Foreign Land Read online

  All evening she tried to find the stranger whose single sentence she had overheard. First she needled, then she sulked. George talked evenly throughout: about a play he’d been to see (with the Laura Ashley woman?), about methods of cooking shellfish, about the doctor’s latest report on her grandmother in Cornwall.

  “It’d be nice if you could manage to get down there,” he said. “I know she’d like to see more of you.”

  And who was he, of all people, to issue her with moral imperatives? She lit a cigarette with an irritable flash of her lighter. It was impossible to be sure, but she hoped that George hated to see her smoking. Later, thinking of that large-boned Anglo-Irish looking woman with the stupid grateful eyes, Sheila found herself seeing her as a rival and a thief.

  The open doorway of her study filled, suddenly, with Tom.

  “You working, then?”

  “No. I haven’t started yet.”

  Tom was very slightly out of focus. The hairs of his beard ran into each other, making his face look as if it had been cast in black bronze, like Marx in Highgate Cemetery.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “I nearly bought a dog.”

  “A dog? What would we do with a dog?”

  “The Chinese eat them.” Tom’s good teeth showed through his whiskers. “It was in that pet shop place, just along from Sainsbury’s. It was mostly sort of Afghan, but it had Dachshund legs. I reckon it had problems.” He leaned his cheek against the frame of the door. “I saw Trev. They’ve been pulling down a place near Crystal Palace. He’s bringing round some wood for me. Mahogany.”

  “Is there any room left for it?” Since Tom’s arrival, the bomb shelter in the garden had filled with baulks of timber and hijacked bits out of car engines. Tom specialized in things that other people didn’t want. In that underworld of Trevs and Steves and Dougs that Tom entered every time he left the house alone, he was, apparently, famous as a Schweitzer of abandoned objects. People came to the door now with old folding cameras whose leather bellows leaked light, stopped clocks, hubcaps, broken canework chairs. Tom took everything in. He was as unselective as a council skip. Early on, Sheila had wondered if she herself had a place in Tom’s recycling system: it was a thought that she had felt it safer not to pursue.

  “I’ll put it out in the garden for the winter. A bit of frost and rain will do it good.”

  She saw a line of words in George’s letter. It was at the bottom of the first side: “It is the rainy season here. As usual, there’s no rain. The last proper wetting was in 1966.”

  “D’you want some coffee?”

  “No, I’ll come down in a bit.”

  “I’ve got to clean the carburettor of the van.” He shifted in the doorway, his hair tangling with the lintel. “Oh. I looked it up. It is a baobab tree.”

  Sheila blinked at him through her spectacles, smiling; but there was a space in the doorway where he’d been and the room seemed to lift slightly in the air.

  She would invite her father to stay. He could have no excuse now for that impregnable hotel. She’d meet him at the airport. No ifs or buts about it. If Tom finished the basement by then George could even have a separate entrance. Though if George ran true to form, he’d see it only as an exit.

  Dear George. She used the writing paper with the stamped letterhead that Tom had made, then crumpled the sheet and dropped it in the basket by her chair. Dear Father, she wrote. There were times when people ought to be made to face up to their responsibilities, and from now on she meant to hold George accountable.

  Her pen moved briskly as she set out her terms. He must let her know his flight number …. If there was anything she could arrange for him (by telephone, of course) in Cornwall …. She came to a tricky pronoun, and hesitated. “We’ll be happy to have you here,” she wrote; and the lettering of that phrase seemed to her to stick out as more formal and deliberate than the surrounding scrawl.

  She realized, guiltily, that it had crossed her mind to ask Tom to go back to the underworld for the week or ten days of her father’s stay. That would be a mangy compromise. Unfair to Tom, unfair to her, unfair, even, to George—and damn him for having raised the question in her head at all.

  There was a raw smell of petrol coming from downstairs. She said sorry to the smell. Yet it was true that few people were good at seeing Tom’s point. He was not a convenient item of dinner furniture. He was unafraid of his own silence and could stay speechless for hours on end: guests usually felt attacked by him. He tended to remind people of things they’d prefer to gloss over, like dole queues and Supplementary Benefits. At the woozy end of the evening, if someone started to boast about paperback advances and promotion campaigns, and use the word “grand” when he meant a thousand pounds, his eyes were likely to come to rest on Tom and his speech, with any luck, would falter badly.

