Foreign Land (13 page)

He shucked off the trunks and splashed naked in the surf. Vera watched the bay for sharks.

Fifteen months later he went to Geneva again. He avoided the road to Carouge, but dreamed of the
Figuera
. In his dream the sea was empty, flat and sunlit: a captain’s braided hat floated on the water. George tried to snare it with a boathook; it bobbed away out of reach.

Figuera
.

Extraordinary. The locked door was wide open, the room empty.

There was a prolonged warning blast from a ship on the estuary. A rusty Panamanian coaster was moving upriver through the pool, dragging its wake behind it like a giant flared skirt. The small boats tipped and slithered on their moorings. As the wake hit them, their reflections shattered. The coaster cruised slowly past the window, a thuggish pike in a pond of minnows. In the still air, the frosted trees on the hills across the water looked etched on glass.

Struggling into his old trousers, George was already full of his trip. He’d take Sheila to lunch, then fly to Geneva. He loved plans, tickets, timetables—all the engrossing paraphernalia of being off and away. He was looking forward—even to the aeroplane, he realized. It made a blessed, unexpected change from looking back. He wanted to husband this new mood, as if it was a precious fluid that could easily evaporate if handled carelessly.

Hugging his good humour, he climbed down the stairs, stooping hunchbacked under the low beams. His parents’ cottage had been built for Celtic dwarfs. There was altogether too much of George to fit it—too many knees and elbows, too alpine a skull. Feeling clumsy and oversized he filled the kettle in the gingerbread kitchen and padded off to look up the number of the railway station. His bare feet stung on the cold slate. It was like the floor of a church; there was something echoing and ancient in its soapy smoothness. His dim ancestors looked very dusty this morning. The sun showed up cracks and coagulations of old paint that he’d never noticed before. The Gainsborough really was a dreadful daub; the cousin’s right hand looked like a piece of meat and, in this light, she had acquired a severe squint. For the first time, it occurred to George that the ancestors were
his
. He could do with them what he liked now. The cousin, for a start, could go to Oxfam. That was a cheering thought. Yes. Sheila could take anything she wanted, then he could dispose of his dead family one by one in jumble sales. How much lighter life would be without them. How long they had outstayed their welcome. How richly they deserved their marching orders.

Listening to the double burr of the phone ringing at St Austell station, George served notice on his forebears and hummed “Tiger Rag”, keeping time on the slate floor with his bare toes.

T
he moment the taxi turned left and crossed the river George was lost.

He’d always prided himself on knowing his way pretty well around London: he kept a useful map of the place lodged in his head on which the city was painted as a string of brightly coloured districts. On the extreme right-hand side there was the area around Charing Cross, where you went to shows and rummaged around for secondhand books. Then there was Soho, where you ate. The bit in the middle was where you did general shopping. To the left of that there was St James’s, where you put up, and where you bought shoes and shirts and stuff. Then there was a stretch of green, before Knightsbridge began. George had always felt protruberantly male in Knightsbridge. When he was married, it had been Angela’s territory and it was still somehow wife-coloured: expensive, over-scented, peopled with voices shouting endearments at each other. After Knightsbridge, there were just People’s Houses; miles of high, white stucco, like an enormous cake. George had nibbled at the icing there, always at the invitation of friends of Angela’s. The edges of the map were marked by gothic railway stations—platforms on which, for some reason, you were always saying goodbye and getting onto a train and never getting off one and saying hullo.

This was right off the map. It seemed to be off the taxi driver’s map too. When George gave the man Sheila’s address, he’d said, “It’ll be three quid over what it says on the meter, mate. And no complaints afterwards …”

“It’s only … Clapham,” George said.

“Bloody Brixton, more like. Most drivers, they’d turn you down flat. I would myself. Only I’ve stopped now, en’t I?”

He had driven on for a hundred yards, then, without turning his head, he shouted through the partition: “Woman, is it?”

