Foreign Land (36 page)

Never had he found something he could love in its entirety as he loved the Haighs’ house in Bolton Gardens. It was, of course, consecrated by the fact that Angela lived there; but without Angela the house would still have been an object of wonder. The most ordinary things in it made George marvel. The lavatories, for instance. The Haighs had two, not counting the ones in their three bathrooms. They smelled prettily of potpourri, fresh towels and sweet peas. Each one was supplied with pictures and a rack of books and magazines. When the Haighs condescended to open their bowels, they did even that in style, inhaling the scent of lavender and leafing through
Tatler
and
Vogue
. Amazing.

It was as if the only life that George had known before had been scaled-down and fiddly, like a Hornby Double-0 gauge train set. Staying at the Haighs’, he saw for the first time what it meant to be Life Size. He couldn’t get over the sheer bigness of it. When you went into the Haighs’ first-floor drawing-room, it wasn’t so much like entering a room as being admitted to a park with a ha-ha, woody avenues and long vistas. The armchairs and sofas were set at great distances from each other, across lake-like stretches of carpet, of a pale and delicate blue. When people talked in the Haighs’ drawing-room, its scented spaces lent to the conversation a curiously operatic volume and grandeur.

“I saw Cicely Beech in Town today,” called Mrs Haigh from the south-west corner. “She was in Fortnums. With her youngest. Henrietta’s nearly three now. Quite the little madam.”

“Oh—sweet!” Angela said from the far north.

“Anyone for a drop more sherry?” sang Mr Haigh, chiming in from the east in his surprisingly high tenor. “How’s George’s glass?”

For quite the most wonderful thing in the Haighs’ wonderful house was the way in which Angela’s parents were being nice to George. He’d expected fireworks. On the train up, he’d been daydreaming about eloping with Angela to Gretna Green, and had feared that five days didn’t give them sufficient time to qualify for marriage under Scottish law.

But it wasn’t like that at all. When he arrived at Bolton Gardens, Mrs Haigh had even pecked his cheek; and Mr Haigh, on his return from the Minories, shook hands with George and said, “So
you’re
George,” as if he was actually pleasantly surprised by the gangling sub-lieutenant in his hall.

Beside the Haighs, George felt awkward and grubby. It was as if life at the rectory had condemned him to be always two or three baths behind these astonishingly clean and polished people. His uniform had been put on clean that morning, but he still felt that he gave off a bad smell and that Angela’s
parents were being extraordinarily kind in not noticing, or pretending not to notice, it.

Mr Haigh wanted to know all about
Larkspur
. George told him all about
Larkspur
—her tonnage, her gunnery, how the Asdic worked. After half an hour in Mr Haigh’s company, he even felt sufficiently at his ease to do his imitation of old Prynne’s lesson in Dead Reckoning. Mr Haigh laughed. Angela, sitting on the arm of George’s chair, said, “Isn’t he just
bliss
, Daddy?”

On his first evening, they dressed for dinner. George had never been in a house where you dressed for dinner. Someone had laid out one of Mr Haigh’s old dinner suits in his bedroom. It was a bit sloppy round the waist and an inch or two short in the arms and legs, but George, descending the staircase and studying himself in the full-length gilt mirror on the second floor landing, reckoned that he cut quite a dash in it. During the meal, his only twinge of fright came when Mr Haigh said, “So you were still at Pwllheli last August?” and George said “Yes, sir,” and Mr Haigh said, “When you and Angela met up.” George was just about to put Mr Haigh right on this one when Angela said, “Yes, don’t you remember, Daddy, when I went to stay with the Donnisons in Shrewsbury?”

“Oh,” Mr Haigh said, “you’re a friend of the Donnisons,” and George was saved, in the nick of time, by the arrival of the stewed mutton.

Everything was done properly at Bolton Gardens. When dinner was over, the ladies, meaning Angela and her mother, actually withdrew to the drawing-room, and Mr Haigh said to George, “Would you care for some port?”

“Yes, sir. Please, sir.” George’s knowledge of the form was a bit shaky here. Were you supposed to pass it from right to left or from left to right? And did it count if there were only two of you?

Mr Haigh put a decanter and a glass in front of him. “I’ve never been a port man, myself,” he said. “I’m down to my last three bottles of Drambuie, and I’m counting on you to win this war for me before I run out altogether.”