  There was also Tom’s age. For everyone else that Sheila knew, their age was part of the interesting genetic accident that defined who they were. Tom’s age was unique, in that it was taken as a moral accusation, and a serious personal shortcoming. He was “too young”. In fact, by comparison with most of her acquaintances, Tom was positively grandfatherly: his tolerance of other people was of a kind that normally went only with cocoa and slippers. Terrible things happened to him. Drunks battened on him, couples warred over his head, girls wept into his knees; Tom took it all. Driving home in the van, after some social fracas that had driven Sheila to the edge of shrieking, the worst Tom ever said was, “I thought that was a bit dire. Didn’t you?”

  “We are still trying to get this house sorted out,” Sheila wrote, “but there are plenty of habitable rooms. You’ll have your own bath.”

  Below, there was the sound of a distant artillery barrage, a voice, and then the artillery changed to infantry on the march. Sheila looked to the window and waited.

  In a minute, they showed, carrying an unhinged door. Tom held the front and a starveling youth in an anorak held the back. He had a parrot’s beak nose and thin straw hair sticking out from a pink skull. Seen from above, Tom’s frizzy bush made him look like an African. They carried the door with clumsy gentleness, padding ankle deep in leaves as they crossed the lawn and rounded the bird bath—a pair of ambulancemen, bearing a critically wounded case. Without a word, they propped the door up against the crumbled wall under the plane tree, then, wordless still, they tracked back through the yellow leaves the way they had come.

  She signed her letter: Lots of love, Sheila.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There was no twilight in Bom Porto. Day stopped and night began in as much time as it took to walk the length of the Square of the Liberators of Africa. It wasn’t much of a square, either: the banks of flowers and shrubs planted by the Portuguese had died of drought since Independence, and only a handful of dwarf acacias and spiky palms still managed to hold out in the red volcanic dirt. The old saltwater fountain was dry and choked with dust, the bandstand had lost its top and the wooden park benches had been carried away to feed suburban cooking fires.

  In the middle of the square, the statue of Dr Da Silva had been redecorated by the army. The bronze doctor on his plinth had a fine walrus moustache and a chestful of medals. He stared grimly out over the city towards the Atlantic as if he was searching the horizon for the puff of smoke that would mean rescue. A bronze African woman in a turban crouched at his feet. With her left hand, she cuddled a plump bronze baby; with her right, she pointed admiringly up at the doctor, whose seaward gaze blandly excluded the woman and her child. The engraved lettering on the plinth read:

  AD

  DR ANTONIO LUIS DA SILVA

  (MEDICO)

  HOMENAGEM DE GRATIDAO

  The words were difficult to make out now, since they lay under a collage of later, more exuberant messages, VIVA PAIM! VIVA ARISTIDE VARBOSA! VIVA A REFORMA! VIVA O POVO!

  Long life to the people … George would be happy to wave his hat in the air for that. He entered the square from the Rua Fidel Castro, a zippered squash racke
t swinging at his knee. He carried an oilcloth shopping bag that he’d stolen from Vera, and wore a smart white gimme cap with a ten-inch brim. This had been bought from Filomeno for a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. On the front in red letters it said

  HOLSUM—AMERICA’S # 1 BREAD

  George liked Bom Porto’s easygoing, festive Marxist-Leninism. The further you went into the Wolof, Negro interior of Montedor, the more the politics of the country lost their good humour. By the time you reached the mountain town of Guia, 200 miles inland, they were inward and paranoid, with rumours of liquidation and torture. But in this coastal, Creole city, the security police were an amiable gang of sloppy drunks, hardly anyone belonged to the Party, and no-one whom George knew had disappeared. No-one, that is, unless one counted Jose Ribeiro, which George didn’t. Ribeiro—who used to spread his fantasies like a contagious itch—had simply made his own bad dreams come true.

