Foreign Land

by Jonathan Raban

  With the trembling flames of the lamps, the glow of the charcoal stove and the twin gas rings burning blue in the galley, the boat was a cave of jumping shadows. He found Diana there, half hidden behind the hanging fern in its basket. She looked younger than when he’d last seen her, even more like the remembered girl on the black and white television screen, the outline of her face softened by the drifting smoke of her cigarette. He blessed her for being there—for being that kindly, floating trick of the air and the light. He brought up a half bottle of Pomerol from his cellar in the bilges, set out knife and fork and placemat on the saloon table, and dined with Diana.

  It was the dining alone—more, even, than the cold palpable silence of Sheila’s room with its closed shutters—that George dreaded most. From May to September, Angela escaped to London for the hot season. Ahaza, the wall-eyed Jewish nurse from Ta’izz, was paid off for the duration and George was left to rattle in the empty house, a summer widower.

  They’d moved to Crater Town, to an ancient, narrow, five-storey tower of baked mud, once the mansion of a date merchant. There were no European neighbours. Camping out by himself in the gloom and dust, George listened through a broken lattice to the babble of motor horns and shouted Arabic in the street below.

  The other summer widowers were a miserable crew. They ate at the Club (toad in the hole, plum duff and warm, bottled Worthington), swapped dog-eared photos of their family houses in England, read their wives’ letters aloud to anyone who’d listen, formed drab huddles round the dartboard, and were treated like lepers by the bachelors. George went to the Club two or three evenings a week and found it lonelier than his forlorn lodgings in Crater Town.

  So he stayed at home, with a Tilley lamp hung from a nail in a beam (the house wasn’t rigged for electricity). He set himself the job of working his way through the Tauchnitz Library, bought by the boxful, sight unseen, from Mesloumian’s, the Armenian bookshop on the corner. He wrote letters. At least, he didn’t so much write them as draw them. Finding things to say to Angela was always tricky: the weather was no use as a topic since it stayed the same way for weeks on end, with the temperature in the hundreds and the humidity in the nineties, and gossip from the Club was pretty sparse at that time of year. Jerry Kingdom shot himself in July; but that was like a freak earthquake, and anyway Jerry eventually pulled through, having missed his heart by several inches and causing only a nasty wound in his shoulder.

  It was the drawings for Sheila that made the bind of letter-writing worthwhile. George drew Arab ladies, like human bell tents, with drums of water on their heads; sailors in wide trousers; dogs; ships at sea; Mr Al Sabir’s new American motor car. He always drew himself in the right hand margin of these pictures—a grinning beanpole in a hat, smoke billowing from his pipe, pointing at the subject of the drawing with a forefinger as big as a banana.

  In the summer, George was sick with the knowledge that it was always like this, really. Sheila and Angela were connected to him by a fraying thread. Each winter, their presence in Aden was more of an accident, and the house on Bab al Qulu felt like an empty house, graced by unreliable and exotic visitors. As Angela’s letter in September ’49 put it, “I shall be coming to stay on the 14th …”; George tortured himself with that phrase.

  He knew it was his fault. It wasn’t surprising that Angela was bored by him—he was bored by himself. Other chaps were bright as buttons, with their easy way of dishing out compliments, their knack of turning everything that happened to them into a clever joke. George felt lumpish and tongue-tied beside these men who sped prettily through the world like skaters on a rink. When the dried-up stream of dinner invitations began to flow again in October, he would see Angela at the far end of tables, laughing as she never laughed in the house, her enormous eyes alight with a rapt attention that George could never rouse.

  “Yes,” George said to his neighbour at the table, a visiting agricultural boffin from the UN, “we should see a gross tonnage of at least two million by next year.” How could you be clever and funny about things like that?

  He did what he could. Each year he dreamed up an adventure for his wife—something that would make her want to come back to Aden, with Sheila. It was George’s idea that she crossed the Empty Quarter with Freddie Blount, driving the second landrover. Everyone said that Freddie Blount was interested only in little brown boys, so George felt safe and Angela, on her return, kept the entire Protectorate spellbound for months with her marvellous stories of the trip. George found a berth for Angela when he heard that Toby Morgan was planning to sail a dhow from Aden to Kuwait. She camped in the mountains in Oman with Alan Pigott-Williams, and flew to Baghdad, from where she drifted down the Tigris to Basra on a raft with Freya Stark.

