Foreign Land (38 page)

George and Angela were married by his father in his father’s church. The Haighs swept down from London in a Roman triumph, bringing hampers, top hats and tailcoats, cine equipment, two bridesmaids and a best man called Rodney whom Angela had found at a dance. Rodney had failed his Army medical on account of his asthma, and did quite a lot of this sort of thing, he said.

“Pity it’s too late to have a staggers,” he said on the wedding morning. “Had a bloody good staggers last week for a man called Tommy Jarvis.” Rodney had flap ears, tow hair and a spotty complexion which reminded George of a raspberry mousse. George was rather ashamed of him, but Angela called him Roo, out of the
Winnie the Pooh
books, and said he was a sweetie, really, who just adored making himself useful to people. George didn’t tell her that Rodney had just asked him for five pounds, which was what he called “the usual”.

But Angela was wonderful. She cut through the gloom of the rectory like a blaze of sudden light. She was so wonderful with other people, too. She asked George’s father how on earth he’d managed to find himself such a darling little church, and made the rector blush—a first, in George’s lifetime. To his mother she said she knew she couldn’t possibly hope to take as good care of Georgie as Mrs Grey had done, there was so much she didn’t know, so much to learn, and she just knew that in Mrs Grey she’d found a second mother, and wasn’t that too heavenly? George’s mother put her arms round Angela and cried fit to bust.

Angela neglected nobody. To Uncle Stephen and Aunt
Eileen, who had come down from Scotland specially for the wedding and were staying at the rectory for a week, she said, “Oh, Scotland! I adore Scotland! It’s my very favourite! Do you have a simply huge castle?”

Uncle Stephen explained that they had a small house in the centre of Dumfries.

“Fibber!” Angela said. “You’re being modest, aren’t you? I don’t believe a word of it. Georgie? Your Uncle Stephen’s been leading me up the garden path.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, he has. He’s been telling me he’s only got a teeny little house in Scotland. I only have to look at him to see great big turrets and battlements, and acres and acres of wild romantic moorland absolutely swimming with grouse and funny old ghillies and salmon and stags and things. Don’t dare to disillusion me, darling, or I’ll die—”

George winked at his uncle and said, “Actually the King’s always trying to swap Balmoral for Uncle Stephen’s place, but Aunt Eileen won’t allow it because she says Balmoral would be far too poky for them.”

“You see!” Angela gave Uncle Stephen a skittish little push in the chest. “I knew. I’m always right. And I bet you’re a terrible old meanie to all your ghillies and people, too.”

Uncle Stephen and Aunt Eileen loved her. You could see. Though Angela’s wit was a bit above their heads. They weren’t used to the way that people talked in London. George supposed that Uncle Stephen’s managerial job (it had something to do with Scottish reservoirs) had never given him much of an entrée into Society.

The church service was, as Angela said afterwards, divine. George stood at the altar shivering with disbelief in his astounding luck. This was what
grace
meant, in the real, religious sense—a sort of marvellous, unasked-for providence that just descended on you, like that—from where else but heaven? He tasted the mouldysweet air of the church, felt Angela, veiled in a cloud of lace, standing close beside him, and believed absolutely in the existence of God for the first time
since he was thirteen.

The organ music, Angela and Jesus were all mixed up with each other in a holy stew. Exalted, lost in the sheer wonder of the thing, George swam to his bride through a sea of beautiful words. His borrowed dress sword clanked on the stone as he and Angela kneeled together in front of his father, and George realized that if he was kneeling, it must be done already. He was—married.

He heard his father saying something about Isaac and Rebecca and heard his own voice crack on an Amen—the first word he’d ever spoken since becoming a Husband. He sneaked a glance at Angela’s clasped hands. The ring was there. He was aware of Rodney’s knees on an embroidered hassock just behind him, and of the folds of his father’s surplice out in front. Each cautious sensation—the sight of the worn red altar carpet, of the Mothers’ Union banner beyond the pulpit, of the grinning choirboy’s face in the front stall—was registered by George as an amazing novelty. So
this
was how the changed world looked to a married man.

