Foreign Land (7 page)

George was the only passenger from Bom Porto, and the wobbly aluminium steps had been trucked out to the 747 especially for him. Climbing them, he felt he was taking his leave of Montedor in a state of bizarre disgrace: he might just as well be wearing a red papier-mâché nose and have his trousers round his ankles.

Nor were things much easier when the steward wound the aircraft door shut behind him and George, stooping, was led
down the plane to his seat. People who are seen off by guards of honour are morally obliged to fly First Class: George, not knowing what was planned for him, had booked a ticket in something called the Executive Club, which turned out to be a euphemism, with free drinks, for Tourist. As he moved along the cabin gangway, he was met by stares of condescending disapproval as if he was a brush salesman who’d been caught masquerading as a viscount.

He squeezed past the knees of his neighbour and tried to let himself off lightly. “Bit of a mix-up out there. I seem to have coincided with their band practice day.”

The neighbour didn’t smile. He waited until they were in the air and then he began to punish George for his indecent celebrity. The man offered a rambling resumé of his domestic circumstances, photographs included, followed by a string of tales about peddling cosmetics in the suburbs of Cape Town. By the time he reached the general question of cash flow in the pharmaceutical industry, George was ready to scream. He searched the man for a sign of a switch that would turn him off, but the high cocksure voice flowed inexhaustibly on. It stopped only when the announcement came over the intercom that they were now ready to show the film. In Purgatory one form of torture is always relieved by the commencement of another.

George raised the window-blind with his finger. The plane had not advanced a further inch, it seemed. There was the same reddish sea swell with its quarter moons of shadow, the same jet trail breaking up in puffs and squiggles. Fearful of the patrolling stewardess, he snapped the blind down on the Sahara and tried to look at the pictures on the screen.

It was the kind of film that was shown only to captive audiences on aeroplanes. Without the soundtrack, it was perfectly incomprehensible. George couldn’t see a story in it, only a jerky collection of dislocated images. The actors seemed to be engaged in a game of cruel mimicry as they pretended to kiss, pretended to fight, pretended to signal to pretend-taxi-cabs. The camera gloated over them in close-up, suddenly
zooming in to give a dentist’s-eye-view of the back teeth of a laughing woman or the staring eyes of a man holding a toy gun.

George tried to concentrate on the backgrounds to these shots, where another world was getting on with its business behind the actors’ backs. There were pretty brownstone houses; an American traffic light flashed “Don’t Walk”; an innocent dog crossed the top left hand corner of the screen; a tug ploughed slowly upstream on a scummy river.

The camera never allowed him to dwell on these small pleasures for more than a second or two. It was continually panning away from them or throwing them out of focus, as if reality was a kind of grit that needed to be forcibly wiped from the eye.

An actor in the film was shouting. His mouth worked like a swinging catflap in a door. The film cut to another actor sitting at an office desk. There was a close-up of a file and the words TOP SECRET.

Bored, George waited for another exterior to show up. He wondered if there was any chance of seeing the river and the tug again, or whether the plot (if there was a plot) had finally disposed of them. The noise of the jets had somehow combined with the pictures: he could hear distant actors’ voices in the engines.

For no apparent reason, a woman in the film began to cry. At least, she made her cheek muscles wobble and contract, and in the next shot her face was wet with dribbles of mascara. The camera stayed on her for a long time. To his horror, George found that he was crying with her. Her shoulder shook; his eyes fogged with tears. She dabbed at her face with a handkerchief, and George’s nose began to run. When the film moved on, to a car chase by night through some attractive streets, George was still crying. First he was crying for shame, then he was crying from the shock of crying. It was mechanical, involuntary, absurd—but he could not stop blubbing. He unbuckled his seatbelt, plunged past his neighbour and threw up in the cramped and overlit lavatory at the back of the
aircraft.

At Frankfurt, George changed planes. At Heathrow, he booked himself in to the Post House Hotel for the night. He tried to sleep, and failed. He did not telephone his daughter.

