Foreign Land (21 page)

There was a plain farm gate set in a dry-stone wall, and a metal postbox marked PYM nailed to a hawthorn tree. Beyond the gate, a track led through a dripping spinney and out on to a hillside of gorse, turf and cracked and rumpled rock. High overhead, a ribbed pillar of granite was topped with a single black pine; below it there was a shallow green ravine, and at the bottom of the ravine a cottage stood on a promontory in its own horseshoe bay. He couldn’t see the garden anywhere.

The water was calm and clear, and from this height the bay showed itself as a baited trap of reefs and shoals. Serrated teeth of rock lay just a foot or so below the surface. A stranger coming in from the sea would strike in seconds. Standing on a slippery outcrop, George looked down and tried to work his way through the maze of purple submarine shadows. There was one hook-shaped channel of deep water between the little promontory and the open sea: the fisherman whose cottage this must have been would have needed four separate sets of marks to get in and out. George found two of them—cairns of loose stones piled above the tideline.

“Hello!” Diana Pym was carrying a sickle.

“It’s … perfectly charming,” George said, beginning as he meant to carry on.

“You see—you could have sailed your boat here.” There were burrs on her jeans and the backs of her wrists and hands were dotted and dashed with small thorny welts.

“Yes—and got wrecked first time out,” he said.

“Oh, no; the sea’s nearly always flat calm here in the cove. It’s safe as houses.”

He pointed out the lines of the reefs. “Oh, really?” Diana Pym said, “I always thought that was just seaweed.”

It took several minutes of scrambling over rocks and following Diana Pym down muddy tunnels through the undergrowth in the ravine before George realized that he had been in the garden all along: the thistles and gorse, the boulders, the shale-falls, the egglike clusters of dried rabbit droppings were all part of what she meant when she said “garden”. She probably included the sea too, and the clotted cream sky.

“Look,” she said, “there’s a good dryad’s saddle.”

It was a fungus on the bole of a tree, a set of wizened tortoiseshell plates growing one on top of the other.

“The spoor of that came from a wood in Surrey, of all places. Fungi are brutes to propagate. I love them.”

She touched the mottled reddish stain on a bare shoulder of granite. “Xanthoria,” she said. “Isn’t it a pretty lichen? That’s from Wales—the Black Mountains.” George fingered the stain too. It felt rather unpleasantly soft and furry, like the skin of the dead mouse.

She had found a wild place and made it wilder. The ravine was a sanctuary for the outlaws of other people’s gardens, for ivy, wolfsbane, herb robert, black bryony. She liked plants that were poisonous, or crept along the ground, or wrapped themselves round dead trees. She went ahead of George and hacked at a patch of brown scrub with her sickle. The garden smelled of wet brambles and cigarette smoke.

“This is pretty much the centre of things—”

It was a grotto, with a waterfall pouring as smoothly as syrup from a ledge of overhanging rock, an inky pool, a willow
tree, early primroses and beds of moss like plumped cushions.

“There’s nothing much here now, but the frogs come in the spring, and the frogs bring the grass snakes … and the badgers sometimes come at night …”

“You’ve got badgers?”

“The sett is off my land. But they use a track that comes through here.”

Behind the waterfall there was a chipped alabaster head, half hidden by a spray of hart’s tongue ferns. It stood on a granite shelf. It had no nose. “Who’s that?”

“Oh … the man in Bath who sold it me claimed it was Artemis. But one goddess looks much like another.”

At the tail of the pool, the water divided round a boulder of rosy quartz and trickled noisily off into a green thicket.

“I call it the stream, but it’s only a ditch, really. It went bone dry last summer. I found a heron fishing here once, but he wasn’t having any luck. It used to run down that slope there … beyond the osiers.”

“You
made
the waterfall?”

“Oh, yes, it’s all just engineering, really. There’s a concrete dam under all that ivy … and then I brought the stream out here through an old sewer pipe. I had to dynamite the pool.”

“Really?” George looked up at the pine on its stalk of rock, fifty yards up the ravine. “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“I held my breath when it went off. It rained loose stones for a bit.”

“Is it legal to blow up things with dynamite?”

“I never asked.”

“Extraordinary. Where did you get the stuff from anyway?”