“Yes, sir,” George said, “I’ll mention it to the Admiralty.”

Mr Haigh laughed and sipped at his liqueur. “You’re not … planning to stay on in the Navy after the war’s over, are you?”

This was exactly what George had hoped to do. If there ever was a Peace (and people were beginning to talk now as if they really thought that the war could be over by as soon as the end of this summer), George didn’t want to lose the view from the bridge. By 1948—even earlier—he could be a lieutenant-commander, RN. After that—well, George (at least before he met Angela) had secretly toyed with the names of Captain Grey, and even Admiral Grey, and thought they sounded distinctly plausible. But it took less than a second in the Haighs’ dining-room to ditch his entire career in the regular Navy. He said: “Oh, no, sir. No, of course not.”

“That takes a load off my mind, anyway. I’m afraid that Angela wouldn’t make a very satisfactory service wife.”

Satisfactory? Surely that wasn’t the right sort of word to use of Angela?

“But London isn’t at all good for her either, you know.”

“No, sir.” So Angela was … ill … in some way that George didn’t know about. Or perhaps she was just delicate. Suppose she had—TB, or even cancer? It would be all right. George would nurse her. She wouldn’t have to lift a finger—he’d look after her.

“I’ve got a contact or two in the ship business in Newcastle-on-Tyne,” Mr Haigh said. “They might come in useful. Don’t know whether you’ve ever been up in that part of the world? It’s on the grim side, of course, but then, with Angela, that’s rather what one’s looking for, isn’t it? Something to bring her down to earth.”

George was lost. He poured himself a second glass of Mr Haigh’s port, said, “Sort of. Yes. I suppose so, sir,” and laughed nervously, man to man.

“Well. We’d better cross that bridge when we come to it. When you win the war for us, yes?” His face was turned fully towards George. His smile was tired. His head, almost completely
bald except for a rim of black fuzz high around his temples, gleamed in the candlelight.

Returning his gaze from the distance of
Calliope’s
wheel-house, George saw a mixture of pity and embarrassment there. No, it was worse than that. It was shame. Mr Haigh was looking at him as if he’d just allowed George to be swindled out of his Post Office savings.

Returning his gaze across the dining table, though, George saw only kindliness there. Angela’s father was a Pretty Decent Type. A grown-up whom you could really talk to. He said, “Well, sir, I give it to September,” which was what Alex Maitland had said a day or two before he and George had ceased to be on speaking terms.

“I’ll act on that,” Mr Haigh said. “I take it as a considered professional opinion. By the way, I gather from Angela that you share my enthusiasm for the Cinema?”

That was odd. So far as George could remember, he’d never said anything about the pictures to Angela. “Well … I suppose I do go quite a bit. You know. When I haven’t got anything else on.”

“Do you like pubs?” Mr Haigh said, with a sudden vigour in his voice.

“I … don’t drink much, sir.” George was conscious of the port in front of him. He wondered if the second glass that he’d poured for himself had been a solecism—or whether the correct thing to do was to finish the whole decanter.

“Pabst,” Mr Haigh said disappointedly. “You know. ‘Pandora’s Box’? ‘Joyless Street’?”

“Not exactly, sir, no. I mean, I don’t think so. The last one I saw was ‘We Dive At Dawn’. In fact.”

“Yes, that’s Puffin Asquith, isn’t it? Yes, he’s quite good, I think, but don’t you find him a bit stagy? Of all those people, I’m afraid the only one I really like is Humphrey Jennings.” He stared at George for a moment and said, “‘London Can Take It’.”

“Yes sir,” George said, rather too reverently, before he realized that it was just another film title. They joined the
ladies.

Later, Mr Haigh rigged up a screen at the far end of the drawing-room and showed some of the pictures that he’d taken with his own cine camera. George thought they were pretty good. They looked amateur only in their short length and the way they ran in silence broken by the whir and click of the projector. All of Mr Haigh’s early work featured Angela as its star. Angela aged three toddled diagonally down the screen through a meadow filled with buttercups and daisies. She held a flower in her fist and offered it to the camera. The picture froze.

“That was Provence in ’28,” Mr Haigh said.