“My daughter,” George said stiffly.

“Women.” The driver pronounced the word
wimmin
and made it sound like the name of an affliction like piles or eczema.
Wimmin
, according to the driver, never told the truth about where they lived. If they lived in Kilburn, they always called it Hampstead; if they lived in Earls Court, they always said South Kensington.

“Now it’s all bloody
Clapham!
Don’t matter where they live, do it? Streatham, Tooting, Tulse Hill, Balham … they all say Clapham. Lah-di-fuckin’-dah!”

George stared out of the window, blocking his ears to the stream of the driver’s provocative abuse. They were passing through a part of London that he’d never seen—never even imagined to exist. It was the grubby midway hour between afternoon and night, and the landscape was dotted with smoky fires in old petrol drums. Derelict men and women stood round them, their faces reddened by the flames. A church went by. Its windows had been boarded over, and the porch had been demolished, leaving a hole in the building big enough for trucks to drive in and out between the altar and the street. A painted sign said WINSTON’S BUDGET RENTAVAN.

It looked a lawless country. The blocks of workers’ flats were dirtier, more sprawled and raggedy, than those of Accra and Dar Es Salaam; there was more trash blowing in the streets than there was in Lagos. Everywhere there were slogans, spraygunned on walls, signboards, standing sheets of corrugated iron. KILL THE PIGS HEROIN EAT SHIT FUCK THE GLC. George thought sadly of the innocent VIVAs of Montedor; no-one seemed to want anything to live long here.

Held up at a stoplight, the cab grumbled in neutral beside a petshop. In whitewashed lettering on its window, the shop promised budgerigars, kittens, rabbits, dogmeat, guppies,
goldfish. It was hardly bigger than a lock-up stall, and its lighted window was opaque with steam, but it stood out in the landscape; a lonely monument to things that were warm, friendly, smaller than the human. Up there in the tower blocks, above this dead air that tasted of iron filings and burned tyre rubber, people were keeping kittens and knitting winter coats for dogs. Very rum.

George leaned forward. “Where are we now?”

“This? Lambuff. Souf Lambuff Road.”

“Oh.” To George the name had always meant a bishop’s palace and a jolly sort of dance called the Lambeth Walk.

Encouraged by George’s question, the driver settled himself comfortably into another contemptuous tirade. The one-way system was, he said, a piece of stupid shit. He cursed all drivers of all private cars. A West Indian in dreadlocks elicited such a rain of bored obscenity that George tried to close the sliding glass between himself and the man. It was jammed open with a wooden wedge. The man was as inexorable as God’s wrath.

At a zebra crossing, an elderly woman in a caliper hobbled slowly in front of the headlights. “Get a fuckin’ move on, shagbag!” the driver said, and made her jump with a blast of the horn. It was as if his anger supplied the motive power for the taxi: fuelled with expletives, it dodged, braked, slewed, cut in. With every gear change there was another burst of filth from the driver. “Wet fart!” he shouted. “Wanker!” “You tit!” “You fuckin’ toerag!”

George, quailing in the back of the cab, lit his pipe.

“Can’t you fuckin’ read?”

“What?”

“No smoking! I don’t give a shit if you want to kill yourself, mate; you go ahead. Get fuckin’ cancer. But don’t you poison my lungs with your fuckin’ smoke—okay?”

Unable to speak, reddening with rage, George pocketed his pipe. Suddenly he was as angry as everyone else in South Lambeth. He boiled in silence; hating the driver, hating the cab, hating the traffic, hating the tower blocks and the bad air and the slow, ugly endlessness of the city as it repeated itself for
mile after mile without a landmark. As the darkness thickened, it seemed part of the geography of the place: south of the river, into the dark. He was sure that he was being driven in wide circles, and twice spotted the same pillar of squashed cars rising over a gaping wall of corrugated iron to prove it.