  When Angela was away on her expeditions, George came back early from the bunkering station to the house and played with Sheila. Ahaza sat cross-legged in the corner of the room, her wall-eye roaming. Some mornings, he carried Sheila on his shoulders to his office on the quayside and saw her properly piped aboard the visiting ships.

  “And an orange juice, if you have one, for Rear Admiral Grey.”

  The captains made a gratifying fuss over her, and Sheila loved the ships—their spooky mazes of ladders and hatchways and secret compartments. Toddling stiffly on wide-apart legs, she made her tour of inspection, collecting treasures at each stop: a rough-cut opal on the bridge, biscuits in the galley, a useful box from the ABs’ quarters.

  “Bound for Cape Town?” George said, writing out a docket in the wardroom with Sheila seated on his knee, making crumbs. “Don’t suppose you could find space for the Admiral and her rusty lieutenant, could you?”

  It was what he always said to every captain. With Angela away, George cherished a sweet recurrent fantasy in which he and Sheila were afloat, alone and out of reach, on an ocean of blue-shot silk. At bedtime in the house on Bab al Qulu, Sheila demanded, “Pigrin Boat! Pigrin Boat! Pigrin Boat!”

  “The owl and the pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful—”

  “Pigrin Boat!” shouted Sheila.

  “They took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped up in a …”

  “Fi Pow Note!”

  With Sheila and Ahaza in the house, George was on a gentle pleasure cruise. When Angela was around, it was a bit like getting a radio report that there was a U-boat somewhere in your sector. The sea looked just the same, but you stood your watch numbly waiting for the sudden white porpoise track of the torpedo.

  She scored some near misses. One afternoon George came back to the house to find her looking appallingly ill, her left cheek swollen out as big and round as a tennis ball, her eyes glazed, her pupils distended. She seemed to be staring straight through him, with her mouth wobbling rhythmically from side to side.

  “Darling!-Ahaza!”

  When she opened her mouth, he saw that her teeth were flecked with bright green. Then he noticed the pile of privetlike sprigs on the floor beside her. She was chewing qat like an Arab.

  The bubble of anxiety broke. She looked absurd. Pathetic. He said: “Honestly, Angela, for Christ’s sake—you want Ahaza to see you like that? Where’s Sheila?”

  Angela looked through him, showing her Martian teeth. She said, “Fuck you,” in a voice so flatly factual and so serious, that George felt the words rankle inside him, doing permanent damage to something vital. He’d always known that he was too dim for Angela, but he’d never realized that he was her enemy before.

  She said, “You’ve ruined my life,” and spat the qat out on the floor—a gobbet of green stuff, like the turd of a sick animal.

  That evening, at the Kerrs’, with Peter Moffatt and Toby Morgan, Angela starred. Describing her qat-chewing, she said, “I think I’m going to become an absolute slave to it—it opens so many doors, you know.” Pipe in mouth, George smiled twistedly and nodded, leading the applause; but he was wondering which particular door it was that she was talking about, and when it would finally slam shut on him.

  She bought a
Leica and announced that she was going to publish a book of photographs called The Harem. She took off for the hills and came back with a mountain of snapshots, most of them wrongly exposed. George gave her a light meter, and Angela played with it a few times, then said that f-stops and shutter speeds were really much better if you left them to instinct and feel. She did her own developing down in the cellar and her hands nowadays were stained with hypo. Without telling her, George picked a dozen of her best pictures and mailed them to a publisher in London; he saw Angela’s photography as his last lifeline to Sheila. The publisher replied, writing direct to Angela. The subject was interesting, he said, but neither the quality of the prints nor the composition of her work allowed him to hold out much hope for The Harem. He suggested, however, that with fewer photographs and a really original text, she might approach the Cresset Press.

  Angela accused George of treachery and betrayal. He had gone behind her back, spying on her. He had deliberately chosen all her worst pictures. He was trying to sabotage her career because he was jealous of her talent.