“Oh … I found an accomplice … I know a man who simply loves big bangs. He set it up, and I pushed the button. He used to be a drummer.”

“Have you done this everywhere you’ve been?”

“Good God, no. I never got beyond window boxes, and they all went dead on me. When I started this, I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know how it would turn out—I thought … oh, I’ll have chrysanths, and snapdragons, and hollyhocks and things.
Like everybody does.” She hacked off a trailing branch of alder. “Then I discovered I had a talent for weeds.”

They climbed down the narrow zig-zag path to the shore. From behind him, Diana Pym said, “I saw your … Sheila on TV yesterday.”

“Oh?” He’d spoken to Sheila over the phone on Tuesday: she hadn’t said anything about being on television. “Ah—yes, of course.”

“She was good.”

“Wasn’t she—” He sidestepped a jagged chunk of rock. Sheila might have mentioned it. He’d been looking out for one of her programmes for weeks now.

“She made everyone else look wooden, I thought. She gives the impression of being completely herself in the studio—that’s so difficult to do, much harder than it looks.”

“Yes …” George said, trying to guess his way out. “She seems almost more natural in front of the cameras than she does at home. Funny, really. Every time she goes on, she has frightful fits of nerves beforehand, you know … shakes like a leaf …” He was glad that Diana Pym couldn’t see his face; but he seemed to have carried it off all right because the next thing she said was, “Your wife—she … died?”

“No—she’s in Norfolk.” He scrambled down the last few feet of shale.

The cottage was too lumpish to be pretty: there was something toadlike in the way it squatted on its promontory, a low building of stone and slate with deepset windows that looked too small for it. The tide had gone right out, leaving it stranded in a waste of ribbed rock and drying bladderwrack. Hooded crows were scavenging in the seaweed; beyond them, George saw another of the fisherman’s marks—a splash of old white paint on a boulder.

“It looks so bald when the sea’s out, I’m afraid,” Diana Pym said.

“No, it’s—charming. Quite charming.” There were two battered blue gas cylinders outside the door. A shrivelled strip of pork rind hung from a bird table, and the stony turf was
scattered with crumbs. It was a rum place for anyone to beach at: Diana Pym must have made it by just as complicated a route as the fisherman who used to sail his boat in here. George wondered where her marks had been. “What were you doing in Los Angeles? Singing?” he said, once they were inside.

The cottage smelled of damp and woodsmoke. She was clearing the friendly litter of books, ashtrays and last Sunday’s papers from the tiny living room.

“No, not then. That was after I stopped singing. Do you hate mess? Your boat’s so neat. I haven’t any whisky; only gin or wine. Or is it too early for you?”

“No—gin will do fine.”

She moved through the cottage scattering announcements over her shoulder as she went. “Let’s have a fire!” she said; then “Aren’t these dark afternoons just hell!”; then “I’m out of ice!”; then “I only got the electricity put in last year!”; then “No; don’t you move!” Still in her gumboots, she shuttled between kitchen and living room, all bone and nerve like a trapped bird against a windowpane.

A copy of the
Radio Times
was on top of the television; it was open at yesterday’s programmes, and George scanned their titles to find out which one Sheila had been on. None of them seemed to be about books: she must have been on another channel.

Diana Pym raked out the ash in the open fireplace. “I was saying about LA … When I went there first, I tried to get into acting. Not proper acting—just TV and radio ads. I was renting out my British accent. Then I bought a slice of a press agency, and spent two years having lunch. Then I went into personal management—singers, you won’t have heard of them. Then I did some work for Joan Baez. Then I sold up and got the house in Brittanny.”

She said this flatly, not looking at him. It didn’t sound like a life at all. He couldn’t imagine her doing any of those unreal jobs in that unreal city. A firelighter flared blue in the grate. Diana Pym said, “Have you been in Southern California?”

“No; I’ve been to New York, but never to the West Coast.”

“It’s a lot like Cornwall. More sunshine … more golf buggies; it’s got the same sea and the same little hills. But they’ve got Spanish names.”

Beside the fireplace there was a dusty glass-fronted bookcase, its doors wedged shut with folded cigarette packets. The books inside looked dull. There were a lot of newish ones on horticulture; the older ones all seemed to be about religion. He saw
The Cloud of Unknowing
, something by Teilhard de Chardin,
The Courage to Be, The Way to Perfection
.