  Night fell to the sound of music in Bom Porto. As the sun went out and the sea went from blood to tar, someone switched on the crackling speakers in the palms and the square filled with the noise of an elderly Brazilian dance band. When George first came here, the band was real, the benches were comfortable, and the tropical greenery was a fairytale forest full of secret places for lovers to hide in. Nowadays, the square was little more than a scorched rectangle of red ash, yet no-one seemed to notice. People still came, summoned by the darkness; and by the beginning of the second scratchy rumba the crowd was as thick and vivid as a poppy field. Young men climbed on to the shoulders of Dr Da Silva and dripped canned lager over his distinguished skull; girls in flouncing skirts did private, spinning dances on the bandstand.

  George eased his way through. His height, topped by his Holsum cap, made him as prominent a figure as a uniformed policeman in a playground.

  “Hey—how ya doin’, Mister George!”

  “Hi, man, what’s new?”

  Arms were laid around his waist. Wherever George went, he wagged his cap, politely clowning for his friends in the crowd.

  “Hello, Mario, how are you? Anna Luisa! God, you’re looking stunning.”

  “Well, George, whaddaya know!”

  Everyone spoke to him in movie American. In this Portuguese cake slice of Africa, English was the language not of colonialism but of romance. George was a Bom Porto institution: he gave everybody a chance to try out their few shards of magic-English.

  “Have a nice day, okay?”

  “Meester!” called a small boy, a stranger to George. “New York!” the boy said. “Boss-town! New Bed-ford Massachusetts!”

  “First rate,” said George.

  “First rate,” said the boy, returning George’s voice to him. It sounded painfully like the voice of a Wodehouse toff. It was a pity that he could not speak like George Raft.

  The music from the speakers mixed with the dry toss and rustle of the acacias. The northeast trade wind, blowing off the Sahara, funnelled through the square like the blast of a giant hair-dryer. It tasted rancid on the tongue, and you could smell in it dead dogs, rotten fruit, kerosene, wood smoke, sweat, mintballs and sewage. It was extravagant, travel stained, African air; meaty stuff, that George chewed on as he walked.

  An albino youth pointed at his squash racket. “Ilie Nastase—okay!” He made a thumbs up sign.

  “Okay,” George said. It was like the smells of the trade wind: by the time they reached Bom Porto, all cultural messages got scrambled.

  Dr Ferraz was promenading stiffly past the bandstand: George ducked his head low and dodged into the crowd. Ferraz had told him to knock off the weekly squash sessions with Teddy—had burbled on about dicky valves, as if George was a defective wireless. Well, Emanuel Ferraz, who took no exercise more strenuous than his evening hobble to the bar of the Hotel Lisbào, looked pretty bloody sickly himself. His long-faced warnings were typical symptoms of old man’s envy: he wanted George to join him in the geriatric set and wasn’t above inventing imaginary diseases to scare his patients into premature old age. Even so, George took good care to hide his squash racket from the doctor. He hove-to in the lee of a bearded palm tree until Ferraz was gone.

  At the end of the square, he turned left into a street of one room cottages built of loose rocks. Their windows were empty of glass, and they were lit by paraffin lamps that threw the shadows of their inhabitants out into the street. George trampled through moving silhouettes. A yellow dog with swollen tits emerged from a pile of rubbish and fell in alongside.

  “Go on,” George said. “Home, dog. Home.” He raised the squash racket. The dog howled and showed her teeth. At the end of the street she was still there, limping hopefully in his wake., He waved the shopping bag at her: “Shoo!” She stared at him, her eyes ripe with incomprehension and mistrust. George reached down into the dirt and pretended to pick up a stone. The dog fled into the dark, the bald sore on her rump bobbing like a rabbit’s scut.

  George crossed a sloping no man’s land of thin red shale and reached the waterfront. The Atlantic tide here on the Bight was too feeble to scour the harbour clean, and the sea was wrinkled, oily and malodorous. The last of the tuna skiffs were being hauled up onto the beach, and men and boys were carrying out dead’fish as big as silver aero engines.

