Foreign Land (23 page)

“Limbo, at least,” Diana said. “Rather an enviable limbo, at that.”

She was looking into the fire. The long back of her cashmere sweater was stretched tight: he could count her vertebrae and see the mothwing pattern of her shoulderblades beneath the wool. She made him think of the model aeroplanes that he’d built as a boy, with their lovely, intricate frames of balsa struts and spars, their taut and glassy tissue paper skins. They were hald together by pure stress: Diana looked as if she were constructed on the same principle. George discovered that he was watching her with surprised and involuntary desire. He felt a sudden jolt of tenderness for her small bones, the surfline of down on her exposed forearm in the firelight, her sad, gruff, ruined voice. He wanted to—

“But you will stay?” Diana was still looking at the burning logs and, for two sweet seconds, George thought she was flying another signal altogether. “Yes,” he said. “There’s something going on in Montedor at present. Something rather awful, I’m afraid. It’s in the papers. It rather looks as if I shan’t be able to go back.”

It would be so nice, he thought, if he could turn to her. For comfort. For kindliness. For loneliness, too. Temporizing, he inspected his empty glass as if he’d just noticed a gang of microbes swimming in the treacly drop of liquid that remained at the bottom.
Well? Did
she want him to risk the hazardous crossing of the rug to where she sat by the fire? He felt as jittery about it, as nervously constricted, as he’d been at seventeen. Encouraged by something in the way her hair (and it
was
still blonde … a very pale, polleny blonde … it wasn’t white at all) grazed her shoulder, he shifted a couple of inches forward in his chair, but found himself finally too stiff to admit his own weakness, to make that bold, vulnerable, candid move.

“Do you want to try to explain it to me?”

George gazed at her, smiling, his head swimming a little with relief. In a tone as gentle as he could manage, he said,

“What?”

“About what’s happening … in Monty … in your African place.”

“Oh.” Disappointed, he made a show of sitting back deep in the chair. “It wouldn’t really make much sense to anyone who hadn’t been there. It’s too messy and internal. No Left or Right to it. The usual boring African story. A weak president in power, and a first-rate shit waiting in the wings to make his move. I’m a president’s man, and I wouldn’t stand a chance if the shit gets into office. That’s about it, really.” With every fresh word he spoke, he felt himself losing her.

“Will it be bloody?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. The shit has been stockpiling weapons for the last two years, and he’s got a lot of the army with him.” He watched Diana. Her face was tilted a little away from him. It seemed to drift out of focus, leaving him staring at a single enlarged eye, the colour of a harebell.

“And your friend—the one in the photograph? What’ll happen to her?”

“Oh … Vera Osorio …” George put a heavy emphasis on Vera’s second name. “She’ll be all right.” To clear himself of any lingering attachment in that direction, he added: “She’s with the Minister of Communications. He’s an old friend too, but he’ll behave like the Vicar of Bray.”

“You’re still there, aren’t you? You’re not really here at all.”

“I thought I was supposed to be in limbo.”

Stubbing out her cigarette, Diana smiled—a quick and funny twist of a smile that might conceivably have held in it the promise of something else, George thought. She said, “You’ll just have to learn now to look forward to things like taking your grandchild sailing on your boat.”

Grandchild?
For a moment the word was as inexplicable as
chihuahua
or
concertina
. It didn’t seem to apply to him at all. Then George remembered. He supposed, sadly, that if Diana was sending him any signals now, she was flying her P and S flags. Keep your distance. Do not come any closer. In a studiedly offhand voice he said, “Yes. Talking of the boat,
actually … I want to try her out at sea while this weather holds. Tomorrow, even … or maybe the day after.” He realized that he was quoting her old song. “If it’d amuse you to come along as a passenger—”

“I’d love to,” she said quickly; then, “So long as you realize that I’ll be no use to you at all.” She scrutinized the bramble weals on the back of her hand. “I mean, I can’t tie knots or anything like that.”

“No, no—the whole point of the boat is that I can manage her entirely on my own.”

And not only the boat
, he thought, watching Diana and wishing that things were otherwise. It would have been different a year ago. It would have been different in Africa. But not now, not here. Getting up to go, he had to pause midway out of the chair to deal with a sharp twinge of Cornish lumbago. It struck him that from now on he would always have to go to bed alone. A … singlehander. The word yielded a melancholy obscenity. Upright at last, his hair tangling with a creosoted beam, he said, “Lovely evening. I did like your wild garden. I didn’t expect to at all, in honesty, but I really did.”

Diana put her hand on his sleeve for a second. “I’ll look forward to the boat. Ring me. I don’t know whether I really expect to enjoy it or not, but I’ll look forward to it.”

She drove him home. Outside Thalassa, with the car door open, he leaned across and kissed her on the cheek. Her skin tasted papery. Letting himself in to the dark house, he remembered exactly which model aeroplane it was that Diana had reminded him of. It was a Keil Kraft Osprey with a 36” wingspan, his most ambitious effort ever. It had taken six weeks of summer holiday labour with broken razorblades, coloured pins and tubes of balsa cement. Its registration letters, GA-GG, were painted on its wings and tailplane. He’d launched it on a chalky down near Oliver’s Battery. Its rubber motor had taken it straight up into a thermal, where it began to glide in a slow circle, higher and higher, its doped skin flashing in the sun. He’d timed its flight: one minute … two …
three … four … four minutes forty seconds … a record. Then it lost the thermal and he had to chase it across the downs, smashing through picnickers and people with dogs out for walks. He’d run for a mile at least when the plane, losing altitude rapidly now, had banked and headed with what looked (“Oh—no! Oh, Christmas! Oh, buggeration!”) like a pure and deliberate act of will for the top of the tallest, most unscaleable elm in the whole of Hampshire. He’d been too far away to hear the crash; the white plane had dissolved silently into the branches. By the time he got to the tree, it wasn’t a plane any more; it was a mess of wastepaper, eighty feet up, with one torn wing flapping gently in the wind. At fourteen and a quarter, George had been too old to cry, but his face had felt very stiff indeed on the walk home to the Rectory. The wreckage was still visible in the tree at Christmas; by Easter there was just a small section of crushed fuselage and a triangle of skin with the letters GG on it. In the summer everything had gone. George reckoned that the rooks had probably used it to build nests with.

