Foreign Land (9 page)

“Who is this? A relation?” She was standing in front of a portrait of a woman sitting at a writing desk. The paint of the woods in the background had oxidised badly. The heavy gilt frame was chipped. The picture was far too big for the room.

“Oh, some remote cousin on my father’s side. My father used to call it ‘the Gainsborough’. It’s not, of course. I doubt if it’s even eighteenth century.”

He felt trapped by the Pym-woman. Glass in hand, she was touring the room as if it was a museum. Trust him to let in the village quidnunc. She peered in turn at each of the eight portrait miniatures in one large frame.

“All Greys?”

“I imagine so. My father was always getting left things by his great aunts. Being the clergyman of the family, he was a sort of natural receptacle for ancestral junk. They never left him any money.”

She had moved on to a rough-cut pane of Cornish slate on which had been painted a galleon cruising ahead under full sail. It was attached to a pin on the wall by a leather thong. An old Easter palm was propped behind it.

“That’s not an heirloom,” George said. He took a long swallow of Scotch to curb his temper; the whisky burned his throat.

“It’s odd, isn’t it—inheriting things? They never seem to fit.” She was now making a short-sighted study of a Victorian sampler. It had once hung in his bedroom when he was a child, and George knew it by heart. Decorated with a random assortment of faded dogs, trees, flowers and boats, it made two attempts at an embroidery alphabet, then launched into verse: “A Damsel of Philistine race/ In Samson’s Heart soon found a Place/ But Ah when She became his Bride/ She prov’d a Thorn to Pierce his Side”. It was signed “Eliz. Catherine Grey—Aged 12 years—February 18th 1837”, like a tombstone.

“Sweet,” said Diana Pym. “Who was Eliz.?”

“I’ve no idea,” said George. He stared irritably at the straggling ends of white hair which were distributed around
the back of the neck of the black dress. “Some ancestor or other.” He realized that he had completely forgotten her face—if he’d ever noticed it in the first place. When she did eventually turn round, it would hardly have surprised him if she had revealed herself to be wearing a monkey mask. In the event, her face was smudgy; its firmest feature was the web of fine lines round her eyes and mouth. No wonder he’d forgotten it. He saw that her glass was already empty. Was the woman an alcoholic?

“Do sit down,” George said, putting a testy emphasis on the
do
. He pointed helpfully at his mother’s black vinyl sofa. The plastic had been grained to look like leather; it succeeded only in having the appearance of ferns petrified in coal. The quidnunc seated herself among the fossils. The sofa sounded as if it was discreetly passing wind.

Diana Pym smiled and held out her glass for more. “Thanks,” she gruffed. As he padded across the slate floor to the kitchen she called: “Watch your head!” Then, a moment later, “Oh—there’s your coat of arms. What does the motto mean?”

George, unscrewing the cap from the whisky in the kitchen, grunted. He couldn’t remember the motto. He thought—I brought this on myself.

He returned to the sitting room, handed her the refilled glass, and sank his length in the one bearable chair in the house, his father’s woodwormy chintz buttonback. “So,” he said, smiling as blandly as he dared, “what were
you?”

A nimbus of cigarette smoke hid her face. She dashed it away with her hand. Her Wedgwood blue eyes were suddenly wary and reproachful. She looked as if he’d threatened to slap her. Oh, damn these people for whom the liberties they take so gaily for themselves are treated as infringements and offences if found in anyone else’s hands! Damn the woman’s impertinent questions! Damn her nettled looks!

“I was Julie Midnight,” said Diana Pym, “I thought you knew.” She blew smoke like a gusty cherub in a corner of an old map.

The name was a puzzle of letters. Then they sorted themselves out. It was impossible—surely?

It wasn’t long ago. A few years, at most. He remembered Julie Midnight. Sitting alone, bored, in his hotel room in St James’s Street, he was watching television. He was half dressed for dinner. The black and white picture was swept by snow flurries of interference. Julie Midnight was singing.