“O
h, haven’t you two met yet?” said Rupert Walpole. “Verity Caine. George Grey. George is just back from Montenegro.”

“Montedor, actually.”

“Sorry, wrong continent. Must be the punch.”

“Oh, heavens, yes,” said Verity Caine. “Now where exactly
is
that?”

“On the bulge of Africa, one block down from Senegal,” George said, using the formula that had grown increasingly weary over the last fortnight.

“Oh,
that
side,” said Verity Caine, shifting her gaze to the slice of apple and the maraschino cherry in her punch. In St Cadix, all of West Africa was on the wrong side of the park.

The Walpoles’ Christmas party was a fixture on the county social calendar. “We’re just having a few people round here for drinks,” was how Polly Walpole put it over the telephone, but the few were many, and the cars in the street outside had come from Truro, Fowey, St Austell, Liskeard, Bodmin. Ben Dickinson had driven down from Plymouth, braving floods to make it.

The long drawing room, with its exposed beams and uncurtained picture window, smelled of Rentokil and cut flowers; the snowy carpet looked as if it had been run up from chinchilla skins. The Walpoles were lavish receivers of Christmas cards: there were six strings of them in the window where Italian madonnas hung sideways next to the stamped crests and regimental ribbons. Rupert had been Army himself, once, and people at the yacht club still sometimes called him
“Major”, but Rupert had preferred to drop the title when he went into china clay. “In industrial relations,” he liked to say, “there are no officers and men—there are just chaps.”

“It cost buttons when Rupert and Polly bought the house originally,” Verity Caine was saying to George. “It was still a pilchard smokery then. They had to do a vast amount to it. Of course, all that’s dead now. They were catching pilchards here when we came, even; but there hasn’t been a pilchard boat working out of St Cadix for yonks.”

“What finished it?” George wanted to get his pipe out, but the smell of the room and the shampooed locks of that awful carpet had No Smoking signs written all over them, he thought.

“Oh, the Common Market. The ruddy French and their seine nets. The whole of the English Channel’s fished-out now.”

George looked over Verity Caine’s shoulder, to the smears of reflected light on the black estuary beyond the picture window where yawls and ketches were tugging fretfully at their mooring buoys.

Across the room, Barbara Stevenson said “When we were out in Kenya—”, and Nicola Walpole nudged her friend Sue and whispered “Two points”. Nicola and Sue were both in the Upper Fourth at Hatherup Castle. Sue was staying with the Walpoles for Christmas.

“Does that make it four or five?” Sue said.

The people at the party were known as the When-I’s, and the game was to catch them actually saying it. You got two points for an Abroad and one for a Home. Last Christmas, Nicola had scored nineteen. This year the going was slower: Robert Collins had said “When I was with Ferrantis”; Laura Nash had come up with “When we were in Highgate”; and Denis Wright had cheated by saying “In Basra, of course, we always—”.

Barbara Stevenson’s was by far the best effort so far.

Polly Walpole introduced George to old Brigadier Eliot.

“You remember George’s mother—Mary Grey.”

“Oh yes, of course. How is your mother now?”

“She’s dead actually.”

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that.”

Everyone seemed very old to George. The women had either lost their waists long ago, or been shrivelled into bags of fragile sticks bound together in peach chiffon. Two men in a corner wore deaf aids and bellowed into each other’s good ears. Wherever he listened, he heard talk of operations.

“How’s the new hip?”

“Oh, pretty good. Can’t manage stairs with it yet, of course. Thank God for the bungalow is what I say.”

“Margaret’s going in in January.”

“Hip?”

“No. Insides. Woman’s thing.”

“Oh.”

For Nicola and Sue, the pace of the game began to quicken when Philip Slater said “When I was in Cyprus”; it was still two points, even though he was only talking about a holiday in Larnaka.

George noticed, with a spasm of hope, a woman on the far side of the room. She was stubbing out a cigarette in a potted plant. If he couldn’t smoke his pipe, at least he might be able to cadge a cigarette from her. He had already turned to join her when he was grabbed by a small, spiky woman who was going distinctly bald.