  Nearly a mile across the water, the bunkering station lit the whole bay with a hard white blaze. Beyond the perimeter fence with its elevated look-out posts (George had christened it the Berlin Wall), the gas and diesel silos formed a magnificent illuminated castle of fat towers and slender aluminium battlements. Along with its other burdens, the wind carried the sound of the electric generators: George heard them humming and throbbing in his back teeth. The bunkering station was the biggest thing in Bom Porto and the finest landmark on the 600 miles of coast between Dakar and Freetown. When George had seen it first, there had been two derelict coal chutes, a rusting diesel tank and a shack marked OFFICE where Miller used to lie on his plastic sofa reading his month old copies of the Hull Daily Mail. Now it was such a glory that the army kept it permanently defended with four gun emplacements, two Churchill tanks and a mobile rocket launcher.

  The Curaçaoan tanker St Willebrordus was still on discharge in Number One. George could see the insect swarm of stevedores on the quay, and he felt widowed by the sight. But Raymond Luis had to learn to handle things on his own. There were five weeks left. George saw them as one might view the dismal, far too brief remission of an illness: he dreaded this reckoning with the small pains and indignities that went with letting go. He still hadn’t faced up to it, even though it had been nearly a year since the President had smilingly picked up his stone. Home, George.

  He turned into the courtyard of the Club Nautico. Teddy, already in his squash kit, was waiting for him.

  “Sorry, Teddy,” George said. “Am I late?”

  Eduardo Duarte, who had lived in the United States and made even the President of the Republic call him Teddy, after Mr Kennedy, made a show of inspecting his wristwatch-cum-electronic calculator. “Eleven minutes,” he said. As Minister of Communications, he was a stickler for timetables. “You have time for one drink. What do you want? A Chivas Regal?”

  “No thanks,” George said. “I’ll go and change.” Teddy himself drank nothing but a Vitamin C cocktail called Sun Top which he puritanically sucked through a straw; he always tried to make George start the evening with a slug of Scotch in the hope of slowing up his game.

  “I got a confession to make, George. I feel real good tonight. And I am going to hit the hot shit out of you, baby.”

  “Oh, yes?” said George. “You and whose sister?” Cheered, he went off to the changing room. In singlet and shorts, he replaced his Holsum cap and took a secret nip from the bottle in his shopping bag.

  After Independence, there were very few yachtsmen left in Montedor, and the Club Nautico was well on its way to becoming a draughty ruin. The club notice board still had the 1974 regatta results pinned to it. They were illegible. Red dust blew around the floors of the high vaulted room
s. Red dust had settled on the imitation Louis Quinze furniture and worked its way deep into the leaky leather armchairs. At weekends, the staff of the foreign consulates used the club as a base for their dinghy cruises to the islands; but on most weekdays it was left to the cockroaches and the house skinks, and to the Armenian barman who himself resembled a large domestic reptile in his greasy tailcoat.

  Now the Armenian was stirring the dust on the cement floor of the squash court with a broom made of palm fronds.

  “Is good now?” he said to George.

  “Fine,” said George, raising a tiny desert storm round his ankles.

  “Okay, George,” Teddy said, “ready for your lumps?”

  His game was fast and flashy. Twenty years younger and a full foot shorter than George, he had been toughened by five years of athletic stuff in the mountains, where he’d been a PAIM guerrilla. On the squash court, though, it was George who was the guerrilla. He knew the jagged cracks in the wall where the spiders lived, the bulges of dry rot, the useful fist-sized crater caused by a stray bullet in ’75. He aimed at every deformity he could reach; and when his luck was in, he could bring the ball back off the front wall at a variety of perverse tangents.

  The two men grunted and spat. Their plimsolls squeaked on the cement. The ball made noises generally confined to the balloons in comics: wham! thwack! pow! blatt!

  “Sonofabitch!” said Teddy.

  Pee-oung! splat! whang! fupp!

  “Oh, kiss my ass, George—”

  Teddy pranced, sprang, dived, stretched, jack-knifed, like a hooked tuna, while George husbanded his wind. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, and the back of his singlet was soaked through. What kind of a fool goes in for this young man’s game at sixty?

  He heard Ferraz gloating somewhere out in the suburban outskirts of his brain. He smashed a winner specially for the doctor. If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen.

  “Oh, motherfucker!”