That was not quite true. She didn’t sing so much as talk, in a sad, flat little voice, over a moody backing of guitar and orchestra. Something-something-laughter … something-something-the
day after
. It was the appearance of the girl under the television lights that had stuck in his head: her helmet of pale hair; her severe black polo-necked jersey; her face, as white and fine boned as the face of a Donatello saint in marble; the way her eyes appealed to the camera. She was irresistibly vulnerable. You wanted to reach out and save her from the brazen glare of the studio. For three or four minutes, watching the shaky image at the end of the bed, George loved Julie Midnight with a heartstopping purity that he’d never be able to summon for a real woman.

“I’m so sorry—” George said. He was incredulous. “Of course—I should have recognized you—”

“Oh, no-one does now, thank God,” Diana Pym said. “It’s just that the village knows, like villages do.”

“Do you—still sing?” he said, feeling stupid as the question escaped him, unbidden.

“No. I garden.”

“It was … just recently, though … surely?”

“No—my last concert was in ’63. They always used to make me up to look dead; I was really dead by the time the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came in.”

“I thought I saw you singing … just a year or two ago …”

“No way-”

Diana Pym and Julie Midnight … They sat together on his mother’s sofa like twin pictures in a stereoscope, and he could not make them coalesce into a single image. Blink, and he saw
one; blink, and the other had taken her place. It was true—Diana Pym had the wrists and eyes of Julie Midnight, the same slender boniness, the same stunned look. In any line of refugees, shuffling away from the scene of a catastrophe, the camera would instinctively single out that face. You would only have to see it for a moment before making out a cheque to the disaster fund. Yet Julie Midnight was Diana Pym: the kind of disaster she suggested was nothing more heart-stirring than an attack of greenfly.

She—or they, rather, were saying: “I adore your slate floor. There’s one in my cottage, but it’s been covered over with a layer of concrete about a foot thick. One would need a pneumatic drill to get at it—”

George, affronted by the thought of Julie Midnight with a pneumatic drill, said: “Yes. My father dug it out when my parents first moved here. He broke his hip on it a week later. After that he pointedly referred to it as ‘your floor’ to my mother. It was rather a bone of contention.”

“You don’t seem to have liked your parents very much,” said Diana Pym.

George found this remark unsettling. Its presumption was pure Pym, but the intimacy of the eyes that went with it was Midnight. The eyes won.

“We just never knew each other terribly well,” he said. “I was in the Middle East, then Africa. They were in Hampshire, then here. We didn’t have a lot in common. I suppose we were all a bit baffled by each other when we met. I used to think we might have done better if we’d hired an interpreter.”

“Well, everybody feels that, don’t they?” She lit a new cigarette from the butt of her last one. In the gauzy smoke, Midnight went out of focus and came back as Pym. The jaggedly cut ends of her white hair were coloured with nicotine and there was something creased and tortoiselike about her face. Too much weather, too little blood. Suppose she had been, say, thirty in 1960 … That would still put her only in her early fifties … Her alarming age made George feel shaky on his own account.

“Anyway—” her head was turned away from him; she was looking again at the big, bad, dusty portrait of that distant female cousin with her quill pen and unfinished letter on her desk. “Your parents seem to have had the last word. You’ve come home.”

“Late, as usual.”

“Better late than never.” Trying to giggle, she began to cough—a deep crackling cough that sounded like a forest on fire.

“Can I get you some water?”

“No.” Her voice was a bass croak. “This part of Cornwall’s awful for bronchitis.”

“You smoke too much,” George said, talking not to Diana Pym but to the girl on the screen in the forlorn hotel room. Diana Pym stared back at him, her blue eyes moist with coughing.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve never gone in for doing things by halves.”

“Whatever brought you to St Cadix?”

