who did the painting.

It wouldn’t be hard to persuade the president that his reputation could only be embellished by slaughtering Wolofs in a show of manly strength; like the feeble artist he was, Varbosa thrilled to the idea of decisive, purifying action. “Blood” was a magic word in his poems. A guerrilla ambush was never just a guerrilla ambush to Aristide Varbosa; it was a Catholic mass, with mission school notions of atonement and redemption blooming from the snouts of automatic rifles.

Advised by Teddy, the president was a genial, pacific soul who’d once asked George if he knew the work of Baudelaire-Rimbaud, a singular poet whom George had decided to leave politely intact. But advised by Peres … George didn’t dare to take the thought further. He felt helplessly distant. He saw the road to Guia, the Cuban soldiers in flappy green fatigues, the hovering helicopter gunship, its rotors stirring the red dust in its shadow like a cloud of cayenne pepper; but the picture was creased and its colour already fading … even Vera, in the passenger seat beside him … even she was beginning to blur.

“How’s the fitting-out going?” said Verity Caine. “I keep on seeing you down on the quay.”

“Oh … tophole, thanks,” George said, trying to bring Vera back into sharp focus again. Pulling himself together, he said: “I need to buy some new warps. Where’s the best place round here for rope?”

At two, just as Roberts was ringing time on the ship’s bell which hung among the liqueurs, Connie Lisle came into the bar and bought a half-bottle of vodka.

“Throwing a party?” said Freddie Corquordale, and winked at Denis Wright.

Miss Lisle bristled from inside her plastic mac and her smile was a quick, nervous twist of the lips. To Roberts she said,
“Thanks so much—” then, “Thanks very much indeed.” When she left, everyone said goodbye with an exaggerated cordiality that made up for not speaking to her.

“That’s an odd bod,” Freddie Corquordale said.

“Connie used to be a headmistress.” Betty Castle was looking at George.

“Bluestocking type.” Freddie Corquordale had evidently met many such ladies in his time.

“Comprehensive, of course,” said Betty Castle.

“Verity’s no bluestocking, are you, dear?”

“No, Freddie, I haven’t got a brain in my head. As you know perfectly well.”

At Thalassa, George wrote to Vera as the afternoon darkened. He framed each new word with his pen as deliberately as if he was phrasing an anonymous ransom note. St Cadix was lonely … his things had arrived … he’d bought a boat … seeing a passing reference to Montedor in the papers had made him feel homesick … he’d love to hear Vera’s news. He mentioned Teddy, but crossed out that sentence. He rewrote the letter in Portuguese and read it over. It looked perfectly innocuous; boring enough to make a secret policeman yawn. He hoped the policeman was a paranoid fiction.

No-one tampered with anybody’s letters in the Montedor that George knew. But the country of the
Sunday Telegraph
report was not the one he knew: the scary thing about those two scrambled paragraphs was that they made Montedor sound just like any other flimsy, tarpaper Third World state—a cockleshell nation that would capsize at a puff of wind from the wrong quarter. He’d been in places like that and knew how appallingly quickly they tipped over: one morning you woke to shooting in the streets; in a week you’d got used to the sight of men you’d once met being blindfolded for their public executions in the sandy town square. But not—surely—in Montedor? Please not in Montedor.

George read his letter again. If things really were still all right, Vera would be flummoxed by it—it sounded half-baked.
He was cheered up by the thought of her sitting out on the loggia reading it, her tongue searching round her upper lip, her eyes wrinkled tightly in the glare.
Where is George at?
She’d smooth the paper flat and leave it on the table in the tall, airy room at the front of the house, pausing over it each time she passed. In the evening, she’d show it to Teddy. Between them, they’d figure it out.

All through the morning, Penhaligon’s Taxi (“Funerals and Weddings Fully Catered For”) kept up a shuttle service in the drizzle between Thalassa and the quay. The tea chests emptied and the boat settled on its waterline as George loaded her with his cargo of precious junk. The tide was on the ebb, and by lunchtime he was standing on the edge of the dripping quay wall, lowering stuff down to the deck in Vera’s bag at the end of a rope. Herring gulls honked and wheezed over his head. He scrambled down the slippery ladder, bruising his shins, and carried another armful of books and trinkets into the dry of the cabin.

Working in the rain, he brought his life aboard; though, for a man as tall and loosely constructed as George, his life was rather on the small side. Piled up in tidy heaps in the saloon, it was, as lives went, a modest affair. There seemed to be hardly more of it than when he’d first packed up his things in a trunk and sent them Passenger Luggage in Advance to Pwllheli.

He spread the striped Wolof rug on the saloon floor and glued his pipe rack (a present from Vera two birthdays ago) to the bulkhead. It was a novelty to be using glue at all: in George’s experience, things always had to be readily movable. The safest way to live was to assume that your marching orders would arrive tomorrow. If they didn’t, that was your good luck; and you certainly didn’t tempt fate by sticking things to your walls with glue. Pleased by the way the pipe rack looked, George hesitated over a particular treasure—a framed watercolour sketch by Van Guylen of ships at anchor in
Mindelo harbour in 1846—and stuck that fast, too.