Outside the church, Mr Haigh had set up his cine camera on a tripod. For several minutes, everyone was made to huddle in the porch, while Mr Haigh panned low over the wet tombstones in the churchyard. He filmed the old women from the village who were waiting by the wall, and a squall of rooks clattering into the sky from the elm trees. Then Angela and George walked arm in arm out of the church and down the gravel drive towards the lych-gate.

“Cut!” Mr Haigh shouted, and made them do it again.

They came out of church seven times. At George’s fifth step (amended to the seventh on Mr Haigh’s fourth take), they stopped, kissed, and Angela let a flower fall from her bouquet on to the gravel. Then they walked on towards the camera, unlinking their arms so that George could squeeze by on one side of Mr Haigh and Angela on the other.

“Do you remember the wedding sequence in von Stroheim’s ‘Greed’?” Mr Haigh asked George.

George’s father was talked into putting on full vestments
and got three takes to himself. He strode through the nettles along the side of the church, robed in gold.

By now, the crowd from the village was packed along the churchyard wall. George saw Vivienne Beale there, and nodded at her, a star acknowledging a fan; and when the wedding party left through the gate, it was Vivienne Beale, George noticed, who threw the most confetti.

At the rectory, the Haighs had laid on a three-tiered wedding cake, smoked salmon, turkey breasts and a whole crate of Mumms champagne. Mr Lewis-White, the rector’s warden, said, “I haven’t seen a spread like this since war broke out,” while Uncle Stephen, who had a problem with rich foods, eyed the three trestle tables brought in from the church hall and said that in Scotland, of course, no-one saw much of the Black Market. Rodney’s speech (it was apparently included in the five pounds) went down rather badly. Mr Haigh said first that he wasn’t going to announce that he had lost a daughter and gained a son, then said it all the same. He seemed distracted, and kept on looking at his watch. George was desperate to be alone with Angela. Since becoming man and wife, they’d barely spoken; and at the reception Angela seemed like a glamorous intimidating stranger—the sort of person whom you see across a room but know you’re never going to meet.

At 2.45, and again at 3.00, Mr Haigh stood by the drawing room window gazing irritably across the uncut lawn to the fringe of trees that screened the rectory from the road. At 3.15, a hooded green MG TC arrived, driven by a man in a leather helmet and motoring gloves who said he had got lost trying to get off the Winchester by-pass.

At 4.00, George and Angela, filmed by Mr Haigh, left for Brighton in the green MG. Brighton had been picked for the single night of the honeymoon because it was reasonably convenient for Portsmouth, where George was due to join
Hecla
at 1600 hours the next day.) Angela drove, miraculously fast.

It was raining in Brighton and the sand-coloured sea came creaming slantwise up the beach in a south-westerly gale.

“Georgie, it’s
far
too rough for them to make you go tomorrow, it’s absurd!”

George, watching the sea through the net curtains of the hotel room, was inclined to agree: he’d been badly sick on
Larkspur
and dreaded the lumpy run down-Channel.
Hecla
was a “Woolworth carrier”—an old merchant ship, decked over to provide a skimpy flight deck for her twenty aircraft. She had a reputation as a bad roller. He said: “No, we’ll be fine, darling. There’s just a bit of a popple on the water.”

Dinner was dreadful. Angela sent hers back and told the waiter that she’d expected to come to a proper hotel and not to a fleabitten seaside boarding house. The waiter said that there was a war on.

Angela opened her eyes wide and said: “Really? Honestly and truly? A war? How utterly ghastly for you. Is it frightfully hush-hush, or can you tell us who it’s between?”

The waiter put on a frigid smile and beat a retreat to the pudding trolley.

Angela said, “Well, that épaté’d
him
, anyway. Oh, darling, I can’t bear to watch you eat yours, it looks perfectly disgusting … like dog-do!”

So George got very little dinner either.