Crouched low in his seat, he tried to get a view of the sky: if only he could get a fix on a star, he could keep tabs on where he was being taken. But the only lights up there were the windows of the flats. As the taxi lurched on through the traffic, they revolved over his head like constellations.

In Africa, George had tried to keep up with the news from Britain. He read the
International Herald Tribune
as often as he could find a copy, and subscribed to the
Weekly Guardian
. It had been with disbelief that he’d read of how suspected IRA men, held in detention in Northern Ireland, had mounted what they called the Dirty Protest. These men had expressed their indignation against the government by turning themselves into giant babies. They didn’t wash. They threw their food on the floor and ate it in their hands. They practised incontinence and daubed the walls of their cells with their own excrement. Sitting, out of the sun, in the Rua Kwame Nkruma, George had followed this story as if he was reading up on the customs of some remote and terrifying tribe. In
Britain?
Surely not.

Yet this new London looked like a dirty protest. It was wrecked and smeared. The taxi driver, fouling the air with words, was part of it. He was only saying what all the slogans said. I hate it here. I’m innocent. It’s not my fault.

And where on earth did Sheila fit? George had meant only to take her to lunch at Wheeler’s, where he could have been comfortably in command. On the phone, though, it had been Sheila who took control. There was no question of lunch—she was working all day, anyway. But he must stay the night, at least. “Father,
really-
” She loaded the word with meanings: it was at once a call to duty, an appeal to common reason, even an exasperated declaration of affection. George had laughed. Holding the receiver to his ear, doodling an embroidered rectangle round the phone number of Swissair in London, he
was game. But he hadn’t bargained on this dreadful place.
Sheila is at home here?

Labouring in third gear, the taxi climbed a ribbed hillside of low brick terraces. The traffic was thinner now: there were sooty plane trees at the side of the road and lighted grocery stores on the street corners. The tower blocks were sinking fast behind. Soon they were no bigger than obelisks in a neglected graveyard. George looked down over the brow of the escarpment and saw the city rendered suddenly harmless by distance and the dark—a dim, untidy scatter of lights across a valley floor. He thought he could make out the black threadline of the river and the amber glow of floodlights at Westminster, puzzlingly near at hand.

At this altitude, even the driver’s manner softened. “Inker-man Rise? That’s off Acre Lane somewhere, en’t it, mate?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Yeah …” He was working it out. “It’s after Sebastopol and Alma.”

Brick gave way to cheesy stucco, plane trees to chestnuts and beeches. The air began to smell like air again. The houses began to look like real London houses, frowning and beetle browed with their heavy cornices and balustrades.

George cuddled Vera’s old patchwork oilcloth shopping bag on his lap, trying to cushion the wine against the jolting of the taxi and keep it warm. It was a ’71 Leoville-Barton, and George had spent a long time in conference with the wine merchant on St James’s Street before he’d bought it. The bottle had cost him as much as a whole case of ordinary claret. He hoped that Sheila would recognize it as a serious treat. But then Sheila appeared on television now; she was bound to know things like that. George felt that the wine struck just the right note. It was expensive. It was thoughtful. It would be gone in an hour. The trouble with most gifts was that they hung around accusingly long after the moment they’d been designed to celebrate had passed. He’d gone to the shop to buy champagne, but had been seduced by the colour of the old clarets, their sombre dustiness, and had thought how well they
seemed to fit, somehow, with the idea of him and Sheila.

The taxi stopped, its motor stuttering loudly in the quiet street. George overpaid the driver, who pocketed the money without thanks and drove off, leaving him alone in the dark with the trees making sea noises overhead. He couldn’t see the numbers on the houses, which were set a little back from the road, their front doors at the tops of fanlike flights of steps. Then he spotted Sheila’s—knowing it by instinct from the light in the tall curtainless window and the bare timber door from which the paint had been freshly stripped. Before climbing the steps, he patted his pocket to make sure his pipe was there, straightened his tie and squared his shoulders. Steady the Buffs, George thought, Steady the Buffs.