He had never had a proper place of his own before. He’d always been a lodger in other people’s houses and had picked up the lodger’s habit of passing through without leaving tracks. He’d been born in a rectory that belonged to the Church and gone on to Navy quarters and Company apartments; and he left each billet exactly as he’d found it. There was no wallpaper so virulent that George couldn’t live with it: in Dar-es-Salaam he’d slept for two years in a bedroom decorated with black feet on a forsythia-yellow ground, though it had once caused a girl called Dorothy to wake him with a screaming nightmare. In Bom Porto, the sheets on his bed were marked “Shepherd’s Hotel, Cairo”, the knives and forks belonged to the French railways, the threadbare grey towels in the bathroom to St Joseph’s Mission School. George felt no more responsible for these things than he did for the weather.

Calliope
was different. Last week, when he’d received from Harwich the cracked and elderly document that registered her as a British Ship, with George as her Master and sole owner of all her 64 shares, he found that she’d been built in 1924, the same year as him. That seemed to fit nicely—it confirmed the odd kinship he’d felt with the boat when he’d first seen her drifting out from the quay. She had been a trawler then, called Lizzie V. She had been rechristened a muse in 1958, when she’d retired and been converted to a yacht. The panelled saloon had been her fish hold; and where she’d once been stacked with crans of herring, George now snugged down his shelf of Kipling. The swastikas on the spines of their claret bindings had shed most of their gold leaf:
Life’s Handicap
was on its last legs,
Kim’s
pages had grown fat and soggy with rereading. He roped the books tight with shock-cord, then made them rock solid by wedging
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
between
Many Inventions
and
Barrack Room Ballads
.

It was a bit late in the day to start building one’s first real nest. In Bom Porto, George had watched other men come out in their twenties and go home to mortgages in England in their
thirties, their migratory patterns as regular as those of swallows. To begin with, there had been a little British community of young men in Montedor. Until 1964, there’d been a consulate. By the ’70s, though, there was hardly anyone left. Carmody went in ’71; Palmer and Lytton in ’75. Humphreys stayed on through Independence until 1979. Then there was just George. It was as if he lacked the internal compass, or radar, or whatever it was that told birds to take off for home at the right season. He lodged where he was, waiting for orders that had taken a quarter of a century to arrive. Every year, the young men grew a shade younger. They stopped calling him “George” and started calling him “Mr Grey”. They showed him photographs of the houses they were going to buy at home—they were all of the same house, an ugly, half-prefabricated building made out of formica and eggboxes, on a “private estate” in a suburb of a Midland city. He knew the names of the girls they were planning to marry—the Alisons, Sues and Janices, with their jobs as nurses and secretaries. “Funny-you not marrying,” they said. “Oh,” George said, “I was married once,” and left it at that. When he saw the young men off, first on the boat, later at the new airport, he felt a melancholy wriggle of envy for them. They were so sure of what they wanted, and of what they deserved; and they had the mysterious knack of seeming to want only what they deserved; where he came unstuck was that he hadn’t deserved the things he wanted. Like Angela, he thought, shaking out an old brown jacket of Donegal tweed and fitting it into the port-side hanging locker.

He wound up the small barograph which used to stand in his office at the bunkering station and glued its wooden base to the shelf. A length of shock-cord, fastened to the wall with screw-eyes, made a good waistband in which to hold the battered olive oil tin full of blunt coloured pencils. There was no room at sea for clutter and loose ends. Everything had to be strapped in its due place and battened down, if you didn’t want the first big wave to turn your life into an Irish stew. George had had enough already in the way of breakages: aboard
Calliope
, he
meant to keep things shipshape and Bristol fashion.

A scallop boat manoeuvered alongside. Its girdle of motor tyres squeezed close.
Calliope
slopped heavily about in its wash as the boat went astern, its screw making the water round it boil. There were voices, booted footsteps over George’s head, the sound of a heavy rope being dragged across his roof to the quay.

Hunkered down in secret, he lit the charcoal stove and paraffin lamps, and watched the saloon fill with dodging shadows, as abrupt and quick as mice. Nothing was still. The timbers of the boat flexed and creaked. The lamps tipped in their gimbals. The floor felt spongy and provisional, as if it might dissolve away from under his feet. The sensation of floating was unnervingly keen and intimate: it was like the childhood dreams in which George had stepped off a top stair and found himself weightless as an angel. Drifting gently down the deep stairwell, occasionally reaching out a toe to touch ground, he’d known that his power was unique. No-one else must learn that he could fly. It seemed that his dreams hadn’t changed much over the last five decades; they had just grown more grandiose. Now he was planning to step off the edge of England and float free.

The barograph ticked on the shelf. A brick of charcoal hissed and settled in the stove. The air was rich, laden with the good smells of wax, oil, tobacco and old wood. Moving carefully, taking pleasure in each sensation as it came, George stooped under the beams to read the barograph. The inked line on the drum was at 1023 millibars and rising steadily. Soon the wind would die and the sky clear. He stretched himself on the plum-coloured leather of the settee berth and watched the sauntering lamplights. As the boat stirred in the water, the lights crossed and tangled. They chased each other along a row of books, rested for a moment on a framed photo of Vera at the beach, and dived to the rough and vivid weave of the rug on the floor.