  “All I wanted—” George said.

  “You’re trying to destroy me, that’s what you want,” Angela said. “But you won’t destroy me, Georgie, and you won’t destroy my baby, because I won’t let you do that. See?”

  He didn’t see. He didn’t see anything at all, he was so blinded by the shocking injustice of what Angela was saying.

  That February, Freya Stark was staying at Sana’a, three hundred miles of rutted tracks away, up on the plateau. Angela was determined to visit her, and to take pictures of the city.

  “It’s supposed to be like something straight out of the middle ages!” she said at the bungalow which Justin Quayle shared with Tony Flowers.

  Alan Pigott-Williams lent her a landrover, which she loaded with aluminium boxes of photographic equipment, water in jerry cans and a suitcase of London summer dresses. Late in the morning, George looked up at the hills from his office in the bunkering station and saw a puff of red dust climbing the ribbed face of the range. He assumed that the dust was his wife.

  For a week George was happy, with Sheila his constant companion. They read books together.

  “Look-Jan-et-look! See-the-dog! Look-John-look! See-the-ball!”

  They spent a morning on HMS Alert. They played draughts. On Friday, they went swimming at Fisherman’s Bay: hand in hand with his daughter in the tingling surf, George was in a panic of love.

  On Saturday, he woke in the dark to a noise from downstairs. He listened and heard it again—the surreptitious scrape of footsteps on stone. There had been a lot of talk lately of qarsana, of thieves from Eritrea who landed by night from the sea. Bungalows on Steamer Point had been broken into and an Adeni watchman stabbed to death. George felt for the torch on the bedside table and for his old naval revolver which he had taken to keeping under the pillows of the bed that he no longer shared with Angela.

  He tiptoed down the narrow flight of tall steps, barefoot, holding his breath in the clammy darkness. He heard the whispered word bugah. It meant tyrant, oppressor. So it was political, this vile, stealthy shuffling in the hallway. He was suddenly very frightened. He clicked the torch on and shone it at the noise.

  Angela was there, with Bill Nesbit. They both looked filthy, as if they’d been wallowing in a dusthole, and George could smell their intimate sweatiness. They were bent together over a Tilley lamp, trying to get it going.

  He said: “I thought you were supposed to be in Sana’a.”

  “We were,” Angela said in her brightest party voice. “Such fun!”

  The flame of the lamp shot up. Nesbit said “Bugger,” and turned it down.

  “Oh, do look!” Angela said. “Georgie’s got his little gun.”

  George realized that he was pointing it straight at Nesbit, and for a moment it looked as if Nesbit was going to stretch his hands above his head. George said: “I thought—”

  “Do you think he’s going to use it? Oh, Georgie, go on, do! It’d brighten things up no end round here. I’m quite prepared to die for something on the lines of Crazed Bunkerman Slays Wife &: Lover—aren’t you?” She put her hands on Nesbit’s bare forearm. The skin of his face was pale under the dust, and he was putting on a bloody awful show of pretending to laugh, going haw! haw! haw! haw! far too loudly, and exposing his gums like a frightened chimpanzee.

  George badly wanted to be rid of the revolver, but there was nowhere to put it—no pockets in his striped pyjamas, no table within reach.

  Nesbit said, “I was just seeing Angie … safely … home, you know,” and hawed again.

  “Oh, do put that silly thing away, George, you look too ludicrous for words.”

  Nesbit looked to Angela for a cue, failed to get one, and said: “I suppose I ought really to be making tracks, sir.”

  It was the “sir” that hurt most: George was only two years older than Nesbit—if that. He gave a miserable half-shrug and pointed at the door with the barrel of the gun.

  “Well. Sorry. Awkward silence, haw, haw! Goodnight.” Nesbit backed out, the grin on his dirty face looking like a bad flesh wound.

  There was the whirr and clank of Nesbit’s starter motor in the street outside, then a rumble as the engine fired.

  “Good Christ,” George said.

  “Man Stands Girl Up: Husband Blamed,” Angela said.

  How could she be so fearless?

  Exhausted, beyond tears, beyond surprise now, George said: “Why bring him back here, to this house?”