He said: “But you’re here to stay?”

The logs were beginning to burn. Diana Pym, crouched in the firelight, had accomplished another of her unsettling reversions: her face had lost twenty years. She said, “I guess so, yes. But I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“You should meet Sheila,” he said, “I was going to ask her down.”

“How old is she?” Diana was half-way to the kitchen.

“Oh …” He had to think back to answer that one. He went through the decades on his fingers. “Thirty … seven … I think.”

“Oh, that’s not so old—”

“For what?”

“For having a baby,” she said.

He stared at her. Was she quite bats? He held his fire. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose it is.”

“Does she want a boy or a girl?”

“I … don’t think … she has any … particular preference.”

“Oh.” She went on into the kitchen. “Of course,” she called, “with the scans they have now, people seem to know the sex of their babies almost as soon as they’re conceived.”

George wasn’t listening; he was remembering something that he’d passed over in the
Radio Times
. He pulled the magazine off the television set and studied it on his knee. It wasn’t a book programme at all. Feeling shaky, he gazed at the print of the billing:

2.45 BABYTALK

5. (Of 6): The Latecomers.

Having a first baby when you’re over 35 can

bring its own special problems and rewards.

The panel of speakers included “Sheila Grey, feminist and mother-to-be”. Impending motherhood, apparently, had made her drop that aggressive pair of initials and go back to the first name that had been George’s own choice for her; though he did wonder, for a hopeful moment, if there might conceivably be some other Sheila Grey altogether.

George’s next indignant thought was that this wasn’t the sort of thing that anyone wanted to learn from the pages of the
Radio Times
. He was offended not so much by Sheila as by the magazine itself—its grubby typography and the blotchy photograph of a grinning comedian with tombstone teeth. He replaced it on the television set. Diana was back again.

“I was … wondering where the bathroom was …” George said.

“Oh—just through there, the door at the end.”

“Thanks—”

Gratefully bolting himself in, George took sanctuary. First things first … Steady the Buffs … He peed, aiming his stream fastidiously at the painted blue shield of Thos Wilson & Co St Austell on the cracked porcelain bowl. He washed his hands. He rinsed his eyes in cold water. He squeezed a striped worm of toothpaste on to his forefinger, and rubbed at his front teeth with it.

Why in hell’s name—

He swilled the pepperminty stuff round his mouth and spat.

Who does she think I am?

He combed the swallowtails of grey hair back over the tops of his ears. He tried running the comb through the stubble round his chin, but the bristles weren’t yet long enough to tame.

You’d think … her own father …

He pulled down the saggy skin under his eyes and inspected them in the mirror. The whites were reassuringly white. He bared his teeth at himself.

In the
Radio Times
, of all places. The bloody
Radio Times!

The mirror over the basin was also the door of a small cupboard. He opened it. Diana was evidently no great collector of medicines: it was a disappointing show … two half-empty bottles of cough mixture, some disinfectant, a tin of Elastoplast, scent phials, 2-milligram tablets of Valium, no secrets. He hesitated over the Valium for a moment, and closed the door with a spasm of guilt at having raided such an innocent bower. But the act of trespass had calmed him.

He saw that the framed picture over the lavatory wasn’t in fact a picture at all; it was a presentation record, made of doubtful silver, and awarded to Julie Midnight in December 1961 to mark the sale of 250,000 copies of a song called “Talking in the Dark”. George remembered a line about “walking in the park”, then a chorus:

The silver disc looked antique now. The gothic script on the imitation vellum was convincingly faded.

So she did write her own words. It was funny to think that pop singers might mean what they sang. Had there been a real person to whom Diana really did like talking in the dark—and was he, perhaps, the same chap who, after all the kissing and laughter, was going to walk out on her next week, next month, or maybe the month after? Had he in fact-walked? And was it because of him that she’d gone off to America? Or was the whole thing just a pose, contrived to tap the market in brittle
little ballads of half-requited love? There was something teasing about the way she’d hung the record over the lavatory: you’d have to be male in order to find yourself standing face to face with it. Had she planned that too?