“George? Betty Castle. Bet you don’t remember me. We met at your ma’s. Mary was a great chum.”

“Oh, yes, of course I do.” He had no recollection of her at all.

“Now
you’re
a Navy man!” She said this, too, as if she was laying a pound each way on an outsider.

“No, not really. It was just wartime Navy.”

“D’you sail?”

“Not much lately. I did a bit when I was in Aden, actually. I rather hoped to pick it up again when I came here.”

Sue said to Nicola, “The old bloke over there—the tall one. ‘When I was in Aden’. Two points.”

“That’s eleven,” Nicola said.

“You see,” Betty Castle said to George, “we sort of had you marked down for the Dunnetts’ boat. Has Alec said anything?”

“I don’t know who Alec is,” George said.

“The commodore. I mean he’s really a colonel, but he’s the commodore. Of the yacht club.”

“Oh, yes, we did meet. But he didn’t say anything about the Dunnings.”

“Dunnetts. No, Wingco Dunnett had a stroke in the spring, and poor Cynthia is right down on her uppers. Wingco’s never going to walk again, and that boat really is the last straw. They can’t possibly afford to keep the thing, but Wingco won’t hear of putting her up for sale. So what we need is a fait accompli, if you see what I mean.”

George didn’t, but said that he did in order to save trouble.

“Are you a racing man or a cruising man?” said Betty Castle.

“I don’t think I’m either—”

“It wouldn’t be any use if you were a racing man, of course, but for a cruising man it’s a super little ship. Wingco’s pride and joy. But he’s changed dreadfully since his stroke. People do.”

The picture window filled suddenly with lights. George, distracted, watched other windows sliding past, almost within touching distance. A freighter was moving upriver to the china clay docks. On her floodlit bows and stern, deckhands were busy with winches and hawsers. She was in ballast, her load line showing three feet or so above where the dark water streamed past her hull like braided rope. She was flying a charred Greek ensign. George put her at about eight thousand tons. Her passage past the room was quite soundless. A face at one bright window stared at the party, stared at George; a young Greek sailor watching a foreign country going by at arm’s length. It was George, though, who felt homesick: he measured the space between himself and the ship. It was just three weeks and a little over three thousand miles, and he had
to shake himself to remember that it was out of reach, that Raymond Luis was in charge.

“Do go and have a look at her,” Betty Castle said. “Poor Cynthia’s nearly at her wits’ end. She’s such a saint, that woman. And Wingco was never any good with money, I’m afraid.”

But George wasn’t listening. “Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes … yes … yes.”

The score went up to fourteen when Nicola caught Mrs Downes in the act, with “When we had the cottage in the Dordogne”. With an hour at least still to go, she was confident now of breaking last year’s record.

“Have you seen the bus shelter?” said Connie Lisle to anyone who’d listen. “It’s been balkanized again. It’s all over graffiti, just as bad as last time.”

Balkanized
was a code word in St Cadix. It had entered the language in the early autumn, when Hugh Traill had used it as an explanation of what was happening to Britain in the 1980s. Traill had worked for the British Council in Damascus. He was not much liked, though he was asked to all the parties. “Frankly,” said Barbara Stevenson, “I don’t really see his point,” and most people found it difficult to see the point of Traill, who wore rubber overshoes indoors and went about the place in trousers that looked as if he had made them himself. When he said that Britain was becoming balkanized, the phrase was joyfully taken up—mostly in mockery and partly in deference to his notorious cleverness. When outboard motors disappeared from the cluster of moored dinghies that jostled around the steps of the Town Quay, they had been balkanized. When work began on the new council estate at the top of the hill, that was balkanization. Most things on television news now were “pretty balkan”; Sue and Nicola were doing their best to smuggle into the general currency the expressions “Oh balk!” and “Balk off!” Less than usual had been seen of Traill himself this winter; Polly Walpole was the first of several people to say that he had probably balkanized into thin air.