At high tea, his father, wearing his white alpaca summer jacket, was put into a high good humour by the news of what had happened to the Osprey. “Treasures upon earth, old boy! Moth and rust!” After tea, he’d challenged George to a game of croquet, and beat him hollow in comfortable time to go off to church and say evensong.

Now, pouring himself a modest nightcap of Chivas Regal in his father’s house, half here, half in the summer of … when was it? ’37? ’38? … George thought: you know, I haven’t changed a bloody bit. All I’ve done is fly a lot more Ospreys into a lot more trees.

He was woken by the soft splatter of the post downstairs and, stiff and liverish, was picking the letters up from the mat while the postman was still getting back into his van on the road outside. But there was nothing from Vera; just bills, a card
from somebody on holiday in Crete addressed to his mother (a Cretan holiday must be seriously boring if it involved one in sending picture postcards to the dead), and a duplicated brochure for Jellaby’s Video Club. It was nearly two weeks since he’d written to Montedor. Sheila’s letters to him had rarely taken more than six days to arrive. Though that, of course, was from London, which was different. He wondered if it would be worth putting off his sea trials and waiting in for the second post. He looked up Diana’s number in the book and dialled it. Five minutes later, stooping, naked, studying his bare feet on the slate, as he rehearsed his lines, he dialled the number of his daughter. He listened to the London trill of her phone—quite different from the low chirrup-chirrup of the local telephones. It was a long time ringing. He picked up the postcard that had been sent to his mother: the handwriting on it was thin and dithery but quite legible.

Some poor old bat with a badly disturbed memory. Today was the 27th, and there’d been no sign of Alice. Away in London, the phone was lifted from the hook and Sheila’s voice, still thick with sleep at 0915 hours, was saying, “Yes? Hullo?” as George swallowed the knot of anxiety in his throat and began to speak.

I
t must be the effect of the seasickness pill. The chemist—who’d brought Diana a glass of water from the back of the shop to swig it down with—had said that it might make her feel drowsy. Well, there was drowsy and drowsy. Her vision tended to wobble and there was a definite buzz in the flesh of her arms and legs. The sensation was actually quite nice, but it roused unnerving echoes of things that she’d aged out of long ago, like the little foil-wrapped slugs of Acapulco Gold that she used to keep in the bedroom closet on Ocean Avenue.

She sat up at the front of the boat with the anchors, hands clasped round her knees, watching the sea slide round and under her, as if the boat was a boulder breaking the stream of an enormous river. The sea kept on coming; an unending drift of open water, teased and crimped by a wind as faint and irregular as the breath of a sleeping invalid. On the shadowy side of the hull she could see jellyfish—whole schools of them, sailing past a foot or so beneath the surface, like tasselled art-deco lampshades on the run. Their colours were so
immodest
… purple, mauve, blue and livid scarlet. As she watched they changed in size, swelling as big as buckets then gathering themselves to the size of a clenched fist. One moment she thought them beautiful; the next they were disgusting, with their wrinkled glassy skins and trailing guts.

She’d been here before, but it was so long ago, when you lay back in the scatter-cushions and found yourself up on a high wire, not knowing which way you were going to fall, into a good trip or into a bad one. If you thought about it, it always turned out bad; you had to go with it, feed it, nurse it along.

She focused on a single small jellyfish, trying to count its mass of radiant filaments; then, as if she was carrying a tray full of water and not spilling a drop, she transferred her attention to the warty, galvanized steel of the anchor at her feet.

From the moment that they’d left the quay, things had started to seem more than a bit odd. First the boat (which had seemed so solid, so cottagey, when it was tied up) had shrunk to a walnut shell as it nosed out into the estuary. Then George Grey had grown. Perhaps it was just that ridiculous cap (H LSUM—AM R CA’S #1 B AD, whatever, in God’s name, that meant), but he seemed to have put on a good eighteen inches overnight. He had been stooping, apologetic, Eeyoreish. Now he was disconcertingly tall. He seemed possessed by some private, and rather irritable, good humour, as he danced round his boat from end to end in baggy jeans and scuffed plimsolls, with the sunlight glinting in his infant silver beard.

They had stolen past the lifeboat, through the line of moored yachts. The river didn’t look like water at all—it had a deep substantial gleam to it, like polished brass. “No flies in this ointment!” George Grey had called to her in a voice too loud for the still morning. As they passed the candy-striped beacon on St Cadix Head, she had gone up front to get out of earshot of the heavy bass chatter of the engine. A moment later, he was dancing again—pulling up sails the colour of red rust. Mostly they hung slack from the masts; every so often a sudden exhalation of wind would make them clatter over her head and shake out their wrinkles, but they seemed to be there only for show, really. George Grey had looked up at them with such obvious pride that she wondered if he’d cut and sewn them all himself.