In another filmlet, Angela cantered on a pony along a cliff in a stormy dawn. Her ride was intercut with studies of other kinds of motion: a motor car speeding along a new arterial road, a biplane taking off from an airstrip, a yacht heeling to the wind on a beam reach. It was titled “Motion Picture”. There was Angela exploring the streets of foreign cities, Angela eating a peach at a picnic, Angela tiptoeing through the gloomy recesses of the cathedral at Chartres, emerging into a pool of puddled light cast by a great stained glass window.

Then, suddenly, there was no more Angela. Her last appearance was when she was fourteen. After that Mr Haigh’s films went abstract. There were pictures of racing clouds, of rippling cornfields, of machines in factories, but not one of Angela.

“This one might appeal to George here,” Mr Haigh said. It was a rather long study, in slow motion, of waves breaking on a rocky beach. As far as George was concerned, it suffered from a single crippling defect: it didn’t star Angela.

“Awfully good,” George said. “I like the way you’ve used the light, sir.”

“It’s just time and patience,” Mr Haigh said. “I suppose everyone has a missed vocation. The cinema is mine. I’d give my eyeteeth to have made one proper movie.”

After the screen had been rolled up and put away and Mr and Mrs Haigh had gone upstairs, George said to Angela:
“Darling, why did you tell your father that I was dead keen on the cinema?”

Angela gazed at him with huge and virtuous eyes. “But I wanted to make him love you,” she said. Then, rising to a challenge, “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s just that I don’t know anything about the cinema. Not that sort of cinema. Not … Pabst and stuff.”

“You’re accusing me!”

“No, darling! No!”

“Yes, you are, Georgie. I can see it in your eyes. You’re blaming me. Everything I do is wrong. I can’t bear it. And I love you so much—”

“Darling!” And he was holding her and saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, darling—” and feeling truly guilty, too, without knowing what it was that he was guilty of. But in a moment it was all right again: Angela was forgiving him. She even permitted him, after a brief period of prohibition, to slip his tongue between her lips. He could feel her cold tears on his own cheek, and promised before God, if there was a God, that he’d never be so thoughtlessly hurtful as he’d been (how could he have done such a thing?) a minute before.

In the morning, he dressed in the crumpled civvies that he’d brought with him in his kitbag. Angela laughed when she saw him. “Georgie!” Don’t you have a proper shirt? If I didn’t know you, darling, I would have taken you for the man who comes to read the gas. It’s too sweet. Mummie, just look at poor Georgie’s shirt!”

“It just looks like a shirt to me,” said Mrs Haigh, who was writing a letter and seemed annoyed at Angela’s interruption.

It just looked like a shirt to George, too. But he knew that Angela was right. After breakfast she took him to Jermyn Street and had him measured. When the man in the shop led George into a little leather-and-cigar smelling room behind, Angela came as well.

“He doesn’t want it cut too full round his tummy,” she said to the man. “And he wants lots of cuff.”

It was another delicious part of being Angela’s, this feeling
of being taken in hand and being talked of over his head. And she knew so much, about all sorts of things. It was only in the wheelhouse that he saw that the girl was treating him like a doll. No wonder she doted on him. George must be unique in her experience—this man who would submit to being dressed, patted, scolded, kissed and spanked.

“He must have them by Thursday. Oh, please?”

The man in the shop said that was quite impossible, until Angela gave him the full treatment with her enormous eyes.

“There’s a war on, miss. We’re very short of staff.”

“But he’s going back to his ship. He’s a fighting man!”

“I don’t know, miss.”

“Oh, you will. I know you will.”

And it was agreed. A dozen shirts, cut to Angela’s detailed prescription, would be ready on Thursday and charged to Mr Haigh’s account.

About this last detail, George was a little frightened. He thought it looked uncommonly close to sponging.

“Daddy won’t even notice, silly. Anyway he loves to pay.”

“What exactly does he actually … well … do?” They had crossed St James’s Street to a treelined court where Angela said she knew a hotel which did quite decent cocktails.

“Daddy? Like I said. He pays for things.”

George laughed. “Pays for what things?”

“Well … you know, if someone wants to build a factory somewhere … things like that. Daddy … sort of pays for it. He works a lot with the government now. Munitions. You know.”

“He’s a … financier?” George said.

“Oh, sweetie, no! You make it sound as if he’s Jewish!”

The sky was suddenly wide open. The haze had gone. There was even just enough of a light wind from the north to think about putting up a sail or two. The water ahead looked bright and frosted. Nothing in sight except the sun.