“Oh, the sea, I guess. I lived in Venice for a while. Venice, California. We were a block away from the ocean. There was a motel and a Burger King between us and it. You could just see a crack of Pacific from the bathroom window—it was about the same size as the toothbrush handle. Then I moved to Brittany, but there was a big hump of cliff and some iron railings and an ice cream kiosk. You couldn’t actually see the sea at all, there. Now it comes right up to my back garden. At spring tides, the cottage feels like a boat on the water.”

“You had friends here?”

“No. I saw a picture of it in a magazine. It looked kind of
dinky.”
She sat hunched intently forward, listening to herself. “It gave me a job. The house was a ruin, the garden was just rocks and turf. In the first year I was out at nights digging, with a Tilley lamp hung in a hawthorn tree. It felt like something I’d been assigned—”

Her face was alight with the recollection of it, but George saw only the empty labour, the lonely woman with the garden
fork, the darkness, the light in the tree. Surely Julie Midnight could have found something better for herself than that?

“Now it’s just there. I’m like the park attendant: I go around picking up leaves and frightening the birds.” She laughed. “I have a reputation to keep up, too. The kids go past my place on their way back from school. I heard them talking once: one kid was saying to another, ‘Watch out for the old looniewoman!’ I guess that’s one way of being accepted in the village: I’m the local witch around these parts. Any day now I expect people to come round to the door asking me to cure warts and goitres.”

“Do you have a familiar?”

“Uh-uh. Cats and gardens don’t go.”

One whisky later, at a quarter to midnight, Diana Pym left. As George opened the car door for her, she said, “Someone said you were S. V. Grey’s father?”

“ … yes,” George said, feeling accused of paternal negligence by the question.

“I’m reading her now. I’ve seen her on television, of course.”

“Have you?” George had no idea that Sheila had ever been on television. The information struck him as alarming: he hoped she hadn’t been on television very often.

“Yes. Rather good, I thought. She’s a witty lady.”

“Yes, isn’t she—” George said with a hearty emphasis he didn’t feel.

“You must be proud of her.”

“Oh … very.”

He watched the tail lights of Diana Pym’s mud spattered car weave through the dark strand of pines and round the granite buttress of the headland. As the sound of the engine was lost behind the rock, it was replaced by the slow, inquisitive suck and slap of the sea below the cottage and the rattle of dry branches overhead. He found his head suddenly full of words. The girl on the screen was singing:

Tonight we kiss, tonight we talk, tonight is full of laughter;

But I know that it won’t last, my dear—

This will all have passed, my dear—

Next week, next month, or maybe the month after.

The words tinkled stupidly. They fitted themselves to the noises of the sea, and the gravelly waves turned into a band playing from a long way off. George could hear drums and saxophones in it, and the steep descending scale of a solo clarinet.

He went back in to the unwelcoming light of the cottage. On the arm of his mother’s sofa, a cigarette was still burning in a saucer. There was something disconcertingly lively about its white worm of ash. George, nursing his drink, watched it smoulder until the worm reached the filter and collapsed into the saucer. It left a thin, sour smell behind, like the exhaust fumes of a vintage car.

G
eorge watched television. He sat over it, legs wide apart, jawbone cupped in his palm, as if he was warming himself before its coloured screen. The sound was turned down low. George aimed the channel changer at the set and stabbed the button with his thumb. He was searching for—he didn’t know what. News. Intelligence.

He wanted to find out … about St Cadix … about his daughter … about his parents … about Diana Pym and the Walpoles’ Christmas party. He wanted to find
England
. He riffled through the pictures, each one as bright and flat as the last. There was no depth to their colour: they looked as disconnected from real life as a series of holiday postcards.

Sitting in his father’s chair, George found himself using one of his father’s favourite words to describe what he saw. It was rum. Everything to do with the TV was rum.

Even its arrival had been rum. In this country (he gathered), where people were trained to stand in line and wait for things and be grateful when they eventually turned up weeks and months late, the TV had veen delivered almost before George had properly begun to think of it. His casual call to the shop in the village had been treated as if it was a medical emergency. The van (“T. Jellaby—Every TV & Video Want Promptly Supplied”) had come, like an ambulance, in minutes.