The war had done for the hotel’s heating system and the room was damply cold. Though the windows were closed, the curtains stirred with the salty wind. The lamp by the bedside refused to work, the water in the bathroom was lukewarm and stained with rust. Angela complained of goose pimples and “blotches”.

“Oh, Georgie—I look such a frump, I hate myself. Hate! Hate! Hate!”

But the double bed with its stiff sheets was a glorious safe harbour. George and Angela lay in its warm shelter, listening to the gale rattling the window frames and to the dyspeptic gurgle of the hotel plumbing. It was, George thought, strangely like being a baby again, to be a married man. Their kisses now were soft and unhurried. Embracing, they were as moist and slippery as eels. George had a little difficulty with
the rubber contraceptive. Angela helped.

Her sudden frantic violence always took him by surprise. Though her arms were tight around his neck, it was as if she’d taken leave of him. Pumping and thrashing, she came to her private climax, her voice a hoarse growl. “Georgie! Georgie! Don’t drown! Don’t drown! Don’t drown!”

He slept with his head cuddled to his wife’s breast.

He woke to laughter.

The water was chuckling against the hull—but it wasn’t that. The laugh was fuller, throatier, more like the rumble of a ship’s twin screws close by. But the sea was clear to the horizon. Fumes from the diesel must be getting to him. He stepped out of the wheelhouse into the cockpit. Where his father had been just a moment ago, Teddy was now sprawled in his scarlet University of Wisconsin tracksuit. Head thrown back, white teeth shining in the sun, he was banging a squash racket against his knee. And laughing.

“Oh, holy shit!” said Teddy and straightened himself up. “I’m sorry, fella.” Then he was off again.

“Oh, George, you sweet asshole! You wimp! You old scumbag!”

D
iana’s muddy car was parked outside Thalassa, its driver’s door open, its tyres sunk in pine needles. Diana had meant to stop only for as long as it took to pick up the mail, but she enjoyed being alone in other people’s houses and the car had already been standing there for more than ten minutes with the open door wagging in the wind.

Once upon a time Diana, on tour in strange cities, had made a habit of calling up estate agents and being shown round people’s homes on the pretence that she was looking for somewhere to live. She was always comforted by these trips, which she kept secret from her manager and the rest of the band. Sometimes there was the sad pleasure of being able to warm yourself for a little while in front of someone else’s family life: their stray Wellington boots, crumbs on tea tables, nappies drying on washing lines, the lingering smell of Vicks vapour rub. At other times there was a happy sense of recoil as you realized that you were glad, at least, that you didn’t live
there
, not like
that
.

George’s house was perfectly hideous, Diana thought. She felt cheered up no end by its horrible shuttered dustiness. There wasn’t anything of George’s in it at all, so far as she could see, unless one counted the TV set in whose curved screen she saw herself reflected as a jolly fat lady.

Nor was there any mail for him, to speak of. A telephone bill. A seed catalogue for Occupier. A very thin airmail letter. Diana looked at the stamp, which was pretty and extravagantly big. It showed a sword, a boat and a baobab tree. She put it away in her bag.

She lit a cigarette and restored the spent match to the box. She’d taken up smoking again, but it was as if there’d been a rift in an old friendship, and she and cigarettes were now on uneasy terms. The fat lady on the screen puffed smoke at her.

She wouldn’t have minded a drink. She poked about in all the likely places, but all she could find was some low-calorie tonic and the dregs of a bottle of Vinho Verde, so she settled herself in the bulbous and smelly buttonback chair and inspected the room.

A pair of kukris in burst leather scabbards hung on one wall. Withered palm crosses were stuck behind the pictures. As for the pictures themselves … they were freakish. They were portraits of the sort of people who should never have had their portraits painted in the first place.

A slug of white ash splashed on the knee of Diana’s jeans. She let it stay there, and returned the blank stare of His Honour Judge Samuel Wilson Grey Ll.B (Cantab) with a frown, for in the Judge’s face there was a faint—faintly displeasing—trace of George. It was something in the set of the jowls and cheekbones; something puzzling and indefinite like seeing (or did you just imagine it?) a stranger wink at you in a crowded room.