  Angela stared at him, her face as void of liking or interest as a brick. She licked a smudge of dust from her upper lip. She said: “I do so hate fucking in the backs of cars, particularly in landrovers, don’t you?”

  It was, as he explained to Diana in the flickering saloon, Angela’s last, and ultimately successful, attempt to rig a final scene with enough drama in it to finish the play. George hit her. For the first time, he began to shout at his wife. He howled at her—the words coming out half-formed and grammarless. It was a minute or two before he heard his own voice joined by the appalled screams of Sheila in her room at the top of the house.

  A little after nine o’clock, the tide turned again. The lights of the town began to slide slowly past the portholes, then reappeared on the starboard side as the boat swung on her anchor to face the sea. Dartmouth went into a spin; George placidly washed up his dinner things. He was thinking of Fisherman’s Bay, of Sheila wriggling in his arms in the sea, her ribcage as raw-boned as a whippet’s. The Indian Ocean rolled in, veined and green. The curling tops of the breakers caught the sun as they exploded into flashpowder.

  “Here’s Arthur!” George shouted over the magnificent gravelly roaring of the surf, and Sheila squealed with joy as he lifted her up over his head, the water peeling off her in shivers of white light.

  He pumped the bilges out, checked the riding lamp in the mizzen shrouds, and slept in the forecabin, a sleep void of dreams. Twice in the night he came close to the surface like a lazily rising fish, heard the companionable mutter of the river close by his ear, and sank again.

  He was awake early. There was no wind. The water looked like tarnished foil under a washcloth sky. After breakfast, he busied himself with pleasant, shipshusbandly jobs. He polished the brasswork in the wheelhouse; he lowered a galvanized bucket on the end of a rope into the river and sluiced down the decks. Breathing heavily, he leaned on the main boom and blew up the inflatable dinghy with the foot pump. The rubbery fabric swelled round him into an undignified craft like a grey chipolata sausage, which George launched over the rail with a splash.

  He needed money. His bank now was up forward in the chain locker, in a Huntley & Palmer’s biscuit tin. What was left of the cash that he’d brought back from Geneva was stored there, in wads as stiff as decks of cards. He hadn’t bothered to clean the tin out first, and it still held a few remains of a fruit cake which his mother must have baked ten years ago, at least. The money smelled of almonds. George pared away a fif
ty pound note from the front of a pack with his thumb, and hid the tin under a coiled heap of rusty chain.

  He made a slow, crabwise passage across the river in the dinghy, fighting the drift of the current and the ebb tide. Every time he looked over his shoulder, Dartmouth seemed to have receded a little further. Struggling to keep his place on the stream, he paddled as hard as he could through the fish crates, logs, old light bulbs, plastic bottles and soft drink cans. A torn car seat sailed past; a vacant pair of oilskin trousers was going cruising in company with a distended pink polythene bag. As soon as George let his oars rest for a moment, the dinghy became part of this glacial seaward trail of garbage. Seeing his own ragged plimsolls, their eyelets gone, their lace-ends turned to feathery catkins, he wished that he’d taken time off to trim his beard: when last observed it had put him squarely in the flotsam class.

  He reached the quayside, tied the dinghy to a ladder, and scrambled up and over the wall into the street. The pavement felt like a trampoline. His first attempt at walking made him landsick, so he held on to a lamp-post, where he was given a wide berth by the morning shoppers. When he got going again, he planted his feet wide and leaned to outwit the land as it rose on the beam.

  Crossing the road he was half-deafened by the long contemptuous blast of a motorist’s horn. He skipped painfully clear of a scowling radiator grille. Ahead of him, a cyclist swerved, then turned to shout at George as soon as he had ridden past. People on the pavement stopped and stared as he leaped and stumbled through to the far shore. He turned back on his persecutors and remembered that cars in England always did drive on the left-hand side.

  He tried to lose himself in the crowd but his wet plimsolls, flapping in the dust, left a spoor of footprints like the track of an unsteady seal. Still rolling slightly, he collided with a boy with orange hair that stuck up from his scalp in foot high spikes. “I am most frightfully sorry,” George said; and the boy smiled back as if he and George were members of the same threatened tribe.